Falls the Shadow (14 page)

‘Good evening,’ the man announced in tones just slightly too rich for Sandra’s liking. ‘My name is Gabriel.’

‘And I am Tanith,’ the woman continued. ‘We are not expected.’

Their faces cracked open into self‐
satisfied crescent‐
moon smiles.

Winterdawn falls.

The Doctor falls.

Winterdawn seizes the arms of his chair, finger‐
nails digging into the leather upholstery, a desperate effort to steady himself.

‘Believe me,’ the Doctor whispers, tears leaving long stains on his face.

Winterdawn found himself gasping for breath. The experience had left him exhausted and exhilarated. Pleasure and pain entwined together. He threw his head back and breathed heavily.

The experience had lasted for no time and forever – it couldn’t be compared to such limited concepts. It just was.

‘I think,’ it was the Doctor’s voice, but it seemed strange and new to Winterdawn, ‘our ordeal is over.’

‘Oh God, yes,’ Winterdawn replied between breaths. ‘What did you see… no, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Where are we?’

‘Nowhere and everywhere, Winterdawn,’ the Doctor replied, his voice rich with confidence. ‘In the heart of darkness.’

Winterdawn let his eyes slip open, and stared into the infinite.

And the infinite stared back at him.

Interstitial space unfolded. It was an incomprehensible sight. For a second Winterdawn’s mind rejected everything around him and he was plunged into a shroud of darkness. Then the shroud slipped.

Winterdawn was reminded of a kaleidoscope – a banal analogy, but the best he could manage. The colours were clear and precise and sharp. They
sang
. Floating and merging and swirling into a whirlpool. Even the colourlessness was beautiful. Winterdawn had never realized that grey could contain so many tones and shades and mixtures.

He blinked and everything was obsidian. Shiny, brilliant blackness. Then white, then chessboard, then pale green like a rough sea journey.

Winterdawn threw back his head and howled.

‘Yes!’ he screamed at the sky. ‘I have abstracted reality! I have unbound the quantum Prometheus! I did it!’ He brought his hands together in a single motion. A thunderclap shook the scenery.

‘Doctor, you don’t know how this makes me feel. This is wonderful, I feel – Jesus, what a load of crap – I feel amazing! I want to sing and dance.’ He slapped his hands against the back of his head, his enthusiasm waning. ‘And dance. Anyway,’ he continued, outlining his plans for the Doctor’s benefit, ‘this is the beginning. From here we can access any time‐
space event in history. We could travel to alien galaxies in a matter of seconds. There’ll be matter transmission, inter‐
real travel, maybe even time travel. It begins here – a scientific, social and metaphysical revolution!’

‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Winterdawn smiled. ‘Shall we explore?’ The Doctor smiled thoughtfully and Winterdawn, not expecting anything other than a positive response, took this as a ‘yes’.

‘There should be a gate around here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Our link back to reality.’

‘Generated by the tetrahedron?’

‘That’s right.’

‘In turn, operated by Harry Truman.’

Winterdawn nodded.

‘I see,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Perhaps…? Yes.’

He stretched an arm into the psychedelia. His fingertips seemed to penetrate the skin of the interstix, sinking into invisibility. His knuckles, hand, wrist and arm were consumed by the envelope of interstitiality.

Pain flashed across his face, vanishing as suddenly as it appeared. Winterdawn had a brief glimpse of tremendous, momentary effort. Then nothing. The Doctor’s arm returned. A shape sat on his hand. It was an oval cut into the side of reality, filled with glowing colours as bright and clear as anything else in the gap, yet fixed like a stained‐
glass window. The gate suggested immutability, stasis, order in the chaos that surrounded them.

Gradually it dawned on Winterdawn that the oval was not in the Doctor’s palm but distant. His sense of perspective was eroding. A wonderful feeling.

‘You see, it was there all the time.’ The Doctor smiled irritatingly. ‘We just had to look for it. This is our lifeline back to normality. I suggest we don’t stray too far.’

Winterdawn smiled.

‘It’s Truman isn’t it? Okay, maybe you’ve reason to dislike him, but he’s basically a good man. Trust me!’

The Doctor was silent, his face shorn of features.

‘Shall we go?’ Winterdawn asked, after a moment’s silence.

‘After you,’ the Doctor suggested.

‘Come on. Give us a push.’

The darkness was unwholesome. The usual musty scent was tinged with something sick, a familiar but elusive scent which made Ace’s flesh shudder. It scared her. Bernice’s fears had something going for them after all. A couple of hours down here and even she’d be a gibbering wreck.

Her torch beam punctured the darkness. It shed little light on her surroundings, but enough. Benny was ahead, trying to find something familiar. Ace let her beam dance on Benny’s back and followed her lead.

‘This looks familiar,’ Benny called. ‘Very familiar. Try singing, it can only inspire me.’

‘I’ve got a bloody good voice,’ Ace protested.

‘I’m sure it went down well with the deaf community of Perivale.’

‘I’d like to hear you do bet…’ Ace broke off suddenly. Her right foot had sunk into something soft, wet, cold, unpleasant. She shook her leg violently, but the offensive article refused to budge.

‘Shit,’ she muttered.

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve put my foot in something.’

‘That’s nothing new. Can it wait, I think I’ve found…’

‘Just give us a light,’ Ace snapped.

‘Okay, okay,’ Benny muttered. Her torch light swung round and struck Ace painfully between the eyes. ‘And in the darkness God said… oh shit!’

The light snapped off. A Benny‐
shaped shadow disappeared into the dark.

‘What is it now?’ Ace called, feeling the hounds of anger straining on the ends of their leashes.

‘Ace,’ Benny’s voice was a quivering cocktail of hysteria, revulsion and horror. ‘It’s someone’s head!’

The tetrahedron’s inner light pulsed smoothly and slowly. It never failed to relax or soothe Truman. He was even beginning to feel kinder towards the Doctor and his entourage. Maybe he was wrong. His problem, he felt, was a lack of
empathy
. He rarely considered other people’s motivations. There were still some doubts whispering at the back of his mind, but he let these slip away, losing himself in the pulse of the pyramid.

Something soft lighted on his shoulder. A small, warm hand. He let his gaze swing upwards and welcomed the sight of Sandra Winterdawn. She was standing over him, smiling at him with a warmth that, Truman felt, he hadn’t seen before. He tried to return that warmth from behind his mask.

‘Hello Harry,’ Sandra said gently, and her voice had a new smoothness, an exciting emphasis. ‘Can we talk? I mean, you have to work this thing.’

Truman shook his head. ‘It works itself. I watch in case it does something wrong. Sit down, please.’

Sandra lowered herself into a squat on the far side of the tetrahedron. Truman found his attention caught briefly by her bare legs – uncovered just below the hem of her dressing‐
gown. Checking himself before his obsession became obvious, he raised his gaze and was entranced by Sandra’s face. If it wasn’t one thing, it was something else – not that he minded.

‘You know,’ Sandra began, picking her words with undisguised awkwardness, ‘how close I was to Justin before he began to… lose himself?’

Truman nodded, grateful for the mask which hid his expression and the guilt that came with it.

‘I first met him seven years ago. I loved him then. He was a wonderful lover, and I ignored his faults.’ She paused to glance around the room. When she resumed, her voice was disjointed, stumbling wildly through her words: ‘My affection dried up long before his madness developed. He hurt me. Not physically, but he was screwing up my mind. And I
stuck
with him! I should have thrown him out but I didn’t. And I don’t know why.’

‘I don’t think I should be listening to this,’ Truman whispered, taking advantage of Sandra’s pause to voice his fears. He felt like he was breaking a taboo, rummaging around in her soul.

‘Please, it’s important.’ Sandra smiled. Truman nodded resignedly.

‘He was an emotional wreck. He’d do anything to get me the way he wanted. I don’t think I saw that then, but I knew something was going wrong, I knew I was losing something. Then, of course, his mind cracked – don’t know why, don’t care. You turned up soon after – you know the rest. I was devoted to him, I nursed him back to health even though I knew he’d be just as bad as before, and having restored some measure of his sanity I watched everything collapse after five bloody minutes in Dad’s experiment. Five
minutes. Wonderful!
One and a half years of putting up with a harmless nut, six months working on his mind, five minutes…! And for not
one
second of all that time did I love him! I’d lost that. It was gone and it’s
never
coming back.’

‘I see,’ Truman replied softly. ‘Why do you…?’ Sandra pressed a finger to the mouth of his mask. Instantly he fell silent.

‘Justin is my patient, not my lover. Not any more.’ Light tears began to bloat under her eyelids. ‘Harry, I know more about you, about how you feel, than you realize yourself. When I was eighteen I thought I’d found a bloody good bloke, and he was but he was also immature and spiteful. You’re like him, as he could have been if he’d grown up. You’re
better
than he was.’

Truman let his tongue roll around the inside of his open but invisible mouth. ‘What are you trying to say exactly?’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake you stupid bastard, do I have to spell it out for you?’ Sandra screeched, tears flowing freely now. ‘Don’t you know what you want? How you feel? I know… I know and… and I want it too.’

‘You are being serious, aren’t you?’

A face red with anger and frustration screamed at him,

‘Yes! Yes! I’d screw you on the floor here and now if it wasn’t for the absolute certainty that Dad and that weirdo Doctor would come rolling out of the wardrobe in the middle of it! I-love‐
you‐
you‐
gormless‐
git!’ She jerked her head out of eye contact, breathing heavily. Truman waited, shocked, for her to recover her composure. Delighted too, and excited, but mostly shocked. There was a suddenness and a certainty to the proceedings which left him numb. Suddenly everything was right with the world, his desire was in reach. It was too much to take in one go.

Sandra turned back to him, her face a normal, beautiful pale white. She’d wiped the tear stains away.

‘Do you understand now?’ she asked, voice little more than a whisper.

‘Yes,’ Truman replied, ‘but I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes you can. Touch me. Touch me somewhere you really want to.’

Truman thought briefly about all the parts of her he wanted to touch and nervously settled on that one place for which his desire overrode everything. There. Tentatively, as if he was about to handle something rare and delicate – and he was – he let his hands brush against her face. One light palm pressing against her cheek, the other cupping itself under her chin. Sandra leaned back, her eyes closed, her breathing deep. Truman began to move his hands, stroking her face as delicately as he could possibly manage.