Are you all right? What can I do?’ Never mind the bell, Bryony understood that the Doctor being sorry was bad news – and him being in pain was even worse. ‘And why are you sorry?’
The image shook its head. ‘I don’t have long.’ It began to blink and blur. ‘The TARDIS will begin defending herself…Be very careful.’ There was another break in the transmission. ‘…to Putta’s ship and find more psy fluid, any psy fluid….contact you again. I need to…it may understand me, know me more, it may understand…’ The Doctor grimaced again and his voice stopped coming through.
Then the Doctor’s projection shattered and fluttered downwards in flakes and curls of light. After that it was gone. The air in the room seemed to dull, as if the TARDIS had wanted him to stay, had wanted to know what it should do.
The cloister bell continued to toll. Bryony thought it seemed more than a warning now – it was a threat.
IN HIS LOCAL FISH and chip shop, Barry McGee was having a fight. He wasn’t a large man and had only ever been in one other fight – when Ross Mackie stole his banana from his lunchbox in Primary 4. The matter hadn’t amounted to much and the banana had been returned, albeit in a sad condition and not worth eating.
This evening, Barry had simply felt more than averagely hungry and – having driven back from his job in a Dundee insurance office – he had decided that fish and chips would be a quick option.
As he parked the car, he’d noticed that the High Street was unusually deserted. There was no one at all about – apart from a young mother, jogging urgently down the street, pushing a pram. Every now and then, she would stop in her tracks and jam her hands over her ears. Then she’d jog-trot onwards at an increasing pace. This wasn’t quite what he was used to from Arbroath on a Friday evening.
Neither was the almost deafening din coming from the houses he passed as he walked to the chip shop. Everyone had decided to crank up their radios and televisions to the maximum possible volume and a chaos of music and yelling was the result.
Barry had thought that the quicker he got hold of his dinner and went home the better.
In the shop there was no queue and, at first, no one serving. Barry waited for a while – pondering the possibilities of perhaps having chicken and chips, or even a white pudding supper…Then, when no one had appeared after five minutes, he yelled, fairly politely, ‘Hey! I’m looking for a fish supper! Hello!’
At this, a hefty figure in a white smock appeared from the back of the shop, sweaty and already slightly tense – in the way that a man who has been repeatedly poked with a stick all day might be slightly tense. ‘What do want!’ he bellowed.’ Following this up with, ‘Oh, and you think this is a dead-end job, do you?’
As it happened, Barry did think that working in a small Arbroath fish and chip shop wasn’t the height of career success.
‘You think I’m here because I didn’t do well at school, because I’m ignorant. And you think I’m some kind of monster!’ screamed the man, flipping back the counter and advancing across the lino floor of the shop. He halted right in front of Barry and yelled down at him, ‘It so happens I’m lovely! I love working with the public! It’s what I live for!’ Before kicking him hard on the shin.
After that, things got confusing and Barry realised – several kicks later – that he was rolling about on the lino and wondering if it was clean.
Barry’s opponent screamed, ‘There’s nothing wrong with my lino! I mopped it myself this morning! And after lunchtime!’ Rolling about, mainly on top of him, was the man who loved working with the public. Then Barry felt teeth being sunk into his right ear. This wasn’t how he’d anticipated his evening would begin.
And the weirdest thing was that the man had known exactly what Barry was thinking without Barry ever having to say a word.
PUTTA HAD TRIED COILING himself into a ball. The fact that this wasn’t physically possible seemed to prove, in a way, that when so many of his broodbrothers had told him he was completely spineless, they’d been exaggerating.
He’d tried tiptoeing around the console room, patting various bits of furniture as if he liked them and this hadn’t made him feel any less at risk, but had seemed to stop anything else bumping him, or clattering his ankles when he wasn’t looking. ‘Ah-ah…I’m sort of…It’s that…’ His voice sounded completely pathetic and he was glad Bryony wasn’t there to hear it. ‘I do think you’re a very impressive.’ He leaned on the console in what he hoped was an admiring way and, at once, a bell began to toll. It didn’t sound like a comforting or encouraging bell. ‘I didn’t touch anything!’
When the bell didn’t stop tolling, he decided to sit one of the large chairs available, but something about it didn’t seem to appreciate his attention. He edged over to the doorway and looked out again – the sand was still there, still furious, still waiting for something it could swallow. The longer he stared at it, the more tempting it felt to just step off, walk out of the terrible Time Lord trap he’d somehow been scooped up into and meet the fate he deserved…He bent further and further forward, more and more of his weight supported by the one hand which still gripped the doorframe. The nearer the restless sand he came, the greater his certainty that he was worthless. He should just –
‘Putta! Putta! Can you hear me?’
It was Bryony. And her voice – somewhat muffled by the insulating effects of the TARDIS wall she was yelling through – brought Yinzill’s least successful bountykiller back to his senses. ‘Yurg!?’ Putta yanked himself back inside the TARDIS’s doorway – one of the brass hand rails really helped – and staggered down the little staircase.
‘Putta! Are you there?’ Her voice was coming from beyond the other door. It wasn’t loud, but it certainly sounded like her, rather than some piece of Time Lord technology designed to destroy him in some horrible, ingenious way.
Putta darted nervily across and spoke – as cautiously as he could – to the not-really-wood of the exit through which Bryony had left him. ‘Yes? I’m me. Are you Bryony?’
‘I can’t hear you.’
He raised his voice. It was likely that the TARDIS could hear him, anyway, however softly he spoke. ‘Are you Bryony? Are you all right? I felt a bit weird again…’
‘I don’t have time for all that. Can you open the door?’
Putta relaxed a touch. If it was insulting him, the voice probably did belong to Bryony and wasn’t some kind of simulation, wasn’t part of a Time Lord trick. Putta grabbed the doorknob.
He tried turning it to the right.
It wouldn’t.
He tried turning it to the left.
No luck with that, either.
‘Putta! It’s just a doorknob – you turn it and then I can get out of here and we can do what the Doctor wants.’
Putta assumed, when she mentioned the Doctor, that the strain had made her begin to hallucinate. Or perhaps she was being influenced by all that Time Lord technology which was meant to be so powerful and strange and about which his elders and betters had always been so respectful in hushed and ill-informed, blustering ways. ‘That’s not possible…urn, my dear. The Doctor is dead.’
‘He’s not dead. I’ve just seen him floating on the kitchen ceiling.’
Putta didn’t find this indicated all was well with Bryony’s mental state.
‘And did you just call me my dear? If there was a doorknob, or a handle or anything I could work here, I’d come in there and…’ There was a sharp series of thumps from the other side of the door. ‘I counted back the number of paces there used to be between this door and the one that leads into the kitchen and I’m sure there were twelve – thirteen at the most. There isn’t even a door any more. There’s…It’s like it’s healed over.’
This was perfectly true. Where Bryony was standing, the corridor was as comfortably lit as it had been, but was now uninterrupted by even the tastefully futuristic circular indentations. It was smooth, flawless, creepy white. ‘Please Putta. If you open the door from that side maybe it
will work.’
‘But I’ve tried. It won’t budge. I can’t even see where there’s a little gap between the door and the doorframe – that’s not there any more.’
‘Oh.’
This sounded so downhearted from Bryony that Putta immediately felt he should focus and, if not take charge, then be a bit more…well, he wasn’t sure what he’d be a bit more of, but he’d work on it. ‘Not to worry.’
‘Not to worry!?’ Putta was glad this was muffled – he hated sarcasm. Bryony went on: ‘Look, the Doctor is somewhere else – I don’t know where – but he got a message through. He needs you to get the psy fluid. He needs the psy fluid.’
‘I threw it away.’
‘Then get it back. Where did you throw it?’
‘I can’t get it back. I can’t leave the…the TARDIS. You may have forgotten, but there’s a large amount of sand outside and it wants to kill me.’
‘Do you hear the bell?’
‘Bell?’ Putta was amazed by how much the Earth woman’s mind wondered. ‘Yes, I can hear the bell. What about the sand?’
‘The bell only chimes when something serious is happening. And we know something serious is happening anyway – the sand and the bunker and…’ Bryony avoided mentioning the jacuzzi. ‘Putta, I can’t help you. But if the Doctor says he needs the psy fluid then he must have a plan and you have to get it. Putta?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Well, I believe that you can.’ She slipped down the wall and leaned close to it, hoping that she could speak more clearly like this – hoping that she’d got the location of the door at least approximately right. ‘I really do, Putta. You were amazing back there. You’ve been amazing pretty often…On average…’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ Bryony lost her patience – partly because she wanted to be the one going to fetch the psy fluid – and added, ‘Either that, or you’re an all-round failure and always have been on every planet you’ve touched and you’ll probably starve to death out there spending your last hours being able to realise how completely pathetic you are!’ Because she had to shout this in order to be audible, it probably sounded slightly harsher than she intended – not that she didn’t intend to be harsh.
‘Oh.’ Putta blinked and felt confused and also horribly wonderful. Confused, because Bryony seemed to think he was both amazing and a complete dead meat sack – and horribly wonderful because that meant she’d been thinking about him a lot and assessing his character. And it made him feel as if she cared and certain – fairly – that she wanted to make him feel functional. She wanted him to be functional. This was both horribly wonderful and wonderfully horrible, because it meant he genuinely would have to open the front door again and somehow leave the TARDIS, somehow cross the sand and survive, somehow retrieve the psy fluid…which he’d thrown into the lake at the centre of the golf course – he had no idea where exactly – and then somehow…Well, if he managed all that he’d end up…He’d end up having to save the day.
He was the one who had to save the day.
‘Oh. No.’
OVER IN HER COTTAGE, Mrs Julia Fetch was sitting down to dinner with her much-loved grandchildren. The place settings were perfect, the vegetables were steaming and glistening in their lovely dishes, there were bright crystal glasses of elderflower cordial and, at the head of the table, was a large platter of…something.
Julia couldn’t quite make up her mind what she fancied this evening and the large shape on the platter wasn’t helping her to decide. Sometimes it looked a bit like a roast chicken – only she wasn’t in the mood for roast chicken – there had been a while when she was fairly sure it was a rack of lamb – lamb would be too fatty, she thought – then a joint of beef, a roast goose, a joint of pork, then something that resembled very large bird – a cooked swan…? Julia seemed to have read somewhere that only the Queen was allowed to eat swans, so that would never do.
Just now the meat course looked tired. It rested on the platter, its surface rippling vaguely like water under a light breeze and roughly the colour of well-roasted flesh. Its form was approximately cubic and it currently didn’t seem interested in making any efforts to look like cutlets, chops, or anything more usual.
Julia rather liked the cube. It would be neat for carving. ‘How many slices would you like children?’ She picked up the carving knife and the fork.
Honor and Xavier both said, in their most courteous voices, ‘Three please.’ And held out their plates.
Julia nodded. She had forgotten that the twins never actually ate anything. This was good – otherwise, she would have worried about how they were keeping up their strength.
BRYONY WAS SITTING ON the floor of the TARDIS passageway, listening to Putta apparently freaking out through the wall. Now and again there were heavy thumps, or wild shouts, most of which weren’t easy to decipher through the wall, but one of which definitely sounded like ‘You’re ugly!’.
‘Putta! Putta! You really do need to get that fluid. It’s the only thing the Doctor asked us to do…’ But it was no good – the thumps continued, interspersed with more yowling.
Around her the TARDIS was obviously doing what it thought it should in case of dire emergency. The entrance had been sealed – with Putta on the wrong side, or the right side, depending on how you looked at it – and Bryony was being taken care of, after a fashion.
‘I suppose it’s good that you like me…’ The lights dimmed. ‘No, really it is good. I am grateful. I just would prefer to be useful.’ She took a deep breath, wondered if making her frustration obvious was wise and decided – to hell with – that she’d yell anyway, ‘But you’re not letting me be useful!’
The TARDIS ignored her beyond returning the lights to their previous level.
And meanwhile, the passageway was apparently keen to provide for her needs as she’d announced them in the console room. Bryony had wanted food and a bath, so while the kitchen remained the kitchen – generously supplied with the mysterious Maxxt – and was just where it had been earlier, two new doors had appeared where she was sure there hadn’t been doors when she first walked along here. One door concealed an intimidatingly complicated bathroom with a massive tub and a number of large plants overhanging it, none of which she recognised, or felt she could entirely trust if she was undressed. The other new door opened onto a bedroom which had rather more plum-coloured velvet than she would have expected, draping about the place, and layers of Persian rugs underfoot. This wasn’t the cutting-edge space stuff she’d been expecting and she had the strong suspicion that she was being distracted by all this potential comfort so that she wouldn’t begin searching out the source of the cloister bell and at least trying to do something about that.
There were, naturally, lots of brass hand rails in both rooms – not to mention the brass taps, the brass towel rail and the brass bedstead. When she flipped down the top of a little not-walnut bureau in the bedroom, Bryony discovered a wealth of futuristic odds and ends tucked into cubby holes, a plethora of dials and switches, several balls of twine, a small model of something like a leopard, a tin of hard sweets and a yo-yo. The bedroom seemed dusty. It clearly reflected the Doctor’s taste, but either he didn’t use it, or else he didn’t sleep much. The bed – under its layer of dust – was freshly made and inviting. ‘Perhaps you’re a spare. Or you got mislaid.’ It didn’t feel as if these elements, these rooms, were being built from scratch – it was more as if they were being shuffled about to accommodate her by an increasingly nervous vessel accustomed to pleasing a semi-madman from another planet who favoured Earth’s Victorian period, who never tidied up and who thought, in as far as he considered such matters at all, that the ideal guest bedroom would look like an opium den.
When Bryony paced back out of the bedroom she could have sworn that the passageway was smaller, that the area of the TARDIS she was being allowed was contracting.
AS BRYONY PUZZLED OVER the TARDIS’s dimensions – a popular pastime with new visitors
– Putta had a plan. For the first time in his life, he actually had a plan. Not only that – he was carrying it out.
His thinking was as follows…
I have to get out of the TARDIS. I can’t get out of the TARDIS. Therefore I am a failure.
No. I have to get out of the TARDIS. Therefore I must get out of the TARDIS.
I will find a way.
How do I usually leave places?
I reverse what I did to get in there.
How did I get into the TARDIS?
Ummm…
Well, I was being eaten alive…
That doesn’t help much. I am not currently being eaten alive and that hasn’t meant that I have left the TARDIS. If I leave the TARDIS, I will, in fact, start being eaten alive and either I will get scooped back up in here again, or else I will be absolutely eaten, because the TARDIS knows me better than it did when it rescued me and it clearly doesn’t like me, because it jabs me with things, or knocks me with bits of itself whenever it –
Ah.
Back a bit…
The TARDIS doesn’t like me very much…
OK.
I’m on to something here.
I don’t know what, though…
No, no, no – this is fine, this is planning, this is…
Right.
The TARDIS dislikes me, but not that much. So I’m still in here. I’m not out there.
So…
Oh, dear.
I have to get the TARDIS to really dislike me. I mean hate me. I mean loathe the sight of me. I mean, the TARDIS has to be sick of the sight of me.
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
Which wasn’t perhaps the way that Napoleon would have made a plan, or Genghis Khan, or Thraxtic, but it was a kind of plan and nobody could deny it.
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