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Lungbarrow - Chapter Eight

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Fragments

'What happens?' whispered Chris. 'What happens next?'

With the dark came a silence that was stifling. Arkhew clung to Chris, too shocked to speak.

The mirror of reality cracked and opened like a slowly exploding flower.

Snatches of time, trapped in shards of shattered mirror glass, came spinning, oh so slowly, past them. Different tableaux trapped in different fragments, reflecting back and forth, creating corridors of jangling light and echoes of the past: the nightmare memories that haunt the darkened House.

Chris and Arkhew stood together, timeless, as time itself danced and fragmented around them.

In the Hall, the terrified Cousins are trying to drag open the great doors. The huge Drudges are forcing them back. Innocet stands on the dais. She is trying to calm the crowd of Cousins. Someone throws something. Innocet clutches at her face. She is bleeding where she has been hit.

Glospin lies in bed, pale with a transfixed stare. Satthralope sits beside him, rocking herself slowly as she holds his hand. In a sudden spasm, he clutches tightly at her arm. Then he falls back, his fevered eyes close and his mouth drops open. After a moment, Satthralope takes a black rose from her bonnet and places it on his chest.

'Good riddance,' muttered Arkhew.

'Was he dead?' said Chris. 'Was Glospin dead?'

'That finished off his schemes!' Arkhew pointed to another mirror shard as it spun slowly past. 'Look over there. Look at the despair.'

The Cousins are gathered round the stone plinth in the hall. They are clinging to it, like frightened kids clinging to their mother.

Suddenly the reflection within the turning shard cracks into dozens of identical little reflections. A double-bladed dagger held by a figure in black stabs Quences through both hearts. Quences stares in disbelief his lips mouthing the word 'You'.

'Murderer!' yelped Arkhew. 'It was him! That's who did it!'

'Who?' said Chris.

'He came back to do it! It was him!'

Wine is spilling off the table.

Chris grabbed Arkhew by the shoulders. 'Who killed the old man?' he demanded.

'Murderer, murderer. . .' gasped the little man.

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Satthralope stares at them from the surface of a turning mirror shard. Her chair rocks back and forth. Soothing, lulling.

Although Chris could not hear her, he understood the words she was mouthing:

'Not dead. Just in stasis. Just waiting. He's not dead.'

A cortege is passing by. On the monstrous catafalque lies the body of murdered Quences.

'Not dead. Just waiting. Waiting in stasis. We're all waiting.'

'Is it over?' Arkhew stared imploringly up at Chris. 'Is the waiting over?'

'I don't know. I don't understand,' stuttered the young Adjudicator. The violence of the murder had shocked him cold. 'Who was it? Who killed the old man? How long ago?'

'Too long.' Arkhew was drifting, moving slowly away. 'No,' he said angrily. 'Nothing changes.'

'What do I do?' called Chris. 'Show me!'

'We've already been shown!'

Chris saw a bright eye approaching in the dark. It pulled hungrily at him. It was the mirror through which he had entered this nightmare.

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Arkhew was already a distant figure in the gloom. 'The will,' he was intoning. 'That's all that's left. Where is the will?'

'Danger, Mistress. Danger!'

K9 retracted his sensor from the operations port and backed away from Andred's desk.

Leela turned the chair to see a Chancellery guard captain standing in the office doorway. There were two other guards with him.

'Stay there,' she muttered to K9.

'Lady Leelandredloomsagwinaechegesima?' the captain said formally.

She stood and walked round the desk. 'Leela is enough.'

As he stepped into the room, she saw that it was Jomdek.

'I am here to place you under arrest,' he announced.

'For what crime?'

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'For using false security clearance codes to access classified information and bio-extracts from the Citadel security systems.'

'Those are the Castellan's codes,' protested Leela.

'But they are not yours, madam. Does Castellan Andred know you've been using them?'

'He is not here,' she snapped.

'Then the charge is treason.'

'I want to see the Castellan.'

'He will be informed.' Jomdek started towards her, but she darted back round the desk to where K9 was waiting.

'These are traitors,' she whispered. 'Get the information we have found to Andred.'

'Danger!' warned the robot dog and extended the gun barrel from his nose.

A guard with a ceremonial impulse staser came round the side of the desk.

'No, K9!' shouted Leela, too late. A thin beam of hard light stabbed from K9's gun and the guard's staser was knocked from his hand. He fell back clutching his smoking glove.

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Before K9 could turn round in the tight space, Captain Jomdek rounded the other end of the desk. A wild bolt from his gun scorched Leela's arm and hit K9 squarely on the flank. The robot lurched sideways into the desk, gave a squeal of protest and stopped dead. Smoke whisped out of his joints.

Leela grabbed at her companion, but the second guard pulled her roughly up. She angrily elbowed him in the stomach. As he sprawled across the floor, she turned to Jomdek. 'Traitor! You cannot arrest me without the Castellan's orders.'

Jomdek raised an eyebrow. 'There are higher authorities than the Chancellor and her Castellan,' he said.

'When Andred learns of this, he will have you stripped of your rank and publicly dishonoured.'

'As long as he isn't found guilty too,' said Jomdek. 'Bring the alien,' he instructed the guards and walked out of the office.

The guards looked at Leela and then at each other. She looked down at the lifeless K9.

'Follow,' she snapped at the guards and walked out with them trailing behind.

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Chris Cwej forced open his eyes and stared woozily at the dark overhead. The air was close and stale. The floor was hard under him. Hard enough to make him think that he might be awake for once. Or was he just lurching from one nightmare to another? No change there, asleep or awake. Maybe his life was a string of bad dreams. A string that someone was pulling tighter so that the dreams were bunching up - no telling one from the next. A string on which to walk the high wire.

Whoa, thought Chris. We're getting dangerously philosophical here.

There was something soft under his head that tickled. He sat up and found that it was the Doctor's pullover, neatly folded into a pillow.

No sign of the Doctor himself.

Chris's skin itched. He looked down at his clothes. He was covered in dust. He sneezed loudly and heard something squeak and scuttle behind him.

A small occasional table, startled by the sneeze, had frozen in mid-perambulation. It swayed towards him a little as if it was curious. Chris sneezed again and the table scuttled for cover in the dark on its spindly legs.

'Damn,' muttered Chris. 'Still here.' He scratched his bare arms, trying to shift the gritty dust. Sometimes it wasn't worth having a bath.

If this was Gallifrey, he wasn't impressed. The place had gone to seed long ago. Six hundred and seventy-three years ago to be exact. Or so he had been told.

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Nearby was the eye-shaped mirror hung with shreds of torn web. The Doctor's oil lamp sat high on another table. Next to it, on the surface of the table, the words CHRIS - STAY PUT - DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING had been written neatly in the dust.

Chris lifted the lamp and tried to make out the TARDIS by the guttering flame, but the police box was nowhere to be seen in the gloom.

'Doctor?' he called in a stage whisper, cautious of what he might disturb, He edged between the massive furniture, afraid it might take a dislike to him and crush him between its angular fitments.

He reached the edge of a small clearing in the bric-a-brac where the shadows were particularly reluctant to disperse. He could just make out a stack of frames at the far side which he did not recognize. So where the hell was the TARDIS?

Somewhere on Extans Superior, there was a rose coral beach where a hover-hammock was floating by an antigrav tray on which sat two skyscraper glasses of a drink like the indigo moonrise on Oebaqul Xo. That's what the brochure said. His name was already on the lime slice in one glass. The other glass was reserved for someone he hadn't met just yet. The hammock, swaying deliciously, was big enough for two.

But, Goddess Almighty, the Doctor had gone without him.

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Chris stepped forward and his foot kept going. As he toppled into the dark, he dropped the lamp and lunged sideways. His arm caught on a heavy chair and he scrambled to claw a grip on its smooth hide upholstery.

The lamp shattered in the dark well somewhere far below.

The chair, creakily protesting, dragged itself away, pulling Chris up out of the hole as it went. He lay on the edge of the chasm, gasping back his breath. His knee was wet, cut on jagged wood.

He was in total darkness. He was alone. Despite all the soul-searching and inner harmonizing of Doa-no-nai-heya Monastery, he really missed Roz. They'd told him he would.

He dared not move. If the TARDIS had really fallen through the creaky floor, had the Doctor been inside? Or had he and his ship just flown away for good? Fled the scene of the crime, leaving Chris stranded. He wondered how long this place had really been neglected. How far back were the events he'd witnessed. And had the Doctor really been the cause of them? And the murder too?

'Doctor!' shouted Chris. 'You could have left a better note!'

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He knew what the Doctor was capable of, but he wouldn't do that, would he? Not murder? I mean, there'd be a good reason for him to come back to murder the head of his own Family. But Arkhew had recognised him. No getting away from that, or from any of the events they had witnessed from six hundred and seventy three years ago - Arkhew had been very precise and Chris didn't doubt the little man's story.

Not that the Doctor would admit to it. The Doctor wouldn't admit to anything. The one thing he'd seemed afraid of was the House. Chris had never seen him so cagey.

An Adjudicator never drops a case until the evidence is substantiated and verified. That ground rule was something to cling on to. Chris stretched out a hand and ran his fingers across the floor. It was full of splinters. Places, as well as machines, could record events. Maybe the House was the expert witness.

Dammit Roz. What do I do?

His eyes were finally accustomizing to the darkness - no longer dark, just shadow-filled gloom. He pulled himself gingerly to his feet and edged a path between the furniture, away from the hole.

Close by, he could make out the downward sloping rail of a stairwell. Then he remembered the note in the dust: STAY PUT - DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING. The Doctor was still here. He'd only gone to find the TARDIS. Chris grasped the rail and reached down with his foot, finding solid support. One deep step at a time, he groped his way down the giant's stairs, moving deeper into the dark and watchful House.