Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [102]
He opened the booth and stepped in. Picked up the receiver and clicked the hook a few times until he heard the hiss and pop of an open line.
‘Hello?’ he asked cautiously. ‘I think it’s you who’s been trying to contact us. Through the phone, coming after Anji in the park.’
Silence.
‘I don’t think you realise why people are afraid of you, why they run. They can’t stand the confusion you embody. They are terrified of it.’
Still just the empty echo.
‘But I need you. I need your mass to draw Enrique out. And I think you need me to release you. Will you? Help me?’
There was a rushing, a tugging, a sense of energy whirling through the handset. The Doctor dropped it, let it swing free, backed out of the booth. Something was coming. Something big and dangerous. Then it was spilling out of the earpiece, growing and bulging and expanding until it was filling the booth. Then the street was too small to contain it.
Hundreds of faces, squared and angled. Frozen. Pale, cubist. As it moved it left traces, afterimages outlined in the darkness. And it was screaming as it bore down on him.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
La Ciutat Dels Morts
The Doctor was backed all the way across the street from the creature. It was still roaring, but hadn’t touched him yet. He pressed his spine flat against the brickwork and looked up at the beast above him.
‘You’ve been trying to find me, I think. The taps on the phone, the targeting of my friends.’
‘Help us!’
It was the same voice as Enrique’s, but this time it was hundreds of voices speaking in chorus. The Doctor tried to focus on the shape of it but it was constantly shifting. The faces were distorted, angled and stylised. Then it shifted again and the Doctor recognised something, a wider image made up of all the smaller ones. His eyes widened.
‘Eric?’
‘Doctor.’ Blair’s voice was dominant now, but the quiet hiss of the others still whirled around his words. ‘Yes, we need your help.’
‘And I need yours.’
The thing gave a rictus the Doctor supposed was an attempted grin, the lines of the mouths flickering upwards. ‘Well, isn’t that handy?’
‘How are you connected to Enrique? Actually, how did you end up in this at all, Blair?’
The Doctor heard a scream from the street, the smash of a bottle on the cobbles and running feet. He glanced after the noise but whoever had been there moments before had gone.
‘People can see you, yet they couldn’t see Enrique...’ the Doctor started to ask. The creature gave a shrug, the huge shoulders distorting upwards. The jagged, rough slide of features wasn’t pleasant, overlapping and twisting.
‘We’re part of the System, just like he is. He is all rationality, all objectivity. We’re his antithesis. We’re all the viewpoints he rejects, all the things he won’t believe. He hates you, you refuse to fit.’
‘He seemed to be terrified when I met him.’
‘We’re always afraid of what we hate. Or we hate what we are afraid of.’
‘We need to find him.’
‘Agreed. We can trace him, we keep trying. But he refuses us, dodges away. He won’t face us, or you.’
The Doctor gestured towards Las Rambles. ‘Well, shall we try anyway?’
The creature moved first. It didn’t turn, its features slid and reformed and twisted into new positions so that it faced the entrance of the street. The Doctor was fascinated. Surrounding the creature was a haze, almost like the haze rising from hot tarmac on a blazing summer’s day. Anything that fell within the haze was shifting, flickering through hundreds of minute variations. It wasn’t so noticeable as they walked towards the main pavement but then, as they got into more lively areas, it was contorting the walls, the posters, the people. Without discussing it, they turned right, heading straight up to Plaça de Catalunya. They ignored the aghast faces and occasional