Forever Autumn

by Mark Morris

  With a shudder, she switched her phone off and put it back in her pocket. Then, as she waited for her food, she thought about how the Doctor must have had to think about this stuff all the time for hundreds of years, and of how brilliant and special and lonely he was. And thinking about that gave Martha a renewed tingle not simply of excitement but of sheer, unadulterated joy. It gave her a sense, not for the first time, of how incredibly privileged she was to be travelling with him – of how, in fact, regardless of the sleepless nights and the frequent terror and the almost incessant bumps and bruises, she was the luckiest girl alive.

  Deep beneath the earth the Hervoken were communicating.

  Theirs was an ancient language, subtle, instinctive and complex. They conveyed meaning not through conventional speech, but via thoughts, feelings, symbols, incantations. To a human being, they might have appeared to be praying, or casting spells, or twitching involuntarily, or at times simply waiting, perhaps even sleeping as they drifted like phantoms on the air. But in truth they were doing none of these things. They were conveying information, formulating a plan.

  They knew – through a mysterious fact-gathering process of their own that humans might (only partly correctly) have labelled mind-reading or remote perception or even witchcraft – that the man with the blue energy was a danger to them, and that he had an emotional link to the girl who accompanied him.

  And they knew too that the girl was currently alone.

  And vulnerable…

  Martha was halfway through her mega fry-up when the hairs started prickling on the backs of her arms. She looked out at the street. Was the mist suddenly thicker and darker? She had been able to see the cars parked by the kerb pretty clearly before, but now they were hazy blocks of dimness. And the vague outline of the buildings across the square had disappeared completely, to be replaced by an almost solid bank of mist that was deepening to the murky green of over-ripe olives.

  All at once her breakfast didn’t seem so appetising. Because now, as well as the hairs on her arms, Martha felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickling too. Plus her stomach was starting to churn with nerves. She tried to tell herself there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing concrete, nothing she couldn’t rise above. Like the Doctor had said, it was just alien chemicals, or psychic oojamaflips, or whatever it was they put in the mist, that were making her feel this way.

  Determined to return to her breakfast – even though her appetite had almost completely gone by now – Martha suddenly realised the music that had been playing in the diner had stopped. Tearing her gaze away from the scene outside the window, she turned her head – and gasped.

  The room was full of mist! It was suffusing the place with an eerie gloom, obscuring the counter, the surrounding tables, the Halloween decorations, Martha’s fellow diners…

  She jumped to her feet, her heart thumping hard. It was difficult to tell where the mist was coming from. It seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. It seemed simply to be there, filling the room. And it seemed to be deepening even as she looked, turning solid objects into murky blobs, transforming day into night.

  Martha felt suddenly alone in the dank silence. Alone, isolated, removed from reality.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Anyone around?’ She was alarmed at how flat and muffled her voice sounded, how the marshy mist seemed to swallow it.

  Suddenly sensing a presence behind her, feeling cold breath on the nape of her neck, she spun round…

  There was no one there.

  ‘Hello?’ she called again, annoyed at the rising panic in her own voice. ‘Will someone please answer me?’

  Once again the mist stifled and seemed to gulp down her words. And once again there was no reply.

  Right, Martha thought. Right. What would the Doctor do? What would he do if he didn’t have his sonic screwdriver?

  He’d make for the door, that’s what. He’d try to find out what was going on.

  She slid out of the booth and started walking in what she thought was the direction of the door. The mist was so thick now it was like being blind. She could feel it on her skin, like the cobweb-caress of ghostly fingers. It was hard not to get disorientated. Even though she knew the door couldn’t be far away, she couldn’t help but think she was heading out into a wilderness, a limbo, a nothing-place.

  A place where she might get lost and wander forever…

  Despite the cold she was sweating. And her heart was still bashing away in her chest. Calm down, she told herself. Don’t panic. You’re in the diner, that’s all. Anything else is just your imagination.

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said, trying to sound as if she wasn’t affected in the slightest. ‘I know what you’re doing and it won’t work on me. I’ve seen stuff you wouldn’t believe. If you think a bit of mist is going to scare me, then you’re very much mis—’

  A figure loomed out of the murk. Martha had to use all her willpower to stop herself crying out. Mist drifted over the figure and then spun away, making her think of a present being unwrapped. She leaned forward and saw that it was Cindy. The waitress was standing still as a statue, her eyes wide and glassy, her mouth half-open. She didn’t react when Martha touched her shoulder. She didn’t even appear to be breathing.

  ‘Cindy?’ Martha said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  The girl didn’t respond. Just continued to stare vacantly into space.

  Like a standing corpse.

  Martha shuddered and moved on.

  A couple who had been having breakfast in a booth nearer to the door were similarly affected. The woman was holding a fork with a piece of waffle jammed onto the end of it. Her husband had his right hand curled around a mug of cooling coffee. Both were gazing into space as if they were catatonic with shock.

  Was everyone in the diner like this, she wondered. Hypnotised or paralysed or whatever. Was everyone in town like this? But why not her? And what about the Doctor?

  As if in answer to her question, Martha suddenly realised that she could see someone moving about in the gloom ahead.

  ‘Doctor?’ she called. ‘Is that you?’

  If it was, he was not only moving slowly, but also remaining silent.

  Perhaps he can’t hear me, she thought. Perhaps the mist is so thick that he literally can’t hear my voice.

  ‘Doctor?’ she shouted again, and the figure drifted closer.

  Yes, she thought, it is him. Or someone tall and thin, at any rate.

  But as the figure came closer still, Martha felt a crawling sense of unease. This wasn’t the Doctor. This was a giant, like someone on stilts. And this person wasn’t just thin, but emaciated, skinny as a rake. And there was something wrong with the person’s head. It was too big, too wide, like… like…

  Then the figure stepped forward, out of the gloom, and Martha saw it clearly for the first time.

  ‘Oh my…’ she breathed and backed away. The creature fixed her with its black, beady eyes. It opened its vast zigzag mouth in its great squashy head, and she saw rows and rows of serrated, shark-like teeth.

  She backed into a table, which scraped a few inches across the floor. Cutlery rattled; a ketchup bottle fell over with a thump.

  The creature raised a hand which was almost as long as Martha’s entire arm. Its taloned fingers moved slowly, clicking like bones as they did so. It made a sound, a breathy, high-pitched sound, something between a sigh, a murmur and a giggle. Then it extended a long, spiny finger and seemed to draw something in the air in front of Martha’s face…

  … And suddenly she couldn’t move!

  Every muscle in her body seemed frozen. It was like being tightly bound with strong, invisible rope.

  Martha could only stand there, horrified, as the grinning thing reached out for her.

  ‘HERE KITTY, KITTY,’ called the Doctor warily, pushing open Etta’s front door a few inches and poking his head round the gap.

  In a slightly guilty way he was feeling pleased with himself. Unable to use his sonic screwdriv
er for fear of alerting the Hervoken to his presence, he had gained access to Etta’s house with nothing more than a bit of wire and his Alpha Centauri Table Tennis Club membership card. His house-breaking skills were a bit rusty, but he’d managed to get the door open in just under seven seconds. Now all he had to do was get past the army of vicious hell-cats and he was laughing.

  Although he had confidently told Etta that the cats would be back to normal this morning, the Doctor had no way of knowing whether that was actually true, beyond doing what he was doing now. If screaming balls of fur with glowing green eyes suddenly came flying at him from all directions, he’d conclude that he’d been wrong and leg it out of there.

  He looked left and right and even above his head, but all seemed quiet. ‘Ah, K-9,’ he murmured, ‘where are you when I need you?’

  Then a grey cat slunk through the partly open kitchen door at the end of the corridor beside the central staircase and came padding towards him. The Doctor scrutinised it as it approached. It had that serenely disdainful catty swagger about it, and its eyes, though green, were not glowing.

  The Doctor stepped into the house and pushed the door closed behind him. Still watchful, he crouched down and let the cat come to him. It slunk around his ankles a couple of times, then rubbed its face against his knee. He picked it up.

  ‘All right are you now?’ he murmured, examining it. He stroked it and it began to purr. ‘Word of advice,’ he said. ‘If you ever get invited to a fancy dress party, don’t go as a nun.’

  He put the cat down and it sauntered away. Still looking around, the Doctor crossed to the wooden door in the panelling that led to the cellar. He could feel the energy in the air with every step he took. It tingled in his skin, vibrated in his nerve endings. Although she didn’t know it, Etta and her family had been living slap-bang on top of a vast source of alien power for the past couple of hundred years. It was a bit like living on the summit of a simmering volcano. It had been dormant for the most part, but now it was powering up, getting ready to tear a great big hole out of the planet.

  Pulling open the wooden door, the Doctor went down into the cellar. He crossed straight to the trapdoor he had asked Etta about last night and tugged it open. A sour-sweet smell wafted up at him, together with a surge of energy so strong it made his flesh tighten, his eyes water and his hair stand up in punky spikes.

  ‘Whoo, talk about overdoing it with the aftershave,’ he said, and backed away, rubbing his face vigorously with his hands, running his tongue over his itchy teeth.

  When the energy had dispersed a little, he approached the open trapdoor again. Beneath it, just as Etta had said, was a square storage space, about chest-height, lined in sheets of metal to make it impervious to rodents and other pests. It was empty now, aside from the lingering ghosts of long-ago fruit harvests. The Doctor jumped down into the hole, his feet clanging on the metal floor.

  He had a theory, and he wanted to test it out. He knew, or at least suspected, that the Hervoken could not have survived all this time, even in their dormant state, without help. He ran his hands over the metal walls of the storage chamber, probing for gaps, searching for a dodgy hinge, a hidden catch, anything. It didn’t take him long to find it, a loose rivet at the top of the right-hand wall. He pressed it confidently – and nothing happened. Nonplussed, he tried twiddling it, and a metal door about a metre square swung open to the side of him.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a cat flap,’ he muttered, and rummaged in his pocket until he found a pencil-torch. He turned it on and shone it into the darkness beyond the door. The light revealed a narrow tunnel, the walls roughly clad in rotting timber.

  ‘Ready or not, here I come,’ he said, and clamping the torch between his teeth he crawled inside.

  The walls were writhing around her. The ceiling was undulating above her head. Even the floor was rippling beneath her feet. Martha’s entire surroundings were made up of black roots or vines, which were constantly on the move, twisting and intertwining like a chamber of snakes. She might have thought they were snakes if it wasn’t for the fact that green light was pulsing and flickering through them, bathing the place in a dim, toxic glow. Indeed, the only thing that wasn’t moving in the hellish environment was Martha herself. She was immobile, her muscles locked into place, able to do nothing but think and observe.

  She was trying to stay calm, to behave as the Doctor would behave, to look around with interest and curiosity. She was trying to overcome the fact that she was terrified out of her wits, trying to tell herself that the reason she kept stepping back into the TARDIS was precisely so that she could have experiences like this.

  I mean, she thought, here I am in an alien… lair? Base? Anyway, here I am. And I’m surrounded by giant, skinny pumpkin-men. I mean, how amazing is that?

  The pumpkin-men, she knew, were called Hervoken. She knew that because she could understand their language, even though it was composed not of traditional speech, but of a complicated fusion of chants and movements and little rituals. Thanks to the TARDIS she understood the Hervoken’s body language, their facial expressions, even their silences. She knew that they were wary of the Doctor, that they considered him dangerous simply because of the technology they had detected him using. She was aware too that they knew he was different to the other inhabitants of the planet because he had… she wasn’t sure exactly what word they used here, either because there wasn’t an English equivalent of it or because their language was so alien and ancient that even the TARDIS struggled to translate it, but the closest she could get to it was ‘aura’. They considered the Doctor dangerous because he had an aura about him.

  When Martha heard the Hervoken ‘talking’ about her, she tried not to look alarmed or interested, tried not to let on that she knew what they were saying. They talked about her as a ‘hostage’, as a ‘bargaining tool’. She knew that they had taken her in the belief that the Doctor wouldn’t move against them whilst they had her in their clutches.

  Wrong, she thought. OK, so she knew the Doctor would back off if they threatened to kill her, but that didn’t mean he’d sit on his bum and do nothing. All the time she was here he’d be beavering away somewhere, thinking of ways to stop them if they needed stopping, or help them if they needed helping.

  Martha was trying to store it all up, trying to remember all the things she had seen and heard in case it proved useful later. She had learned that the Hervoken’s power reserves were low, and that even with the ‘Necris’, which was the book on top of the plinth-thing in the centre of the room, there was now barely enough left to channel their psychic energy. Paralysing all the people in the diner while they had grabbed her had taken a lot out of them, and they needed a temporary power boost to keep things ticking over. Without it the – she translated it as ‘sky-heart’, though took it to mean the place they were currently standing in – the ‘sky-heart’ would slip back into dormancy, forcing the Hervoken once again into hibernation.

  Works for me, she thought, though in truth she knew that that would only be pushing the problem underground for future generations to cope with, kind of like burying nuclear waste. She watched as the Hervoken gathered around the Necris and began to chant, their soft, childlike voices making Martha feel woozy, although not in a good way. Theirs was a lullaby that promised terrible nightmares rather than sweet dreams.

  The Hervoken sketched symbols in the air with their hideous fingers. The one she took to be their leader simply because he (or was it a she? Martha had no idea) seemed to initiate everything, produced some kind of powder or dust, apparently from nowhere, and scattered it in a ritualistic pattern.

  One of the Hervoken stepped forward and placed a hand on the Necris. Instantly all the bubbles of green light that flickered and flashed intermittently among the writhing vines seemed to rush towards the centre of the chamber, to gather at the base of the plinth and flow upwards. The Hervoken with its hand on the book became bathed in green light. It opened its wide mouth and hissed, reminding Mar
tha oddly of a man stepping into a warm shower after a hard day’s work. The light enveloped the Hervoken completely, filling its deep-set eyes and the black, jagged crack of its mouth, until it looked more like a Halloween pumpkin than ever.

  And then, fizzing like a soluble Aspirin dropped into water, the alien faded away.

  In the tunnel the Doctor felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. He held out his left hand and saw the hairs stiffening, standing to attention. He sucked his index finger and held it up, as though to gauge the wind direction.

  ‘Frying tonight,’ he murmured. ‘Definitely on the right track.’

  He crawled on.

  Panting and sweating, Rick, Scott and Thad were helping to carry lengths of timber and unwanted items of furniture from the big woodshed on the edge of Juniper Park to the growing pyramid of flammable material which would form the Pumpkin Man’s funeral pyre at the climax of tonight’s festivities. The fire was a Blackwood Falls Halloween tradition. Nobody knew who had started it or where it had come from, but every year the townsfolk made a Pumpkin Man out of paper and straw, sticks and old clothes, which was placed on top of the fire and burned to ashes. Rick knew the British had something along the same lines, where they burned an effigy of some guy who had tried to blow up their Parliament. He didn’t think that happened on Halloween night, though, and he didn’t think the British burned their guy for the same reason the townsfolk of Blackwood Falls burned their Pumpkin Man, which was to ward off evil spirits and keep the town safe for another year.

  It was a long walk from the woodshed to the bonfire site – all the way past the bleachers and the baseball diamond, the Carnival marquee and the stalls set up either side of it in a kind of giant horseshoe shape – and by 10.30am the boys were ready for a rest.

  Rick’s dad, who was helping to build the bonfire itself, dressed in construction worker’s hardhat and canvas gloves, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a ten dollar note.

  ‘Good work, boys. I think you’ve earned yourselves a soda,’ he said, handing Rick the money.