The Drosten's Curse

by A. L. Kennedy

  Putta’s heart flipped like a particularly happy dolphin – he didn’t know this, he was completely unfamiliar with dolphins – and he decided to hope that this partially empty metal container was the flask of psy fluid.

  At the same time, he managed to twist and wriggle out of his ill-fitting jacket, leaving Honor holding it, rather than his shoulders. This meant he was a little disorientated for a second, but then he reached out blindly with his numbed fingers and – not there, not there, not there, it has to be here somewhere, my lungs are going to burst – THERE IT IS – found what absolutely felt like the cylindrical flask he was after.

  Putta clung to the phial while Xavier dragged savagely at his ankles. Putta knew he wasn’t going to make it to the surface…he was beyond his last gasp…he had no idea what to do.

  AS SHE LAY IN the bath, Bryony was suddenly aware of a cool, smooth sensation on her forehead. She opened her eyes – for some reason she’d thought that having her eyes closed might be the best idea for whatever was going to happen next – especially if it was going to involve concentrating. There was nothing visible, but she had the distinct impression that a female hand was pressed gently to her brow. It reminded her of a time when she’d broken her leg as a child and been in hospital and her mother had come into the little bay in the A&E department and done just the same – pressed a hand to her forehead and made little Bryony feel OK.

  I suppose this is it, then.

  And it was.

  Almost at once it didn’t matter whether Bryony kept her eyes open or not – she could only see a rush of blue and silver and then a massive dark. She panicked a little – it didn’t seem to her that she was going to be able to breathe – but that pressure stroked again across her forehead and she inhaled and there was air. She was OK. The TARDIS was trying to comfort her.

  Suddenly, like two high ocean breakers crashing down over her, Bryony felt sweeps of massive energy tearing through her. She couldn’t believe that her atoms weren’t actually being shaken apart. She wasn’t sure they hadn’t been. She felt enormous pain. But she held on. She held on. She stayed as steady as she could, while colours and lights spiralled round her and forms seemed to eddy past – almost recognisable, almost frightening.

  Bryony knew that she was supposed to keep as calm as possible and comfort the TARDIS. Things might get very strange, but she had to think safe and happy and friendly and calm thoughts and make them as big as possible and send them to the TARDIS.

  So – knocking away the stinging and lancing hurt running along her limbs – she imagined friends laughing and the way plums tasted if you’d just picked then off the tree and a walk she’d taken in 1972 with a guy she’d thought was really nice, but had been too shy to tell – and the first time she’d been at a pantomime and been so thrilled by it all – the lights and the flashes of smoke when the villain turned up and shouting, ‘It’s behind you!’

  Of course that’s when she felt the taptaptap at the back of her neck and knew – there was something else here with her now.

  It was behind her.

  IN ARBROATH’S WEST PORT, the pavement was lined with surprised people. Shouting across the road at each other were, among others, Jimmy Findlay, Susan Findlay, Hughie Paterson, Gus Palmer, Brian Waters, Amanda Walter, Melissa Brown, Paul Cluny, Martha Cluny, Paul Jnr Cluny, a man called Clive Hughes who had intended to deliver Chinese food to number 15, and twenty or so others.

  None of them had intended to yell at each other.

  None of them had intended to have splitting headaches.

  None of them – apart from Clive Hughes – had intended to be anywhere near the West Port. Some of them hadn’t even intended to be in Arbroath.

  And yet they were yelling – yelling because their brains hurt, yelling because they felt bullied and scared, yelling because they felt they were being spied on, yelling because they understood horribly clearly all the lazy and dull and selfish and nasty and uninspiring and greedy thoughts that everyone else who was yelling were having right at that moment.

  As far as each one of them was concerned, everyone else was a completely repulsive person and deserved to be yelled at for the rest of their life.

  Or maybe they deserved something worse.

  TRAPPED IN THE MURKY waters of the Fetch Lake, Putta felt his throat and chest burning. Both twins were clutching his limbs now with astonishing strength.

  I can’t…I can’t…

  He could feel himself beginning to lose his grip on the world.

  There’s got to be…The Doctor would think of something…Bryony would…I got this far.

  And, with his last remnants of strength, Putta unscrewed the flask and let the psy fluid escape into the water. He let it do what it always did – enhance the psychic fields of all available entities in the vicinity and render them more known to each other, or suitably calibrated detection devices.

  It had been all he could think of to do and – suddenly, massively – all he could think of increased. He even – for a very brief period – awoke the dormant telekinetic abilities he shared with sixty-seven per cent of Yakts. And this meant that, at his most despairing, he became stronger than he ever had been.

  The twins were disorientated by his surge of energy and also perhaps by this burst of ambient psychons. Putta was just able to break free from them and strike out towards the surface of the lake.

  Once his head broke through the water he gasped, spluttered and flailed in a very unheroic manner, but he still felt immensely glad to be alive.

  Which was just before he felt entirely horrified. The Doctor had wanted the psy fluid. And Putta had just emptied it out into a lake.

  That may not have been absolutely the right thing to do.

  FAR BENEATH FETCH LAKE, inside an extensive complex of watery tunnels and caverns hollowed out by millennia of geological activity and the repeated movements of a vast pseudo-body, lay the monstrous and ever-more alert combination of psychic energy and dissociated atoms which was the Bah-Sokhar.

  And beneath that lake and within that vast assembly of matter and inside an air pocket sustained by the Bah-Sokhar sat the Doctor, trapped and alone.

  And yet – just like his mind – he was also free and everywhere.

  Passing beyond the pain his own body was undoubtedly experiencing, the Doctor was drifting in the oldest and most versatile kind of virtual space – that created by an imagination. Except this was more than just the world of only one imagination, one consciousness. The Doctor had travelled out of his own mind (some beings had remarked before that he was quite often out of his mind) and now he was partly in Bryony’s. The Doctor had rapidly passed through Bryony’s memories – that tedious argument with a guest, that midnight row, that tense exam, that red tricycle, that unpleasant spoonful of mashed pear, that answering wriggle she gave in the womb as her mother laughed at something – and on into somewhere slower, more stable, more luminous – her deep self. It felt like a cathedral, like an endless horizon, like a fireside. Bryony’s consciousness was, naturally, far smaller than the Doctor’s – that was why it would make such a good focusing area for psychic energies – but it was still not unimpressive.

  As he observed Bryony’s past, the Doctor fought the pain imposed on him by the Bah-Sokhar. He also fought its fear of him and of the unknown, fought its uncontrolled urges to destroy. He tried to surround himself with this beauty that was Bryony.

  And finally into the mind cathedral – the safe, relatively small space – came the TARDIS’s consciousness, flinching and darting like a nervous animal.

  The Doctor could tell she was holding back, being as tentative as she could, but still the force of her presence – the new, deep level of contact – was literally breathtaking.

  He struggled to let go of the rush of images, the thousands of planet falls, the gape and rush of the time vortex, the spinning panoramas of galaxies, star births, supernovas…the flux and glimmer and growth of the TARDIS from its densely secret biomechanical roots.
>
  Please.

  The Doctor very rarely begged, but he was begging now.

  His muscles were twitching, almost convulsing – his jaw was locked, but he kept on.

  Please.

  It seemed almost impossible, though – even with the help of Bryony as a kind of meeting point – to somehow grasp the essence of the TARDIS and harness it, turn her energy towards the Bah-Sokhar.

  Please. Please. Come on, old girl.

  He could tell that the TARDIS was afraid. She knew – perhaps better than anything else in the universe – how terrible the Bah-Sokhar was. Her genetic material was so old, so scarred by long-ago apocalypses, so wise and aware of the evils in reality…He just couldn’t get her to trust him, to believe that she might come closer to the beast and survive it – even render it safe. Quite frankly, he didn’t entirely believe that himself.

  Please.

  And then – far above in Fetch Lake – Putta emptied out the psy fluid into the lake.

  This was absolutely the right thing to do.

  The effects of psy fluid work in inverse proportion to the psychic abilities of those exposed to it. This is hardly surprising as it was developed by a species – the Tlatha – who had minimal psychic abilities and who were at that time ruled over by the notoriously despotic Simpilin – who were quite advanced telepaths. The Tlatha used the psy fluid to overthrow their masters and become equally despotic after a few years’ practice.

  This design feature means the fluid works best with inanimate objects – like the G50 Threat Detector – which have almost no consciousness. It also works well with relatively underdeveloped entities like humans and Yakts. The Doctor, as a Time Lord, was hardly affected by it at all – he had lazily exercised but not unimpressive telepathic abilities and massive reserves of artron energy, even for a Time Lord. He was also extremely clever.

  Being extremely clever – and knowing how psy fluid worked – he was able to realise that Bryony, with her tiny human psychic capacities, was essential to his plan. (He did have a plan, he wasn’t just making things up as he went along. Or not much.) He knew she could do far more than open her mind to act as a safe virtual place in which to calm the nervous TARDIS and perhaps negotiate with the Bah-Sokhar. She could do more than keep the Doctor away from the nightmares the creature seemed to insist on creating inside the fleshy cell it had formed to trap him. Holding her nerve and concentrating as she never had, Bryony could even be more than the friend he needed in the Bah-Sokhar’s great darkness. She could also respond immensely well to the psy fluid if it were released in her vicinity – or even if it acted on the Doctor and flooded his consciousness, which would then reach her through him. All she’d have to do would be to weather the sudden rush of artron energy from – possibly – two directions and stay determined and, indeed, brave.

  Or else – even if she was as incredibly brave as the Doctor thought – the psy fluid’s energy might simply burn up her personality – along with the now vulnerable TARDIS and the Doctor himself, and along with his ability to regenerate.

  But he was hoping not.

  He was hoping that things would work out well.

  The Doctor always tended to hope that things would work out well – his life would have been unbearably stressful if he didn’t. Plus, a long lifespan spent travelling in both time and space had given him a certain perspective on hideous situations involving almost certain death. So far, none of them had ended that badly.

  In the event, Bryony was close enough to the lake to be affected directly by the psychon energy and, 58 milliseconds later (because of the delay caused by Time Lord and – mainly – human nerve impulses) to be hit by the psychon energy which had rushed through the Doctor.

  AND THAT’S WHAT CAUSED the sensation of two waves breaking over – or rather, through – Bryony while she tried to comfort the TARDIS.

  The waves felt a little as if she was having the thoughts and emotions of a whole crowd of people pushed into her head, as if the livingness of too many beings to count had all leaped at her and were speaking, feeling, moving, burning inside her skin.

  Even in the strange virtual space she occupied with the help of the TARDIS – somewhere that both was and was not her own mind – she had that sense of her skin, her body. Her physical self was something far away and under immense strain. She couldn’t help wondering if she would be able to return to it. For a gasp of what felt like breath – somewhere I’m still breathing, then, that’s good – Bryony was afraid she would never really be herself again.

  And then she felt the taptaptap at the back of her neck and knew that she wasn’t alone.

  ‘Splendid. I knew you were just the girl for the job.’

  Bryony span herself – or her idea of herself round – and was confronted by a virtual Doctor. He seemed much more solid than the projection she’d seen inside the TARDIS and so, obviously, he was able to creep up behind people and scare them half out of their minds.

  ‘Doctor! What on earth!? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘Of course. We’re both really quite far out of our minds.’ He let loose one of his huger grins and his big eyes fixed her with a look that was ninety per cent down-to-business and ten per cent but-my-business-is-so-much-fun-and-look-we’re-not-dead. ‘But not out of the woods – not yet, Bryony Mailer.’ Those parts of the environment contributed by the TARDIS – the strands of light, that sensation of being lifted and enveloped in warmth – all grew more intense. They were clearly suffused with happiness. She was glad to have him home – even if the home was only virtual and his body was still in the flash cell, lost deep in his meditation.

  Back in the Bah-Sokhar, the Doctor’s real body was shivering with effort and hurt, while his strained face made him look – for once – as if he truly was hundreds of years old. But his virtual self was his best self – the flamboyant, charming person Bryony had first met. So although she was also glad to see him and deeply relieved, her relief emerged as a kind of defensive fury. ‘You…You big…’ She couldn’t think of an appropriate word for what he was and opted for ‘Don’t call me a girl.’ Which sounded a bit limp. Bryony found out that she too was, somehow, solid when she whacked him on the arm and he felt it.

  ‘Ow!’ The Doctor shook his virtual and yet very realistic head. ‘No time for that. But I’m glad – I think – that your psy-form is consolidated enough to be painful. We’re doing well, we really are, and you’re not to worry in any way if—’

  Probably, the Doctor was about to say, ‘If our shared virtual space is suddenly torn open by the head of a monstrous snake, its tongue composed of blue / white and mobile, searching flame, its skin dripping with some terrible, unclean, thickish liquid, its eyes clever and merciless, their empty black seeming to drain the life force from you when they settle on you.’

  Because that is exactly what happened.

  Bryony had assumed the worst was over, that her virtual self would maybe hug the Doctor’s virtual self and then they’d possibly send the Bah-Sokhar some really deep and philosophical thoughts

  Just thinking the Bah-Sokhar’s name meant one of those huge snake eyes swivelled and began glaring into her. Her entire consciousness started filling with all her worst memories: the choke of water when she almost drowned once; the day she heard her grandmother had died; every night she’d spent crying and every reason she’d had for being sad…And then the fears yet to be realised started closing in – being ill, being old, being alone, being a failure, being dead…Being dead.

  As these corrosive thoughts worked at her, Bryony could see that her left hand was fading, becoming insubstantial. Her right was still solid, but she knew that the complex of energy holding her essence in this imaginative dimension was being forced apart by the Bah-Sokhar.

  Worse, she could feel the TARDIS flinching around her and then withdrawing. Bryony guessed that perhaps the real body of Bryony Mailer was by now being compressed by the retreating and panicked ship.

  The Doctor’s mind was now de
eply embedded in Bryony’s, and he reached out for her hand to comfort her. As he did so, the snake’s tongue lashed out to the side and swiped him away into the dark.

  Bryony could hear him call out in pain, but could no longer see him.

  The snake’s head glowed with rabid colour and shattered into a spray of light and disappeared.

  She was now in a dark that defied imagination – a space of utter emptiness, without mercy, without cruelty, simply without any interest in the existence of life.

  And this is when the Bah-Sokhar spoke inside Bryony’s head. The psy fluid had allowed it to reach her with a fraction of its monstrous telepathic strength.

  YOU ARE THE BRYONYMAILER CREATURE

  Bryony answered aloud – although she had worked out this wasn’t necessary, she felt that speaking was more familiar to her and would help. She didn’t want to let the Bah-Sokhar have everything its own way. ‘What have you done with my friend?’

  HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND I WAS YOUR FRIEND I REMEMBER NOW I AM AWAKE I MEET YOU A LOT A LOT A LOT

  Bryony couldn’t understand this. Meeting a giant snake wouldn’t have slipped her mind.

  Of course, the Bah-Sokhar understood this idea as she had it, just as easily as it understood her speech.

  WE MEET WHEN I PLAY I LIKE PLAYING WITH THE GRANDMOTHER CREATURE I PLEASE THE GRANDMOTHER CREATURE WHEN I PLAY

  Bryony was still bewildered. And she wanted to know if the Doctor was all right. Before she could ask again, the Bah-Sokhar shouted into her head, blisteringly large words.

  HE IS WELL OK OK

  When Bryony screamed, there was a dense silence in her head for a few seconds and then, slowly emerging from the blackness as if it were fog, came Xavier and Honor. They looked as entirely human and friendly and lovely as ever. And they also looked worried.