The Doctor nodded like someone who isn’t remotely convinced, like someone patronising an ugly-minded, silly child.
‘I’ll show you!’ Zandor clenched the stone arms of his throne, shut his eyes and then looked as if he was a toddler holding his breath until his got his own way.
The walls of the church shivered, shapes and symbols raced over the surface of the throne and the air thrummed. Putta and Bryony thought their heads would burst with the sudden increase in pressure.
And then, magnificent and haughty, noble and terrible, here was the full horse form, the deep old identity that the Bah-Sokhar had chosen for itself. It stood, clapped one vast hoof against the stone beneath it and raised sparks.
The beast glared at the throne, perhaps recalling those centuries-ago days when some other Conductor had called on it to make the throne and then called on it not to murder or destroy, but to build and carve and shelter, make a place for a village to gather, make beauty for them to see. It had left stones which had fed a legend, stones which had eventually been used as part of a church, charged stones, precious stones which had finally been moved into a museum and then touched by an angry young man full of hatred.
If hate touched the Bah-Sokhar it still couldn’t quite resist what that hate required – not yet.
Zandor paid no attention to the grandeur of the creature – he was caught up in his loathing of the Doctor. He screamed on, eyes still shut. ‘It will do what I want! It will do whatever I want!’ His cheeks flushed and his acne reddened. ‘I can make it dance! I can! Dance! Dance, Thing!’ Zandor opened his eyes and glared at the elegant and huge horse. It bridled, tossing its head and its horrifying, writhing mane. Its eyes glittered with unquenchable fire. ‘Dance!’
It appeared to struggle, its muscles straining.
But then it did start to lift its mighty hooves in ridiculous capering moves, to trot back and forth, nodding like a toy.
The Doctor said softly, ‘I really don’t think this is very wise.’
‘I’ll do what I like! I’ll always do what I like! Shut up!’
The horse paced, crossing its front hooves, performing the clumsy idea of dressage that Zandor was imagining, that Zandor was using to humiliate it.
As Bryony looked on, she felt sorry for the great creature – it might have done terrible things, but it didn’t deserve this kind of master and who knew what even more terrible things it would do under his command. When she thought this – gentle, but very clear – she heard the Doctor’s voice inside her head saying – Yes. Now.
And she understood.
She glanced very carefully over to the Time Lord where he was kneeling on the floor. His face was drawn and ashen, but his eyes shone – he’d tricked Paul Cluny Jnr exactly as he’d wanted to…and now he would never get to be Zandor, wouldn’t be the Grand High Emperor of anywhere. Paul was too distracted to monitor or control their thoughts and so now they could use them freely, as the Doctor had intended. The Bah-Sokhar had grown and changed in its long years on Earth and, although it had once fed off hatred, it had grown to love…well, it had grown to love love. Very few beings in the universe don’t love being loved in one way or another and as an immensely sensitive psychic being, the Bah-Sokahr could appreciate love on a massive scale. While the would-be Zandor tried to torment it in ugly ways Bryony and the Doctor and – as best he could – Putta all reached out with their minds and loved the Bah-Sokhar.
They loved its amazing abilities, they loved its capacity to changed and evolve, they loved its care for Julia Fetch, the loved that it hadn’t killed them, that it had trusted them with direct contact – they loved it in detail. And they loved it in general. After so many taxing and horrifying experiences, with heads that were scrambled with exhaustion, shock and fear – they simply loved it.
And the horse stopped dancing.
They didn’t dare raise their heads for fear of alerting Paul, although he probably wouldn’t have noticed – he was so shocked and furious that he was being refused. ‘What are you doing, Thing!? You can’t disobey me! I am the jewel at the heart of the universe! Did you hear me, you stupid piece of crap! I am—’
The horse form of the Bah-Sokhar stood, magnificent and shining, its eyes full of justice. And the creature thought.
NO
The power behind the denial knocked the Doctor, Putta and Bryony flat onto the floor. As they rolled in pain, they could hear Paul howling in agony and impotent rage.
Putta – his body his own once again – lifted his head and watched as the shapes and symbols on the throne raced and convulsed. The air thickened with darker and darker clouds shot through with darts of silver fire. The clouds become more defined and showed themselves as a boar, a bear, a goat, a calf, a fish…all the beasts of the Drosten Stone, walking back to be confined as carvings. As each one entered the stone, it seemed to pass through Paul, making his limbs shudder. He had stopped yelling, stopped saying anything. His eyes were dulling and his shoulders were hunching.
And then the stones themselves began to blink and shiver, to flicker in and out of their positions as parts of the throne.
Paul Cluny Junior raised his eyes briefly to the Doctor, and the Time Lord could see how afraid he was, how horrified he was to realise that his dreams had betrayed him and that the power he had never truly controlled had come for him now and would not be denied.
The horse form reared high. As it did so, the stones making up Zandor’s throne separated and stood, hanging slightly above the floor, somehow waiting and watchful.
Paul tumbled to the floor without his throne to support him and, although he tried to stand, to scramble up and start running…he couldn’t.
The Bah-Sokhar dropped its weight forward to stand again, its hooves striking up fire. It tossed its head, breathed, set its gaze upon its enemy.
Cluny moaned, kneeled, hunched and a shadow seemed to rise over him, like a kind of cape. His body began to fade and turn transparent. And then, with a cracking sound that rocked the great Drosten Stone, Cluny disappeared from his reality and – for a moment – the caped figure at the foot of the Drosten’s carving – the caped figure kneeling humbly underneath the beasts – seemed to glow redly. It aimed a little carving of a bow and arrow at nothing, as if it were afraid even of shadows. The Time Lord, the Yakt and the human bore witness as – perhaps – what was left of Paul Cluny Jnr melded with the sandstone and – perhaps – met the fate of other weak and greedy-minded humans who had sought to be Conductors, who had tried to control the Bah-Sokhar.
After that the church was utterly silent.
THE DOCTOR COUGHED AND sat back on his heels. He hated this bit. Of course evil had to be overcome, but he never did enjoy seeing any life form getting what it deserved – the more appallingly a being behaved, the more appalling what it deserved would be. The Doctor preferred mercy, on the whole – and sometimes he arranged it. After all – if everyone got what they deserved all the time, no one would be very comfortable…or possibly even still alive.
He stood and moved over to help up Putta and he noted that Bryony – great girl – was on her feet and brushing herself down.
None of them felt like speaking. All of them had their eyes mostly fixed on the Bah-Sokhar’s form. It was extraordinary and still impossible to consider without a thrill of terror, but it also seemed…
TIRED
The thought slipped carefully out to sound in their heads, but Putta, Bryony and the Doctor realised that most of the telepathic clamp was gone – their heads felt quiet and private and strangely small. And their headaches were gone.
The Doctor broke the silence, his voice very warm, but a little ragged after so much screaming. ‘I should expect you are…I should expect you are very tired indeed.’ He stepped delicately and respectfully forward to the mighty horse.
The Bah-Sokhar rested its forehead down carefully against the Doctor’s in a kind of salute.
I WILL GO
‘Perhaps it’s for the best, yes.’
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And the Doctor closed his eyes, a spasm of weariness and sadness rocking him. Sometimes happy endings weren’t that happy.
THE DEFEAT OF ZANDOR did mean that peace returned to Arbroath in a strange, dizzying instant.
No one could quite recall what they’d been doing up until the point when they discovered that they were driving a van full of strangers, cowering in someone else’s back garden with a number of other people, far away from their usual delivery route with no letters to deliver, hiding in an uncomfortably small kitchen cupboard, waving a golf club at a traffic warden and yelling, ‘But I love you!’
The Bah-Sokhar had not only removed the twin child forms and Zandor forms in a breath, it had sent out a pulse of psychons which wiped the memories of all the humans who had been caught within it radius of influence.
Because humans only pretend to like the strange and remarkable and mainly avoid it like the plague, almost everyone shrugged off their embarrassing or humiliating or peculiar circumstances. What came to be known as Arbroath’s Lost Weekend was explained away as the result of flu, mass hysteria, food poisoning, nuclear testing, the effects of fresh air following on the consumption of ‘bad pints’, or the influence of aliens. (Obviously, very few people believed the alien explanation.)
The Commandos marched back to their barracks and the Civil Defence Corps sloped away to their secret bunker, determined never to mention anything about the whole affair again. Senior officers felt that if it couldn’t be summarised in writing on the appropriate forms, then it must not have happened and all other ranks agreed. Policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, milkmen and a number of other uniformed professionals went back to their jobs with an oddly forceful desire to be very courteous and helpful, as if they were making up for something. Amongst the general population, neighbours occasionally stopped and felt slightly closer than they might have done before, or smiled at strangers and seemed to find them familiar. People got very good at charades and the local poker players did very well when they tried to guess if their opponents were bluffing. And there were four marriages which might not otherwise have happened.
And there was no grief or mourning – not because wives and husbands forgot they’d been married, or friends couldn’t recall missing friends. It was because no one was missing.
The Bah-Sokhar really did have remarkable powers and really had been learning as it dozed and dreamed and played. So as that pulse of psychons swept aside multiple engrams full of pain and fear and confusion and bereavement, the Bah-Sokhar didn’t just reabsorb its defence forms – it also returned those it had fed upon.
This worked well and meant that a number of men and women with various medical conditions were pressed back into reality with their health problems cured. The Bah-Sokhar built bodies as close to perfection as accuracy and its abilities could allow.
There were glitches, however.
Almost everyone was returned to reality correctly, but only almost. Paul and Martha Cluny, whose son had become a carving, were supplied with a male teenage child, who bore an occasional resemblance to David Agnew at that difficult age which offers a young man the choice of being fairly pleasant to most people, or doing business with wholesale ruthlessness and understanding value only as a commercial concept. In effect, the Bah-Sokhar gave Agnew a second chance. The fact that he didn’t take that chance and grew up to become, once again, a dreadful bully, mediocre golfer and boardroom tyrant wasn’t the creature’s fault.
In the absence of an adult David Agnew, the Bah-Sokhar transferred his business holdings, authority and directorships elsewhere and so Mrs Agnes Findlater came back to life, walking along the seafront and in possession of a healthy stock portfolio, a number of thriving factories and a chain of extrusion moulding companies. She lived out the last of her years enjoying this immensely and behaving like someone who has suddenly realised that she was sometimes allowed to relax. Her employees were fond of her – even though she insisted on the adoption of a corporate cardigan with a hand-knitted logo.
When Kevin Mangold returned – bemused and irritable – to the Fetch Hotel, he discovered that it was dreadfully over-booked and dozens of guests were outraged that they had nowhere to spend the night, that their luggage had been placed in storage and that they seemed to have lost up to a year of their time.
Although Kevin had completely forgotten that he had once been quite heroic when faced with insurmountable odds, he did retain a few vestiges of the imagination and empathy which the threat of death at the hands of the Bah-Sokhar had summoned up in him. Sometimes he would dream that he had been taken away to be murdered by something horrible and would feel himself facing what was about to destroy him with a surprising level of dignity. And then the dream would evaporate and he would wake. Or else he would dream that he was waking and that his memories had been rearranged. And then he would really wake up. This phenomenon – along with the ‘disappearances’ and ‘reappearances’ and ‘luggage events’ all came to define was christened the Fetch Triangle. And it made Kevin Mangold very successful as a hotel manager once he scaled back the golfing side of operations and opened the place to investigative documentary makers, researchers and thrill-seekers.
Naturally, no real thrills were provided. The Fetch was peaceful now. And, from a point slightly after 4 p.m. on 6 June, the grandmother clock in the entrance hall started to run again and to keep proper time.
Almost everything was as it should be – or as near as reality ever gets to that.
IT WAS SLIGHTLY BEFORE 4 p.m. on 6 June 1978. The Doctor, Bryony and Putta were sitting in Mrs Julia Fetch’s parlour again. They’d used the TARDIS to skip nearly two days – or had lost them by accident – and had landed near her cottage. During the journey, the Doctor had told Putta and Bryony about various planets, various times and – rather pointedly – various beings he had met who settled down together and did rather well as a result. He’d even, although he couldn’t quite think why it was necessary, shown them where the wardrobe was – or possibly asked it to come across and meet them. Bryony and Putta had picked out items they found more suitable – and less embarrassing than the scuffed, shredded, water-stained, adventure-stained and generally bizarre remnants they’d been wearing.
It was Tuesday 6 June, the worst of the confusion in the town and the hotel had been smoothed away and the sun was shining merrily on the garden outside. There had been a small shower of rain and the remaining droplets sparkled on leaves and blossoms. It was all staggeringly beautiful.
After the TARDIS landed, they had ambled under the trees along little paths for a while and looked at sand that wasn’t trying to destroy them and streams they didn’t have to wade along and slopes they didn’t have to fall down. Putta picked up a couple of golf balls that hadn’t been hit towards him and didn’t hurt his hand. It was lovely afternoon. If rather dull.
Although, obviously, the fact that Bryony was with Putta and that Putta was with Bryony wasn’t as dull for them. They were both feeling silently hysterical.
The Doctor had eventually led them back here to Julia Fetch’s perfect garden and her pretty cottage and her cosy parlour.
Putta sighed as he peered out at that perfect garden. He sighed once more as he squeezed Bryony’s hand, which she didn’t mind him holding. She also – apparently – didn’t mind him in general. His second sigh was bigger than the first – it rose from his second pair of borrowed shoes – two-tone brogues – and ran up his shins inside his pair of borrowed flannel trousers. Under his borrowed shirt, his heart clenched and unclenched as if he was either very happy, or gravely ill. He wondered if he should burst into song – it seemed appropriate somehow.
Bryony – finally comfortable in snug jeans and what she felt was a killer T-shirt – felt Putta squeeze her hand and, indeed, heard him sigh and sigh again and thought – last week I was in a dead-end job and desperate for adventure. This week I’ve been in two spaceships – not outside the planet – and one of them was only going up the road and the other j
ust hopped over a few fields – and a couple of days…a couple of days…oh, good grief, I’ve travelled in time…And I really like a spaceman and he seems to like me…Her thinking paused for breath and she was, not for the first time, very glad that no one else was aware of the tumult going on inside her head. And I actually…I mean, I love him. I do. He’s kind of great. Not wonderful, maybe. But my goodness he’s promising. And he was a hero – he really was. And he has a spaceship. It’s a great spaceship…I’ve met better…The Abrischooner is – to be honest – only built for a maximum of two, small beings who are really fond of each other and therefore don’t mind being crushed up together for fairly extended periods…This made her smile. It also made her remember the very confusing and mildly embarrassing speech the Doctor had given them both which seemed to deal with inter-species relationships – or seemed to want to mention them – before he gave up and reached out a bag of jelly babies and said, ‘Well, anyway…’ And then again, now her smile vanished, how could someone from Yinzill get together with someone from Earth. And why would someone who was so clearly all heroic and adventurous want to marry someone who’d only just started having adventures and who’d never even left her own planet…Marriage…The idea of being tied to anyone from any planet for maybe the whole of the rest of her life left Bryony queasy and disturbed – and, given her recent experiences, it surprised her that anything could still do that.
The Doctor was also sighing, but not because he was happy. He was waiting until – yes – now it would start…in walked Julia Fetch with more tea things. He hadn’t managed to raise an appetite for what was already set out around him on cake stands and side tables and trays.
Even though not one of her guests had much of an appetite, Julia – with only the usual number of limbs today – beamed at them, ‘Ah…another tea. And it was only yesterday we had the last one…or maybe the day before yesterday…Or close to that…’ She balanced an extra plate of cucumber sandwiches on the mantelpiece. ‘Now does everyone have enough to be going on with?’
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