Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [153]
An intelligence that hasn’t quite forgotten what it is. Growing blindly up, searching for a way out. Searching for a way off the planet. In its tours through human minds it seeks and selects and hunts, like a plant’s green shoot rising up through the earth, reaching out. Moving towards the light. Towards the ultimate goal. Towards escape.
Moving towards the Doctor.
The mushroom mutates over swift fungal generations, altering its own natural tendencies to produce toxins. It tailors those toxins as humans begin to sample the mushroom and interact with those toxins. The mushroom becomes a drug and people experience its effect and introduce other people to it.
The drug navigates through them, seeking the ones who would serve its purpose.
Warlock finds the girl called Shell because it is seeking out the Doctor, and it uses her because she is a useful vehicle to him. Just as, decades before, it found a useful stepping stone in a man called Harrigan.
As it flows towards its own destiny, warlock sweeps the man’s intelligence along, carrying it from one human body to another.
Warlock moving with its own agenda, moving towards its own goal. Towards this moment.
Towards escape.
Now the alien intelligence of warlock flowed into Vincent’s mind like quicksilver and he understood all these things and more.
Vincent sensed the old Texan’s mind caught up in the energy web of warlock, part of the complex pattern of information.
Harrigan was still thinking that warlock would carry him along with it, carry him into a new body.
Like an old turtle that’s about to shed its shell. And climb into a brand new one. That was the way it had happened once before. When he’d been reborn before.
But now warlock just flipped Harrigan off into the outer darkness, shedding the complex mesh of his mind like a dark bird shaking a drop of water off its wings as it took flight.
And as his mind vanished forever into the void, a pattern of information dispersing like smoke, the old Texan’s body began to go, too.
Warlock caused it to energize, igniting his withering cancerous body for what little fuel value it had, converting it into heat in one luminous instant which lit up the tiled kitchen of the house in Allen Road and gave it a cheerful warmth that would last for hours.
‘Oh well, at least it hasn’t left a body for us to clean up,’ said Ace.
And that bolt of liberated energy hit Vincent, driving the payload of warlock’s intelligence. A sentient creature finally free.
Flashing upwards from the earth after decades trapped in the darkness. A creature so intangible that it trembled on the verge of what exists and what doesn’t.
But it existed now. As a pure powerful flame of thought. Driven by the incinerated husk of the old Texan it roared forward, a bolt of thought colliding with Vincent. Primal thought and even more powerful emotion.
A single emotion.
The desire to go home.
And Vincent did what he did best. He magnified the effect.
So warlock surged upwards, riding an energy wave. Streaking up, away from the earth, streaming out into the universe. Far beyond the atmosphere of the blue‐green giant, into space, lancing out into the distant galaxies. Travelling again. Alive and united again.
Going home again.
As they watched, warlock exploded out, escaping into the sky and beyond, and Harrigan’s body turned to ashes.
Ace thought of the phoenix rising up from the tattoo on Shell’s forehead.
And Benny thought of a dark bird carved on a cemetery gate. A bird carved in antique wood, taking wing as it rose into darkness.
But all Creed thought of was Justine. She had come to him. She had run across the kitchen. To him. She had chosen. She’d made her decision.
Creed held her tight. She was trembling in his arms.