Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  He attempted to explain this, stammering out something about the function of the Provisional Department, but the Brigadier cut him short.

  ‘It seems that “provisional” is entirely the right description,’

  he said brusquely. ‘Oh well. You’ll just have to do.’

  The Brigadier gestured down the corridor in the direction the monstrous creatures had gone. ‘Thoroughly bad sorts, but I’ve seen worse. I’ve no doubt the Doctor can handle them.’ He tapped his moustache with a thoughtful finger, obviously considering his line of attack. ‘I think our best bet for the moment is to secure the immediate area, see if we can’t find a way of calling in reinforcements. Come with me. Well, what are you waiting for? You’ve been given an order by a superior officer, which by my reckoning, from the shape of you, means any officer at all.’

  The spaces of the TARDIS formed and reformed as the Doctor and Romana, with an all-but-insensate Katharine Delbane in tow, ran through them. Its internal geography seemed to have undergone some fundamental and basically chaotic shift, so that familiar and entirely prosaic environments like the cloister room, the linking chamber to the eye of harmony, any number of storage compartments, the jungle room, the observatory, the chess hall, bestiary, shoe cupboard and skin museum appeared more or less at random and quite unexpectedly. The other spaces and apparitions were decidedly more strange. They kept up a good pace but were forced to backtrack occasionally and hunt around, following inhuman senses that merely told them they were getting closer to or further away from some region of wrongness - wrong in a particular and distinct way - in the TARDIS spaces, as if they were playing an abstract game of ‘hot and cold’.

  To human eyes, the nexus point of which Romana had spoken would hardly have seemed to be worth the trip. They finally reached a largish, vaulted hall littered with broken fluted-marble columns and items of vaguely Athenian-looking architecture; such ideo-and pictograms as were incised upon them, however, hailed from the non-human minds and hands of ancient Mu.

  So far as the visible spectrum of human terms was concerned, it was nothing more remarkable than a hall scattered with oddly chiselled masonry.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ said the Doctor, trying and failing to prevent his body shaking. ‘Can’t you feel the sheer power of the thing?’

  ‘I can feel it,’ Romana said. She attempted to inject her voice with a degree of aspersion suitable for answering a patently obvious question - but, rather like the Doctor trying to control his shaking, she failed. The enormity of the thing overwhelmed those senses that could so much as notice it in the first place. This wasn’t some mere nexal conduit. This was a Nexus, in the capitalised and archetypical sense - a maelstrom of Universal impact and collision that made the Vortex itself look like the slow seeping of greasy washing-up water from a partially bunged-up sink.

  Delbane chose that moment to look up dreamily. ‘It’s peaceful here,’ she said in the disconnected and perfectly calm tones of the lobotomised. ‘I like it.’

  Then her head lolled again. She stood there, unconscious but upright, held by perfect neuromuscular stillness.

  ‘The Doctor and Romana barely paid heed to her, staring as they were into a burning heart of chaos that only they were equipped to see.

  ‘Do we dare?’ breathed Romana. ‘If we were to step inside, could we possibly survive?’

  ‘Quite possibly not,’ said the Doctor cheerfully - although his cheerfulness seemed, at this point, to be not a little forced.

  ‘On the other hand, we’ll never know unless we -’

  ‘Not so fast, Time Lord,’ said a voice behind them. The mouth and vocal cords with which it spoke might have been human, but the sound it made was definitely not. The Doctor and Romana turned to find the monstrous minions spilling through the doorway of the chamber, and behind them, feet floating three inches off the ground, the body of Crowley.

  ‘Do you know,’ the Doctor said scornfully, ‘if I had a penny for every time some power-maddened villain used those exact same words to me, I’d have... ah, four pounds, seven shillings and fourpence. Do they give you a little booklet with the job or something?’ He looked inside the floating figure with his Gallifreyan senses, and didn’t like what he saw. The poor chaps Crowley had turned into his minions were the sort of thing he encountered every day of the week, and no problem at that, but the man himself was different. Very different.

  ‘What is it that you want, Mr Crowley?’

  ‘I am not,’ the man himself spat, with a disdainful sense of dramatic revelation, ‘your “Mr Crowley”. I never was your “Mr Crowley”...’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve known that since I said I’d never met the real Edward Alexander Crowley and you agreed with me. I knew the real Crowley for years,’ he said in an aside to Romana, who for her part wouldn’t know an Edward Alexander Crowley from a Joe Soap. ‘Lovely chap, if dreadfully misinterpreted, and a bit too fond of the old laudanum...’

  ‘A puny human fool...’ said the body of the man who had hitherto been known as Crowley. He seemed a little put out and deflated that his Final Revelation had been so casually trumped.

  ‘And the fools just keep on coming,’ said the Doctor. ‘Don’t they? I suspected as much from the instant I met you - that patina of suavity was rather too deliberate to be anything other than contrived. I could see from the start that you had no - in every generally accepted sense of the term - bottom.

  Different biological processes, you see,’ he again explained to Romana. ‘I think our man here is what is known as a homunculus - a rather more advanced form of golem technology, built from organic materials and animated by a demon.’

  ‘That’s hardly a scientific description,’ said Romana, dubiously.

  ‘Well, call it a quantum-based dynamically self-referential pattern matrix if it makes you happier,’ said the Doctor, ‘or an Energy Being, or an automemic Entity - what ancient Earth cultures thought of as a demon. An Entity who inhabits the homunculus is more-or-less analogous to an AI operating system...’

  ‘Excuse me...’ the Entitic AI operating system currently operating the body of Crowley appeared to be getting slightly irate at being ignored. One of the minions took an exploratory swipe at the Doctor, who stepped smartly aside so that the minion missed, misjudged the follow-through and ended up injuring its degenerating body quite nastily.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Doctor, brightly. ‘So what... -

  race or species is inappropriate, I gather - so what variety of demon are you? The Azrae? The Raagnarokath? The Jarakabeth...?’

  ‘Our name is of no matter,’ growled the body of Crowley.

  ‘Ah, so it’s the Jarakabeth.’ The Doctor turned to Romana once again. ‘They don’t like their name being spoken, the Jarakabeth.’

  Romana nodded intelligently. ‘It gives one power over them or some such?’

  ‘No, it just embarrasses them. It’s one of those demon names with unfortunate connotations, rather like the English name of Cropper. I beg your pardon again.’ This to the demon Crowley, who was by this point looking fit to burst, and who knew what might burst out of him. ‘Please, do continue.’

  ‘The man Crowley summoned me,’ the demon continued, glowering murderously from his burning eyes. ‘Set me to work. I allowed him to think that the feeble bindings he had placed upon me were sufficient. I toiled for him, and when the time came for him to use the shell of my body in the subterfuge of counterfeiting his death, I at last revealed myself in my true Aspect. I subsumed him.’

  The demon smiled. ‘A flesh and bone container is the same as wood and fungus to me...’

  ‘And you’ve been passing yourself off as him ever since,’ the Doctor finished expeditiously. ‘To what end? You haven’t exactly achieved Dominion over the Kingdoms of the World and ground them to dust beneath your heels, have you? Skies black with the bodies of the burning dead are slightly noticeable by their absence.’

  ‘That will come,’ the demon Crow
ley said.

  ‘You’re a bit inept, in my opinion,’ said the Doctor. ‘All this time and you haven’t even managed to open a proper gateway into the dimensions of Hell. I mean, look what happened to it when even a couple of TARDISes hit it.’

  ‘That too will come.’ The demon smiled nastily. ‘The Golgotha processes were plunged into disarray by your race’s machines, Time Lord, shutting me off from the artefact that was my source of power... but now I shall retrieve it. I will simply step through this new portal your Time Lady here has created, and which you seem to be so pointedly ignoring.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘Ah. Do you know, I was rather hoping you couldn’t actually see that.’

  ‘The eyes, such as they remain, might be functionally human, Doctor,’ said the demon. ‘I, on the other hand, such as I remain, am not. Soon, now, I shall tear the curtain between the dimensions open wide and engulf your very universe in primal Chaos...’

  ‘And then what?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘What?’ said the demon Crowley, a little taken aback by the abruptness of the question.

  ‘Well, if I understand correctly,’ said the Doctor. ‘you’ve gone through all these machinations to arrange things so you can open the door to Chaos, utterly obliterating any sense of Order in the universe for all of time. Or not, as it happens, Time being a function of Order. So what, precisely, do you intend to do with the universe then?’

  ‘I shall impose my Will upon it,’ said the demon Crowley, firmly. ‘I shall take the stuff of Chaos and order it to my liking and desire...’

  ‘No you won’t,’ said the Doctor, patiently, ‘because you won’t be there to do it. This is primal Chaos we’re talking about, yes? No self-referential construct, no sense of identity, even such as yours, can survive in it.’

  ‘I am its master,’ the demon said, a note of uncertainty just on the edge of preternatural Time Lord hearing entering its voice.

  ‘It is mine to unleash...’

  ‘That’s like saying a gallows won’t snap your neck just because you happen to be pulling the lever yourself.’ The Doctor snorted. ‘Do you know, I really wish that just once some megalomaniacal villain bent on destroying the known universe would actually sit down and think it through. It’s one thing to be a suicidal paranoiac wanting to switch the whole world off, but if you want to be suicidal you can just kill yourself and let everyone else alone...’

  ‘Silence!’ snarled the demon Crowley.

  ‘Twenty-seven pounds, fifteen shillings and tuppence,’ said the Doctor to Romana out of the comer of his mouth.

  ‘Oh you’ll regret your insolence, Time Lord,’ growled the demon, and the glow in his eyes flared bright enough to blind any human eye looking directly at it. Around him, the minions staggered, their twisted flesh withering and flaking as though a process of post-mortem decomposition had been accelerated by time-lapse photography Both Time Lord and Lady sensed the biologically generated energies as they were sucked from the minions into Crowley’s body, building up a charge that made evolutionary back-brain hackles rise in each of them.

  The body of Crowley seemed to expand, vulpine, avine, insectoid and reptilian features sliding across his face as though something inside were hunting for a more appropriate form, throwing new forms up at random and then discarding them. The effect was all the more horrifying because of the constancy of the physical expression of pure evil that underlay each abortive transformation.

  ‘I was going to keep you alive,’ the mouth of Crowley said, through splintering and shifting teeth. By now, the actual sounds it made were utterly senseless. The thing inside was speaking directly with what passed for its mind. ‘I was going to show you the heart of darkness, the screaming and unending night. Now, I think, I just don’t want you to be alive.’

  Transcendental energies arced from Crowley’s body to the Doctor and Romana, blasting them off their feet and making their bodies jerk as though with Saint Vitus’s dance. As they lay, stunned, they realised as one that this had merely been the sucker-punch, intended to stun them before the major offensive. As one - before they could raise their mental guards - they felt insubstantial tendrils plunging into them. The feeling was not the equivalent of some galvanistical shock, but more akin to the complete opposite.

  The interplay of bioneural, kinetic and calorific energies contained within a living individual is, in actual fact, far more complex than a basically meaningless term like ‘life force’

  implies. Be that as it may, it was just that interplay of energies that the Doctor and Romana felt streaming from them, sucked into the body of Crowley for the entity inside it to gorge upon.

  ‘Must... must resist...’ the Doctor uttered through gritted teeth, some fading pan of his higher intelligence wondering just what it was about situations like these that had absolutely everybody saying things like that. Then that particular part of his higher intelligence shut down. He looked at Romana. She was moaning and her skin was turning dull and thin as energies inside her died...

  ‘No!’

  The exclamation was so loud and unexpected that everything seemed to pause in momentary, confused silence.

  For an instant, neither the intangibly attacking nor the attacked could work out quite where it had come from.

  The first clue was when the withering minions, every single one, imploded with a smack and a spray of dust, biological energies wrenched from them in one catastrophic discharge, like static electricity earthing through a Marks & Spencer’s coat rack.

  The second clue was the sense that these energies had not been released by the creature in the body of Crowley who had appeared, after all, to be using the minions as though they were a collection of dry-cell batteries.

  The third and final clue was when, from her slumped position off to one side of the chamber, where she had been left and subsequently forgotten about, the body of Katharine Delbane climbed to its feet and then rose higher, floating on a level with that of Crowley, its eyes burning with an entirely similar light.

  ‘Ramo tath nor gir,’ the mouth of Delbane said. ‘Ta lekme Rakthamak di salo man te solo ma!’

  The force of the incorporeal blow knocked the corporeal body of Crowley backwards, tumbling through the air. Both the Doctor and Romana felt the ghostly tendrils linking them to the thing inside Crowley’s body whip away from them, leaving deep gouges that had no relation to physicality.

  The thing inside Crowley appeared to recover a little; the body righted itself, and the head turned to grin at the advancing body of Delbane through ruined teeth.

  ‘Little Katharine...’ it said in the voice that issued from its mind. ‘Why I had no idea.’

  ‘And that will be your undoing,’ said the voice of Katharine Delbane, or rather the Voice that issued from her. ‘It seems that you are as short-sighted as you ever were. You fail to see things even when they are placed before you. Anok ra di samonan ma Kadethed on sami danonat!’

  Again, the body of Crowley rocked backwards in the air, but the creature inside had been anticipating this and rode the blast.

  Alien energies hummed around the demon, their cycle accelerating as it gathered its forces to retaliate.

  ‘I will try to keep him here,’ Delbane said to the Doctor and Romana as they staggered unsteadily to their feet, the thing inside her taking control of her mouth and allowing it to make actual sounds. ‘You have a job to do, I think. Go and do it.’

  ‘Salaki na meh Tononak ti ramen keti lamo da...’ the thing inside Crowley was saying. Visible energy now crawled around him like a collection of coiling snakes.

  ‘Well, if you’re quite certain we can’t be of any help...’ the Doctor began, caught between the abstract idea of saving the entire universe once again, and the rather more concrete considerations of the battle happening right in front of him.

  ‘Your concerns are elsewhere, now, Doctor,’ the thing inside Delbane said, in tones containing an element familiar to absolutely anybody in the as-yet-undestroyed universe, wh
o is about some involved and stressful task and doesn’t need well-meaning fools blundering in and trying to help. ‘Go and attend to your concerns. I will deal with [uninterpretable name] here.’

  ‘My word,’ said the Doctor, unable despite himself to resist commenting upon the sound the ‘name’ made when filtered through human speech: like an explosive choking drawn out over several seconds. It’s like the way a cough in a room drowns out every word being said for an instant - the vocal cords producing every sound of which they’re capable simultaneously...’

  A new sound now came from Delbane, which might be best characterised as the building up of utter blinding rage - and Romana, for one, didn’t need anyone to draw her a pictogram to tell her at whom this rage would be directed.

  She took the Doctor’s arm. ‘I think we’d better do what she says. This does seem to be more her sort of thing, and there’s nothing we can do to help her in any case.’

  ‘Well, if you really think so...’ said the Doctor.

  ‘I do,’ said Romana. ‘Trust me on this.’

  As the battle between arcane forces set to escalate around them, the Doctor and Romana ran to what to a human would be a completely unremarkable and empty patch of thin air, and disappeared into it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Everything is Happening at Once

  In the Lychburg Drive-o-Rama, in the shadow of the massive humanoid creature built from men, women and children, the thing controlling the body of Dr Dibley plunged the scalpel into the back of the Doctor’s neck - which suddenly wasn’t there any more. Possibly due to the lack of basic human reflexes remaining in Dibley’s body, or possibly because the thing controlling it had other things on Its mind to deal with, the body of Dibley lost its balance and fell forward skewering its face, possibly through one of its eyes, on the scalpel still clutched in its hand. From this position there was little to see of a gory or repugnant nature, but the body spasmed and jerked as it expired, the physical shock of its damaged brain shutting down its heart.