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Lungbarrow - Chapter Twenty-one

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Rice Cakes and a Banana

Chris dreamt he was awake.

He lay on a hard bed with a shawl over him. He'd just seen the murder again. Same characters, same location, same blood. And the white-haired figure was the man in the portrait. The man that Innocet called the first Doctor.

Towers of diamond lattice rose above him, like wine racks with coloured tubes instead of bottles. Above those, there were tangled branches merging with the solid, mottled sky. Something scampered along the underside of a branch, jumped across a gap and vanished behind the towers.

'Six,' said Innocet's voice.

Chris heard the clack of counters. He angled his head and saw Innocet and the Doctor hunched over a Sepulchasm board. The room could be a library, he thought. But there was no power to read the books.

'I was trying to get to my old room.' The Doctor threw a die. 'But there's a lagoon in the North annexe. Two again.'

'An underground stream comes in on the third level,' said Innocet.

Chris could hear them being polite.

'Only when I was thrown out, I left an experiment running that I didn't have time to finish. Some hybridized water-sligs that I crossed with a red-petalled orchid. I don't expect they survived.'

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'Eight,' she said. The counters clacked. 'The creatures were locked in your room for one hundred and thirty years. When they finally broke out they were as big as ichthydiles. There's a breeding colony in the annexe.'

'Ah. So that's why it's been closed off.'

'Forty-seven years ago, one of them strayed away from the colony. The Drudges trapped it in the kitchen. But no one could kill it, so it's still there.'

Goddess, thought Chris. That was what was in the larder.

A die clattered. 'Two again!' complained the Doctor. 'This is ridiculous. I know you think I killed Quences, but it isn't true.'

'I saw you leave his room.'

'Impossible. I didn't come back to the House. They didn't even want me back. I was happy to concur.'

'Quences wanted you back. Nine. I'm catching up.'

'He was clinging to false hopes. But I wouldn't be tied down to his plans. And so Satthralope buried the place out of spite until I returned. Where's my Badger gone when I need him?'

'That dreadful old toy.'

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'A present from Quences.'

'Oh, Snail,' she sighed, 'He always indulged you, you know.'

Snail! thought Chris.

There was a smile in the Doctor's voice. 'It's a very long time since I was called that.'

'Yes.' She sounded duly embarrassed. 'Once you were safe, Badger went off quite meekly with a Drudge.' There was a pause. 'So what was in Quences's will?'

'How can I possibly know that?'

'Because you stole it when you came back! It's your throw.'

'And murdered Quences in warm blood? Three to win.'

'I saw you. Chris and Arkhew saw you too.'

'One and a half,' he complained. The counters clacked. 'And I didn't kill Arkhew either. What did Satthralope do? She must know. Quences is laid out downstairs for everyone to see.'

'Yes.'

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'Oh, no!' The Doctor's voice was suddenly chilled. 'It's for the House. That's why he's laid out. It's all a lie. She hasn't told the House!'

Innocet lowered her voice. 'It nearly killed her, but she managed to convince the House that Quences survived your attack.'

'Not guilty!' he insisted.

'And to convince the House, she had to convince herself too.'

'More fool Satthralope. Still deluded after all these years.'

'Then you tell her that, before she tries to wake Quences up.'

Oops, thought Chris.

'Your go,' said the Doctor.

'What is your function?' demanded Satthralope.

The motheaten avatroid monstrosity known as Badger stood before her. Web strands stretched across its filthy fur. One crystal eye dangled from its socket on a cluster of fibres. 'To serve my master?' it asked gruffly.

That irritating habit of answering with questions. 'Who reactivated you?'

'My pupil?'

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Masters, pupils. Wasn't the Academy good enough? No wonder the Doctor was such a scapegrace when Quences had spoilt him so. 'You should never have been packed away in storage,' she told the offending mechanised tutor.

'Are there tasks for me?'

'Certainly not!' No need to wait and ask Quences what to do. 'Take it apart,' she said to the Drudge and the servant reached for the avatroid's override port.

A shaggy arm slashed across. The machine bellowed with a program of rage. It caught hold of the Drudge and the two grappled together, careering dangerously near the old woman.

Her chair scuttled back carrying her out of reach.

She screamed for her other servant and lashed out with her cane.

The Drudge was squarely matched by the avatroid, but the brute lowered its head and butted at its wooden adversary with its curled horns.

As the Drudge skittered backward, the avatroid scooped it off the floor and swung it round. Its head collided with a wardrobe and sheared off at the neck.

The machine brute threw the headless Drudge to the ground. Then it lumbered away out of the room. The door slammed behind it.

'Get up! Get up!' shouted Satthralope.

The damaged wardrobe was shivering in the corner. The Drudge was crawling round the floor, trying to find its head. The splintered object had rolled under a table, and was emitting a creaking snarl of rage.

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'Christopher?'

Chris peered drowsily at the Doctor. He was smiling gently from the end of the improvised table-bed. 'I'm sorry about the dreams. You know what it's like.'

Innocet was beside the Doctor. She raised her eyes to whatever the Gallifreyan equivalent of heaven was.

'Is there anything to eat?' Chris asked.

The Doctor fumbled in his pockets. His arm went deeper than the clothes could possibly allow. He produced an over ripe banana, an individual pack of broken water biscuits, two Japanese rice cakes and a white dove, the last of which he hurriedly stuffed back.

Chris took a rice cake. 'Thanks, Snail.'

The Doctor cringed, but Chris nodded towards Innocet. The Doctor suddenly understood and passed the rest to his Cousin. She looked at the food with reverence, almost afraid to eat something so precious.

'Peel the banana first,' he said, indicating which one it was.

Chris pulled off some fluff and munched the rice cake. It was surprisingly fresh. 'What about the dreams?' he said.

'Ah. Yes, well.' The Doctor looked flustered. He crossed to the door and listened for a moment. Then he straightened a mirror that had been turned to the wall. 'You see Chris, what's been happening\x85 Um, well, it's the TARDIS, you see.'

'Yeah?'

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'Well, my head really. Only it's been getting so full lately. People to see...'

'Plots to unravel.'

'Yes, you know the sort of thing. But even my brain has a limited capacity.'

'Unlike your pockets.'

'Yes, you know I think I might have a hole. I seem to be losing things...'

'Your head is full,' Chris reminded him.

'Um, yes. So to compensate, the TARDIS may be sideshunting a few of my subconscious thoughts into the nearest available database.'

'Meaning me?'

'Um, yeee-esss. It was only trying to be helpful. It hates losing information. So it augmented you as a receptor.'

'Sneaky,' said Chris. He picked at a small cut that prickled on his arm, unsure where it had happened. 'I suppose I'm meant to feel honoured.'

The Doctor was tying slow knots with his fingers. 'Unfortunately, I'd had a few thoughts about this place lately. Just passing thoughts. You asked me about families once... And I'd been dwelling on the implications of my own mortality.'

'So you think that I laid in the coordinates to get us here.'

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'Entirely influenced by my subconscious, Chris. Not your fault at all.'

The young man rubbed the back of neck. 'Anything else?'

'Well, yes. That interference by the TARDIS has also opened your head up to all the stuff that's echoing around the House. So it's me, you see. My fault. I should be saying sorry to you.'

He held Chris's eyes for a moment and then studied the floor hard. 'And I am so sorry. This was never meant to happen. I never meant to come back here. I admit it.' He surveyed his surroundings with undisguised contempt. The floor, the racking, the dusty books, the veneered walls and ceiling through which grew the grasping, twining fingers of white wood. 'Once upon a time I was eager to flex the sinews of the Universe. After all, who wants to be a spectator, or even a player, when you can be a piece on the board in the thick of it?' He sighed deeply. 'But chains from the past drag you back into the dark. Lungbarrow is the worst place in the Universe. I vowed never to retum - but here I am, back. My mistake.'

'OK,' said Chris. 'I'll just sit here at the bottom of your Family's mental garbage chute...'

'Nothing gets out,' said Innocet coldly. 'None of the hate. None of the despair. All the cold, tortuous helplessness that binds us together as a Family. That's what you condemned us to.'

The Doctor pulled a small gauge from an inside pocket and held it towards the ceiling. He pumped a button on the top and studied the reading.

'The Family that stays together decays together,' he muttered. 'So where exactly are all my Cousins?'

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'Gone away,' Innocet said. She had folded up the banana skin as if it was a treasure.

'No. That's not true,' said Chris. 'I think they're still here.'

The Doctor looked startled. 'Chris?'

'I heard them. When Maljamin went, I heard voices calling him. They were in my head, and I'm sure Innocet heard them too.'

Innocet hiccupped and looked away.

'Why didn't I hear them?' complained the Doctor.

Chris shrugged. 'The TARDIS again? Maybe I'm picking that up too. And it's so oppressive here. Suppose your missing Cousins are really in hiding.'

'Or waiting.' He narrowed his eyes at Innocet.

'How should I know?' she said. 'None of us asked for this.'

The Doctor held up the gauge for her to see the reading. 'The House isn't buried that deep. So why has nobody done anything? Or are you just happy to sit and wait for the archaeologists to arrive?'

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A layer of earth pressed down on him. Darkness. He couldn't breathe. He was going to scream.

Then the earth opened. A trowel nearly went up his nose. The sky was blue-white above him.

A head slid into view. It was Bernice, a smug grin on her face. She started to dust him with an archaeologist's airbrush and shook her head. 'Look at the state of this. What a mess.'

She poked him about a bit. 'Still, it's amazing how they can reconstruct things, even from the most dilapidated old fossil remains. He'll probably look quite good mounted in a museum.'

'Sorry,' said the Doctor. 'I think that was one of mine.'

Chris groaned.

'We have something important to ask you,' said Innocet.

'Assuming that you feel strong enough.'

'You know me,' said Chris wearily. 'I'm notorious. I'll try anything once.'

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Glospin smeared the sample of Chris's blood on to a glass plate and slid it under the rickety lenses of an antique magniscope. It was underlit by scrapings from a deposit of luminescent sodium he had found in the Family vaults, among the bodies of Lungbarrow's hardly ever illustrious forebears.

In the plasma, there were reddish platelets and crudely developed pale white phagocytes.

As he suspected, not even remotely Gallifreyan. The Doctor had brought worse than an intruder into the House.

The wall opened a panel and Glospin extracted a small casket. Inside, neatly folded, were copies of his own notes and theories about the Doctor. They were yellowed with age. He wondered if Innocet still had the originals.

From somewhere below, he heard the angry, percussive snarl of a machine. The House gave a shudder.

Instinctively, he recognized the herald of yet another new threat to his inheritance and his birthright.

The Doctor flexed his fingers nervously over Chris. 'The only way to clear this murder business up is for Innocet to look into your mind. She's always had a gift for that sort of thing.'

'And a certificate from the Syndicate of Cryptaesthesians,' added his Cousin.

Behind them, the library door resisted opening twice and then flew wide with a protesting crack. A massive shape, tall as a furry Drudge with ram's horns, lumbered into the room.

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'Badger!' exclaimed the Doctor. 'I never expected to see you again.' He shook Badger's claw and, in an extraordinary display of affection, hugged the huge brute like a long-lost dog until his hat fell off. He whistled again and the Badger, which looked more like a stripy, pig-tusked bear, piped the response.

Innocet looked away, embarrassed.

Badger's voice rumbled up from some subterranean cavern in his chest. 'Then why did you summon me?'

'Oh well, one lives in hope.' The Doctor turned to the others, grinning like the madman. 'Chris, this is Badger. He was my oldest friend, and my tutor when I was still in brainbuffing.'

Chris nodded politely, used by now to being introduced to far more unlikely acquaintances of the Doctor. He was aware that Innocet was sitting quietly, picking at her rice cake.

'And you know Innocet, don't you?' the Doctor enthused.

'Correct,' announced Badger.

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'Where have you been all this time?'

'He was in a cupboard for six hundred and seventy-three years,' said Innocet. 'Waiting.'

Chris slid off the table. 'Can we get on with this, Doctor?'

'Just a moment.' The Doctor reached up to Badger's wayward eyeball and jiggled it back into its socket. 'How's that?'

Badger looked about the library. 'Thirty-one-per-cent improvement.'

'It's your eye,' declared the Doctor. 'Not one of my essays.'

'We are ready now,' said Innocet.

'Oh, very well.'

The Doctor sat on the bed and watched as Innocet and Chris sat on a mangey pelt rug.

'I know.' Chris shut his eyes and tried to calm his ragged thoughts. 'It'll hurt you more than it'll hurt me.'

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'Possibly not,' she said. 'Please open your eyes.'

She was staring at him as she had done before. Deep into him. Her grey eyes cutting and peeling away the layers of his thoughts.

'Um,' he said.

Think about Quences. What did you see in his room? When he... When he was...

Murdered, thought Chris. When he was brutally murdered.

The moment came easily.

The old man was laughing as Satthralope swept out of his room in a rage. He turned to work on the huge furry mound on the table.

The memory cracked across. A dozen simultaneous murders in one broken mirror.

A figure in black. An elderly man with white hair swept back behind his head. He had fierce eyes and a beak of a nose.

Yes, it is the man in the portrait.

In his left hand, he held a double-bladed dagger. Quences turned and the intruder stabbed down once through both hearts.

The old General, blood bubbling from his mouth, gaped in disbelief at his murderer. 'You', he mouthed.

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'Innocet, listen to me!'

Excuse me, thought Chris. This is my head.

'Murderer!' whispered Innocet.

Chris, opening his eyes, saw Badger loom behind Innocet.

'Badger!' The Doctor was there, pushing the brute back. 'I don't need protecting.' He turned to Innocet.

'Yes, it was me. My first self. I recognized me. You are right.'

'How could you see that?' she said, scrambling to her feet.

'I came in after you. I thought you might need a lifeline. Just as well, wasn't it?'

'Then you admit to the murder at last.'

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'Admit it? I don't even remember it.'

'Wait,' said Chris. 'Badger? That was you on the work bench.'

The robot creature shifted. 'Which bench?'

'The bench in Quences's room.'

'Leave this to me,' interrupted the Doctor. 'Badger, who murdered Quences?'

'I have no memory of such an event,' boomed the robot. 'Is it historical?'

'Do you have any memory of where Quences's will is?'

'I have no such memory.'

'That memory could have been erased,' said Innocet.

The Doctor walked to one of the boarded-up windows. He yanked back the panelling and squinted out at the black earth and rock that pressed in from outside. 'You used to be able to see the well from here. That old crumbling well in the orchard. Do you remember, Innocet? And you told me that once, on the very day I was born from the Loom, you saw a stranger down there. You said she was leaning over the well, trailing her long hair into the water. And the sunlight was dappling all green and brown over her robes, so that you couldn't really tell if she was there at all. And you ran down to the orchard to find her, but when you reached the well, there was no one there. Only fruit bobbing on the water and a scent of roses.'

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'The rose woman,' said Innocet. 'I hadn't forgotten. I imagined it was an omen for the good of the House. Perhaps I was wrong. I've never known who you really were.'

'I don't believe in omens. Omens are empty thunderclouds with no drop of rain. The portentous sound of people grasping at broken straws.' He reached to support himself on a shelf, and then thought better of it. 'What can I say, Innocet? I don't remember killing Quences, but we've just seen it happen. It was me, the first Doctor. But I never came back here. That poor old man loved me, I think. And he was a bully and a tyrant too. But I could never kill him.'

'Then where were you?' she said.

'I wasn't here,' he replied. 'I was far, far away.'

'Where?'

He rapped his finger on the window pane in frustration. 'I can't remember. Silly really.'

Chris looked from one to the other. They were both staring at him. Piercing eyes that sheered away his thoughts and exposed the darkness underneath.

He knew who the woman by the well was. She had sat at the Door to the Past and she had the scent of roses.