by Dave Stone
‘Well, if the local police aren’t up to it,’ said Victoria, ‘why don’t they just send a... telegraph message or similar to - oh.’
‘Exactly.’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s nowhere they can send a telegraph message or similar to. The city is isolated.’
‘But how could people not notice that?’ Victoria asked. ‘And how would they get things like food? It would run out, surely?’
‘Nobody would have to be any the wiser,’ the Doctor said. ‘If there’s nowhere to go outside the city limits, as we proved, it would never occur to people to do so because it would be a basic impossibility - to even think such a thing would be madness, plain and simple. Or possibly, people think there’s a world out there, and occasionally make plans to travel to it, but something always comes up - the world itself conspires against them by its own laws of cause and effect. And as for food and suchlike...’ The Doctor waved the issue away dismissively.
‘Food appears on your plate because the waiter brought it. And the waiter got it from the chef, and the chef got it from the market, and the market got it from its suppliers... it doesn’t have to come from anywhere, originally, so far as any one link in the chain is concerned.’
‘But it would have to start from somewhere...’ Victoria began. She was getting a megrimous fatigue from trying to keep all this straight.
‘Doesn’t have to,’ said the Doctor. ‘Our own universe works on a process of expansion and contraction, from Big Bang to Gnab Gib, and a single point where it started isn’t necessary. And besides, as I said, this place seems to have its own laws of cause and effect.
Anyway, wherever this place is in terms of the rest of the universe, and whether it was created artificially or not, there’s no way for anything to get out. I think this entire town is in the centre of a killing-bottle for something. Or possibly a larder, though what might actually be feeding is anyone’s guess. And speaking of food...’ The Doctor perused the remainder of the picnic. ‘Has everyone finished? Good. We’re off back to the Mercy Hill hospital.’
‘We’re going back there again?’ asked Jamie.
‘Yes. I want to see the body the young lady so conveniently forgot being near to when it died in the flames... hopefully before it gets mysteriously spirited away.’ The Doctor started packing the last of the food away in his wicker hamper. ‘I’d have gone back to the hospital earlier, but it’s always best to see the hideously charred and horribly mutilated remains of a dead body on a fun stomach,’ He thought for a moment. ‘Or should that have been empty stomach? Oh well. Never mind.’
It was quite strange, all things considered, that in an establishment as large as Mercy Hill the first person of any note they ran into was the jolly-looking doctor they had encountered earlier. His name, it transpired, was Dibley, and at the moment he was looking distinctly less jolly. This was almost entirely due to the Doctor’s manner.
In her time spent travelling with the Doctor Victoria had found herself constantly surprised at him, not so much by the way in which his entire manner could change almost from one minute to another, but by the way he seemed to inhabit that manner so completely that on some deep level you were shocked when he changed it once again. Ordinarily, he took the part - was the part - of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it when at all possible.
When danger threatened, however - being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example - it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes... a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.
Already, in the past few hours, Victoria had seen him display a fine (if, it must be said, rather condescending) scientific mind, and now she saw him display something new - a patrician sternness that, it seemed, would brook no demand on its forbearance.
‘You can’t come in here...’ Dr Dibley was spluttering as the Doctor stormed through the Mercy Hill morgue. He attempted to clutch at the intruder with the intention of restraining him, but the little man seemed to be always out of his grasp. The general effect was of a large and portly shape skipping and fluttering about the Doctor with all the effectiveness of a moth around an angry gaslight.
‘I think you’ll find I have the authority to go where I like,’
the Doctor told him, seeming to loom over the hapless medic despite being a full head shorter, and carefully leaving any particular authority he had unspecific. That was a part of it, Victoria thought: if the Doctor had named the authority on which he was acting, it would have probably been the Order and Garter of Advanced Busybodiness, Second Class.
The two men had fetched up against the stainless steel doors behind which the bodies, presumably, were kept to avoid them cluttering up the corridors. The Doctor perused them with a look of disdain. ‘These are your post-mortem storage facilities?
There hardly, if you don’t mind my saying so, seem to be enough, unless you have an extraordinarily quick turnover.
I’m looking for the body of a man who died last night in suspicious circumstances.’
‘This is a big town,’ said Dr Dibley. ‘There would be more than one -’
‘But not that many burnt alive in a car wreck,’ said the Doctor. ‘Well, man?’ he continued, in a clipped and rather military-sounding voice which he had no doubt picked up on his travels and squirrelled away for later use. ‘Which one is it?
You wouldn’t want me opening doors at random. Who knows what I might find?’
Loath as he was to go around showing bodies to people who were, after all, complete strangers, albeit complete strangers with a commanding manner, Dr Dibley couldn’t help but turn his eyes to a stainless steel door off to one side.
‘Thank you so much.’ The Doctor stalked over to the door and opened it with a flourish. ‘Now, then, we’ll soon see... Oh dear.’
The overwhelming sense of authority suddenly left him and he craned his neck disappointedly inside, just to make sure he hadn’t been mistaken the first time. ‘It seems we’re too late after all.’
Artie Bunson opened the door of the tenement apartment he called home and crept inside as silently as he could. If his mother heard him she would no doubt insist that he tell her all about his day, make her a calamine tea, have him do her corns with a paring knife and yet again leaf through the family album, telling him how he had been such a beautiful baby and his poor dear father would have died of disappointment in him now, had he been alive.
From the door of Mother’s room, he heard a gurgling snore.
That was good. As she grew older Mother tended to sleep more and more. Artie, while awake, dreamed of the day she would never wake up.
In his room, the same room in which he had slept as a child, he was free to work on what he thought of as his ‘hobby’.
Artie couldn’t quite remember when it had started, but at some point years ago he had discovered an impulse in himself to acquire little human figures and put them into poses. In a cupboard - the one thing he had ever stood up to Mother about, telling her that she could not look in there on pain of, well, pain of never waking up - was a collection of little girls’ dolls and GI Joes, little men and women moulded out of clay and Silly Putty.
Each one was very carefully twisted and positioned by refined increments into shapes that spoke to something deep inside him.
Artie looked at the little men and women for a while, then carefully took them from the cupboard and lay them on his bed. He was going to have to find somewhere else to store them, now; he had to make room for his new project.
He wondered, idly, why he had never thought of this before.
All the pieces, as it were, had been there but only today, as he was goi
ng off shift, had the idea occurred, fully formed, as though someone or something bigger and brighter than him had for a moment been doing his thinking. Now that the idea had occurred, however, he could see possibilities for developing it.
Artie Bunson unzipped his big, heavy holdall and started taking out the charred skeletal remains of what had once been a boy called Norman Manley. He started piecing them together on the floor, ordering them by careful increments of refinement into something of his liking.
Chapter Fourteen
Reversals Without Transition
‘Are you all right?’ Jim McCrae flipped his cigarette butt from the Sierra. ‘I thought you’d gone completely tonto on me for a while, son.’
They were parked in the parade ground that served as the UNIT, and now the Special Branch, car park waiting for the Doctor’s assistant to come out.
‘I’m fine,’ Danny Slater said. He was already going through that mental healing process common to those exposed to the physically impossible; the mind papering over the sudden holes in its world-view with false memory perceptions. ‘It just gave me a bit of a start, that Doctor guy doing his magic trick and all.
Threw me a bit.’ Slater thought for a moment. ‘I can see how it was done now, of course. You get this big sheet of mirror, right, and you put a flap in the back...’
‘That Romana bird, though,’ said McCrae. ‘She was a bit of all right.’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ Slater replied. ‘I’d look for a hand grenade down her vest any day of the week.’
‘And you’d probably find one.’ McCrae lit another Rothmans with his gold-plated Zippo and scrunched around in the Leatherette passenger seat to shove the lighter back in his feather trousers. ‘More of a side to her than somewhat, I thought. Nice pair on her, though.’
Danny Slater shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t like it when they hang down all dangly like that.’
‘I suppose they could get caught on things if you’re not careful,’ McCrae said gnomically. ‘You couldn’t operate heavy machinery.’
‘Yeah,’ said Slater. ‘I’ve always preferred plain gold earrings on a woman, myself. Or possibly a couple of studs.’
Katharine Delbane’s opinion of the pair was well-founded.
The mistake would be to assume that Slater or McCrae were not perfectly aware of this, or could bring themselves to basically give a toss. Their work for the Provisional Department bordered on complete incompetence - but it was the incompetence of any man who was ever asked to do the washing-up. Do it badly enough, for long enough, and nobody expects any better. Meanwhile, you can put your feet up while somebody else does it for you - exasperatedly, three times out of five.
Slater and McCrae were, quite simply, a couple of lads who had lucked into working for the Provisional Department, having been palmed off on it after their original stints in the army and police.
TV
and
movie
ideas
of
covert-operations
work
notwithstanding, the life of a department operative was remarkably safe in reality, so long as you took steps to make it so and avoided the sort of unfortunate assignment where you had to protect some defector or whatever with a price on his head and assassins after him.
House surveillance was merely an opportunity to catch up on your kip out of the rain. Shadowing a target was a chance to go shopping. And the joy of it was that the work was in any case so nebulous that you were covered. Slater and McCrae knew precisely what their purpose was in life; it was to be a voice on the radio saying, ‘Control, the suspect has given us the slip,’
and then going off to get a kebab.
The door of a barracks hut swung open and Romana came through it, heading for the car with a determined stride, her skirts swishing about her.
‘That’s quite a walk she’s got on her,’ said McCrae. ‘Yeah,’ said Slater. ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ said McCrae. ‘This does not bode well. I have the nasty feeling that we’re going to be expected to do some actual work.’
Outside the wire a number of unkempt-looking women were linking arms and singing something about universal sisterhood. Amongst the pink triangles, labris-axes and CND
badges they sported, Haasterman noticed a number of high-level Wiccan symbols and suppressed a small smile. If only they knew.
The energy these people generated, in thaumaturgic terms, was barely enough to power a minor Circle of Protection, but every little helped. In fact, the existence of the women’s camp had been the deciding factor in Section Eight deciding to use this particular base, as opposed to one further west; supersonic transport-technology made the difference of an extra couple of hundred miles from US soil completely and utterly meaningless.
‘Look at ‘em,’ Lieutenant Major Derricks jerked a thumb towards the tents and teepees of the camp itself, where a news crew were interviewing a collection of protesters. ‘You know what they’re saying, don’t you? How us Yanks are gearing up to kill their precious kids.’ He snorted. ‘Bunch of dykes. What do they care?’
There were so many contradictions in that statement - the most obvious of which being that several of the interviewees were sporting children and babies in arms - that Haasterman decided to leave it alone. Life was too short. Derricks was one of the regular base personnel, its security officer, which basically meant that he was the on-site representative of the CIA.
A muscular and sweaty man with problems of a certain psychological kind. This was par for the course, in Haasterman’s experience. Servicemen based overseas were generally screened to be utterly trustworthy in some respects but in others were the sort of men and women that the people back home were damned glad to see the back of.
A thin drizzle flecked at Haasterman’s uniform jacket from the miserable grey sky. It seemed that this damn country was determined to reinforce every common prejudice about it, every time he arrived.
When Section Eight had come in with their request for use of the facilities - a request that was, effectively, an order that could not be refused without running for president and winning - the base commander had cleared out a hangar for them. Interestingly enough it was listed in the map records as Hangar 18. Haasterman headed back to it, dodging across the taxiways, occasionally returning the salutes from base personnel that his uniform required and wishing it looked less like the barely-worn-in fancy-dress get-up it effectively was.
Within the hangar, some technicians were wiring up the sensor and data systems while others were going over the transport, which included two out of the three prototypical Snark IV cargocopters that the Section had brought in.
A squad of black-clad ground-force troops, provided by the Section’s point man in the UK, were in evidence, seated around a number of trestle-tables off to one side, playing cards and drinking coffee through the mouth slits of their knitted Balaclava hoods.
Haasterman knew that, in the interests of security, it was standard operational procedure for them never to remove these if there was a chance of them being seen and recognised, but the sight of all those masked and faceless men was a little disquieting all the same.
The sigils of Protection were already in place about the walls and activated, but the concentric circles that bound a pentagram drawn in powdered chalk and pig’s blood on a cleared area of the hangar floor were broken, and the final lines still had to be drawn. Haasterman walked past it to where a technician was plugging leads into a portable scrambler switchboard-pack.
‘Do we have a secure international line?’ he asked. Secure meant something several orders of magnitude higher than anything available on the base itself, even the lines of communication step-connecting its missiles to the nuclear football.
‘Go right ahead.’ The technician gestured to a handset.
Haasterman picked it up and punched in the direct code for Dr Sohn in Lychburg. It was time for his hourly rea
lity-check.
With the general decline of commercial shipping in the latter half of the twentieth century, London Docklands had become redundant; real estate ripe for the clearing and property developing that in very real terms embodied the Spirit of the Age. In other words: a collection of uninhabitable, partially completed architectural white elephants built on the cheap by money-grabbing jackals.
‘There you go, sweetheart,’ Slater said as he pulled the Sierra into the shadow of Pyramid Wharf, the half-built tower block that would one day be seen from every point in ‘London, much as those who saw it might wish they couldn’t. ‘That’s the place this Doctor of yours told us about.’
‘Very nice,’ said Romana, brushing at some errant cigarette ash that had found its way on to her gown. She had cracked a window on the drive to avoid breathing in the fug of smoke coming from McCrae but, in any case, what with the general air pollutants of this primitive society in any case, she’d had to shut down two-thirds of her lung capacity completely. She could feel the pollution doing her harm.
Slater peered through the windscreen at the block. The superstructure was up, but only the first fifteen floors had so far been installed in some module-based building process. There didn’t seem to be any actual work going on, for all it was a weekday, and the only vehicles in evidence were dormant earth movers. There was no sign of any conveyance that might have served the dangerous agents of some mysterious enemy force -
and this, so far as one Daniel Michael Slater was concerned, was all to the good.
‘Now, what I think we should do, darling,’ said McCrae, speaking Slater’s mind for him, ‘is scout out the area for a while. Sit tight and wait for developments...’
He realised that he was talking to thin air. Romana had left the car, slammed the door behind her and was storming for the block; the way she moved showing that her attitude could have been summed up in two words. And they weren’t ‘bless you’.