Falls the Shadow (26 page)

‘No,’ Ace said blandly. ‘Sorry.’

She blinked and was about to move away, to leave him to his own thoughts, when he whispered something that held her in a tighter grasp than if he’d physically grabbed her.

‘But there must be guilt.’ The Doctor’s voice was wistful again, as if remembering something. ‘And vengeance, and retribution.’

Ace’s head jerked back to stare at him.

‘Gabriel and Tanith,’ the Doctor continued. ‘They must be stopped.’

‘Stopped.’

‘Annihilated. Destroyed. Killed. I don’t sound like the Doctor, do I?’

Ace closed her eyes and thought: No, you sound exactly like the Doctor, as he used to sound.

‘We’ll do it now. It’s safe to go back into the TARDIS, you can get your gun. I hate to say it but I think brute force is going to serve us better than anything else.’

Ace studied the Doctor’s face in alarm, wondering how someone so infinitely clever could be so infinitely stupid.

‘I’ve told you,’ she snarled, pressing her face against his. ‘I’ve tried that. It doesn’t bloody work!’

The Doctor lowered his head, raising his hands to his eyes. Ace waited, wondering if he was crying beneath those fingers.

He lowered his hands and stared at her with cold, needy eyes.

‘Ace. For pity’s sake, I don’t know what to do.’

‘We have them up a gum tree, sis,’ said Gabriel. ‘They’re stupid people.’

‘Obviously,’ Tanith agreed. ‘Another diversion?’

‘I think we should just kill them. They’ve lost their novelty value.’

‘There’s still some mileage in Ace and Sandra. We’ll get nothing from the Doctor, but we’ve always known what a po‐
faced killjoy he is. The same goes for Winterdawn.’

‘Sandra’s our weak link then?’

‘Absolutely. Kill a few birds with one stone.’

‘Bloody big birds.’

‘Now.’

It was the cry that alerted Ace. She turned, her immediate thought being that it was Winterdawn screaming. It wasn’t. Winterdawn was choking, his daughter’s hands locked round his throat – the only sounds he was making were quiet agonized bursts of retching. No, the cry was coming from Sandra – an inhuman howl of blood‐
lust singing on her lips. Ace gaped for a moment, slow to react.

Winterdawn’s knuckles were writhing, clawing at the arm‐
rests of his chair. His eyes were pleading and bulging. His daughter’s vicious, animal face was reflected on his pupils. He didn’t understand this, Ace could tell. He felt afraid and betrayed. She knew the feeling.

She sprang forward, dragging Sandra’s hands from her father’s throat. They gave, but she didn’t have the strength to wrench the daughter away from the father. Suddenly the Doctor was at her side, firm hands clasping onto Sandra’s forearms, trying to force her back.

‘Must be a hormonal or chemical imbalance in her body,’ the Doctor yelled, over Sandra’s furious animal howls.

‘Yeah?’ Ace yelled, finding an elbow lodged painfully in her stomach. She bent backwards, but wasn’t weakened enough to release her grip.

‘They must be tapping into it, affecting the old brain, race memory centres. Goodbye to a million years of evolution!’ The Doctor rattled off his words with the speed the situation demanded.

Sandra’s face was suddenly pushed into Ace’s. Ace could see the blood‐
raw eyes, the saliva building on her teeth and gums. She was leaning forward in a perverse mockery of a kiss, trying to get close enough to Ace’s throat to bite. Ace delivered a blow to the oncoming face with the flat of her hand. She received a stinging pain on her palm for her trouble. Sandra writhed in their grasp. The strength coursing through her limbs was too powerful for them to hold for long, and Ace knew it.

‘The wardrobe!’ Ace heard herself gasping desperately. ‘Lock her in!’

She saw the Doctor nod savagely.

It was an agonizing effort getting the spitting, hissing creature hauled across the room. It was even more of a strain shoving her into the sarcophagus, and keeping her there while they jammed the door shut. But they managed it. Ace flopped against the wardrobe door, counting her bites and bruises, scowling with exhaustion and, perhaps, with a little desperation. Benny was dead and this wasn’t ever going to end.

‘She’ll calm down in a minute,’ the Doctor gasped. ‘Not much oxygen in there. The human body returns to its, er, default state to preserve the air.’

Ace nodded grimly, casting around the room.

Something was missing. The room was too empty. There was a hole.

She blinked, and realized.

‘Winterdawn!’

The muscles in Winterdawn’s hands and wrists were aching, his palms were raw. Both hands were tightened round the wheels of his chair, jerking it forward in awkward bursts. His palms ground and chafed against the wheel treads in an attempt to shuffle himself faster along the corridor. Rage outweighed discomfort.

He wasn’t certain where he might find the monsters loose in his house. They were here somewhere, he would find them. And then he would kill them.

Sandra. They’d struck at him through his daughter.

Through my
daughter
!

Bastards.

His teeth ground together, fighting the pain in his hands, the ache spreading up his arms. His gums were bleeding. They always bled when he was in a vicious mood, or doing something exceptionally physical. Or both. The blood tasted watery in his mouth.

Gabriel and Tanith. He didn’t know them, he’d never met them, but he’d created them. He had brought them into the world, however inadvertently, and he could destroy them. He remembered the ecstatic joy he’d felt over half his lifetime ago when he’d cradled Cassandra in his arms. There was no such joy now – simply loathing for the latest creatures he’d fathered. They were children. He could reach into the cots of the new‐
born. The slightest pressure would shatter their necks. He would do that, he would, really he would.

Twisting forward, he screamed, forcing his words with all the pressure his lungs could manage,

‘Whereareyou? Whereareyou? Where are you,
you bastards
?!’

‘Wotcher,’ said Gabriel and Tanith.

They were barely a yard from him. Impressive figures in extravagant clothes. Winterdawn barely registered the details, but he absorbed the impression of the whole with hateful relish. These were Gabriel and Tanith. There could be no doubt about that. There was no innocence on their faces, there was just sharp cunning, arrogant hatred and vicious hedonism. Their figures might have been specified from a catalogue. But their real shapes… they could have been a compound of everyone Winterdawn had loathed over the years, up to and including himself. They made his skin crawl on the inside.

‘You wanted to kill us!’ Gabriel stepped forward, his voice smooth and scornful, his eyes glowing with red fire. ‘Kill
us
! And how would you have done that, old man? Run us over?’

Tanith laughed lightly. Winterdawn didn’t laugh at all.

Gabriel was close enough to touch. His pupils were balls of red flame. He seemed to grow taller, towering over the chair now. Winterdawn realized that Gabriel’s feet weren’t touching the ground. He pulled his head up again in time to see a hand falling towards his chest – a hand bunched into a short, powerful fist – a hand that burned with a halo of scarlet flame.

Contact.

Winterdawn screamed. The blow had struck lightly against his shoulder, it probably hadn’t even bruised him. But the touch – the touch
burned
. There was no buildup, no charging of intensity, no slow and tortuous ascent to the peaks of pain. The pain was simply there, shrieking through him, and he shrieked with it. Beneath him his chair creaked and shattered, collapsing underneath him. He fell backwards into a pile of twisted metal, metal which would never resemble a seat again. Not that it mattered. Winterdawn expected to die soon. Sometime in the next minute if the pain didn’t let up. He lay flat on his back, trying to ignore the fear.

Gabriel leant forward like a priest preparing to take a final confession. He said nothing, his eyes reflected nothing. He raised his red hands and pressed them against Winterdawn’s face, cutting off the light but doubling the pain.

Winterdawn spasmed, trying to ride the torment.

The hands were pulled away. The pain remained, a ghost pain haunting his limbs. He didn’t dare move, he doubted that he could. He was too frightened to think of doing anything.

Tanith stood over him, legs parted, smiling lazily like a child on a summer day. Only the harsh blackness of her eyes robbed her of innocence.

‘Don’t think we’ve finished,’ she said. ‘It’s just my turn, that’s all.’

That’s all.

She knelt beside him, reaching forward with hands that glowed orange. Winterdawn tried to pull himself away, tried to shout something –
anything
– but his tortured body betrayed him.

Tanith laid her hands on Winterdawn’s face.

The pain returned in a new, different form. It had ceased to be pain, became a bland sensation that shook rather than stung Winterdawn’s body. After a while it almost seemed pleasurable.

Tanith took her hands from his face and placed them on his knees.

‘Do you know how many connections there are in a single human nerve?’ she asked casually. Winterdawn heard himself replying, equally casually:

‘Millions.’

Tanith nodded, and said nothing more. Her hands slipped between his knees and began to work up the inside of his legs, touching and stroking. Here was a new sensation, and one that Winterdawn hadn’t expected. He stared thoughtfully at Tanith’s face, at her precise, thoughtfully obsessed expression, and realized that for the first time since his wife died, he wanted to make love to a woman. To Tanith.

Tanith knelt beside him. Gabriel stood at her shoulder. Winterdawn looked between their faces, trying to make the connection.

‘Get away from him, scum!’

Winterdawn frowned, realizing that neither Gabriel nor Tanith had spoken. The voice belonged to the Doctor’s surviving companion and emanated from a distance, from the far end of the passage.

Tanith looked up from her work, then stepped away from Winterdawn.

‘You’re too late.’ Gabriel was triumphant. ‘You’re far, far too late.’

Then both of Winterdawn’s new‐
born children turned and walked away, the way they had come.

A shape appeared at Winterdawn’s shoulder, falling to her knees beside him. Ace’s face loomed in the corner of his eye.

‘’Sokay!’ she hollered back down the passage presumably to the Doctor. Winterdawn felt like adding deafness to his list of pains. ‘He’s alive.’

‘That’s debatable,’ Winterdawn muttered, but the woman didn’t seem to hear him. The Doctor appeared in his line of vision, opposite Ace. His expression was concerned, but it was a deadened concern, as if he had lost his zest for life. Winterdawn frowned, realizing that his own zest for life had just returned.

‘Do you have a spare chair we could get for you?’ the Doctor asked. Winterdawn stared with sharp eyes into the hollows in the Doctor’s face. Automatically he broke into a fit of infectious laughter.

‘He’s hysterical,’ Winterdawn heard Ace mutter.

‘Far from it,’ he spat in the spaces between giggles.

He stretched out an arm, sweeping aside the fragments of metal and plastic, the pieces of the thing that had once been his chair, the cage that had bound him and frustrated him for five years. Five years he’d wanted to cast it aside like junk. Five years. Looking back was like trying to stare at the heart of an impenetrable black mist. His memories of the period were obscured by the hungry fog. For five years of his life he had hidden himself in the darkness alone and unloved.

‘We’ll carry you,’ the Doctor said, his voice slow and slurred. The world had become soft and tired. Winterdawn smiled. It was like a dream. An old, old dream.

He raised his body on his elbows, forcing himself into a crouching position. From there he followed old, barely remembered movements, until he was once again standing on his feet. His legs shook after years of lifelessness, but they remained firm. The ground gradually stabilized under his feet. The Doctor and Ace stared stunned. Winterdawn allowed himself another smile at their expense.

‘Now,’ he asked, turning and trotting awkwardly back down the corridor to the cellar room, ‘how is Sandra?’

Bernice Summerfield woke to find ghost screams echoing in her ears,
her
screams. She had ghost memories of death,
her
death. They were wonderful thoughts to wake to.

She lay on her side, tucked cosily beneath the blankets of her deathbed. She was loath to move. Benny Summerfield was a pig when it came to rising in the morning, and she wasn’t going to let her death stand in the way of old habits. She just wanted to lie in bed and rot.

She rolled onto her front, settling down to doze. Quarter of an hour later she raised her head blearily, forcing heavy eyelids open. She felt like risking a light headache in exchange for a few more minutes of oblivion, but decided against it. She shrugged the covers from her body and lay still, freezing in the chill air of the afterlife.

You’d think they’d leave the dead to rest in peace.

Death. She could only think about it dispassionately. She’d died. She was pretty certain of that. She’d felt her body shut itself down; no one could have survived the power streaming out of the window. She knew she was dead, she just didn’t believe it. Death was somebody else’s problem.

As a child, Benny had slept with death next to her skin. Then she’d grown up, reaching an age where it was chic to dwell on the grave. She dwelt on it and it terrified her. She assumed that everyone shared that terror, that all living creatures clung onto their lives with tight claws. You could measure other people’s lifespans, but how could you measure your own?
C’est la vie, c’est la mort.

She believed in the afterlife. That was something she’d considered odd – an atheist believing in life after death, even if only on broad, existential terms. It was the hope that kept her sane as an angsty teen. So here it was, laid before her. And the fear that purred in her ghost guts told her that it would have been much better if the door her death had opened led to oblivion.

This was not a good place. Not by a long chalk. Indeedy no.

She wondered if she could get pissed in the afterlife. Only, she suspected, if this was the
bad place
, and then simply for the sake of the massive hangover you’d receive afterwards.

She tipped herself over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. She landed awkwardly on her side, flagstones flattening her ribs. An ache spread along her side, the bruises writing themselves into her bones. But the shock had woken her completely, and she stood, clutching her tender shoulder, ready to confront the afterlife.

The afterlife was a gloomy chamber, heavy with the smell of smouldering wax. It was a massive, ancient place. The walls were built out of rough stone blocks. Similar blocks lay beneath her feet, worn down into a polished surface. The bulk of the chamber was empty. Benny’s bed was an unwieldy item of black ironwork but it was a tiny fragment of furniture amidst a wasteland of blank stone. Shadows filled the emptiness, clinging to the walls like cobwebs. They growled and swam, their advance on the chamber held back by flickering candle‐
light. There were candles on stands, hanging from the ceiling or supported on wall brackets; a few sat unguarded on the floor, melting into ugly pools on the flagstones. These were
real
candles – fat, stubby, yellow. Their smoke was foul. Benny gagged as the smell swarmed into her senses.

The candle‐
light was warm yellow and Benny’s skin was bathed in a sickly reflection of that light. Her whole body seemed so thin and weak. She was dressed in black, in a one‐
piece garment like a swimsuit, that hugged the shape of her body. Its surface rippled in response to tensing muscles, almost as if it was physically part of her. Handy for a quick get‐
away – though it had no
style
whatsoever.

She prowled round the chamber, tracing the walls beyond the shadows. The gloom stifled her senses, her eyesight lost its keenness. She stepped into one patch of shadows and almost knocked over a table.

Laid out neatly on the moon‐
shaped surface was a chessboard, readied for war. The pieces were squat caricatures carved from ebony and ivory. The hollow eyes of pawns and bishops and queens and rooks and knights stared at Benny from their positions. The kings had their eyes closed, blinding themselves. It was an impressive set. More immediately interesting was the bottle beside it.

Benny reached for the bottle, and checked the labels carefully. Two, both handwritten. The larger had an ornate border and was written in a strong, bold hand:
Lafite ’28
. The smaller label was written in a light, more intimate hand and was stuck at an uneven angle.

To my oldest friend, on the occasion of our meeting in Munich, 23rd of April 1853.

Bernice raised the glass neck to her lips and took a swig – a mouthful of a half‐
way decent vintage. It was the only hopeful thing she’d so far found.

Further into the darkness she found an archway decorated by carvings of skulls, arranged so that each fleshless head seemed to gnaw at the scalp of that below. Benny passed by without closer inspection, grateful she no longer had a stomach. A thick curtain blocked the arch, composed of hundreds of separate strands of ivy strung from the stones above. Benny forced a gap between the heavy fronds.

The room brightened, the gloom was relieved slightly, but there was no blaze. Inside the chamber was still darkness, beyond was twilight.

Beyond the arch was a stone balcony – beyond the balcony, a panorama over a sprawling city extending to the horizon. The city was a bundle of soaring shafts – black, white, brick and grey rods thrusting skywards. Some were chimney stacks, pumping an unending cloud of black pollution into the sky. Others were towers, dirtied by the clouds billowing from the neighbouring flues. The air of the city was damp and filthy.

The city was a nightmare of industry. The chimneys erupted from ugly, angular buildings with grey roofs and tiny windows, walls discoloured by their own soot. The factories were cramped boxes packed together into industrial compounds, protected by high walls and barbed‐
wire fences. Benny had seen this on a hundred worlds – industry and exploitation dancing obscenely, cheek to cheek. The fences evoked memories of prison camps – and worse – the emaciated creatures concentrated within. Benny remembered them now. She wasn’t certain whether the constant shriek of sirens was hailing a change of work‐
pattern or reporting another purge. She looked again at the smoke billowing across the city, wondering what it was that burned.

The city was steeped in symbols. Those buildings that were not industrial were bizarre, living images carved in stone. Architecture ran riot, as if the stones of the city were growing naturally. All the buildings climbed upwards, but not all climbed straight. Massive windows of stained‐
glass depicting incomprehensible scenes sat in the heart of their greying stones. Hewn into those walls were shapes and figures from a hundred cultures, nesting places for the ugliest gargoyles. This mess of architecture made a maze of the city, in which every street was an alley bounded by sheer walls ascending to infinity.

The city was decaying, rotting before her eyes. Buildings were crumbling or derelict. Some of the tallest shook uneasily. Those parts of the sky untouched by the damp smoke were dry with dust. This city was dying, falling apart as Benny watched. Yet it thrived on this decay, and even as the weeds or the urban entropy encroached on one building, more sprang up on the fringes, assembled haphazardly. The city was poisoning itself, revelling in its own self‐
destructive decadence.

Benny could see figures moving in the city – on raised walkways, on ledges – but the shapes were vague, her glimpses fleeting. The population remained invisible.

The sky was grey. There was no sun. There was no moon. There were no stars. There were no clouds. The sky was bland and blank.

‘I don’t think I’m in Kansas any more,’ Benny whispered before turning.

There was a shape waiting in the gloom behind her – distinct from the rest of the darkness.

‘I want to know one thing. Is this the good place, or is it the bad place? I live in hope, but the landscape isn’t reassuring.’

The shape seemed to consider. It replied in a pleasant voice of indeterminate age:

‘Professor Summerfield, you will find that this place is neither good nor bad.’ The shape stepped forward and became a man, dressed in a long coat and a broad‐
brimmed hat and dark glasses.

‘I
know
you.’ Benny’s recognition blossomed.

‘Our last meeting was rather brief and the conversation unstimulating. I’m quite glad it’s you here. Of all the Doctor’s party you strike me as the most personable.’

‘Thanks,’ Benny mumbled shyly like a teenage girl on a first date, her curiosity dampened by the man’s quietly compulsive manner. ‘It’s, uh, Benny, by the way. “Professor Summerfield” is the name I want on my grave. I wonder if they remembered?’

‘Benny.’ The mellow voice pronounced it strangely. It was not used to addressing people in such intimate terms.

‘A nice place you have here. Where did you find it?’ Benny asked, her appetite for answers surging to the fore.

‘This?’ The man smiled, sadly, weakly. ‘This is my creation. This is my prison, my home. This is Cathedral and it has stood for almost fifteen thousand million years.’

Benny frowned, indicating the chaotic nightmare beyond the ivy curtain.

‘You’re responsible for that?’ Her voice was venomously critical.

‘I am.’ The man’s face twisted into an injured frown. ‘I would not have built it this way given the choice. I am the messenger of Cathedral, I am its conscience and its soul. But I am not its architect.’

‘But you
said
you created it,’ Benny rounded on him.

The grey man smiled again. When he spoke, his voice was slow and sour.

‘Between the conception, and the creation, falls the shadow. Other hands built this. I simply laid the foundations. Would you care for a game of chess?’

Bernice didn’t reply.

‘Benny?’ the man prompted. After that there was only one answer she could possibly give.

‘I thought,’ Benny considered her position and found that she was almost disgusted, ‘that everyone –
everyone
– had heard of Fool’s Mate.’

‘My opponents have been noble creatures,’ the man said, with more humour than disappointment. ‘They would not stoop to anything so underhanded.’

‘Ah, you picked the wrong one this time,’ Benny replied, feigning aggression. ‘Dead or alive, I’m a devious bitch.’

The grey man nodded thoughtfully. His face was so bland, so dull, that Benny just had to laugh at the grotesque comic effect. She took another swig from the bottle.

‘Dead?’ The question and the smile were both innocent. Benny frowned, losing her sense of humour.

‘I am,’ she stated, half‐
questioning, half‐
reassuring herself.

‘That depends on your interpretation,’ the grey man sifted through his words carefully, ‘of death.’

‘How do you mean?’ Benny’s frown remained engrained onto her features.

‘If you believe that when you die, your body ceases to function but your mind, your soul, your
ka
, is transposed to a new level of existence, well you are dead. This isn’t a heaven – it isn’t a particularly good imitation – but it does exist on a separate plane to your own. The explanations are not religious or supernatural, your circumstances are unique. I suspect your mind was guided here by the forces that are loose in Winterdawn’s house.’

‘Gabriel and Tanith?’ Benny asked.

‘For reasons of their own. I can’t imagine what they might have in mind.’ Benny took this as a ‘yes’. She’d known the man for minutes but had already lost hope of getting a straight answer out of him.

‘You remind me of the Doctor,’ she said absently.

‘Oh.’

Benny burst out laughing again. Her companion was quietly amused. When she had calmed down, she launched into the question she’d been saving up.

‘So, what is this place?’ she asked in a casual enough tone but with a cool undercurrent that demanded a serious answer. ‘This Cathedral? A nice piece of real estate, yes, but I’d give it a clean before putting it on the market. Hot and cold running pollution, gargoyles optional. It’s not real…’

The grey man raised a gentle hand. It silenced her.

‘Cathedral is real. It is one of the most real places in the cosmos, but no, go on…’

Benny picked up the thread of her enquiry.

‘What I want to know is, is it a parallel thingy, a virtual thingy or a computer thingy?’

For the first time since Bernice had met him, the grey man laughed. His lungs expelled short, half‐
hearted chortles. His face contorted uneasily, confirming Benny’s suspicion that this was a man who indulged in the odd giggle every couple of centuries but otherwise stuck rigidly to rigor mortis lip‐
twitches to convey the apotheosis of good humour.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, coming to the end of his feeble chuckles and wrinkling his face in embarrassment. ‘No, this is nothing like a computer. I’m no great technophile. I leave hardware to those amused by such things.’

He rose from his stool, pushing forward as he moved, and resting his knuckles on the table. Benny had the uncomfortable feeling of being in school, a teacher looming over her to unleash a tirade about the misdemeanours of Summerfield. But the grey man’s features were light. As light as they could be.

‘Cathedral is a metacultural engine.’

Benny let her lips twitch in the manner of her host. He acknowledged this with a slight nod of the head.

I wish I could see his eyes, Benny thought. This one I can’t read at all. Utterly inscrutable. Or so utterly transparent that I haven’t noticed.
I wish I could see his eyes!

‘I know what an engine is,’ she said slowly. ‘I know what culture is. I even know what “meta” means – I looked it up once specially. But the combination of the words lacks that certain spark.’

The grey man nodded, head bobbing up and down happily.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, and the happiness abdicated in favour of something darker, ‘a story.’