Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [23]
The wallop of hitting the floor seemed to knock some sense back into him. In a moment, he was standing up again. His head felt strangely light. He looked down and saw the Doctor crouching on the floor over a prostrate shape. It took a moment for him to realize that the shape was his own body.
The Doctor struggled to turn the body over. He muttered something and pulled strands of web off the body's face with a pair of tweezers. Chris couldn't hear because his head was suddenly full of noise. Voices were whispering and laughing and crying and calling as if an invisible crowd was passing by.
The lightheadedness was increasing. It was lifting him off the floor. He was drifting towards the big mirror. He saw his own reflection coming up to meet him. His hand went out, but it passed straight into its mirror image and he followed, sliding through the surface of the glass like water.
The Doctor was not in the reflected room. The only light came through the mirror. It shone like a window back into reality. Soon the light faded and the piles of bric-a-brac around him dissolved into darkness. But Chris still heard the voices. He was drifting downward, sinking through the floor into the house below. New lights dancing in and out like reflections patterning a kaleidoscope. More and more lights. Myriad reflections of reflections stretching away from him. The white branches which grew through the house seemed to be bending and creaking in the wind.
The voices were gradual y hushed and a dreadful silence fell. The place was holding its breath. It was like the moment before a storm.
In a huge, high-ceilinged kitchen, Chris saw two massive creatures, nearly two and a half metres tal , with hard angular faces carved of wood. Even the long cassock skirts that they wore resembled wooden panels, but the substance moved and folded like heavy material. The creatures were oblivious of Chris as they unloaded trays of steaming delicacies from the vast ovens. On the tables sat a number of extravagantly garnished dishes. There were pyramids of bulbous fruit, like gourds. A shovel-beaked animal with horns had been roasted whole. It had a purple fruit stuffed in its beak and yel ow berries were studded along its glazed body. The cooks were preparing a banquet, but there was no smell from their culinary labours. It was dreamlike. All around, solid, but at a distance too.
The kitchen dissolved in a welter of steam. Chris was floating along passages and galleries bordered by the tall white tree trunks that grew through the house's whole structure. It was al on the wrong scale. All the furniture was as massive as the stuff in the attic. He felt like a child wandering amongst it.
Time didn't seem to matter here. It occurred to Chris, but didn't unduly worry him, that he might be dead.
From a high window, he looked out over a valley where rows of silver-leafed trees ran down to a snaking river far below. The place was perched halfway up a mountainside. Another mountain rose on the other side of the valley, behind which an apricot-coloured sun would soon have sunk. Directly below the window, in a garden shaped like a basin, there were interlacing lines of plants that wound and tangled in coloured knots. At its centre, on a raised plinth, stood a weather-worn statue wielding a black rod. The rod's crystal head refracted the sunlight as a bright spear down on to the patterned garden. Chris guessed that the entire garden was an elaborate sundial or possibly an even more intricate timepiece.
Another wing of the house extended to the side. White tree trunks also grew on the building's outer walls. They appeared to be an integral part of the architecture, a tracery into which the stone and wooden walls were fused, or even grown. Here and there, outcrops of blue foliage, either from a rambling creeper or as if the house itself had come into leaf. The curving roof rose above the gables like the scaly carapace of a slate-grey pangolin.
Chris drifted on. He passed framed portraits of grumpy