Island of Death

by Barry Letts

  ‘We’d better get it up to the temple. Mother Hilda’ll go spare. If the Skang is dead, that fouls up the reward ceremony completely.’

  As he spoke, the Doctor felt an involuntary movement from Sarah. He tightened his grip on her arm, and as soon as the guards disappeared round the corner carrying the body, he slipped back into the jungle.

  ‘What was it? What did they say?’ he hissed to Sarah as soon as she caught him up.

  ‘It was the word “reward”! The reward ceremony. That’s what Jeremy said they were coming here for, to get their reward!’

  That settled it. It was all falling into place. ‘Right,’ said the Doctor. ‘One way or another, it’s got to be stopped. The guard was wrong. It’ll go ahead even if one of them is dead. There must be at least twenty other Skang to take part.’

  She still looked bewildered.

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you? That was the significance of the walkie-talkie. They were calling Brother Will, weren’t they?’

  ‘You mean that the dead Skang...’

  ‘...wasn’t all that he seemed. Brother Will fell from the cliff, or was pushed maybe, and when he landed and was killed, he resumed his real shape.’

  ‘Every one of those teachers, from Mother Hilda down, is a Skang!’

  Bob Simkins, staring unseeingly at his cup of black coffee, removed his head from his hands, and said, ‘Do you have to make such a bloody clatter with your knife and fork?’

  Sorree!’ sang Chris, his mouth full of sausage and fried egg.

  Funny, he thought, he seemed to be the only one who was finding life as jolly as they all had yesterday. Never mind about last night’s piss-up, they’d come back on board as happy as a crowd of soccer fans after they’d won the cup.

  And now - well, the blue mist had long gone, but it was as if the whole ship was sitting in a black fog of gloom. When they were about to go home! But then he’d never been able to understand why people fluctuated up and down the way they did.

  The CO had sent a message to say that he wasn’t to be disturbed until it was time to weigh anchor; the Brigadier, the Doctor and Sarah hadn’t surfaced at all; and if Bob, as the acting Number One, hadn’t had to get up to make the ship ready for sea, he’d still be crashed out, no question.

  It had been a good party.

  The Cox’n appeared in the doorway. Bob didn’t even open his eyes. ‘Excuse me, sir...’

  Bob sat up with a jerk. ‘Ah yes, Cox’n. Everything in hand?’

  ‘I couldn’t say that, sir. The Doctor and Miss Smith have gone ashore, it seems.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘The small launch has gone, and both their cabins are empty. I checked. Shall I send someone across to chase them up?’

  Bob groaned. ‘The good Lord protect me from the clever clogs of this world. You’d think he’d know better... No. We’ll leave it as late as possible. He’s aware that we’re sailing on the tide.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Better tell the Brigadier, though.’

  ‘Wake him up, sir?’

  ‘If necessary.’

  Rather you than me, thought Chris, mopping up his egg yolk with a bit of toast.

  It made a sort of sense, thought Sarah, as she hastily wound her uncomfortable way back through the jungle. That would be why Alex Whitbread was so keen to get back. He was cut off from his own kind. He must have been left in Bombay by mistake.

  And the way he’d reacted when she’d tried to take his photograph in London - presumably it would have shown him as he really was.

  But of course! That’s exactly what had happened! The Polaroid she’d managed to snatch through the curtain was a shot of Brother Alex without his disguise - if that’s what you’d call it.

  ‘You mean the Skang are shape-shifters?’ she’d said, after she’d recovered from the initial shock of the Doctor’s revelation.

  In some of the tales with which the Doctor had whiled away their previous tedious trips through the Time Vortex, he had told her of his various encounters with those strange beings who could change their shape as readily as the chameleon its colour. For that matter, he’d told her, the TARDIS herself should have been an automated equivalent, if only one of her circuits hadn’t given up the ghost - just as the relativity circuit had.

  ‘Shape-shifters? Well... Like so many questions, the answer has to be yes and no.’ He’d spoken impatiently, urgently.

  ‘This is something different. But we haven’t got time to go into it now. You must get back to the ship as fast as you can and tell the Brigadier that things are about to come to a head. It’s time for action. He must remount his raiding party

  - but double it in size - treble it. Every available man! It may be hopeless. After all, we have no idea what powers these aliens have. But we can’t wait to find out.’

  ‘Show him your photos and tell him what we’ve discovered.

  Everything. Tell him that I was right. The future of the human race does lie in our hands... and not at some time in the future. Now!’

  ‘But... but I don’t know everything. I mean, what do you think is going to happen?’

  It couldn’t be more clear. There’s going to be a mass ingurgitation.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘The disciples are going to get their reward all right. By the end of today there’ll be nothing left inside their skins but their bones.’

  Jeremy! And all of those poor kids!

  ‘But that’s not the worst of it. I’m convinced that this is only an advance party. If the Skang manage this successfully, there won’t be just twenty of them, there’ll be thousands; and by then it’ll be too late. They mustn’t even start this “reward ceremony”. You must make Lethbridge-Stewart understand that. He must do whatever is necessary to prevent it - whatever the cost. Now, go!’

  ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘Me? I’m going up to try to stop them myself.’

  Of course he was.

  Alex hadn’t expected to find Brother Dafydd exulting in their success to the same extent that he was. But he was a little surprised to find Dafydd lying curled up on his bed, hugging himself to still the shaking in his body. If he turned up at the council hearing in that state, it wouldn’t take long before the whole story came out.

  ‘Dafydd,’ he said quietly, so as not to startle him.

  Nevertheless, he gave a convulsive jump, and a twist to see who’d come up on him so silently. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said with a gulp.

  Alex sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I’ve come to say thank you. I felt in my bones that I could trust you, and you’ve proved me right.’

  Brother Dafydd shuddered. ‘I was okay until I heard that scream.’

  Alex nodded. ‘I was afraid it might catch somebody’s attention too. Evidently not.’

  Dafydd sat up. ‘No, no, I mean that I...’

  Alex’s voice hardened. ‘If you feel that you’ve soiled your lilywhite hands, then give them a scrub with carbolic soap.

  That’s all in the past. We’ve other things to think about. I need your help. It’s going to be a busy day for both of us.’

  ‘No. No more. I should never have agreed to go along with your plan. I’ve always tried to keep the...’ He couldn’t go on.

  His face was working and twisting as his emotions took charge.

  ‘I’d say you had no choice. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Alex let the threat in his voice be quite apparent.

  Dafydd’s head dropped. His shoulders were heaving.

  Great Heavens! The man was crying!

  Alex changed his tone. ‘My dear fellow, you mustn’t think that I don’t know how you feel. I didn’t sleep at all last night.

  To the end of my days I shall be grieving for dear Brother Will, who’s been our anchor and our rock throughout these long months...’ Was he going too far? No. The fool had stopped weeping. He was listening. ‘For the rest of my life I shall have to carry the weight of guilt for what had to be done, for what was ab
solutely necessary for the success of the project. Be it on my head. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.’

  Dafydd looked up. Alex leaned forward and took him by the shoulders. He looked deep into his eyes. He was enjoying himself. Like a concert violinist who’d practised until the music itself played the instrument, he relaxed into the skill he’d acquired in the Oxford Union and at the hustings, and perfected at Westminster.

  ‘Oh, Dafydd, Dafydd. Haven’t you understood? I must have you - and nobody but you - at my side. Who else can I trust?

  I shall be supreme on this planet, yes, but you... you will be the agent of my will. You will be my first minister, my chancellor, with total power over all, Skang and human alike.

  But nothing comes without a price. We must bear the pain together. We must learn to love the anguish. We can’t escape our destiny.’

  The old rule of three. It never failed. He could almost feel Conference rising to give him a standing ovation.

  Don’t let him look away.

  ‘As I said, we have no choice. We must carry the burdens of leadership between us, you and I, for the greater good of the Skang.’

  Now he must keep quiet; hold the eye and keep his trap shut.

  Hold it—

  Hold it...

  Dafydd blinked. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

  * * *

  Would he be in time? The Doctor dismissed the thought, which kept popping up as an unspoken sub-text to his cogitations.

  ‘No, not shape-shifters...’ he was saying. ‘They’ve shown no signs of taking on anything other than the human form. But it’s not just that. In my conversation with Dame Hilda, there wasn’t an iota to make me suspicious. I would have sworn in a court of law that I was talking to the same woman as the one I’d met before.’

  He was talking to himself. Like the voluble wife who said to her mocking husband, ‘How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?’, the Doctor, when faced with an intractable problem, had a secret habit of discussing things with himself out loud - or rather, sotto voce. Though on this occasion it wouldn’t have mattered if he had chattered away at full volume, as he was halfway up the five-hundred-foot cliff, clinging on by his fingertips and the toes of his boots.

  The Gallifreyan duplication of physiological function was not confined to the heart, as the Doctor had told Sarah when they were precariously afloat together. One of its most useful aspects was the ability to separate the operation of the two hemispheres of the brain.

  In the normal course of events, he would have tackled the mammoth task of scaling the very nearly vertical side of the volcano by letting the cack-handed rationality of the left brain be quiescent. The ‘I’ that was the Doctor would take a back seat and enjoy watching the expertise of the trained climber that resided in the spatial somatic genius of his right brain.

  But if it was necessary, as now, he could leave his body-brain complex to its own devices and retreat into the logical common-sense processes of left brain thought.

  He had decided that he had no hope of stopping the progress of the ingurgitation by tackling it head on. There were certainly as many Skang as there were national teachers and organisers. Every one was a Skang, an alien with unguessable powers; and as he’d said to Sarah, there were at least twenty of them, possibly more.

  His best bet was to get through to whatever remained of the humanity of Dame Hilda - the Hilda Hutchens who was, after all, a Fellow of All Souls as well as a Nobel Laureate - and persuade her to abort the reward ceremony before it started.

  But would he be in time? The thought came bubbling up once more. Perhaps it was foolish to have started on a such a climb - a climb that would have merited an entry in the record books. But how else could he have got to her unseen?

  ‘Stop your nattering,’ he said aloud to his unruly mind. ‘I’ll either do it, or I won’t, and that’s all there is to it.’

  He’d often said something of the sort to others. But somehow it seemed far less comforting now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As Sarah neared the end of her arduous journey through the now doubly uncomfortable jungle back to the shore, she stopped and let herself drop down onto the ground. For a moment, she lay prone, letting the exhaustion seep out of her muscles, trying to ignore the smarting of the myriad scratches on her legs and arms.

  It was bad enough the first time, but the second trip was just too much, especially towards the end when she was near the avenue of huts by the beach, where she had to be extra careful because of the Skangite followers she could see milling about.

  She raised her head. Now that she was almost at the little inlet where they’d left the boat, there was the danger that she might be heard - or even worse, seen - by one of the watching guards. It was time to revert to the Doctor’s snaking movements. It was slow, yes, but much safer.

  It was a good thing she did. She spotted the boat through a gap in the bushes, and as far as she could see the mini-beach was empty, but as she moved cautiously forward she heard the murmur of a voice. She could just make out the words.

  ‘Try Brother Will again.’

  ‘What’s the point? He must have the bloody thing turned off.’

  She inched her way to a position where she could see the cove more plainly. Yes, there they were. A glimpse of white was showing through the dirty shrubs where they were hiding.

  The boat was out of the question. How was she going to warn the Brig?

  * * *

  ‘And so you will vote for Brother Alex’s reinstatement?’

  Brother Bunnag from Thailand smiled. His twinkling eyes were smiling too. ‘I think it would be the compassionate thing to do, yes. And skilful too, as you have indicated.’

  With a word of thanks, Dafydd moved on, glancing round to make sure that his lobbying was as discreet as Alex had insisted it should be. If he could convince an ex-Buddhist monk, the rest should be easy.

  Luckily, Dafydd found this first task given to him by Alex more than congenial. He was able to put himself heart and soul behind it. From the start, he’d thought that Hilda’s softly-softly approach was not only unnecessary, but ultimately harmful to the cause. Yes, of course they should use the Skang bio-chemical method of gaining recruits to the cult and enfolding their minds until the moment of assimilation, but in purely human terms the organisation was so lax that, projected to a planetary level, it was guaranteed to collapse.

  This planet was ripe, like a Victoria plum tree at the end of a hot summer, with its fruits so dripping with sweetness that the birds and the wasps vied with each other for the juice.

  The Skang could search for aeons and not find its like. It must not be lost.

  Brother Alex was right. What had to be done, had to be done.

  Curiously enough, it was only due to the influence of the late Brother Will that the whole thing hadn’t fallen apart already. If only they’d been able to persuade him to join them! But his almost canine devotion to Mother Hilda had ruled that out.

  But these others, whom he was working on one by one, had been unerringly picked out by the political acumen of Alex Whitbread. They were a far softer target. If Alex had had the time to do the same in Bombay he’d never have been excised.

  Brother Alex had really understood how he felt about the death of Will; and he trusted him. Dafydd took a deep breath to still the sudden flutter of fear inside him as he thought of the other commission that had been assigned to him.

  One thing at a time.

  Who was that? Oh, yes... He glanced down at his list. Good.

  Another. He was doing well.

  ‘Ah, Brother Gyogy, may I have a word?’

  She’d have to swim.

  But as she’d told the Doctor, she could hardly keep afloat.

  When Sammy had taught her to sail, she’d never stepped into the dinghy without a life jacket. How could she hope that her feeble breaststroke (that always degenerated into a frantic doggy-paddle) would take her all the way to the ship? She
’d never managed more than a spluttering length, and the Hallaton must be at least a couple of hundred yards away.

  It was no good trying to attract their attention. Even if she managed it, she had no way of signalling a message. Why hadn’t they taught semaphore at St Margaret’s Grammar?

  There was no way to warn them.

  Oh yes there was! It was only a slim chance, but it was worth ago.

  But first she had to get away from the two guards. She snaked her way down the coast until she was round the next headland, safely out of sight.

  Yes, it really looked as if it might be possible. If she kept her nerve, she might be able to swim out to the reef that rimmed the lagoon - which at that point was much nearer than the ship - climb out onto it, and then make her way along its length until she was near enough to the Hallaton to have a chance of making it in the water.

  But there was another thing... One of the snags of swimming - apart from the possibility that she mightn’t be strong enough to make it, or might end up as a shark’s lunch

  - would be how to keep the shots of the island dry. She had no idea what prolonged immersion in salt water might do to the Polaroid prints. And without them there wasn’t a hope that they’d believe her.

  She was still trying to think of a better idea than swimming when she pulled the strap of the camera case over her head, to hide it under a bush.

  Aha! One problem solved, anyway. She unclipped the strap and experimented with changing its length. Yup! She could slip it under her chin, and fix the snaps onto the top of her head.

  Shoes off. Keep the rest on, in the hope that it might afford a mite of protection from the coral. She waded into the sea, wincing as the salt bit into her scratched legs.

  At least the water was warm.

  He stood on the clifftop, taking deep breaths and letting his arms and legs recover from that last extra effort needed to get himself past the grassy overhang onto the clifftop. There seemed to be a slight ache and a trembling in his biceps -