Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [78]
embracing alien worlds; an asteroid-gemmed canvas of virgin territory. He longed to explore it, the chaos of the preceding moment all but forgotten. That is, until the scratching sound reached his ears.
Something was tearing at the outer hull of the timeship, scratching to get in. The sound echoed around the length and breadth of the TARDIS, mighty strips of environmental force-field gouged away with each clawful - and it had to be claws, judging by the noise. Claws that would strip away the onion layers of the ship and grope for him if he stayed put.
He hammered at stiff buttons on the mushroom-shaped console, prodded switches that came away in his fingers and, horribly, the TARDIS was screaming as it was clawed to death.
The Doctor heard those screams as he finally succeeded in grappling with the dematerialisation lever, the location of which he had incredibly, albeit momentarily, forgotten. The TARDIS
shook as if a big boot had stomped on its transdimensional spine, and the system spanning the screen blurred into nothingness to be replaced by the purple orgasmic thrusting of the space-time vortex. The Doctor collapsed against the console.
And then the scratching recommenced.
Impossibly, there was something out there, clinging piggyback to the TARDIS, riding with it through space and time and ripping its way slowly inside.
Irrational terror caught the Doctor and had him up and running for the door. He passed through, staggering blindly into the corridor beyond as lights pulsated greenly and sickly and the symphonic death rattle of the TARDIS crashed in his ears.
His fear chased him through corridor after metallic corridor, each the same, each seemingly endless - all apart from one which, inexplicably, was overgrown with nettles and weeds. In the centre of this passage a simple stone tomb nestled. The Doctor kicked his way through the undergrowth, slowworms easing away from his shoes to slither under the memorial.
There was a name etched on the eroded lid, and the Doctor 188
gazed at it in fascination. So the TARDIS was dead, he was dead, and the craft had become a floating tomb adrift for ever in the vortex. The thought had him running again, as if he’d forgotten the essential truth that there was nowhere to run to. Through the nettles and hogweed, then through the far door, down endless corridors and up to a final door which led back inside the control room, to stare at the screen and what it showed him.
The scanner revealed a portion of the outer shell of the TARDIS
and the spindly spider thing that clutched it with black, irradiated limbs. The teeth of the beast, as well as its claws, were ripping at the exterior, leaving long scorings. The repulsive hitchhiker turned towards the screen and the Doctor saw the face: his own face, mutated by the unknowable forces of the vortex, eyes locked with madness, mouth grinning and losing teeth that spun away into the void. The white hair was alive like a sea anemone, coiling and thrusting even as the flesh charred away to drift into the time stream, but yes it was his own face.
And yet not. Evil as much as the cosmic erosion of the vortex had eaten away at it; perversion pulled at the corners of the leering grin. Bare id incarnate lusting after a whole universe, playing the beast with four backs with the craft that would take it where it willed. Insanity urging it to destroy what it needed. The Doctor’s own ego, loose and satanic, scratching away the layers of his goodness.
The Doctor fell to his knees, eyes tight shut, hands over his ears as the TARDIS cried with everlasting sorrow.
The Cirbury villagers watched the roadies unload the cattle truck the next morning, hefting amps, speakers, instruments and cables over the stone wall and into the field of stones. There was plenty of discussion of course; this was the ‘convoy of evil’ after all - or half of it, anyway. But, strangely enough, there was no undue consternation. The newspapers told them the main batch had headed off for Stonehenge, and that