Falls the Shadow (19 page)

‘This,’ Page continued, ‘is exactly what I’m talking about. In order for individual freedom to flourish we must unchain the human mind from the dogma of the Group. The individual urge of the strong society is secular in character.’ She flung the crucifix away.

She’s quoting, Benny thought. That’s far too meaningful to be original.

‘Don’t you believe in anything, Page?’

‘I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number. Bentham said that, and he was right. I believe that the strong should be allowed to get on with it and if anyone can’t stand up to that then tough. Society benefits.’

‘That’s fine. I enjoy discussing the nature of freedom with gun‐
toting psychos. If you’re going to kill us do it now and be done with it. Better still, give us a three‐
year start.’

Page smiled. It was not unwholesome.

‘Why should I kill you?’ There was something delightful and innocent about that voice. ‘You three are exactly what I’ve been looking for. I can use human resources. Hostages.’

‘No,’ Ace said, her mouth an aggressive ‘o’‐
shape, teeth bared and clenched.

‘You forget. I have the superior means of coercion.’ She tapped the side of the gun meaningfully.

The silence that followed was tense and menacing and thankfully short. It ended with a slow murmur of pain. Cranleigh was still on the floor, howling plaintively. His left thigh was a mess of congealed blood and muscle. His face flexed with pain, but his screams were halfhearted, as if he was losing control of his vocal cords.

Benny moved towards him but a sharp rattling from Page’s gun had her drawing up short, slipping into motionlessness like a party game.

Some party.

‘I’m going to
help
him,’ she protested.

‘Why bother?’ Page asked casually and sincerely.

‘You’ve crippled him!’ Benny squawked her outrage. It wouldn’t do much good. Page’s mentality was sealed firmly against the calls of compassion. Page adopted a strange half‐
smile, half‐
sneer.

‘As above, so below.’

Benny stared. There was nothing she could say.

‘If you’re so concerned, one of you can stay behind and clear up.’ She prodded her boot into Sandra’s stomach. ‘Since you’re lying about anyway, it might as well be you. Good luck with him.’

She turned back to the others. A triumphant, expectant smile twitched like a dying thing on her lips.

‘Let’s go, shall we?’

Benny’s feet moved like lead. There was a dogged reluctance to her movements. Ace remained stiff and stationary. Her face was curled up into an expression of disgust. Fingers stabbed viciously in Page’s direction and for a moment Benny was afraid that Page might take a shot at her. Her terrible fear of death, submerged by Page’s appearance, suddenly resurfaced at the back of her mind. She shuddered expectantly.

Page didn’t shoot. Ace spoke.

‘You listen to me, bitch,’ she said, cold and self‐
assured. ‘You’ve got that gun now, but you drop your guard for a second while I’m around then I’ll kill you. Understand?’

‘Perfectly,’ Page replied, her tones and smile sweet. ‘I won’t drop my guard. Shall we go?’

‘Time travel, eh?’

Winterdawn sounded cheery. Winterdawn sounded weak. A weak man trying to sound cheery.

The Doctor had his eyes tight closed. The darkness inside his eyes seemed warm and reassuring. A cosy, stifling sensation that reminded him of a childhood when he was smothered by the lethargy of Gallifrey. With his eyes closed he had his illusions. He couldn’t see the corruption, the cynicism, the heartlessness of the adult world. Why should he have to open his eyes? Why couldn’t he stay here like this forever?

He was scared to open his eyes. After the glass storm, he was afraid there might be little of them left. Bloody bundles and severed optical nerves. He shivered at the thought. He couldn’t live without his eyes.

He let his lids slide open.

There was no pain. There was nothing wrong with his eyes.

The interstix flickered around him – meaningless patterns dancing on an infinitely distant, infinitely large cyclorama. He could see it perfectly. Something like a sigh passed his lips.

He looked at his hands, his clothes, his legs. They were undamaged.

‘It’s an illusion,’ Winterdawn’s voice cut through the stillness. He was lying on his back on the invisible floor of the gap. Beyond him lay his chair, tipped on its side. One of its wheels spun slowly under its own power – the other lay on the pseudo‐
ground several metres distant.

‘It looked real from here,’ the Doctor called.

‘Our minds made it real,’ Winterdawn replied thoughtfully. ‘It was a purely mental attack. No wonder Justin went mad.’

The Doctor knelt by Winterdawn and spoke softly:

‘There’s another possibility.’

‘Yes?’

‘The attack
was
physical. We suffered terrible injuries but we don’t realize it because this place is fooling with our perception. This is the mental attack. Can you move?’

‘For a scientist you ask some incredibly stupid questions,’ Winterdawn snapped, the discomfort of his position etched onto his face. The Doctor nodded grimly and lifted Winterdawn into a sitting position.

‘Better?’

‘Thank you.’ Winterdawn smiled weakly. ‘I wanted to talk to you about time travel. It is possible then? Really real?’

‘Really real.’ The Doctor smiled.

‘I knew it!’ Winterdawn announced, glee and triumph shining in his eyes. ‘I knew it! I wish I could have proved it! So Einstein was wrong!’

‘No.’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘Einstein was right. His assumptions were wrong. I tried to put him right but he wouldn’t listen.’

Winterdawn’s thin lips bristled into a smile.

‘Do you travel all the time? You’re not tied to any time or place?’

The Doctor nodded.

‘I rarely settle. Perhaps I should. I did once, but I was a different person then. It’s always been just me, my TARDIS, my companions…’

He trailed off slowly on a wistful note. Winterdawn’s face was curious and cautious, anxious to enquire further, uncertain of whether he was trespassing on private ground, breaking personal taboos.

‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying slowly. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

The Doctor tried to raise a hand to shield his face and his feelings, but he thought better of it.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said firmly. ‘It doesn’t matter now. My family is gone, long gone. My friends… I… I have my companions. I’ve had many fellow travellers in a long life. I’m much older than you can imagine. I’ve had so many friends. But they all go in the end. It’s so easy to let them go, so difficult to find them again. Sometimes, you see, I miss the old stability, the warmth of belonging to a single place.

‘But I think I’d be just as lonely there.’

Winterdawn nodded and looked away. The Doctor raised a hand to his forehead, a shadow blocking out his eyes. Silence ruled for a long instant.

‘I wish I’d said goodbye properly,’ the Doctor said softly. ‘I don’t like this. I can think of better places to die.’

His head swung upwards, new vigour burning in his eyes and his soul. His hands clapped together, releasing a sound like a roll of thunder.

‘Let’s see if we can get this chair of yours fixed.’

Sandra’s world was close, a lightless shroud smothering her. Her sight had waned, given up on her. Five years ago this terrified her. Five years ago it was like being captive in a tiny epoch of death. She had grown used to it, learned to live with the paranoia and the loneliness. She could taste nothing but the bitterness left by Page. She could feel the cold air on her face and a dull ache on her chest where a crucifix should be.

Without sight, her world became a world of sound. The sound of her voice, confident and soothing as she tried to coax some spark of thought from Cranleigh. Her world became a monologue. How long had she been speaking? Time gave way in the darkness.

‘Everything I told Harry was true,’ she was saying. ‘I’m sorry if that hurts. I went to Harry because I realized – had been forced to realize – how much more I felt for him than for you.

‘But… God, this is going to sound like gibberish. But I loved him because he
was
you. All the things I liked about you, that drew me to you in the first place. I liked you at the time.

‘You remember how we met? Mum and Dad met up that way. Mum told me, it was just after the Grosvenor Square thing. Afterwards my mum said, “Okay, what’s your name then?” and he said, “Winterdawn,” so Mum said, “I think we’re on a first‐
name basis now.” He was never quick on the uptake.’

She hugged herself against more than just the draught.

‘I don’t think I can help you. I can’t even see you. I don’t think you’ll die. Does it matter? If you live or die…

‘I think it does. I don’t know, you’re still in there somewhere. You can’t erase the human spirit like that.’ (fingers click) ‘Part of you still hears me. It’s just a question of drawing you out. I’ll count to a hundred…

‘One, two, three…’

She stopped, alerted more by instinct than anything else.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Only us!’ Gabriel and Tanith’s voices sang.

‘
Get out
!’ Sandra roared, but in the darkness her voice seemed faint.

‘Don’t take on so.’ Gabriel.

‘We only want to talk.’ Tanith.

‘We made breakfast.
Page
had the gun.’

Sandra sniffed disdainfully and drew her legs up to her chest.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘We are going to destroy
everyone
, one soul at a time. Starting with this island Earth. This self‐
important rock in the ocean of infinity.’

‘This microdot in the great book of the universe. This nullity which imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’

‘We are going to obliterate it.’

‘At least, that’s the plan at the moment. It could change. We
could
strut the land as gods instead.’

‘Or grant everyone one wish alone, with which to change the world.’

‘Scatter the population of the planet to random destinations throughout space. Reveal a universe colder and vaster than they’ve ever imagined it!’

‘Unleash some sort of monstrously tentacled extra‐
dimensional horror on London! But that might be too obvious.’

‘But you – we’re going to do what we always wanted to do. We can see how delicate your chemical structure is. We see it in infinite, fragile detail – the knife‐
edge on which you balance.’

‘We’re going to give you a shove and see what happens.’

‘Now,’ Gabriel and Tanith’s voices blended together into one eerie echo. It howled in Sandra’s head. And suddenly something focused in her mind, lean and aggressive, howling in the darkness.

The beast appeared on the black horizon. In a second, it was upon her.

Jane Page had a cold and systematic mind and she conducted her search in a cold and systematic way. Cold, systematic, frustrating. Every room she’d searched – every corridor, every floor – had been empty. Nothing but furniture and – occasionally – the dull, metronomic clicking of a clock. Her impatience began to get the better of her.

It was this house. It was too big and too empty. It was trying to impose its architectural bulk onto her identity. It was a cold place and it set her on edge. After so long searching in silence she longed for the sound of the human voice – something –
anything
– that would improve the atmosphere.

The two women who walked before her at gunpoint, clearing the way for her, were deathly silent. She didn’t expect them to join the search with anything more than forced enthusiasm but she hoped they might say something. No matter how snide, how derogatory. It was getting to the point where she wanted to take a shot at them for no reason whatsoever.

Could she shoot them? In self‐
defence, yes – but could she shoot them on a whim, in cold blood? Probably not, it exceeded her brief. Besides, the blood was flowing like molten lava through her veins.

She prodded Bernice in the back with the barrel of her gun, to see what reaction she could provoke. She was almost disappointed when the woman just shuffled forward, saying nothing, not even bothering to look at her.

‘That’s kind of them,’ said Gabriel.

‘Together in one place,’ Tanith added.

‘One area.’

‘On which we can focus.’

‘What do you think?’

‘Trauma, dark fears, the skeletons in their cupboards.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘Show them.’

And suddenly Professor Bernice Summerfield wasn’t mute, brooding on her intimacy with death, the inevitability of her own oblivion. Suddenly she was somewhere else. Manywheres else. A myriad different places.

Mother’s skin burning, peeling away, torchlight for the assault force, voice a siren screaming at an inhuman pitch, coward father turning ship and running like a cheetah from Dalek ships moaning and sobbing with terror as the sound of indiscriminate slaughter echoes behind him child at my feet bloody and bruised and close to death it just takes a little extra effort kill kill kill kill kill kill killkillkillkillkillkillkillkillkillkill kill bloody taste in her mouth tasting it loving it, seeping through to her brain mental orgasm like sex and betrayal and Judas each man kills the thing he loves the coward with a kiss so many people died in the transit tunnels because you let that creature inside you contemptible cowardly little things that meant nothing to you but must have made other people’s lives hell you are a
bully
Summerfield.

Benny folded her arms, lips twitching into an unperturbed smile.

‘I’ve seen this before, chaps,’ she called to the absent couple she knew was listening. ‘It’s disappointing when you know how it ends. How about something new?’

Ace found herself elsewhere. A cold loveless elsewhere. Defiant wilderness. Vibrant jungle burned to nothing by repressive napalm. Dorothy fire‐
bombed her mind as she fire‐
bombed houses, burning away everything she saw as weak and girlish and, basically, like, not the sort of thing you need when a six‐
armed something whose name you can’t remember is coming at you like it’s hunting dinner (probably is too). She stripped away the baby stuff and there was nothing left. She’d tried to buck the system and ended up bucking herself.

(Something like that).

She’d been scared of ghosts, of fire, of fascists, of Doctors. She’d toughened mind, body and soul against them, took on the devil’s methods as her own, right? So she’d shot a few things. Did it matter what they were, what they wanted? Did you kill men Ace, women Ace, children Ace, did you kill babies Dorothy?

Perhaps.

So she kicked back. Ace and no one else. There was no one leading
her
, no damn outside forces working on her – not any more. The funny thing was, she’d caught this fascist once, this real big Nazi who loved to hurt and kill and maim and it was like looking into a mirror. Just goes to show. She blew the Nazi away anyway because she could never stand glib endings.

Ace becomes baby Dorothy again, and Iceworld, Gabriel Chase, the Doctor, Benny and Daleks are things the future holds in store. Nevertheless, baby Dorothy’s skin begins to smoulder and within seconds her body is a torch, burning away into nothing.

And Page?

Page believed in the greatest good for the greatest number, in the right of the strong to trample the weak to death, in right being might. Page believed in all these things and more, but she no longer believed in herself. Her name was forgotten, written on a long‐
lost piece of paper, floating away on the wind. At the heart of her slogans, her charters, her guns, her death camps, her job, there was nothing. A hard, icy block of nothing.

Jane Page believed in nothing, so Gabriel and Tanith showed her nothing in all its glory – a limitless arena. They showed her this, then they showed her herself in relation to it, how meaningless she was in comparison to it. They showed her that some things can be less than nothing.

The nameless woman clutched at two syllables, at ‘Jane Page’ because that was all she had left. Then she began to cry.

The interstitial light strobed violently, settling down as a swirling mist, tinged pink by leaping and writhing will‐
o’‐
the‐
wisp lights on the fringes of the interstix. The Doctor ignored it. He was becoming too accustomed to these changes of scenery.

‘God, this is dull,’ Winterdawn purred. ‘Can you fix the chair?’

‘It’ll border on the makeshift.’

‘Does it matter? It’s not as if we’re going anywhere.’

The Doctor smiled, but it didn’t stave off the hollow growing inside him. Something was consuming his energy, his vibrance. His skin felt brittle as eggshell. So, for that matter, did his mind.

How long can I last here without going mad? How long can Winterdawn last?
He looked up at the professor, sitting helplessly in the heart of the mist, sighing to himself and looking round in boredom. The madness that would consume him would be trivial. It would be nothing compared to the madness of a Time Lord. When
his
mind went it would unleash a storm across the surface of his brain. The Dark Design, the Time Lords called it, and went out of their way to hide the sufferers in institutions. The Doctor had known many insane Time Lords in his time, but no mad ones. Pretenders rather than kings.

How will I feel, when I am lost in the Dark Design? What will I think?

No. He didn’t want to think about this. These were cold futures. They should not be dwelt on. He hurled himself into the task of repairing the wheelchair, relishing the concentration involved.

‘Do you want to know,’ Winterdawn asked, ‘why I did this?’

‘Yes,’ the Doctor said, barely noticing the question.

‘I want to destroy the world,’ Winterdawn said calmly.

The Doctor’s head bobbed up.

‘Literally?’ he asked cautiously, his fears softened by the droll smile Winterdawn was displaying. The professor shook his head in response.

‘I want – wanted – to destroy society.’ The Doctor listened patiently to that voice. Winterdawn didn’t sound insane, and there was none of the deceptive clarity that might hide deeper madness.

‘How would you… destroy… society?’ the Doctor enquired cautiously.

‘With technology. With
this
.’ Winterdawn waved his arms round, gesturing at the void around them.

‘I told you,’ Winterdawn continued hurriedly, though he seemed more enthusiastic than obsessive, ‘that interstitial travel would bring about revolution! It would be a revolution in culture, in thinking. Change people’s minds and you change the world they live in. This is
real
freedom I’m offering them! An infinite universe, all within our reach, theirs to choose from. The whole superstructure of our existing societies would collapse.’

‘You’d like that?’ the Doctor asked thoughtfully.

‘I would,’ Winterdawn said. ‘The old society is dying already but not fast enough. I want to see its
grave
, Doctor.’

He blinked, the fanaticism in his eyes softening. He turned slightly so that his face became shadowed and unreadable.

‘When I was a student, in the sixties, I felt like a conservative in radical times. Oh, I’ve supported things like CND, Greenpeace, stuff like that. But they were the mainstream – radically respectable. I wanted to get the Americans out of Vietnam, I was on the Grosvenor Square march. But I wasn’t
committed
– I just went along for the violence, the drinks, and the hope of getting a girl into bed.

‘Well there wasn’t any violence and there weren’t any drinks. But I
did
get that girl into bed. Funny how things work out. I met a wonderful woman. And then I married her. Jenny was more of a firebrand than I was. She was at the heart of the stuff I dabbled in. She loved freedom… life…’

Winterdawn broke off. The Doctor sat silently, patiently. After a time, Winterdawn began again.

‘What happened to the radicals?’ he asked. ‘Where did they go? Was there some intelligence that snatched them off the face of the planet? Feels like that. A decade after Grosvenor it seemed like it had dried up. There hasn’t been anything since. Hundreds of movements, but nothing like the sixties. They didn’t want to change anything, and they got respectable far too quickly. Youth culture’s become a training ground for insurance salesmen! There’s no challenge any more. No guts! No poetry! Just a stifling, steel‐
shelled
nothing
! We have a system that’s worshipped like a new religion. It thinks it’s secure. It’s not.’

‘There are worse societies,’ the Doctor broke in. ‘And better ones.’

‘Ah well. It’s not as if I’m in any state to do anything about it. Besides, it’s killing itself You’ve seen the future. Tell me.’

The Doctor frowned darkly.

‘It ends, of course. Everything ends.’

‘
When
does it end?
How
does it end?’ Winterdawn’s tone was suddenly aggressive and demanding. The Doctor felt pressured.

‘If you had changed society,’ the Doctor decided to defuse the question, ‘surely the economic base of the old system would still be intact?’

‘Yes, but not for long,’ Winterdawn fielded the question hurriedly. ‘It would be a dinosaur, quickly extinct.’

‘Dinosaurs,’ the Doctor whispered, ‘are large, stupid and violent. The first years of your new society would be bloody, Winterdawn.’