by Jacqueline Rayner, Mike Tucker, Paul Magrs, et al (retail) (epub)
Harry froze. He had heard something behind him.
He turned to find nothing but shadows.
‘Sarah Jane? Is that you, old girl?’
He heard the apprehension in his own voice, felt it grip his heart. His sudden sense of dread was irrational, he knew, but compelling. Buck up, old boy, he told himself firmly. You’re too old to be afraid of the dark.
‘Sarah Jane?’
Silence and stillness. He was imagining things.
He turned back towards the door … and found himself face-to-face with a nightmarish ghoul.
Raw shock robbed Harry of the ability to react. To his horror and confusion, he recognised the creature that came looming from the murk. It was Sarah Jane – but not the Sarah Jane that Harry knew. Her eyes were horribly wrong. Only the whites of her eyeballs showed. Her sodden clothes and hair clung to her, slimed with a dark, glistening ooze. She had a pale, curved blade grasped in one hand, raised to strike. As she lunged at him, her body moved in an awkward, jerking fashion.
Harry had no time to save himself. The dagger was already slicing down towards his chest when the floor shook violently once more.
Sarah Jane’s blade slashed harmlessly through thin air, as both she and Harry went sprawling. Harry crashed down into a pile of junk, sending it tumbling and clattering in all directions. He scrambled back to his feet, desperate to defend himself against the next attack, but none came.
Sarah Jane had fared rather worse in her fall. She lay unmoving on the floor beside the sturdy metal trunk with which she had collided. Harry could see the pale dagger lying not far from her side.
He approached her warily, kicking the blade away. As he crouched over her, she gave a feeble groan, then let out a sigh. Harry was baffled to see twin wisps of green vapour escape her nostrils, then dissolve away.
Sarah Jane’s eyelids flickered open. To Harry’s great relief, her eyes had returned to their normal state.
‘Harry?’ Her voice was weak.
‘Take it easy, old girl. You’re in a bad way. Whatever happened to you?’
Sarah Jane didn’t reply – only twisted her neck feebly to look over to her right. Harry sensed that she was trying to direct his attention to something. He followed her gaze.
Nestled amid one of the heaps of assorted junk was a glowing, glassy orb. It closely resembled a fortune-teller’s crystal ball, but for the fact that its dark surface was veined with luminous hairline cracks. It was from these cracks that the eerie green light that dimly lit the attic was escaping.
Sarah Jane turned her bleary eyes back to Harry.
‘Witches …’ she murmured. ‘From … the future.’
Harry could see that she was fighting her confusion to convey something urgent.
‘Mustn’t … touch!’ With another sigh, she slipped into unconsciousness.
Harry anxiously checked her over. There was no sign of serious injury; her breathing was regular and her pulse strong. Her body was evidently demanding that she sleep off whatever trauma had left her in her present sorry state. He carefully moved her into the recovery position, then took stock.
What had Sarah Jane been trying to tell him? He turned her words over in his mind. Witches? That made no sense. And that reference to something from the future? He recalled the Doctor’s talk of ‘a-thing-out-of-its-time’.
Harry turned his gaze back to the glowing crystal sphere – and half thought he glimpsed a hideous face glowering back at him. But it was hard to look directly at the thing now. The veins of green light in its glassy surface had increased in number and intensity. Peering at it through screwed-up eyes, Harry suddenly knew, beyond a doubt, that it was this, whatever it was, that had brought the Reapers down upon them.
The Doctor had a plan. He knew just what he had to do in order to save his human companions. Finding a way to do it, however, was proving far from easy. And he was rapidly running out of time.
‘Think, you addle-brained old fool!’ he scolded himself, reaching urgently for the switches beside a twitching shield-meter.
He had tried every evasive trick up his sleeve to shake off the Reapers, but the TARDIS was being buffeted more fiercely than ever. Tough as she was, she wouldn’t take much more. It was only a matter of time before her self-preservation reflex triggered an emergency rematerialisation.
That needn’t spell doom, the Doctor knew. If he could only ensure that the forced landing took place on Earth, in the last third of the twentieth century, Sarah Jane and Harry should be spared. That was the plan. That way, neither of his companions would represent an anachronism at the moment of the Reapers’ purge. They’d be in their own timeframe. The Reapers ought to leave them be. He had little fear of them taking him. A Time Lord could hardly be out of his proper temporal place. He belonged anywhere and anywhen.
Which is to say nowhere, thought the Doctor darkly.
The problem lay in securing the targeted landing. He had already made several attempts to program the necessary vectors. Each time, before he could complete the task, a violent Reaper strike had caused a major course deflection – rendering his calculations useless.
‘Gaaargh!’
He let out a bellow of frustration as another wild jolt scuppered his fifth attempt to attain the crucial destination lock. This latest jolt, however, brought inspiration. It dislodged something on the console. The Doctor watched it skitter across the control panel. He snatched it up, eyes shining. A manic smile lit his face.
‘The Space–Time Telegraph! By the Seven Systems! Of course!’
Since their hurried departure from the Nerva Beacon, the Doctor hadn’t given the device another thought. He had used the source coordinates of the brigadier’s mayday signal to set a course, then put the telegraph aside. Now he saw it held the answer.
The brigadier’s transmission – a psionic beam – would have left a residual charge trail across the Vortex. Faint and only short-lived, yes …
‘But if the old girl’s sensors can trace it before it fades …’
The Doctor hastily inputted the necessary algorithms. If the TARDIS’s navigational systems could lock on to the psionic beam’s trail, they could auto-adjust after any deflection. She could follow it home.
As the Doctor launched the tracer program, another Reaper strike rocked the TARDIS. Warning lights blinked urgently at him from the console. Every read-out screamed at him that his faithful craft was in a critical state, desperate to exit the Vortex, desperate to prevent herself and her crew from terminally disintegrating within it. He fought to override her emergency abort procedures for a few more seconds – precious seconds the tracer program needed.
‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged, his wide-eyed stare fixed on the console viewscreen.
Another tremor struck.
The Doctor threw back his head to rage at his craft’s unseen assailants. ‘Confound you, you devils! What is it you want?’
‘Doctor!’
Harry burst into the console room. He was in his shirtsleeves, having used his sports jacket to bundle up something he was carrying at arm’s length. The something was emitting a powerful green glow that penetrated its jacket wrap. There was a mixture of triumph and panic in Harry’s eyes. ‘I’ve found it!’
The green glow suddenly flared to a dazzling glare. With a look of dismay, Harry released his incandescent burden. The crystal ball he had carried from the TARDIS’s attic spilled from its wrap, then fell and disintegrated in a blinding explosion of energy before it could hit the floor.
Three dark forms came swooping from the epicentre of the blast. Each split the air with a bloodcurdling screech as it grew and mutated into a huge wraith-like creature.
In this, their natural form, Lilith and her mothers were infinitely more terrifying than in their guise as hags. As they swooped and circled, the billowing of their cowled cloaks revealed a hideous alien anatomy beneath. Their faces were a fleshless nightmare of raven-like beak, lipless mouth and protruding jaw. Their grotesquely outsize hands had
long, thin, clawing fingers.
Harry, wide-eyed with horror, pressed himself back against the wall.
But the Carrionites had no interest in Harry.
Eyes burning with vengeance, they circled the Doctor menacingly, as he gaped at them, for once tongue-tied with surprise.
‘We have him, mothers!’ screeched the vile creature that had tormented Sarah Jane as Lilith.
‘No silken words, Doctor?’ mocked Doomfinger. She let out a crowing cackle. ‘’Tis well. None can save you now!’
‘Your doom,’ screamed Bloodtide, preparing to strike, ‘has come!’
With a cheerful bleep, a green indicator lit on the console. Its viewscreen flashed up an alert. The tracer had locked on.
‘Hold tight, Harry!’ With a yell, the Doctor lunged for the controls. He threw a lever, and all hell broke loose.
An emergency landing meant an accelerated, no-frills rematerialisation: no spatial dampeners, no temporal stabilisers, just several seconds of whirling, whooshing, juddering mayhem, ending in an almighty, bone-shaking thud.
Even before the time-rotor column had stopped moving, the Reapers too burst from the Vortex. They materialised through the TARDIS’s walls like three vast, grey, bat-winged phantoms. They were formidable creatures, each with a long scythe-tipped tail and six barbed limbs, the strongest of which were stretched with a leathery membrane to serve as wings. Red eyes burned in a bizarrely angular head with no mouth. Instead, each Reaper had a gaping chest-maw: a hideous, fang-lined opening in its thorax.
They fell upon the Carrionites with awesome swiftness.
For Harry’s instinct had been right: it was the time-shifted crystal ball and the beings within it that had brought the Reapers rushing. It was the Carrionites’ attempt to change their fate by erasing their nemesis – the Doctor – from the past that had created the time paradox the Reapers had scented.
The three Carrionites would have been a match for all but the most deadly of foes. Reapers, however, were predators of a different order. The first to attack plucked Bloodtide from the air and drove her, screeching, down on to the console-room floor, where it enveloped her in its mighty, smothering wings. Within moments, Lilith and Doomfinger had been brought down and pinioned in similar fashion.
The Reapers’ limbs and wings stifled the screeching, thrashing resistance of their victims as their chest-maws went about their gruesome business, tearing and swallowing ravenously.
Then suddenly the horror was over.
Their prey consumed, the Reapers dematerialised as quickly as they had come, dissolving back into the Time Vortex in the blink of an eye. As they withdrew, history restored itself, timelines realigned, healed, resumed their uncorrupted paths …
Harry staggered as the floor lurched beneath his feet. ‘I say, Doctor – what was that?’
As the time rotor eased to a standstill, the Doctor glowered at him.
‘A perfectly good landing is what that was,’ he growled. ‘As anyone who knew one end of a helmic regulator from the other would appreciate.’
Sarah Jane came hurrying into the console room.
‘Are we there?’ she said eagerly. ‘And where is there, by the way?’
‘Exactly where it should be,’ replied the Doctor, with a pointed look at Harry. He grabbed his scarf and led the way out through the TARDIS’s open door into a rugged, rolling landscape of gorse bushes and heather.
‘Scotland, 1975,’ rumbled the Doctor. ‘Or thereabouts. Certainly within striking distance of the brigadier –’ with a flourish, he produced a tartan-rimmed, feather-plumed tam-o’-shanter from behind his back and tugged it down over his wild curls – ‘or I’ll eat my hat!’ He grinned broadly.
Sarah Jane was still admiring the view. ‘I adore the Scottish moors!’ she declared, beaming. ‘They make me think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.’
‘The Scottish play?’ said Harry. ‘We did that at school.’
‘Murder, intrigue and witchcraft!’ said Sarah Jane with relish.
‘Witchcraft?’ The Doctor pulled a sceptical face. ‘Poppycock!’ He made a final adjustment to his unique hat. ‘Come along, then. This way!’
And he set off purposefully through the moorland heather, his two human companions following dutifully in his wake.
‘Doctor! It is so good to see you once more. Bene!’
Tegan and Turlough watched in amusement as a large man with an expensive-looking suit and a broad Italian accent engulfed the Doctor in a bear-hug that practically lifted him off his feet.
The Doctor struggled to free himself from the man’s grip, obviously embarrassed by this show of affection. ‘It’s good to see you too, Vittorio. You’re looking well.’
Releasing the Doctor, the man patted his ample stomach. ‘A little too well, eh, my friend? Perhaps I need to take a few trips with you in your TARDIS. Travelling with you is always a good way of keeping fit, yes?’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Tegan with a laugh.
As the man turned his attention to Tegan and Turlough, the Doctor hurried to make introductions. ‘Tegan, Turlough, this is my good friend Professor Vittorio Levi.’
The man gave a short bow, then took Tegan’s hand and kissed it theatrically. ‘Friends of the Doctor are certain to be friends of mine.’
He then took Turlough’s hand in a crushing grip. ‘Although the Doctor seems to change his travelling companions as often as he changes his face, yes?’ He laughed uproariously at his own joke. ‘Still, you are all welcome. Benvenuti!’
‘Vittorio.’ The Doctor caught hold of the professor’s arm. ‘You sent a message asking me to come at once. What seems to be the trouble?’
‘Trouble? There is no trouble, my friend! I invite you to my party!’
‘A party?’ Tegan’s ears pricked up at that.
‘Si, signorina Tegan. Does the Doctor never take you to any parties?’
‘No, he does not!’ Tegan glared pointedly at the Doctor. ‘His idea of a good time is finding something appallingly dangerous.’
‘And then making sure that we are right in the middle of it,’ agreed Turlough.
‘That’s hardly fair.’ The Doctor looked hurt. ‘I always do my best to find things that are interesting, stimulating … It’s not my fault if those situations also turn out to be dangerous.’
Levi gave another enormous belly-laugh and clapped the Doctor on the back. ‘Well, I can assure you that you will find no danger here.’
‘And where exactly is here, Vittorio?’ asked the Doctor hesitantly. ‘I mean, I’m aware that we are in a space station orbiting Earth, but –’
‘Ah, but this is no ordinary space station,’ Levi interrupted.
‘Then what is it?’ asked Turlough.
‘Come, let me show you.’
Linking arms with a surprised Tegan, Professor Levi led the three time travellers from his office (which was large enough to contain not only his huge desk, but the TARDIS as well) and ushered them along a short corridor towards an impressive set of double doors.
‘This –’ Levi opened the doors with a flourish – ‘is the greatest museum the human race has ever seen!’
Tegan stared in astonishment at the huge atrium in front of her: a grand circular space with twelve pillared galleries radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. Every inch of floor and wall space was lined with sculptures, paintings, and display cases crammed with treasures from antiquity.
The Doctor scurried forward, gazing up in delight at a large marble statue of a bearded man. ‘But isn’t this Ammannati’s statue of Neptune from the fountain in Florence?’
‘Quite correct, Doctor.’ Levi stood in the centre of the atrium, pointing at each of the radiating galleries in turn. ‘Greece, Italy, Syria, Egypt … The antiquities of all the Earth are gathered here in this museum.’
‘But why?’ asked Tegan. ‘Why remove them from Earth in the first place?’
Levi regarded her sadly. ‘You are from the twentieth century, yes? Even i
n your time, the damage being caused by pollution to these priceless artefacts was of concern to scholars like me. A hundred years later …’ He shrugged. ‘Well, in order to preserve what was left of our past, we needed to look to the technology of the future.’
‘But this must have cost a fortune!’ Tegan said.
‘Several fortunes,’ agreed Levi. ‘Luckily there are still enough people on the Earth willing to use their wealth and influence for the greater good.’
‘It’s magnificent,’ said the Doctor, staring around in obvious approval.
‘It is indeed. And tonight, my friends, you shall be my guests at the grand opening gala!’
‘Tegan. We’re going to be late.’ The Doctor rapped impatiently at the door of Tegan’s room.
‘Just hold on a minute, will you?’ came the irritated voice from inside. ‘I’m not ready yet.’
Turlough rolled his eyes at the Doctor. ‘Earthlings …’
After Professor Levi had finished showing them around the museum, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough had returned to the TARDIS to get ready for the evening reception. Fortunately, the time machine contained an extensive wardrobe, and the Doctor and Turlough had already changed into smart dinner suits.
The door to Tegan’s room opened at last, and she emerged into the corridor wearing a chic, brightly-patterned cocktail dress.
‘How do I look?’ she asked.
‘You look fine!’ said the Doctor, oblivious to how beautiful she was. ‘Now hurry up or we’ll miss the start of Vittorio’s speech.’
The Doctor strode off along the corridor, and Tegan and Turlough hurried after him. As they entered the console room, a tall silver robot looked up from the controls.
‘Ah, Kamelion, there you are,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’d wondered where you had got to.’
‘Merely recharging, Doctor.’ The robot cocked his head to one side. ‘You have changed your appearance?’
‘Only superficially.’ The Doctor grinned. ‘Although having your shape-shifting abilities would have certainly been a benefit in speeding things along.’
‘Hey!’ Tegan glared at him. ‘An evening gown takes a little more preparation than a dinner suit, you know.’