by Dave Rudden
Even as he spoke, the name SHARA BETOMAX appeared again in type so large it barely fitted on the screen. Even Rose knew that, in panto-speak, that meant the actor named was a big deal.
Rose pretended to think for a moment. ‘Can I wear one of the silly collars?’
A pained look crossed the Doctor’s face.
‘I am sure that can be arranged,’ the attendant said. He snapped his fingers, and two thin plastic rectangles materialised before them. ‘Please take your tickets. Do not misplace them, as they are used for the teleportation lock.’
‘Teleportation lock?’ Rose asked.
‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor said, as the other patrons around them began to vanish. ‘Everyone knows the worst part of going to the theatre is having to climb over people to your seat. That’s why now it’s all done by –’
All of a sudden, both Rose and the Doctor turned sideways and disappeared.
There was a dark and weightless moment, a feeling that was a little like being in an elevator and a little like being in love, and then Rose was abruptly un-sidewayed like a paper hat from a Christmas cracker.
The golden palace and crowds of theatregoers were gone. So, Rose realised, was the Doctor.
She was alone.
Alone in a rather ordinary-looking storeroom, which was, by itself, not a reason to panic. Rose had spent enough time backstage (before what her mum called her ‘little acting hiccup’) to know that the gilt and sparkles always faced out. The inside of a theatre – the real inside, the bit the audience never saw – tended to be mostly peeling floor tiles and cardboard boxes.
No, that wasn’t the problem.
The problem, she decided, was all the Daleks staring at her.
‘Hello,’ came a voice in clipped, arch tones. ‘You must be the expert.’
In theatres across the universe, it is common to have a code for when an important person is in the audience. This important person might be a critic, or a famous actor, or a casting agent looking for the next great star.
Throughout the Masque Magestrix, the message was conveyed. Flesh melted and ran. New faces were prepared.
The correct audience had been detected.
After so long, the show could begin.
‘More tea, my darling?’
Rose nodded raptly.
She was dimly aware that this probably wasn’t the time for conversation. Someone or something had neatly separated her from the Doctor. She had been teleported into the middle of a hundred Daleks. Admittedly, they were prop Daleks, but this was not Rose’s first outing. Something was definitely afoot.
Unfortunately, it was rather hard to focus on this while Shara Betomax was in the room.
Shara Betomax, whose performance in The Empress Magdalene had spawned a new religion overnight. Shara Betomax, who had played the famous outlaw Noon Speranza with such grace that afterwards every script had been gathered up and fired into a sun so that no lesser actor could ever sully the role. Shara Betomax, who had been cast as the lead in The Saga of the Time Lords precisely because she could steal the show from a hundred Daleks. Shara Betomax, who had the magnetism of a dwarf alloy star.
She was small, and she was slight, and each of her many wrinkles was as effortlessly elegant as the veins in polished marble.
‘I never used to pour my own tea,’ she explained, each word somehow sharp and soft at the same time. ‘Normally, a show would furnish me with an assistant. Sometimes two. Alas, that was in better days. Now …’ She sighed a perfect sigh. ‘Now, I do panto.’
‘I’m not much of a fan, either,’ Rose said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and it was far easier and more pleasant just to listen. Shara Betomax had that kind of voice. You could have cut up her syllables and used them as currency.
‘Madame Betomax?’
The woman who popped her head round the door frame was dressed exactly like Shara, her silver robes crowned by one of those dessert-spoon headdresses. She held a walkie-talkie in her hand.
‘Three minutes until curtain-up,’ she said.
‘Gabadine Tho,’ Shara explained. ‘My understudy. Gabadine, this is Doctor Tyler, an expert in Time Lords who management rather rudely teleported in on top of me.’
Rose started to apologise, but the actor shook her head minutely. Even her scorn was stately.
‘Not your fault, my darling. The trials of my reduced station.’ She trailed off, confusion crinkling her brow. ‘Gabadine? What’s the matter?’
The understudy had begun to shake. Her fingers drummed on the door frame. Something moved under her features, distorting them the way the passage of a shark ripples water.
‘Time Lord,’ Gabadine whispered through gritted teeth. ‘Time Lord.’
And then her features dissolved into a swirl of flesh.
Rose and Shara watched in horror as Gabadine’s face became a foaming soup, her chin collapsing inwards, sucking in her hair like seaweed down a drain. More whirlpools of skin opened in her stomach and palms, joining and spreading until her whole body was a bubbling upright Jacuzzi full of boiling …
Similarities.
‘Plastic,’ Rose whispered, then grabbed Shara Betomax as respectfully as she could. ‘We need to get out of here.’
They bolted.
Behind them, the Auton screamed a trilling, atonal scream.
As Rose Tyler and Shara Betomax ran, The Saga of the Time Lords began.
Rose knew the play had started because, as they had fled from the storeroom – just one step ahead of the staggering, slavering Auton – the loudest orchestra she had ever heard opened up seemingly right above their heads.
The noise was unbelievable. It physically vibrated her, like a struck bell. Rose swayed for a moment, reeling at the assault, before she remembered that she was fleeing and should really keep fleeing. It probably sounded very good if you were a few rows back, but at the minute all she could think was that she’d been in quieter air raids.
Shara grabbed her arm and pulled, dragging Rose through a set of double doors.
The din immediately lessened, though Rose’s head still rang. She saw a mess of couches and tables, and realised they were in a green room – somewhere for cast and crew to wait in between being called onstage. The scatter of cups and plates on the tables gave the sense that the room had been very recently and suddenly evacuated, but whether that was because The Saga had started or because people were turning into Autons Rose wasn’t sure.
‘Help me with this!’ Shara said, and the two of them pushed a couch in front of the doors they had just come through.
They were just in time. As soon as they stepped backwards, the whole door frame jumped, shaking under the wet pounding of two plasticky fists.
‘Good thinking,’ Rose said.
Shara Betomax tutted. ‘Did not the Empress Magdalene defend the gate of her castle for three days armed with only a phase-sword and a hypershield?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rose said. ‘Did she?’
‘No, actually,’ Shara said. ‘But I did when I was playing her, which is roughly the same thing.’ Her brief look of amusement disappeared. ‘That was Gabadine. We’ve been rehearsing together all year. I was talking her through a divorce. And she just … changed.’
‘It wasn’t Gabadine,’ Rose said. ‘It was an Auton. They like duplicating people. Was Gabadine sick recently? Absent?’
‘Not a day,’ Shara said, shaking her head. ‘We’ve been in each other’s pockets for months.’ The look of queenly composure she had worn from the moment Rose had met her faltered. ‘Do you … do you think the real Gabadine is alive somewhere?’
Rose placed a hand on Shara’s shoulder, shocked at just how small and thin it was. ‘It’s very possible.’
‘Then we need to figure out what this Auton wants,’ the older woman said firmly. ‘And stop it.’
‘Them,’ Rose said faintly. ‘Stop them. It’s usually a them situation.’ A chill went through her. ‘And, as for what they want …’
Forgive me, Doctor. I was not informed you would be attending.
The error in the psychic paper that had teleported Rose right into the path of an Auton.
The look on Gabadine’s face, just before it had ceased to be a face and become a sucking nightmare swirl.
Time Lord. That was what it had said. Time Lord.
‘I think they’re after my friend,’ Rose said. ‘The Doctor. The real Doctor.’
The doors jumped again, so violently the couch was shoved a couple of centimetres back before they could right it.
‘We need to find him,’ Rose said.
She looked around. There was another set of double doors identical to the ones they had just come through, and a metal service elevator.
‘Do you know where we are?’
Shara nodded. ‘It’s a simple layout – one circle on top of another. Above us is the stage. This level is all storage and dressing rooms. Through there –’ she pointed at the other set of double doors – ‘is the system control room.’
Rose’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that where the teleporter controls are?’
‘Yes.’ Betomax stiffened as the cacophony above changed in tone. ‘That’s the overture finishing. I’m expected onstage soon.’
Life-and-death situations tended to provoke a lot of odd reactions, but even to Rose this was a new one. ‘You can’t seriously be thinking of going out there to act, can you?’
The doors shook again, the Auton keening against them with a fierce, animal need.
‘The show must go on, my darling,’ Shara said. ‘You don’t understand. I’m playing the Hand of Meg – the most important and mysterious figure in the Time Lords’ origin story. It’s the only role in this circus worth playing. My agent had to literally kill people to get it.’
Rose blanched. ‘Really?’
Shara shrugged. ‘Runner-up on Dancing with the Stars. No one minded. But it is my role, and I must play it. I need to be there to invent time travel. Otherwise, Rassilon can’t betray me and lock me away in Harmony’s Eye. It will ruin the whole second act!’
There was genuine panic on her face.
‘I understand,’ Rose said, as the Auton pushed its stretched-toffee thumb of a head through the join between the doors, gnarling at them through a melting mouth. And she did understand. It was Jericho Street all over again. Without Shara saying her lines, nobody else could say theirs.
Rose sighed. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this but, if you just get me to the control room, I’ll find my friend. He can stop this, and the show can go on. OK?’
Shara nodded, actual tears in her eyes.
She really is very good, Rose thought.
‘Thank you,’ Shara whispered. ‘It’s through here.’
They made their way to the second set of double doors across the room, flinching as, inch by creaking inch, the Auton forced the doors behind them open.
Rose’s mind was racing. When had Gabadine been replaced? The last Autons she had faced hadn’t exactly been experts at complex mimicry, and you didn’t get more complex mimicry than The Saga of the Time Lords. How long had they been here? Actors playing actors, waiting for the right person to arrive.
Waiting for the Doctor …
Just as Rose had the thought, the elevator pinged. She and Shara turned to see two human stagehands in dark outfits step into the room. Both stagehands froze in horror at the sight of the bubbling, snarling Auton halfway through the blocked doorway.
‘Oh, thank heavens,’ Shara said. ‘Gentlemen, please –’
Their eyes locked on to Rose.
‘Time Lord,’ they hissed in unison.
This time, Rose didn’t wait to get a proper look. She just bolted, wincing at the liquid sounds of warping flesh behind her.
The double doors led out into another long, dingy corridor with more doors leading off it every few metres. It was some consolation that The Saga had apparently reached a quiet bit, with a single male voice, rather than an entire orchestra, rattling the architecture.
‘That was Ribald,’ Shara panted beside Rose. She even ran in a dignified fashion, like a startled flamingo. ‘And Mern. I’ve signed autographs for them. Ribald puts me in my harness for the scene when I fall into the black hole. I know them.’
‘They’re not who you think they are,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not sure anyone here is.’ Judging by the size and scale of the production, there could be dozens of Autons out there. Why couldn’t we have gone to a one-woman show?
‘That way!’ Shara said, pointing at a door with a red light above it as, behind them, their three pursuers burst into the corridor in a chewing-gum tangle of grasping plastic hands.
The control room was small and square, and had that very deliberate clutter so often present in control rooms and workshops and garages – anywhere that very serious men and women wore toolbelts and organised screws by size and weight. Rose recognised it immediately from the TARDIS.
Unfortunately, most of the room was covered in Auton – a great, heaving mass the size of an elephant, if someone had spread an elephant like butter across one half of the room. Hands stuck out at odd angles. Faces, too – some human-sized and looking extremely perturbed, and others stretched out across the groaning bulk like distorted toffee sculptures. It would have been horrific if it hadn’t all been clean and waxy plastic. As it was, it reminded Rose of the time she had tried to give her dolls a tan by putting them in the microwave.
‘Time Lord!’ it roared through twelve mouths at once. ‘TIME LORD!’
‘I’m really not,’ Rose snapped back.
There might have been controls somewhere under the throbbing, gargantuan bulk, but there was no way Rose was going to go fishing for them. Betomax had pressed herself against the door they had come through, but already her feet were slipping and scraping as the Autons outside tried to get in.
I hate the theatre, Rose thought, then jumped as something twitched in her jacket. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her plastic ticket. It was tremoring so fast it was almost a blur.
The Auton-beast reared above her, drawing its great, soupy mass into a tsunami of smooth plastic flesh. The faces that still had eyes narrowed them, and the mouths that could open screamed at the top of their lungs, ‘TIME LOOOOOORD!’
And then it turned sideways and disappeared.
In its place, looking rather dishevelled, was the Doctor.
‘Teleportation,’ he said, then blinked. ‘Sorry. Feels a bit weird if you don’t finish the line.’
He blinked again, blearily, then whipped out his sonic screwdriver to point at the door. There was a deep clunk as it locked itself. Tentatively, Betomax stepped away. It didn’t budge.
‘Much better,’ he said, then shot Rose a wry glance. ‘And some people say the theatre is boring.’
Rose threw her ticket at him.
He snagged it out of the air with infuriating grace and held it up to the light. ‘Brilliant things, these. At first, I thought there was a malfunction. But, by the third time I materialised inside a stationery cupboard, I began to suspect someone was trying to separate us.’
‘Then how –’ Rose began, but the Doctor had already tossed her back the ticket.
‘I used the psychic paper to get us the tickets, and the tickets are all connected to the teleporter array. I backtracked that link to take control, and to find you. Simple.’ He tapped a finger against his lip. ‘Well, actually, it was incredibly complicated – but that explanation was really simple. Love a simple explanation.’ He looked a little sheepish. ‘Especially since it covers up the fact that I may have teleported a very large Auton to a very small stationery cupboard. But that’s a tomorrow problem.’
He suddenly swept by Rose, bending his stork-like frame to gently kiss Shara Betomax’s hand. ‘Shara Betomax. Loved you as Noon Speranza. You know, I played Omega myself in a school play once. Female version too, actually –’
‘Doctor,’ Rose said. ‘Autons.’
‘Yes,’ he sai
d, suddenly serious. ‘It’s not just the engineers, is it?’
‘It could be everyone,’ Rose said. ‘Understudies, stagehands … According to Shara, they’ve all been perfectly normal for ages. Until –’
The door shuddered. The tiles on the floor began to buckle and shift as thick liquid pushed up from underneath.
‘Until a Time Lord arrived,’ the Doctor said. ‘That was the trigger. The Autons kidnapped these people, replicated them, and have been mimicking them so closely that they might have genuinely believed they were those people until we showed up. Actors believing they’re actors. Actors waiting for their cue.’
‘This isn’t a play,’ Rose said, watching the seeping, creeping fluid grow a mouth and snarl. ‘It’s a trap. Waiting for a Time Lord to show up and spring it.’
‘And now there’s who knows how many in between us and the TARDIS,’ the Doctor said. ‘And Autons don’t stop. They never stop. Shara?’
The actor had sunk to the floor, wrapping her thin arms round herself.
‘All that work,’ she said. ‘All those rehearsals. And now it’s all going to come grinding to a halt in front of a million people …’
‘Shara,’ Rose said gently. ‘It isn’t about the play any more. It’s about –’
‘That’s it,’ the Doctor said. ‘Oh, Rose Tyler, you absolute genius.’
‘Thank you,’ Rose said. ‘Wait. What?’
‘These Autons have been in deep cover for who knows how long,’ he explained. ‘Rehearsing, practising, living The Saga of the Time Lords over and over again to get it right. That kind of complex mimicry leaves an effect. It etches the plastic. That’s why they’re coming apart so badly. They’re resisting.’
‘Doctor, what are you talking about?’
‘You remember what it was like, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Walking that stage, learning those lines, drilling it again and again until the line between who you are and who you play starts to blur?’
‘I remember freezing,’ Rose said. ‘I remember panicking because I didn’t know what to say next.’