The Drosten's Curse

by A. L. Kennedy

  And then Honor and Xavier – slightly as if they had been dreaming for a while – shook their heads and laughed, and the universe stretched and settled back into place, and they shouted together, ‘Tea! Tea! It must be time for tea!’ and scampered towards the cottage door.

  THE DOCTOR HAD THOUGHT it best to lead his two companions out of the Spa through the fire exit. None of them remotely resembled individuals who had been through a sublimely tranquil and restorative experience of balanced wholeness. They looked if they been buried at sea. In a whale. And that might have alarmed Miss Pitcairn, the Spa Manageress. Who would eventually discover the scene of horror they were leaving behind. The Doctor found that leaving behind scenes of horror was usually wise, particularly if you might be likely to get an unfair amount of the blame for them.

  Their unconventional route out – which hadn’t passed the changing rooms – meant that Putta now had to cope with being outdoors in a sand- and slime-covered bathrobe (without flip-flops) in the presence of Bryony. Who had saved his life. Again. He was unsure about whether he wanted to burst into song, or make a break for his Type F378a Abrischooner, fire up the engines and never be seen again. At least he had discovered that it wasn’t actually possible to die of shame. Which, in a day of hideous shocks, had still come as something of a surprise.

  Bryony herself was sporting a marginally less grubby bathrobe. She was, Putta thought, looking quite graceful as they set off back towards the golf course. Trotting barefoot next to the Doctor, she peppered him with questions. Putta had never seen anyone trot barefoot more beautifully. Actually, he’d never seen anyone trot barefoot – but that didn’t make her any less monumentally lovely.

  Lovely and frustrated. ‘But I don’t understand—’

  The Doctor interrupted. ‘Naturally, you don’t. You have no experience of what would happen if a completely reckless interplanetary vandal managed both to spill psy fluid on a planet where it didn’t belong and accidentally introduce a sandmaster larva to a perfect environment to hyper-accelerate its developmental cycle. Sandmasters often co-exist with Parthian mind wasps – in the sense of spending part of their larval stage eating the wasps’ brains from the inside out. Beings who shall remain nameless should remember to decontaminate their hulls before they make planetfall…You…’ he growled at Putta as if he was only letting him remain nameless because he couldn’t bear to pronounce his name and shot him a glance that made him huddle deeper into his oversized, but tattered robe. ‘You, Putta, came much closer to wiping out every life form on Earth than anyone should on their first visit. Or on any visit. Do you intend to destroy every civilisation you encounter?’ He continued to glare and then seemed to find further scolding impossible and lapsed back into explaining how cleverly he had worked things out, despite being subjected to a massive psychon dose.

  ‘I had the largest available consciousness, you see…So it attacked me the most.’

  ‘But where has it gone?! Where’s the monster?’ Bryony still wasn’t satisfied and she didn’t think this was because she hadn’t got enough experience of whatever sandmasters were. She thought it was most likely because the Doctor was extremely bad at explaining.

  He hadn’t, for example, explained what planet he was from – even though it clearly wasn’t Earth. And she didn’t quite like to ask – somehow the idea of enquiring made her feel shy, or else nervous. But it would have been useful, she thought, if he’d said, ‘Hello, I’m the Doctor.’ And then not forgotten to add, ‘And I’m from some really strange other planet and quite possibly have an amazing spaceship somewhere hereabouts which you should take a look at and, by the way, I know how to deal with monsters – just about – so don’t worry too much if one turns up. That kind of information could save other people a good deal of stress. She looked over at him and thought, He’s used to monsters, though. He takes them for granted. He’s almost happy to see them. And something about that – about living a life which assumed there would always be monsters – made her feel chilly, even though it was a lovely day and the mature trees around the golf course looked magnificent and very normal and the birds were singing just as they had yesterday, before everything changed.

  She tried to keep on chatting and suppressed the thought that – now that the major panic in the Spa was over – she felt slightly more like screaming than she had at the time. ‘One minute, it’s eating everyone it can get a hold of and the next it’s a heap of muck. Which there will be complaints about. And…oh, Lord…’ Bryony couldn’t help remembering the body in the pool – Agnew’s ghastly, bloodless face above the bubbling, crimson water…she felt clammy and bewildered, and the Doctor put his arm around her to keep her steady.

  He gently distracted her with information, albeit not quite the information she wanted. ‘The sandmaster’s life cycle was advancing so rapidly that, while it was highly aggressive, it probably only had a few hours left before it would either join a mating stream – which it couldn’t because we’d surely know if there was more than one around here – that would involve a positively huge table reserved for two with massive romantic candles and…’ He was attempting to cheer her up with nonsense and checked her expression to see how he was doing before he went on. ‘Or…well, beyond that instar, that developmental stage…well, they tend to either explode, or dissolve. We seemed to speed up its decomposition—’

  ‘Explode! You didn’t tell us that it might explode!’

  ‘Would you have been happier if I had?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Then I made a terribly wise decision by not mentioning it. And they don’t often explode. Then again, they don’t often come into contact with psy fluid and have their psychic abilities massively magnified so that they can control matter, interfere with minds…’ The Doctor made a noise somewhere between a snarl and a sigh.

  Putta winced, expecting to be shouted at again. But instead he felt the strong and heavy thump of the Doctor’s free arm hugging his bruised shoulders. ‘Putta. Let’s go and have tea. Don’t you think that would be a good idea? Tea, anyone?’

  ‘Oh, well…’ Putta gulped and felt mildly tearful. ‘Um, tea. I think I’ve had that before. It was nice. It didn’t try to kill me.’

  And Bryony found herself making the decision unanimous. ‘Tea.’ Because tea might be what you should have after vanquishing an alien, emotionally sensitive carnivorous golf bunker monster. As far as she could tell.

  ‘Yes. The cottage is this way, isn’t it?’ The Doctor released them both and paced languidly ahead across the grass, accompanied by his scarf.

  But then he stopped, turned. ‘By the way, Bryony. Thank you so much for saving my life.’ And he looked at her, his eyes quickly serious, frighteningly intelligent, a quality in them that seemed to know her right down to her bare feet. ‘I would have been completely done for without you.’ Then he rubbed his face and looked more playful, seemed to be waiting for a compliment.

  Bryony duly delivered one. ‘Well, but you were the expert.’

  ‘Yes, I was, wasn’t I?’ The Doctor nodded without a trace of modesty. ‘I almost always am.’ And he unleashed a startlingly huge smile.

  ‘As long as the thing’s gone…’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it is.’ He footled in the grass with the toe of one battered shoe. ‘Either that or I’m completely wrong and we’re all still in horrible and increasing danger.’ He chuckled and dodged from foot to foot, and once again Bryony had a feeling that the universe could be a cold and dark and terrible place if you weren’t ready for it. She didn’t feel ready at all. But then again – it did also seem more exciting and marvellous than anything she’d ever dreamed of.

  ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘You do what?’

  ‘I do travel in a thoroughly remarkable vessel. She’s amazing in every way.’ He winked. ‘In case you were wondering…I borrowed her. Or she borrowed me. You might say we ran away together…Oh, it must be a good few hundred years ago, now…’


  At which point Bryony realised that the Doctor’s explanations were never going to be quite as helpful as she hoped. He winked at her.

  ‘Well…’ Bryony repressed a huge desire to just blurt out – can I go and see it now, now, now? She felt that she should give him the impression that earth people couldn’t be impressed by just any passing space traveller.

  The Doctor studied her carefully and seemed about to speak, but then turned and headed off again blithely, calling over his shoulder, ‘You didn’t do so badly either, Putta. There may be hope for you yet.’ His long form loped over the grass as if he liked nothing better than walking across smallish, wettish, concretey, leafy and occasionally sandy planets full of promising people with tea and perhaps cake at the end of his journey. Tea and cake or horrible and increasing danger. Either one would be lovely.

  AT ROUGHLY THAT SAME moment the Doctor was thinking tea would be lovely and also realising he was feeling a bit hungry, Mrs Agnes Findlater was pottering beside the Arbroath seafront, a few miles north west from the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. She was heading along the West Links and away from the slowly declining old Miniature Railway station. A light summer breeze gently tousled the wave tops out to sea, and the afternoon light was sparking off the water in a way that did her heart good. These days, she was feeling her age a wee bitty and it was especially cheering to be outdoors and enjoying a nice day and a breath or two of salty air.

  She was just remembering how much fun she used to have on what was then the fairly new tiny railway. While she’d been raising her children, she’d been able to take them to visit it in its huffing and steaming prime with queues and crowds gathering to climb aboard for trips up the little line. Tasty snacks had been on offer along with the sort of fun which seemed to have faded away at around about the same time gentlemen stopped wearing spats. Although she couldn’t honestly say she’d ever seen that many gentlemen wearing spats during her life, there was something about them which suggested fun.

  Agnes thought that today she would go as far as the point where Elliot Water ran into the North Sea and then head home for a pancake and jam, maybe even two. She did seem to be feeling extremely peckish.

  And this was when a number of unusual things happened.

  Firstly, when Agnes – or Mrs Findlater, as she preferred to be known – glanced over at Mr Gillespie, who was walking his dog in the distance, she felt absolutely sure that he too was thinking about the model railway and long-ago summers.

  Secondly, she was just as absolutely sure – while his dog leaped and barked about his ankles in some kind of alarm – that Mr Gillespie was also thinking about her thinking about the railway and about pancakes. There was this kind of terrible echo inside her head. It was making her feel seasick. She also had a terrible taste of pennies in her mouth.

  Thirdly, the echo was getting worse and now seemed to additionally involve what were surely the very disorganised and slovenly thoughts of the two young men in overly tight jeans with ridiculous flares who were kicking about over there in the surf and – now that she looked more closely – falling over and shouting while holding their heads. Young people today simply didn’t know how to behave.

  Fourthly, Agnes observed – and she was an observant woman, as any of her neighbours would have stated with enthusiasm, had anyone asked – that the shoreline closest to where she was standing was…well, she didn’t like to use this kind of word, but it was writhing. And while it was writhing it was also thrusting upwards and outwards with these really quite disgusting-looking growths, like living branches, or thick whips, or other things she didn’t wish to consider. They were moving very quickly – and even hungrily – towards her.

  Fifthly, Mrs Agnes Findlater of Heather View, North Port, Arbroath, disappeared entirely in a swirl of sandy light, muscular goo and violent motion. And a brief glimmer from the metal clasp of an imitation crocodile skin handbag.

  ‘It was as if the ground just swallowed her up,’ Bobby Christie would say to a reporter for the Dundee Courier and Advertiser that evening. Bobby was one of the young men who had been harmlessly hanging about on the beach near Agnes and had seen some of the incident in the small spasms of clarity during which he wasn’t experiencing the worst headache of his life and getting seawater in his eyes because of rolling about in the surf, helpless with pain. He regretted at once not adding ‘man…’ at the end of his statement and regretted this even more when his friend, Callum Smith, remembered to say both ‘man…’ and ‘you know what I mean, yeah…?’ Smith would therefore have made himself appear almost impossibly suave and sophisticated around the town for several weeks if his statement had ever appeared in the paper. Of course, it didn’t and this meant that no one ever got to appreciate his attempts to sound like a soon-to-be bass player in a soon-to-be popular band with a soon-to-be catalogue of amazing progressive rock hits.

  The sixth unusual thing involved the Northern Zone Regional War Room. This was a vast and beautifully air-conditioned, radiation- and blast-proof bunker, its entrance carefully camouflaged as an innocent-looking cottage near Creif. Inside the bunker, a number of members of the Civil Defence Corps experienced what they mainly described as a weird feeling. Their delicately calibrated instruments, ever-watchful for signs of nuclear attack and other dire perils, didn’t pick up any trace of unusual activity, but nevertheless – they all felt weird. For several long and queasy minutes, being tucked away beneath three metres of tungsten-reinforced concrete, steel beams and nifty brickwork didn’t feel like any kind of protection at all.

  Seventhly, Mr Gillespie left his dog with his sister in Carnoustie at round 7 p.m. and then went quietly home, ate an entire loaf’s worth of toasted cheese and then went to bed for a week. Mr Gillespie was generally agreed to be a sensible man.

  ‘GOOD LORD, I AM really, one could say…just slightly…’ The Doctor didn’t look like a remotely sensible man. His long legs were stretched out ahead of him, lazily crossed and filling Julia Fetch’s parlour rather more than seemed reasonable. He was still sandy and grassy here and there, and the knees of his trousers were heavily stained. His hair was responding to indoor air by being particularly active, as if it was trying to hide him from something, and he had to keep swiping it back from his face. And every time he waved his arms – and he didn’t seem able to speak without a good deal of arm waving – it seemed inevitable that he would wallop one or other of the exquisite glass figurines that balanced on every available surface. As these were all models of octopuses (or octopodes) and therefore masses of ingeniously sculpted and fragile legs, both Bryony and Putta were flinching roughly every four seconds in expectation of terrible breakages. They were both more than slightly aware that they weren’t looking quite their best.

  Mrs Fetch hadn’t been at all fazed by the appearance of a gangly, grinning man with wild hair and wilder eyes, a more than slightly tattered (and probably fired) receptionist and a slightly chewed (and wholly in love) ginger young fellow, both in bathrobes. She had simply led Bryony into a pristine guest room and left her to pick out – as it happened – a cashmere sweater and tweed suit, cut according to what was once called the New Look. Bryony was not very secretly pleased with how good she looked in this, even if the arrangements she’d had to make for underwear were slightly dated and complex and the only shoes she’d been able to get her feet into were a pair of galoshes which didn’t quite complete the ensemble with the flair she’d hoped for.

  She still took Putta’s breath away when she emerged looking brushed and fresh and almost sand-free.

  Putta himself was rather more eye-catching. He’d simply been supplied with an ancient, rather mothy pair of plus fours, left over by a long-gone acquaintance, some long socks, heavy golf shoes which were rather too large and a shirt, an Argyll tank top and good, stout tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

  Putta hadn’t been at all sure – after Mrs Fetch left him alone in the kitchen to get changed – that his new outfit would impress Bryony and the fact that,
once she’d reappeared, she snorted into her tea every time she glanced at him tended to make him think that trousers should probably always go all the way down your legs if you were going to look sensible in front of people you wanted to impress.

  Just my luck, thought Bryony. The one chance I get to meet my reclusive boss and all I do is prove that I know some very weird people. And end up borrowing her underpants and – for goodness’ sake – the girdle that’s supporting my stockings which I actually think are silk…God lord, I can’t even look at Putta – I’ll start laughing and then not be able to stop. Then again, I’m hardly in much better shape. I suppose she’ll assume I generally look as if I’ve been battling monsters all morning and wander about in a bathrobe.

  Bryony also pondered whether it had been an entirely happy coincidence that a thought-sensitive monster had ended up living in the grounds of a hotel owned by someone who was clearly obsessed with octopodes. Maybe that had made the thing become more like an octopus – even if it hadn’t started out that way. Bryony was aware that she had no idea if the usual kinds of thought-sensitive monsters looked like octopodes. (Or octopuses – Mrs Fetch had explained that they could be called either thing and that both were correct. She was very nice, but seemed really firm on the point that anything to do with octopuses should be correct.) Bryony thought again of the tentacles snaking round Putta – of the body that had been in the pool – and found that she didn’t want her nice ginger biscuit, or indeed her pleasant cup of tea, served in a cup and saucer that were so fine she was worried they might just crumple up while she held them.