by Stephen Cole
‘That’s no justification,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘You know very well it isn’t.’
‘I know your kind,’ she spat at him. ‘I knew it from the moment we met. The lump of butter that won’t melt in your mouth. The roses you come up smelling of every time.’ She sneered, shook her head. ‘I was damned the second the Schirr saved my life.’
‘No,’ the Doctor gasped as he clawed feebly at her hands, his eyes tightly shut. She slackened her grip. ‘No,’ he said more firmly. ‘You lost someone dear to you and never let yourself recover. You withdrew into yourself, withdrew from life, until nothing mattered at all. The Schirr didn’t cause that change in you. You did it yourself.’
‘Oh, you’re funny.’ She stared at him, breathless. ‘You think I didn’t know there’d be a price for my life? That they’d want something from me in return? It’s so obvious.’ Her hand slid down to her side.
The Doctor stared at her. ‘The cyst?’
‘It was theirs,’ she whispered. ‘They grew it in me. Malignant. No way to remove it save the way you saw.’
He met her gaze, grave and unflinching. He acted like he understood now. Like he wasn’t afraid. ‘And over the years it’s slowly taken control of you. Led you to this pass.’ His bony hand gripped her wrist and he spoke urgently. ‘But it’s gone from you now! Now you can fight their conditioning, prevent this evil –’
DeCaster was approaching the tunnel bend. Coming into the light.
‘No, Doctor. It’s for the best, all this.’ She let her forehead rest against the Doctor’s chest. ‘When we’re all a part of them… We’ll start a real war. A proper war, one we can win.’ She couldn’t suppress a sudden smile. ‘And even if we don’t… I won’t be scared any more.’
‘You’re mad,’ he said quietly in her ear. ‘Quite mad.’
She heard the rasping breath of DeCaster as he rounded the corner. Straightened up, but a fraction too late. His pink eyes looked furious, the pupils dilated to red specks.
‘Has he explained what he has done?’ the Schirr enquired.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he hasn’t.’
The Doctor looked up at the Schirr and smiled weakly. ‘Through here,’ he croaked.’ I will show you, sir.’
‘Why so feeble?’ DeCaster wondered. His voice was sticky, seductive. ‘I smell youth in you. Can the body be so frail when the mind is so…?’ He trailed off mid-sentence. Then he seized the Doctor by his coat and lifted him off the ground. ‘Yes, of course. I see it now.’
‘What?’ Haunt asked nervously. ‘What is it?’
‘He is holding back the paralysing pulse with his mind.’
Haunt stared at the old man. ‘It’s not possible.’
‘Such power we shall have in this little creature when he is ours,’ breathed DeCaster. ‘But look at him now, he is so tired.’
The Schirr dropped the Doctor to the tunnel floor. He scrambled up, a pathetic figure, limping along towards the light, trying to get away.
‘Let go, little creature,’ DeCaster shouted after him. ‘Let go, and the joining can be completed.’
Haunt saw two of the Spook constructs stride up out of the blue mist that swirled through the propulsion chamber. They towered over the Doctor.
‘I asked for them to appear as angels, Doctor,’ she called out to the old man, ‘and they did. I could never understand God. But angels are different. They can be evil as well as good, can’t they?’
The Doctor staggered back from the constructs. They caught him with ease.
Haunt watched him as he struggled to hold on. Watched the Spooks as they pushed and pulled at his feeble body. ‘I wanted angels,’ she told him, ‘to guide us to our rest.’
III
‘We need a distraction,’ whispered Ben, mindful of the oversized ears of their Schirr captors, and unsure the constructs were really so detached from all this as they seemed. ‘Creben, Shade, if we can lead them away from here, through that secret passageway, Polly and Tovel can have a go at fitting them crystals and getting us out of here.’
Polly glanced down at Tovel. She crossed her fingers, and nodded.
Creben and Shade looked more doubtful.
‘It’s the only chance we’ve got,’ Ben insisted. ‘Cheer up, this is the easy bit. Once we’ve done that, we’ve got to save the Doctor.’
Creben looked away. ‘Forget it.’
‘You just gonna wait till you turn into one of those things?’ Ben hissed furiously.
‘You’re only prolonging the inevitable,’ Creben muttered, not turning round.
Ben nodded to himself. Polly glared at Creben, but he was too wrapped up in himself to even notice.
‘Shadow?’ Ben asked, eyebrows raised.
‘Shade,’ he corrected. ‘All right. I’m in.’
Ben saw Polly’s fattening face light up with a smile.
‘Thank God for that,’ said Ben gratefully. ‘Next question. Any ideas?’
He saw Shade staring at what looked like boiled sweets that had fallen from Roba’s torn combat suit. His eyes met Polly’s. She scooped a couple up discreetly, pretending to check on Tovel, still slumped on the floor beside them.
‘Not hungry, ta,’ said Ben, bewildered. But Shade reached into his own pocket and pressed one into the puffy, blistering flesh of Ben’s hand.
‘Follow my lead,’ Shade said. ‘Polly, can you act sick? They’ll be less bothered about guarding you if they think you’re like Frog and Roba.’
Ben glanced at the two of them, spreadeagled on the floor, misshapen and twitching. Roba’s milky eyes met his own. He turned away.
‘All right, I’m ready when you are,’ he said.
Polly gave a pitiful, sobbing cry, and collapsed to the floor, thrashing about beside Tovel like she was mental.
‘Now,’ yelled Shade. He threw the boiled sweet down at the floor between two Schirr. He’s missed, Ben thought for a sickening moment. The silly sod’s missed. But a second later, with a bang like a cap popping, a long rectangular bubble appeared, one of those things Frog and the others were lying on. Three Schirr went tumbling backwards as the thing expanded and knocked them off their feet.
Ben ran up screaming to two of the stone angels and threw down his own instant mattress. It sprang into full size. One of the creatures fell heavily to the ground, the other flapped away in surprise, like a dirty great startled pigeon.
Now every second counted. Ben sprinted for the door in the wall, raising a fist in triumph at Shade, who was matching him for speed across the control room. A big, pink, Schirr fist.
He halted in the doorway, looked back. One of the angels was already drifting across to catch them. The hunched-up Schirr lumbered after them like amateur Lon Chaneys. And behind them, unnoticed, Polly was helping Tovel into a kneeling position, helping him towards the navigational console.
‘It worked,’ Shade panted. From his tone, the gormless grin on his face, you’d think nothing he’d done had ever worked before.
‘Yeah, like a charm,’ said Ben wryly. ‘Every ugly in the place’ll be breathing down our neck.’
‘Let’s go.’ Shade led the way down the passageway like he was John Wayne all of a sudden.
‘Terrific,’ Ben muttered, and ran to catch him up.
The beating of stone wings echoed eerily down the tunnel behind him.
IV
Haunt watched the Doctor collapse to his knees, clutching his head. The constructs had toyed with him for a few minutes, spun him in dizzying turns through the air and batted him about between them. She sensed he couldn’t stand much more.
DeCaster did too. His eyes had narrowed to white slits in his great livid face. ‘He is falling,’ the Schirr muttered. ‘The barrier is giving way.’
Then he convulsed with giggling laughter as the Doctor screamed out in pain and dismay.
Haunt felt herself trembling. This was it then. The moment she’d been saved for.
DeCaster swaggered up to her. She looked deeply into his glisteni
ng white eyes, ready to be taken. ‘I accepted the new life you gave me,’ she whispered. ‘Now I accept your new death.’
‘You were ours from that moment,’ he murmured soothingly, tilting her head back. ‘We knew all you were and foresaw all you could be.’
You understood me, she wanted to say, wanted to smile, but DeCaster had pulled open her mouth.
‘And we always reclaim our own.’
A flood of sour saliva fell into her mouth, choking her, as the Schirr pressed his open lips against her face in a kiss. He crushed her body against his own. She couldn’t move. Distantly she could hear the Doctor shouting out, but she couldn’t hear the words. Surely there was nothing left to be said?
The Schirr’s flesh scalded her own. She wanted to scream but he didn’t wish it, so she stayed silent. His mouth opened wider, sucked in her whole drenched face, his teeth tore her hair from her bleeding scalp. She was breathing his air, big whooping gulps too big for her lungs, so she used his. He bit off her head and it went rolling down his black throat to melt in his guts. The body she left behind was a bag of old blood and bones, drying in his heat, more desiccated with each new beat of their heart.
There was no fear, no sorrow as the last splashes of Haunt bled away. Only strength as their mouth, DeCaster’s beautiful wet mouth, moved in the chanting of the ritual.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE UNEXPECTED GUEST
I
POLLY HAD FITTED the crystals into the console. They sparkled in the light like Hatton Garden’s finest. Her puffed-up fingers hovered indecisively over the tactile controls. Tovel was trying to tell her which buttons to press by nodding his oversized head at them. The muffled grunts of alarm he made when she went for the wrong ones left her wondering what would happen if the course correction sequence got snarled up. She tried to follow his gaze across to a small lever beside the screen full of numbers.
Tovel groaned again, more loudly.
‘Well which one is it then?’ she snapped at him.
‘For God’s sake, let me.’ Creben pushed her aside and hit a switch below the lever.
Polly looked at him as she felt a faint rumble from somewhere deep beneath her feet. ‘Thanks for joining us,’ she said.
‘They won’t kill us – you might,’ Creben retorted. But she could tell by the embarrassed flush of colour in his cheeks that he wasn’t helping for that reason.
Tovel started to gurgle and groan again.
‘I’m not even pressing anything,’ she protested.
She realised he wasn’t looking at her.
Three of the Schirr had come up behind them, one each. Polly almost gagged on the stench of them, a sickly reek of sweat, perfumed soap and filled nappies. The one zeroing in on her, wrinkled and wheezing, was smaller than the others but broader. It reached out for her face.
She tried to twist away, out of its reach. But she was frozen to the spot, paralysed, unable even to scream as it touched her with its sticky hands.
II
Ben kept running. His footsteps ricocheted around the tunnel walls like gunshots as he pelted through the darkness, the whooping and rustling of the massive angel’s wings getting louder, closer. Ahead of him he could hear an eerie chanting, a litany of hard sounds against a background noise like cats yowling at enemies, ready to pounce.
Then Ben’s legs locked. He collapsed to the ground, face and hands stinging from the impact. Blue light from down the passage shone in his eyes. He couldn’t close them.
Shade had fallen too. His body was lifeless, his arms stretched out stiffly to the light.
The creature that had chased him here landed lightly close by and crouched silently to inspect him. Its expressionless face came up close to his own.
It couldn’t close its eyes, either.
Behind him he heard heavy, dragging footsteps. He strained every muscle he had to try and move, but it was useless. The Schirr were coming, for him and Shade, for the Doctor. To destroy them.
III
The webset seared the Doctor’s fingers as he tried to tear it from his head. It was no good. He couldn’t shift it. Blocking the pulse for so long had left him exhausted. Now that it had slipped past him, torn through the neural web as fast as a thought, he felt his muscles stiffen and cramp as the paralysis hit.
The Morphiean angels watched him. Their mouths were open, O-shapes in the hard grey flesh, and a noise somewhere between singing and screaming issued forth. DeCaster’s body made a giant X, all but silhouetted against the fierce blue of the propulsion units. Nothing remained of Haunt save for the dark stain smeared on the Schirr’s billowing robes. The half-words and whispers he chanted reverberated in the Doctor’s head, whipped up the sympathetic Morphiean energies in the glass cylinder to a crackling incandescence.
Then another Schirr peeped into the bright blue light, started to slouch over to where the Doctor knelt, ready to take his body. But he was spared the doomy image. It vanished as DeCaster’s mystical babble summoned up a darkness in the Doctor’s eyes more profound than any he had known.
He willed himself to hold on to consciousness. The network contracted, gathered the nine of them together. The Doctor felt them all around him, vague digital impressions scattered about, brushing against his senses as they were slung like mud into the blackness. Ben and Polly were fretting for him even as they dwindled and died. Shade and Tovel wished only for a little more time. Frog, who didn’t think of herself as a frog any more, hung on for grim life to the person she could be. Creben and Roba were both buried deep within themselves, so it might hurt less when the last layers of self were peeled away.
And he felt Haunt’s presence, all that was left of her, crushed to a pulp of ones and zeroes at the epicentre of the joining. The digital vortex swept the Doctor down too, dragged him closer and closer to the point of no return as the ritual neared its peak.
Then he became aware of something else.
Someone else, hidden there in the dark.
‘It’s you, is it not?’ the Doctor heard himself whisper. ‘Shel? Can you hear me?’
There was a sluggish shifting of sensation. The Doctor gritted his teeth. ‘Shel, a trace of you remains. Reach out to me.’
He could feel Shel’s presence hovering close by, a still point in the storm as skin and spirit began to pare away.
‘Join me here. Stand with me.’ The Doctor steeled himself for one last, despairing try. ‘Stand with me against them.’
Shel let himself be found.
DeCaster felt it at the same moment. He choked on the hisses and clicks of his incantation, and started to scream.
IV
The Schirr’s face filled Polly’s vision. Its big hands cradled the back of her head as it opened its mouth, ready to devour her.
But something was wrong. It froze in front of her. Polly got the distinct impression it was trying to close its mouth again but couldn’t. Now it was the one paralysed, and she, she could move again. Her body was stiff and slow, but she could move.
The Schirr that had been crouched over Creben was frozen too. Creben had toppled back against the console. Though his neat features had started to warp into those of a Schirr, his eyes were still brown and human. Slowly, painfully slowly, he struggled to grip on to the console and pull himself to his feet.
‘Tovel,’ Polly gasped, turning to face him. ‘Quickly, we must finish what we started. What else do we need to…’
He wasn’t listening to her. There was little of Tovel left now. His eyes had grown pink and large, fleshy white jelly dripping off them like thick tears. The expression on his broad face slowly shifted into anger, and his hands gripped Polly’s throat.
V
The stone angel had upped and gone, and Ben could move again. His arms and legs had cramped up like he’d just swum the Channel, but still he crawled painfully down the passageway, into the light towards the Doctor. The Schirr behind him made no effort to follow him. It still crouched there, shivering so violently Ben thought it m
ight shake itself apart.
He hunted through the rolling indigo swell for any sign of the Doctor. There was DeCaster, spreadeagled against the glass cylinder like it was sucking him in. He writhed in agony, screamed out as glittering blue lightning crackled out from the glass to shake his colossal bulk. The stone angel was peering at him, as if trying to understand what was wrong, as the room began to darken to a stormy grey.
Ben cowered back instinctively as a dark shape detached itself from the pitching shadows. But it was friend, not foe.
‘Doctor!’ he yelled. ‘Doctor, what’s happening?’
‘Something our friend DeCaster did not allow for,’ the Doctor shouted back triumphantly. ‘A tenth soul in his black little ritual.’
‘Tenth?’ Ben didn’t understand.
‘Shel, my boy!’ the Doctor yelled, his words nearly lost over a deafening blast of what sounded like thunder. ‘As an artificial intelligence his interface with the webset was far more comprehensive. His outward form was a carrying case only – the real flesh of him is the scripting in his circuitry. His presence in the network is as real as yours or mine.’
‘’Course it is,’ Ben yelled, still puzzled, but enjoying the barmy smile on the old boy’s face.
There were footsteps behind him. Ben spun round, ready to fight, but it was only Shade. He looked completely lost.
As he opened his mouth to speak, Ben shushed him and pointed at the Doctor. ‘He’s your bloke. Maybe you can get some sense out of him.’
‘Don’t you see?’ The Doctor staggered over to join them. He looked a little bruised but was apparently untouched in any other way by the Schirr infection. ‘The mere presence of Shel’s personality in the neural network DeCaster had assembled was enough to create an imbalance. The ritual could not be completed. It’s coming undone, I only hope it’s not too late.’
‘And what about the Schirr?’ asked Shade. He pointed at DeCaster who was bellowing back against the glass. He shook like current was running through him.