Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [86]
They drove past Vincent’s house and along to a roundabout near a small stretch of park. ‘Careful,’ said the Doctor, and Benny slowed down to let a group of swans walk across the road. Then she circled the roundabout to achieve a U-turn, heading back to the house. They parked outside and the car windows fogged up immediately the engine died. Benny wiped a spot clean on the glass with the edge of her hand. She peered out at the neat little street, well‐tended English gardens on either side. It wasn’t even dawn yet.
‘We can watch the sun come up over the river,’ said the Doctor, suddenly popping his door open and stepping out of the car. Benny hurried after him, telling the Mercedes to lock itself. It was a misty, steel‐grey morning and her footsteps echoed in the empty streets.
The Doctor resumed talking as soon as Benny fell into step beside him. ‘I needed to destroy a large installation, much of it underground. I needed a suitable weapon and I duly assembled one. It was a somewhat curious weapon. It consisted of two people.’
‘People?’
‘Vincent and Justine. They were the two components that would combine to form a weapon of great destructive power. Justine had done terrible things in her life. And terrible things were done in turn to her. The pain and anger inside her formed the ammunition of my weapon. All I needed to launch it was a suitable delivery system.’
‘And the delivery system was Vincent?’
‘Or think of a signal and an amplifier. The signal was coming out of Justine. The amplifier was Vincent. A boy with a very odd talent.’
‘It sounds like it.’
The Doctor and Benny crossed the road to stand at the riverside wall. They stood watching the muddy water slopping at the pale stone foundations of Barnes Bridge. A gull floated past them, sliding along the wind and screeching. Benny leaned on the cold metal rail beside the Doctor.
‘Ever since childhood Vincent had a faculty that he repressed. A form of telekinetic power that enabled him to transform raw emotional energy and beam it out into the world. But not his own emotional energy. Other people’s. You only had to touch him to ignite it.’
‘Sounds dangerous.’
‘It was. Say you were angry and you touched him. Then your anger was channelled and magnified, exploding out into the real world with the force of a missile strike.’
‘And Justine was angry.’
‘She ached with rage. She hated those who sought to despoil the earth. Like the men who had built this place I described on the side of the mountain. They stood for everything Justine hated. Combined with Vincent she would form the perfect weapon. All she had to do was touch him.’
They had walked back from the river now, along a street full of small shops, all closed and shuttered in the early morning silence. Benny said, ‘And it worked?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘No. It was a miserable failure. I hadn’t taken into account the human factor. The two components of the weapon had fallen in love with each other. The murderous hostility I had been counting on had faded in Justine. She was suddenly useless for my purposes.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Oh, this and that. We had to improvise a solution.’
They had reached a small churchyard now, just behind a bus shelter on the main road. The Doctor wandered over to the strange old church gate, a roofed structure with small benches on either side. Benny looked at the old carvings in the dark wood. A fierce angular bird was depicted rising from the top of a tower, taking flight. She realized that the Doctor was looking at her. ‘They call this a lych gate,’ he said. ‘Do you know why?’
‘A lych was a corpse, right?’
‘Very good. Hence Lychfield. A field of corpses. Places of mass burials during the great plagues.’
Benny yawned. The clean autumn air was so cold that her breath was fogging. She glanced over at the Doctor. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. And his breath didn’t fog. Benny shivered and hugged herself.
‘I could do with a hot bath and a night’s sleep.’
‘I know. You’re still operating on New York time. I expect you’re exhausted. I know I’ve always found New York time