Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [0]
by Andrew Cartmel
It was the ruthless pack instinct of the primeval forest. But warlock magnified it a thousand times and made it lethal.
There’s a strange new drug on the street. It’s called warlock and some people say it’s the creation of the devil. Others see it as the gateway to enlightenment.
Benny is working with an undercover cop, trying to track down its source. Ace is trapped in a horrific animal experimentation laboratory. But only the Doctor has begun to guess the terrible truth about warlock.
This disturbing sequel to Warhead moves beyond cyberpunk into a realm where reality is a question of brain chemistry and heaven or hell comes in the shape of a pill.
Full‐length, original novels based on the longest running science‐fiction television series of all time, the BBC’s Doctor Who. The New Adventures take the TARDIS into previously unexplored realms of space and time.
Andrew Cartmel was script editor of the Doctor Who television series from 1987 to 1989 before moving on to edit Casualty. He has written comic strips for Marvel UK and is currently writing Judge Dredd for Fleetway. This is his second book in the New Adventures series.
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
* * *
In memory of my father,
George Bliss Cartmel
* * *
Chapter 1
Ace woke up between clean sheets. For a moment she experienced that sort of total disorientation which is almost a deliverance from existence. She didn’t remember where she was or even, for a brief instant, who she was.
But gradually, lying there in the bed, she pieced it together. There was the familiar sound of pigeons cooing that reverberated down the hollow length of a chimney to echo in the empty fireplace of the bedroom. There was the comforting musty smell of lavender on the pillow.
Outside the window green branches eased against the glass letting bright slices of sunlight into the room. Judging by the angle of the light it was late afternoon.
Ace had been hopelessly drunk when she’d got in. She’d spent the better part of the night and most of the previous day drinking with friends in London. Or at least, she and Vincent had been drinking Justine had refrained because they’d just learned she was going to have a baby.
Ace had been sitting in their garden, the dark branches of a tree stirring above her, trying to name the constellations in the night sky while she and Vincent finished the brandy.
Ace wondered how long she had been asleep. It might be twelve hours or thirty‐six. There was a soft sound on the pillow next to her face and the movement of something at the edge of her vision. She turned and saw, almost touching her face, too close to focus on properly, a warm curve of fur.
Ace reached over and stroked the cat. His name was Chick, short for Chichester. He was a small lithe cat with ginger fur and greenish‐amber eyes. The Doctor had discovered his mother, a wild cat, wounded and sheltering in one of the outbuildings of the big manor house.
The Doctor had brought the cat into the house and cleaned her cuts while Benny had poured her a saucer of milk. The Doctor had glanced absent‐mindedly at the saucer and said, ‘No thank you. Oh, it’s for the cat.’
But the wild cat had turned her nose up disdainfully at the milk, as she would continue to do for the rest of her stay with them. She had however permitted the Doctor to tend her wounds. Two or three days later, playing with her in the sunlit ruins of the greenhouse, it was Ace who’d realised that the wild cat was pregnant.
And it was Ace who’d woken from a deep sleep at 3 a.m. and heard the wild cat crying out in the silence of the dark sweltering summer night. Crying out as she went into labour.
Ace