Doctor Who: The Many Hands (12 page)

'This way,' Monro hissed in her ear.

She couldn't see which way he was heading, but
felt his hand pull her gently into the darkness. She
couldn't even see the faint shape of his back in front
of her any more, and she could feel her heart starting
to flutter. If he meant her any harm, if perhaps he felt
closer to the hands and Alexander than he did to the
rest of the human race, she couldn't have picked a
better place to follow him where she would never be
heard of again.

She took a deep breath and told herself to think
about something else. Monro was on her side, and he
was just as frightened of the hands as she was. And
if he wasn't... well, she'd just have to wait for him to
show some sign of it before she worried about it.

The darkness was so thick, she thought she could
feel it brushing her skin. Either that, or they were
walking through cobwebs. There was a faint scuttling
sound coming from somewhere behind them. Martha
began to wish that everything she'd been told about
carrots as a child was right. She tried blinking, but still
all she could see was soupy, impenetrable blackness.

'Mr Monro?' she whispered.

He shushed her quietly, but gently squeezed her
hand.

Martha was starting to realise that she really didn't
like the dark.

Suddenly, the hand creature she was clutching so
tightly gave a jolt and began struggling like crazy.
Even though she knew what it was, Martha couldn't
help but react with panic. The creature had tricked
her into thinking it had gone to sleep, it had been
so still and gentle: now it was going crazy, digging
its nails into her flesh to escape. Martha had to use
both hands to try and keep hold, but even that was
no good. She felt a sharp pain across the back of her
hand and cried out, standing upright and banging
her head against the ceiling again. Her hands came
together automatically, trying to stop the blood that
was barely flowing.

She dropped the hand and heard it scuttle away on
the dry floor.

'Great!' she hissed.

For a moment, she considered giving chase, but it
was hopeless: all she would do was stumble around in
the darkness without even knowing if it was making
rude gestures just inches from her face. Even if she
could follow it, she knew exactly where it would be
heading: she didn't want to stumble into Alexander in
these dark little rooms. It was a fairly safe bet that the
hand would be back soon anyway, leading that grey
giant behind it. She'd much rather she wasn't here
alone when it arrived. She had to get to the Doctor.

That was when Martha realised.

'Mr Monro?' she whispered, waiting for his
answering shush.

She couldn't hear anything, just the sound of fingers
drumming against dusty streets and rotting wooden
floorboard. She took a small step forwards, squinting
and holding her hands out in front of her. With every
movement, she hoped to feel the cloth of Monro's
jacket against her fingertips. Or the cold clamminess
of Alexander's grey skin.

'Mr Monro?' she risked raising her voice a little.

Still no answer. She was alone.

'Oh no,' she said softly.

There was a part of Martha that wanted to curl up
in a ball on the floor and close her eyes against the
darkness, despite the rest of her knowing that staying
put would only make it all the easier for the hand to
find her. She couldn't see a thing anyway. And where
would she go? Perhaps if she waited here, Monro
would find her again and lead her to safety.

Something scuttled across the floorboards above
her head.

No amount of triple-sun sunsets could be worth
this.

Martha closed her eyes and dug into her pocket.
The mobile phone's screen lit up as she turned it on,
and she waved it in front of her. The light it gave out
wasn't much to write home about, but it might stop
her walking straight into a wall. She took a small step
forwards, stopped and let out a breath. OK. Then she
took another step.

Suddenly, the phone went dead.

Martha's heart skipped in her chest, until she realised
that the display had just timed out. She hit a button at
random, and the pale green light returned. She let out
another breath, and stepped slowly forward. With
every inch she moved, she kept expecting to touch
some cold, dank, unspeakable horror that would just
make her scream and run away. But she didn't. The
sound of the scuttling was growing louder, sounding
like someone drumming in the street outside. She
took a step forwards.

The light from the phone made a small green
square on the wall.

Waving the phone around and pressing buttons
at random, Martha quickly managed to follow the
wall until the light vanished into a black hole. Trying
not to give a shout of triumph, Martha quickly felt
all around the gap: it was a doorway! A low, open
doorway! She hurried through it as fast as she dared
in the darkness.

For a moment, she wondered if she had even left
the room she had been standing in. The drumming of
racing fingertips was still just as loud, and the room
was still just as dark.

She was about to whisper for Monro again, when
she saw something at the far end of the room. Nothing
definite, just the vague sensation of something
reflecting the pale green light of her mobile. The
gentle dancing of motes in daylight.

Martha hurried over, the light getting less faint
with each step so that by the time she was at the far
side of the room she felt comfortable enough to move
without holding her hands out in front of her face. It
was a wonderful feeling, having even such a faint and
greasy light come back to her: if it was up to her, she
would spend the rest of her life above ground and in
the sunshine.

Somewhere, somebody screamed.

Martha's heart jumped again.

'Mr Monro?' she called, not even thinking to
whisper. 'Mr Monro?'

There was a sound behind her, something moving
in the darkness she had just left. Martha spun around,
and, for just a moment, there was something there.
Like the vague afterimage of a candle on the eye once
you'd blown it out, she could see a shape at the far
end of the room. The room suddenly felt icy cold,
and there was an overpowering smell of oiled leather
everywhere.

The thing at the end of the room was a man.

It was there for just a moment, a man covered
head to toe in a long black leather coat and a broadbrimmed
hat. Martha was so surprised to see him
there that she took a step towards him, about to call
to him. He saw her first, and turned into the light. His
face wasn't a human face: instead, he had the long
curved beak of a raven and peered at her with two
glistening black eyes.

By the time McAllister and the Doctor reached the
raft, the two hand creatures had already dived
into the Loch and were halfway to the other side.
They seemed to have taken the vague form of two
giant dogs, both about the size of a St Bernard. The
Doctor could only begin to imagine what particular
quirk of DNA had caused that, unless the shape had
been consciously chosen for the advantage it would
give it on land and in water. Which would suggest
intelligence.

'Don't take your eyes off those hands,' the Doctor
shouted to McAllister as they pushed the raft back
into the water. 'If we lose them, that's it.'

McAllister scowled at the Doctor, but saved his
breath.

The Doctor grabbed an oar and started to paddle
furiously, but the two creatures were very nearly at
the other side of the Loch before he even managed
to get a good rhythm up. McAllister uttered a small
string of curses under his breath, and helped with the
rowing whilst keeping the hands clearly in sight. They
still weren't going to be fast enough, even with the
both of them. What the Doctor wouldn't have given
for a good anachronistic outboard motor.

Instead, he had to settle for a stroke of luck.

As the two doggy creatures reached the other side
of the Loch, they pulled themselves up onto the shore
and looked, just for a moment, as if they might start
shaking their fur dry. Instead, their front legs briefly
brushed against each other – but where they came
together, they didn't come apart again. McAllister's
mouth fell open as the two dogs opened up into two
balls of waggling fingers that started very deliberately
to interlock into one shape.

'Don't stop paddling!' the Doctor shouted.

They managed to get the raft nearly three-quarters
of the way across the Loch before the two creatures
lifted themselves back up again. Except that now they
were one: a large stocky man-mountain with trunklike
legs and broad shoulders. The man-thing gave a
quick look over one shoulder at the approaching raft,
and then started jogging along the edge of the Loch.
The Doctor dropped his paddle and stood up on the
raft, watching for just a moment.

It was a shame. It was always difficult to get the
TARDIS to land near a good dry cleaners. And he
really was fond of his blue suit.

'Row!' McAllister shouted.

The Doctor dived into the Loch.

The water was cold, and shot into his ears, nose and
mouth. It tasted foul but, as he came up, he powered
himself forward through the water, wishing he'd
thought to take off his heavy coat. The Doctor heard
the sound of McAllister diving inexpertly into the
water behind him. Why did nobody ever listen when
he told them what to do?

The Doctor reached the shore, looking up quickly
enough to see the creature loping away towards the
town. Behind him, McAllister was struggling in
the water, unwilling to open his eyes and see where
he was in case the slime got into them. The Doctor
tutted impatiently and waded in to pull him out. The
soldier coughed brackish water as he struggled to his
feet, and then looked around for the creature.

'It went this way,' the Doctor said. 'If we hurry, we
might catch it.'

McAllister gave him a shrewd look.

'I may have misjudged you, Doctor,' he said flatly.
'You're a brave man.'

The Doctor smiled and smoothed down his wet
hair.

'If anything you do harms this town,' McAllister
continued, 'I'll see you strung up in the Grassmarket
and your head on a spike on the Castle walls.'

The Doctor nodded. 'A traditionalist, then,' he
said.

And then they ran.

The grassy slope of Castle Hill was starting to give
way to large ramshackle wooden buildings and narrow
streets that ran steeply up to the Royal Mile. Even down
here, there were plenty of people about, and the way
they were either shouting, hiding or crying suggested
that their hand-man had come this way. There was a
man clutching onto a tired-looking donkey as if he
was torn between protecting it and jumping on its
back to ride to safety. His eyes were wide and his jaw
had dropped: a witness if ever the Doctor had seen
one. The donkey, meanwhile, was casually relieving
itself into the brown waters of the Loch.

'Which way did it go?' the Doctor asked.

All the man could manage was to point down
one of the narrow alleyways. McAllister nodded and
hurried after it, but the Doctor hung back for just a
second.

'Don't let him do that,' he said, nodding to the
donkey. 'People have to swim in that.'

The Doctor didn't wait to see if the man listened
to him or not. He raced away up the alley, weaving
between the few people who were all trying to race in
the opposite direction. The turnpike houses loomed
up on either side, and the street soon got pretty
gloomy. The Doctor started to remember expressions
about meeting creatures at the end of dark alleys, but
he put them out of his mind. In a few moments, he
had caught up with McAllister. It was good to know
he could still outrun someone twenty-two times
younger than him.

'This is Stewart's Close,' McAllister panted. 'We'll
be right under the Royal Exchange soon enough.'

The Doctor looked up: the darkness wasn't being
caused by the tall houses any more, but by a rickety
wooden roof overhead. Was the hand-man just
running blind, or was he instinctively trying to head
underground? Did he even have a plan?

'What do we do when we catch it?' McAllister
asked.

From somewhere came a shout of surprise.

'Probably that,' the Doctor said. 'Come on.'

The cry had come from a little apartment just to
their left, next to what seemed to be a saw-maker's
workshop, still in use. The apartment had a little low
door hanging open, but inside it was as black as any
night the Doctor had ever known. McAllister twitched
impatiently at his side, clearly thinking that if they
weren't giving chase to the hand-man they were just
wasting time. But the Doctor knew better than that:
he had recognised the voice.

He stepped into the darkness.

'Hello Martha,' a familiar voice said from the
darkness.

Martha's heart skipped, and she forgot everything
except rushing over to the Doctor and squeezing him
so tight she could hear the wind pushed out of his
lungs. It was almost worth everything else, a moment
like that. Then she felt the slime on her skin, and the
smell reached her nose.

She pulled away again.

'Ugh!' she said. 'What happened to you?'

'Little swim,' the Doctor said lightly. 'What
happened to you?'

Martha felt a lump appear in her throat.

'There's something in here,' she said, her voice
dropping to a whisper. She tried to look around, but
the misty grey light had vanished and the room was
back in darkness. 'It looked like a man all dressed in
leather, only he had a raven's face.'

'A beak?' the Doctor asked. He was rummaging in
his pockets. 'Leather hat?'

Martha shuddered at the memory.

'That's him,' she said. 'You too?'

'I'm afraid not,' the Doctor answered. 'Sounds like
you saw a plague doctor. They looked after the people
who'd been struck by the pest. The leather was to
protect them, and the mask was to keep the smell out.
They thought the smell was the cause, you see.'

'You've brought me to a plague town?'

'This was over a hundred years ago,' the Doctor
said. She felt him move away from her. 'This place has
quite a reputation for ghosts. Don't worry. Doctors
are the good guys.'

And suddenly, she could see him. He was standing
in front of her, his arm outstretched and holding what
looked like a little sun in his cupped hand. Martha
nearly jumped out of her skin when she turned
and saw Captain McAllister standing next to her,
dripping wet and without his heavy red jacket. To her
annoyance, the Captain didn't even look at her. He
was looking over her shoulder.

'Of course,' the Doctor said casually, 'it might just
be something else.'

The leather-clad plague doctor was standing in the
corner, his raven's beak looking up at the room's other
occupants: two grey giants, one of which Martha
knew had once been Alexander Monro. Where the
other had come from, she couldn't guess, but she
clung tightly to the Doctor as it stepped forward.
The plague doctor's leathers rustled, and a solitary
grey hand jumped out before melting into the giant's
flesh.

The body of the doctor fell silently to the floor.

Martha bit her lip.

Pinned to the wall behind the two grey figures, the
old anatomist Monro struggled. Grey disembodied
hands holding his wrists and his ankles to the
crumbling stonework, whilst another pair of hands
clamped across his mouth, leaving only his wide and
staring eyes uncovered.

Martha looked to the Doctor, but all his attention
was on the grey monsters.

Suddenly they moved.

Every hand that made up the front of the two grey
creatures opened its fingers wide, leaving nothing but
a man-shaped mass of waggling tentacles. The two
figures took a step closer to each other, and the tips of
those fingers touched. They caressed, they explored
and they interlocked. The hands were grasping tight
to each other now, and with one sudden pull they
moved so close together that it was impossible to see
where the one ended and the other began.

The fingers closed in, and there was but a single
creature there.

'Doctor,' Martha said, moving in protectively.

'It's all right,' the Doctor said.

Martha didn't believe him.

The creature shifted awkwardly from one foot to
the other, as if testing its new legs. It was twice the size
it had been before, and was cramped uncomfortably
into the room. Its face was so subtly formed that
every thought, every human expression passed so
clearly across it; Martha couldn't believe that it was
made purely from the flexing of cold fingers. Its eyes
were two deep pits, and deep within each one a single
fingertip flicked this way and that in mimicry of a
pupil. Both eyes watched the Doctor cautiously.

'Can you talk now?' the Doctor asked.

The creature growled a little.

'That's it,' the Doctor coaxed, as if it was a stumbling
child. 'Come on.'

'I...' the creature said. 'I live.'

'Yes, yes you do!' the Doctor said with a cry of
triumph. He turned to Martha with a glint in his eye.
'You see that? Eh?'

Martha gave him a cold look. 'Doctor,' she said.
'Alexander's in there.'

The Doctor looked at her for a moment, and
realised: the hands had been attaching themselves
to the dead because they were designed to coalesce
around a single body. The damage that had been
done had made each individual hand try to start the
process independently. When he'd repaired them,
he'd inadvertently caused some poor soul to get
trapped inside the creature as it formed.

'Well,' the Doctor said. 'We can't have that. Listen...
have you got a name?'

The creature stood a little taller.

'I am Onk Ndell Kith,' it said proudly. 'I am alive.'

'Yes,' the Doctor agreed. 'Do you mind if I call you
Kith?'

The creature looked as if it didn't have an opinion
on the matter.

'So,' the Doctor said airily. 'Kith. What now?'

The creature drew itself up as much as the low
ceiling would allow. In practice, this simply meant
that, as it rose up, it loomed further over the Doctor.
He felt McAllister shift beside him, and glanced the
glint of a metal dirk hidden in his hand. This wasn't
the time for heroics; the Doctor quietly twisted the
knife out of the Captain's hand and dropped it into
his pocket.

'I am alive,' the monster repeated, more threatening
now. 'You cannot know what it has taken—'

The Doctor took offence at that.

'Oh I think I can!' he protested. 'Splitting your
consciousness down into a series of self-replicating
organic units? Each little one expendable on their
own, so long as just one survives to clone itself again
– it's brilliant! As soon as there are enough of them to
reach their critical mass: boom! There you are again,
right as rain.'

'You appreciate the technology,' Kith said.

'I
understand
it,' the Doctor corrected.

'I have achieved immortality,' Kith said grandly. His
chest swelled with pride. 'I will never feel the touch of
death.'

'And believe me, I know how hard that can be,' the
Doctor said sadly. 'But that isn't quite the full story,
is it?'

For a moment, Kith was silent.

'When I came here, I crashed into the water,' he
answered eventually. 'My units fell into a hibernation
cycle.'

'Here?' McAllister asked. 'The town?'

'The planet,' Martha answered quietly.

'This man discovered one of my units,' Kith said,
pointing at where Monro was still pinned to the wall.
Still staring wildly. 'He damaged it, attacking it with
lightning-electricity. As it woke, it tried to use his
DNA to effect a permanent repair. It did not work.'

'Doctor?' Martha said out of the corner of her
mouth. 'Monro said that when he found it, the hand
didn't look like a hand. Not until after it got his blood
on its nails... and then it looked exactly like his.'

The Doctor nodded.

'The hand was trying to repair the damage using
Monro's DNA,' he said, fascinated. It had been a
good few centuries since he'd come across a modular
organism. 'It kept hold of the bits it needed from its
original make-up, and replaced the rest with a clone
of Monro's hand.'

'Not just his hand...' Martha said.

The Doctor's eyes widened.

'You cloned a whole person?' the Doctor said. 'Just
how much damage did...'

Kith turned, letting one shoulder drop, and the
Doctor's voice trailed off. In the light of his lamp, he
could see a section of the creature's skin where the
fingers had not joined together properly. Instead, they
were swelling and turning a livid bruised colour, the
nails digging uncomfortably into the swollen tissue. It
didn't look natural, and it didn't look healthy.