Doctor Who: The Many Hands (10 page)

The Doctor stepped out very slowly and calmly,
holding the hand out in front of him like he was
waiting for someone to take it and shake it. The
creatures that had been attacking the door and the
walls all stood back the instant they saw the hand. It
was as if an invisible line had been drawn around the
hand, the Doctor and Captain McAllister that none of
them wanted to cross. The Doctor glanced back briefly
at McAllister, but the soldier kept his face impassive.

'Stay close,' the Doctor whispered.

'Should I?' McAllister asked blithely.

The Doctor took another step forward, his trainers
sinking into the soft ground. The majority of the
creatures surrounding them had come up from the
bottom of the Loch, and the water was still dripping
from them, turning the earth into mud. The Doctor
looked up at the gloomy clouds above. It didn't look
like the grass was going to get the chance to dry out
any time soon.

'Have you seen what they've done to the church?'
McAllister whispered.

The Doctor took a quick glance behind him: the
wooden door had been splintered and shredded by
long sharp nails scratching across it, but it was the
brickwork that was the most shocking. Whole bricks
had been torn out of the wall, or else just crumbled to
dust where they sat. Whatever else they were, these
creatures were strong. If they decided to take a dislike
to them now, there was no chance that the Doctor or
McAllister would make it back inside.

'They must not reach the Castle,' McAllister said
firmly.

The Doctor glanced up at the Castle Rock, looming
up to their left over the dull grey mirror of the Loch. It
looked so permanent, so impregnable. He estimated
it would take the creatures a good few minutes before
they could breach the defences and get at those inside.
If they decided that was what they wanted to do.

'Does it look like they want to?' the Doctor asked.

'I have my duty,' McAllister answered.

The Doctor tutted loudly.

'At least you didn't bring a musket,' he said.

'The musket isn't a close-quarters weapon,' was all
McAllister would say.

The Doctor didn't look at him: he kept his eyes on
the rapt audience that was standing, watching him.
As he stepped away from the church, the creatur
moved in around him, never coming close enough to
touch him. They were an eclectic mix, to be certain:
redcoats in fading uniforms, highlanders in weedsoaked
kilts, wryters from all through the ages with
lank hair sticking to their sunken-eyed skulls, and a
lord in his finery who could have been a member of
the Slitheen family in disguise. Each had a single hand
clutching to their breast that was the mirror to the
one twitching groggily in the Doctor's own.

'This can't be what you were made for,' the Doctor
told them. 'This is just you trying to get out of the
Loch. So what are you here for? What were you meant
to do? If you tell me, I can help.'

The creatures looked at him, blank eyed.

'They're dead,' McAllister said. 'They can't talk.'

The Doctor looked down sadly.

'Dead men tell no tales, eh, McAllister?' he said.

And he reached into his jacket pocket.

The prisoner – the Doctor – simply stood in the
centre of the ring of the walking dead, holding that
bodiless hand in his and looking into each face as if
it was someone important to him. Each face looked
back blankly, grey skin and grey eyes, no life in
them. McAllister saw them differently: there were
no individuals in that crowd, just a mass of men
that he might need to fight his way through. He eyed
them cautiously, weighing up where the crowd was
thinnest and judging which of the creatures might be
stronger than its neighbour. Without turning, he was
acutely aware that every one of them was following
the Doctor away from the church. He hoped that
Howkins had taken note and was already leading the
civilians away.

They had moved further into the churchyard –
perhaps the Doctor had the same thought as him
and wanted to get the creatures away from the
church, but it was a dispiriting sight that met them.
The churchyard was dotted with holes, piles of earth
thrown up wherever a hole wasn't, and here and
there a headstone tumbled. There were more of the
creatures than there had been on the other side of the
Loch, and it wasn't hard to imagine where they had
come from.

The Doctor pulled his wand from his pocket, and
started waving it at each of the creatures in turn. At
one point, he put it into his mouth to free a hand to
pull his spectacles from his pocket, only to tear them
off again as if he could not believe what they had
revealed to his eyes. McAllister just let him do what
he would: he himself was considering whether light
artillery might succeed where muskets had failed, and
how he might communicate his need to the Castle.

'Benjamin Franklin,' the Doctor said suddenly.

McAllister felt his heart jump, but kept his body
neutral. It wasn't exactly a secret that the colonial
statesman had visited Edinburgh, but neither was it
common knowledge what he had done whilst here.
Certainly McAllister didn't know, even though the
Lord Provost had entrusted it to him personally to
see that Franklin had a stagecoach to take him back
to London again. It was well known that Franklin
wasn't simply in London to bring the city news of
the colonies: fifty years earlier, Scotland might have
laughed at the English for entertaining the eccentric
spy. Now their fates were entwined, and Edinburgh
became just another piece in a complicated chess
game.

McAllister had to be suspicious of the prisoner's
interest in their American visitor.

'Benjamin Franklin!' the prisoner cried again,
slapping his forehead.

'Is that intended as an accusation?' McAllister asked
coldly.

The prisoner thrust his wand and his spectacles
back into the same pocket, and when his hand
reappeared it was holding something that looked
like a small purple purse. He looked briefly from the
purse to the disembodied hand he was holding, and
then thrust the hand in McAllister's direction without
preamble.

'Hold this, will you?'

McAllister found, to his wide-eyed amazement,
that he took the hand from the Doctor without
complaining. It felt cold against his skin: cold and
clammy like wet marble. It was hard to credit that
it was even alive, and yet it flexed its fingers and
scratched its nails against his palm as he held it. For
just a moment, the truth of what was happening
threatened to overpower him: here he was, standing
in a churchyard hoping to protect Edinburgh from the
risen dead. He took a breath, and the moment passed.
He had his duty, and his duty was first and foremost
to not feel afraid.

He held the hand, and looked up at the Doctor.
He was stretching the purse between his two hands,
and each time he let go with one it would snap loudly
back into the other. Without warning, he raised the
purse to his lips and started to blow into it: it inflated
squeakily, reminding McAllister of nothing more or
less than a sheep's bladder. The Doctor waggled his
eyebrows as he blew, and then whipped the ball from
his mouth and tied a knot in the free end.

'Catch,' the Doctor said.

He batted the purple ball, and it bobbed in the
air until McAllister caught it in surprise. It was only
a moment later that he realised he was no longer
holding the hand, but as he looked up he saw that the
Doctor had it again.

'Just rub that against your head, would you?' he
asked.

For no reason that he could fathom, McAllister
found himself obeying. All he could think, as he
rubbed the ball against his wiry hair, was that he
hoped his men had evacuated the church: he would
hate to think that any of them might be watching him
doing this.

The Doctor, meanwhile, pointed at the hand he
was holding.

'This,' he said simply, 'is a piece of snake.'

McAllister stood there, rubbing the ball against his
head as the creatures surrounded them in silence and
watching the hand shake itself on the Doctor's palm.
Of all the things it was, a snake was not the first that
would have come to mind.

'A snake,' he echoed.

The Doctor smiled boyishly.

'He was an amazing chap was Benjamin Franklin,'
the Doctor said. McAllister noted that he was talking
in the past tense, and wondered how long ago the two
had known each other. 'A polymath, for a start. Which
is impressive, if you're... you know, impressed by
that kind of thing. And he invented things – invented
things left, right and centre, did old Benjamin.'

McAllister stopped rubbing the ball against his
head.

He frowned.

'But he was also a cartoonist,' the Doctor carried
on regardless, reaching out and plucking the ball
from McAllister's hands. 'He drew a cartoon called
Unite or Die
: pretty simple, just a snake cut up into a
few pieces. I don't think Michelangelo was worried,
but it got the point across. They used it to convince
the colonies to unite against British rule.'

He pointed at the hand in his.

'This,' he said, handing it the ball, 'is a piece of
snake.'

The hand leant back on the stump that was its wrist
and took the ball in its fingers, closing them around
the knot so tightly that the taut skin squeaked. As
soon as the fingers touched that thin skin, the hairs
that ran down its back stood on end and the grey
flesh seemed to flicker with blue sparks. The Doctor
seemed to have been expecting as much, and already
had his wand in his hand again: it squealed briefly, and
then cast its blue light in silence. The Doctor glanced
up at McAllister.

'Wonderful stuff, static electricity,' he said. 'You
wouldn't believe some of the things it can do.'

The hand twitched furiously in the Doctor's palm,
digging its sharp fingers so hard into the ball it held
that it suddenly burst with a loud pop. The Doctor
simply smiled, as if indulging a child. The hand
twisted and turned, wrapping itself in the flapping
remains of the ball as if it was trying to clothe itself,
and then suddenly it froze. Its fingers stretched to
their full length, and the stump of its wrist pointed
straight up into the air.

'And what has it done now?' McAllister asked
grimly.

The Doctor merely smiled.

'Unite or die,' he said.

The hand gave a little shudder, and then in one
movement it hopped from the Doctor's palm and onto
the mud below. The Doctor looked to McAllister with
a parental smile on his face, but McAllister was too
busy watching the ring of creatures that surrounded
them. He remembered how the Young Pretender's
supporters had united, and what it had meant for
Edinburgh as they had.

But it was too late for qualms: the little hand
reached the leg of the nearest of the creatures to it,
a young girl in an apron and headscarf. It clung onto
her long, wet skirts with its sharp nails and scurried
up her leg like a squirrel. If the girl had been alive,
McAllister had no doubt that she would have been
screaming. Instead, she stood in silence as the hand
reached her chest, and touched the fingers of the hand
that was already resting there. It was a tender caress
for just a moment.

There was a brief spark, so brief that McAllister
couldn't swear he hadn't imagined it. But if he had,
then he would need to find some other explanation
for the fact that there was only one hand clinging to
the serving girl's heart. A hand that seemed almost
double the size of the one that had been there before.
What had the Doctor done?

The hand on the girl's chest twitched, and dropped
to the floor.

Seconds later, so did the girl.

The ground around her was wet enough that, when
she fell, she sank a little way into it. It wasn't as if she
had fallen, or even died there and then: she fell with
such force, landed without any semblance of grace,
that there was no mistaking the fact that she had been
dead long before she fell. All the same, McAllister
couldn't help but see his own daughter lying there on
the ground, the wet grass brushing against grey flesh.

The hand had already climbed another leg.

Soon another body fell.

'What is this?' McAllister asked.

The hands were all starting to wake up – somehow,
without word or sign, they all knew what the Doctor
had taught the first. They abandoned their host
bodies to fall in the dirt as they all leapt and clawed
together, two becoming four as four became eight
and eight became sixteen. Soon there was a multitude
of hands all running across the churchyard trying to
find each other, each new addition increasing the
size of the original until the smallest was the size of
a decent hunting dog. Still they raced and bumped
and grew. McAllister realised that they were gradually
moving away from the church and closer to the Loch,
shedding their hosts as they did so.

'What
is
this?' he demanded.

The Doctor looked at him, wide-eyed and excited.

'The hands aren't creatures in their own right,' he
said. 'They're cells. Individual parts of something
bigger. There's an instruction buried deep inside them
to cling to each other, combine until they eventually
become something bigger. But they were broken, and
they'd got it into their heads that they should cling to
the dead and get them up and about instead. So I fixed
them. Now we get to see what they really are.'

'And what will that be?' McAllister asked.

The Doctor smiled that boyish smile again.

'I have absolutely no idea,' he said.

Now four creatures the size of dogs were pushing
through the trees and heading back to the murky
waters of the Nor' Loch. As the four paired off,
electricity crackled and suddenly there were two
bears dipping into the water and pushing away from
the shore. McAllister and the Doctor watched them
go. The church was safe. The creatures were heading
across the water towards the Castle.