Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [66]
they always seemed to be these days, were full of hate.
Hate. Why so much hate? She had always been passionate, and yet frivolous. Times they were a changin’ and the beautiful, innocent Chinese girl he had fallen in love with had transformed in the space of a few weeks into a twisted soul.
And Jo with her.
Jimmy was mad, but then he’d always been an angry young man, desperately seeking somewhere to vent his rage. This summer he’d certainly found it.
This bright, bright summer of hate.
Bristol University Hall.A cavalcade of cars.Paparazzi.Police, of course, but merely a token skeleton force.Bodyguards.
The royal visit is going ahead as scheduled. And here comes the princess now, stepping from her limousine, flanked by musclemen, caught in a fusillade of clicking cameras. Up the stain of the magnificent old university administration building she comes, nineteen years of age, not particularly striking, in face rather ordinary - but some have said (Hello! magazine among others) that she has a pleasant, homely face. The bodyguard: press around her like flies, and there at the top of the steps is the honoured dean, looking very honoured indeed as the cameras blaze away.
And here is Derek Pole, just behind the surging ranks o photographers, who are in turn behind the red ribbon barrier gauntleting the steps and the pavement. Of course he has lied n Jeremy Willis all along: the revolver inside his bomber-jacket pocket is snug and hard. He holds his camera against the bulge and takes a few amateurish snaps of the princess as she move towards a spot where she will be directly in front of him.
Of course there will be no kidnapping. That was never the plan.
Pole’s entire life has been leading up to this hot, prickly pounding moment. He can taste blood in his mouth, his excitement is so extreme.
Here she comes...
* * *
158
The cattle truck had left the cemetery too; the skeleton force of UNIT men remaining there had even opened the gates for its largely unwitnessed exit. Now it was passing through the streets of Bristol, a filthy, growling thing.
‘What are you?’
The question was simple, yet the answer came in a complex series of images that kaleidoscoped inside the reality-wound of the truck without the being so much as speaking a word.
The Doctor stood in the darkness, and the being’s history was all around him, glowing with alien starlight.
It started with a journey. This journey began on the far shores of infinity - so inconceivably distant it would stretch the sanity of a human, then snap it like a spider thread. So, so far, at the other end of the vast black desert of space that was the universe, littered with the bones of stars and the dust of forgotten worlds.
Here the creature was conceived within a womb of rock spinning through the radiation-bathed flue of a black hole, passing on, cosmic spawn without rhyme or reason, simply being; cast adrift through barred spirals and asteroid belts, surfing meteor wakes and moving ever on...
On, on.
Galaxies bloomed and died around its passing. Species ended screaming in the silent void of space, and the creature cared not at all, knew nothing of his stargate floating. Merely was, and thought not.
The rock tumbled on, through tides of time, through eddies of the infinite, guided by an indefinable call that echoed only within the core of the cradle rock.
The call grew louder, more tangible, and now the Doctor can recognise galaxies, systems, planets. The rock was locked into an interstellar flight path of inconceivable, perhaps mystical, programming, and it had passed through its incredible voyage practically unscathed. The rock was moving towards planetfall now, answering the ley summons of primal energies locked 159
within the earth of one particular field in one particular country of one particular world.
The parent rock recognised those signal energies: they pulsed within its own core. Perhaps it had sensed a kindred