Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [97]
Only Mr Wolcott had escaped, pushing his way through the screeching doors and out into the rain. Now he slipped and stumbled away from the building, listening to the cries of the townspeople around him, not being able to see most of them for the dirty water blowing into his eyes. Obscene shapes were copulating in the gutters, and there were things in his head.
They’d been memories, once, but now they had wide and gaudy wings. Something grabbed Mr Wolcott by the shoulders.
‘Moths,’ he yelped. ‘Things like moths. In my skull.’
‘Shhh, man,’ said a voice. ‘Damnation, you’re all right.’
‘In my skull.’ Mr Wolcott looked up, peering through the rainwater. There was a face in front of him. Thick-set. Square-jawed. Dark hair plastered across wide temples. A birthmark in the middle of the forehead, but it was shrinking.
‘Erskine? Erskine Morris?’ whimpered Mr Wolcott.
The face nodded.
‘In my skull,’ Mr Wolcott told him. ‘Like moths, huge –’
‘Wolcott. Look at me, man. Concentrate. Look into my eyes.’
Mr Wolcott did so. The moths stopped beating their wings.
‘What do you believe in?’ asked Erskine Morris, in an almost supernaturally calm voice. ‘What do you really believe in?’
Even if there’d been somebody around to ask him – a faithful companion, perhaps, or a curious bystander at the very least –
the Doctor probably couldn’t have explained how he knew where to find Catcher’s house. Perhaps he’d spent so long playing in the dark places of the universe that he’d become like an amaranth himself, always knowing where to find the chaos, always bringing his own kind of order. Perhaps that was it.
‘Sorry, was it a faithful companion you wanted, or a curious bystander?’ queried one of the shadows of Hazelrow Avenue.
‘Quiet,’ said the Doctor.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked another. ‘We can’t just leave the Doctor there.’
The Doctor pulled his hat down over his eyes as he walked, rainwater collecting in tiny pools across the brim. Not just water, though. Something else, mingling with the rain. H2O–
X. Hydrogen, oxygen, and anarchy.
The homeworld of the Time Lords, according to Professor Thripsted’s excellent volume Genetic Politics Beyond the Third Zone , can best be described as ‘stagnant’. Born into a society where change comes once in every heliotrope moon, each new generation finds itself forced to devise increasingly elaborate rites and ceremonies, in order to disguise the crushing banality of life on a planet cut off from the rest of history.
‘Him? The Doctor?’ asked the first shadow.
‘Well, that’s who the doors through,’ answered the second.
‘There outside was came no one else. Ben, do you remember he tracking room said in the what?’
The sky was still dark over Woodwicke, and getting darker.
The sky over the horizon seemed perfectly ordinary, though, reassuringly muddy. It was as though the darkness only wanted Woodwicke. For now.
‘Ben, do you remember what he said in the tracking room?’
‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ the first shadow replied.
Probably the most extreme ‘rite of passage’ among young Time Lords is the game commonly known as Eighth Man Bound. This game is played only by the neonates of the Time Lord Academy, students who have been imprinted with the genetic codes that allow them safe passage through the vortex, but who have not yet gone through the decades-long rituals of graduation. It is never played by Time Lords of those
‘newblood’ Houses for whom a change of body is as trivial as a change of fashion, and who come straight from the loom with a secondary heart. Eighth Man Bound was described by one House Kithriarch as ‘the most repulsive and irresponsible pastime it is possible to imagine’, and the game is said to claim the lives of up