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Doctor Who: Lungbarrow - Chapter Three

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Talking to Yourself

The harpy shrieked and spread her tattered black wings above her. She ran at Chris, taking to the air, beating the stench of carrion over him in fetid gusts. He flung his arms up in defence as her claws snatched at him. Her filthy hair jangled with jewels and amulets. She had an eyepatch.

Chris stumbled backward, but she caught him in her talons, dragging him under her dead weight. She perched on his chest and tore out his heart with her beak.

Chris Cwej yelled himself awake and fell off his lilo with a splash. He lay trembling on the surface of the bathwater, bobbing on the little effervescent waves, clutching at the right-hand side of his chest.

Even in the super-buoyant water of the TARDIS's bathroom, he knew he was sweating. Bad dreams again. 'It's OK,' he kept repeating to himself in between deep calming breaths.

The Doctor had said, 'It's fine if you drop off in the bath. Just don't do it face down.' Hence the lilo.

Normally Chris didn't let that sort of thing worry him, but he'd had more than a headful of stress lately. Still working through it. Could be years before it all came out. He'd better not let on to Roz, though. He realized he had clutched the wrong side of his chest for his heart and felt a lot better.

Something bobbed against him. The Doctor's plastic duck with a goofy grin on its beak. For a moment, he thought it had been laughing.

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He rolled over on the water and stuck his head under the surface. How did the loofah always sink to the bottom when everything else floated? He couldn't even dive for it. The density of the water just bounced him back up to the surface again. Giving up, he struck out for the tap end and hauled himself out of the bath.

They must have reached Extans Superior by now. An idyllic backwater world off the main space lanes (said the brochure) with breathtaking beaches and exotic nightlife. The Doctor muttered something about mosquitoes, but promised to get them there fifty years earlier, before the place got ruined by tourist development. Which wasn't exactly what Chris had in mind.

Chris reached for a towel and shook out his yellow hair. Then he remembered what had happened to Roz. He was using her towel. It still smelt of her. It was still here after all this time. Still fresh - that was the TARDIS for you. He stood for minutes on end, his face buried in the towel, grateful she hadn't been totally cleared away, listening to the slap of the water reverberate in the huge tiled bathroom.

Damnation. How could he forget that? Lose the rest, but don't forget that. That was unforgivable.

He had a dull ache in the small of his back. Even the familiar thrum of the TARDIS was niggling him. He was so tired, but if he was still getting dreams like he'd just had, he didn't want to go back to sleep ever again.

You've been through all this already, he reminded himself. It's just working through. First of all you have to forgive yourself.

OK. He was forgiven. Easy. Too damn easy. He still wanted to go out and get smashed.

Failing that, he could go and take it out on the Doctor.

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Doroth\xE9e McShane opened her eyes and looked at the white ceiling overhead. She had a pain in her chest where someone... someone who had climbed out of her mirror when she'd dropped her guard, had shot her.

The weapon had been a high-impulse carbine - the sort of heavy-duty gun carried by anti-Dalek squads in the Flova trenches during her time with the Irregulars. One raser lozenge could slice the legs off a Marsh-Dalek at sixty metres.

It wasn't something she'd had to think about much lately.

A face slid into view. It was the girl called Ace again.

She sat on the side of the bed like a hospital visitor. She'd pulled her hair back into a ponytail and was wearing black leather trousers, a Stone Roses T-shirt and a black bomber jacket covered in badges. Young with no sense of style.

'You were clinically dead for about twenty minutes,' she said.

Dorothee peered down her blouse. There was a dry burn scar dead centre of her chest. A fierce little hole was scorched through the Chantilly lace. No blood. 'At that range you could hardly miss. I didn't think you could adjust the level on those things.'

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Ace studied the gun. 'You can't,' she said.

'So how come I'm still here?' Doroth\xE9e sat up and reached for the weapon. 'Show me.'

'No chance.' Ace jerked it away. She produced a small flask from her bomber jacket. 'Here. Drink this.'

Seeing the look of distrust on Doroth\xE9e's face, she grunted, 'Yeah. I'd feel the same.' She unscrewed the cap, took a hefty swig and blenched a little. 'Half way across the universe and it still has a hell of a kick.'

Doroth\xE9e took the flask. 'I left this at home. In my room in Paris. How did you get hold of it?'

One corner of the girl's mouth edged into a smirk. 'It was a present from a starship trooper. It's a keepsake. For services rendered.'

'Not like that,' snapped Dorothee and resisted the impulse to hit the little bitch.

'Yeah?'

'Six days we were together. On Crocarou Station, before I flew out on a mission. We didn't think I'd come back.'

'Tell me about,' interrupted Ace. 'And when I did, the base had been blown apart by Dalek shock troops. I threw up in someone else's kit bag. I still cry when I remember him.'

Doroth\xE9e gulped back her anger. 'That was me! I did that. No one knows about it. I never told anyone!'

But Ace had tears in her eyes.

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Doroth\xE9e swigged hard from the flask. This Ace knew exactly which raw nerve to hit. Still, the brandy had the desired effect. She could kid herself she wasn't half famished or frightened for a while. The flask was fuller than she had ever kept it. Enough to drink her tormentor under the table. She passed it back and studied the girl.

Ace's face was wrong. It wasn't quite a mirror image. It was the wrong way round. Doroth\xE9e got a bad feeling that the girl was real. 'Tell you what,' she said. 'There's no afterlife. There wasn't a tunnel with a bright light at the end of it.'

'Tough,' said Ace and swigged at the brandy. She shifted further up the bed. 'How long have you been following me?'

Doroth\xE9e hunched herself up at the pillow end. 'And I thought you were following me.'

'First sign of madness. Talking to yourself.'

'But I'm not, am I?' said Doroth\xE9e. 'I'm Doroth\xE9e McShane. And I never wore those trousers with that jacket.'

Ace leant forward. Her eyes were like ice. 'Can't both be real, can we?'

Doroth\xE9e held her ground. 'Truth or dare,' she said.

'OK,' nodded Ace, unfazed. 'Be my guest.'

'Tell me your name first.'

'Easy,' she said. 'I'm the cat-girl. I'm the Dalek-killer and the lion-hunter. I'm Time's Vigilante. My name's Ace. So what's yours?'

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The Doctor was in the TARDIS console room, where Chris somehow knew he would be. He sat hunched in a chair, staring at the scanner screen, which was switched off. Under his jacket, he was wearing his old pullover - the one with question marks that Chris thought they'd seen the last of. He wondered if the Doctor had somehow changed into it without taking his hat off. He hoped it signalled a return to the Doctor's old indomitable self. No more worries about sudden death and regeneration.

'The teabags have run out,' the Doctor complained without looking up.

Chris was not in the mood to find out that someone else was worse off than he was. 'Are you having trouble sleeping?' he asked.

'Oh sleep, that some have called the cousin to death,' the Doctor quoted unhelpfully. He shrugged without looking round. 'I wouldn't call it trouble. Why? Are you still having trouble?'

'Yes.'

'Not sleeping at all?'

'Yes. I mean, I sleep. It's the dreams.'

The Doctor sighed and stared at the blank screen. 'I don't seem to remember my dreams any more. But when you get to my age there's so much to forget.'

Chris watched him stand up and walk across to the console. His fingers hovered over the wide array of controls. Then he seemed to change his mind. He walked backward to his chair and sat down again. He still hadn't looked at Chris. The all-purpose solution that the young man needed was not going to materialize. He turned to go.

'Christopher, have you touched the coordinate selector?'

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Chris stopped where he stood. 'No.'

'What about the time vector generation unit?' The Doctor's tone was as prickly as an Academy tutor looking for a fight with an errant rookie.

'The time vector what? Why? What's happened to Extans Superior? I thought we were...'

'Never mind.' The Doctor shifted his gaze to the floor. 'What sort of dreams, Chris? Different or the same?'

Chris stood in the doorway. His hand gripped Roz's towel tightly. He couldn't say anything. It didn't matter.

'That bad,' said the Doctor. 'You'd better put some clothes on and tell me.'

Ace was clapping. A slow, steady, jeering clap as Doroth\xE9e downed the contents of the flask. The brandy was burning her throat, but she tilted the flask higher and higher. She almost choked and sat down on the floor with a thud. 'Dare complete,' she announced and wiped her mouth.

They'd both been drinking while they compared identical experiences. Doroth\xE9e remembered plenty, but Ace recalled events with photographic precision, even recent things that she looked too young to remember. They'd been rambling for an hour now over subjects ranging from explosives and places they'd visited to the best way to handle uppity servants and men (not much difference). They'd compared scars, conquests and deaths. Doroth\xE9e had lost her Harley and won it back. Ace had won the bed and a holiday in Paris in the year of her choice. She was flopped on her back across the bed, leaning her head over the side, watching Doroth\xE9e upside down. All the time, she kept a tight hold on her gun.

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'I thought...' slurred Doroth\xE9e, rolling her head. 'I thought that the two of us couldn't meet. . . couldn't ever meet. It's the Brontosaurus Effect. . . or something.'

Ace grinned. 'The Blini-vichyssoise Effect.'

'No, no, the Doctor told me... no listen, listen, he said that he warned Rassilon and that they'd had a lot of trouble with the prototype of the Hand...'

'That's right. The Hand of Omega. And you remember what Lady Peinforte said? About knowing who he really was?'

'Yeah, and the Cyber-Leader didn't even want to know. You should have seen his face.' Doroth\xE9e grimaced a metallic scowl and Ace grimaced back.

'Her face too,' she sniggered.

But, Doroth\xE9e noted, her eyes weren't laughing. They were still like ice.

'You don't believe all that, do you?' Ace went on.

Doroth\xE9e was on all fours, shaking her head as she crawled towards the bed. 'Who cares? I'm crukking paralytic.'

'But what d'you think. . . what did he mean?'

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'Dunno. Never know half of what he means. He just makes it happen.' She put her head on the floor and closed her eyes.

Ace's voice came nearer her ear. 'He keeps bloody strange company, doesn't he? What about the Master and the Daleks? And Rassilon.'

'And Adolf Hitler,' murmured Doroth\xE9e woozily. 'And Leonardo.'

'And President Romanadvoratrelundar. What the freak is he up to, eh? Social climbing?'

'And Lethbridge-Stewart,' Doroth\xE9e whispered. 'And good old Skoda Birianivitch.'

'What?' Ace said in sudden earnest. She leant closer. 'Skoda who? Never heard of him. Who's he?'

Doroth\xE9e lurched up with a sudden cut from her fist that sent Ace spinning across the grey room. Before Ace could recover, she was looking along the barrel of her own gun.

'Don't know me that well, do you?' snapped Doroth\xE9e. 'You thought I was well past it.'

Ace said nothing, so Doroth\xE9e pointed at a badge on the front of her interrogator's bomber jacket. 'See that one. That's a continuity error. It shouldn't be there.'

Ace nodded. 'Blue Peter badge. Lost it on the Watch Tower in the city of the inside out TARDIS.'

'You know too much,' said Doroth\xE9e, getting into her stride. 'Don't know how you did it, but you've been inside my head. You've got all the lurid facts, but you don't have a clue what I feel. And this isn't about me anyway, is it?'

Ace stared coldly. 'You reckon?'

'Call yourself an interrogator? You couldn't interrogate the time out of a policeman. You're not Ace. I'm Ace and Dorothy and Doroth\xE9e.' She managed a smile. 'The Doctor's secrets are his, not mine. So who sent you? What's the game?'

The room went black. Doroth\xE9e was alone with her thoughts.

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'I dreamed I was standing in front of a huge wall. Huge stones, really ancient. No, older than ancient. As if it had been there forever. The stones were rust-coloured. The wall went right up into the clouds and there were birds high on it, wheeling birds. Vultures maybe? I couldn't tell. There was a pair of big doors in the wall. They must have been bronze, but they were all tarnished.'

'This is very vivid,' said the Doctor.

Chris shook his head. 'Yeah. I never remember dreams like this. I wake up and the details go really fast.'

'Tell me about the wall. Was there anybody with you?'

'Not at first. There was a stone pavement in front of the doors. I was standing on it, but when I looked at the ground beyond it, that was moving. It was sliding under the pavement. Under the wall. The whole wall was moving slowly forward over the landscape.'

He waited for a reaction, but the Doctor sat silently, waiting for him to continue.

'So ahead of me, ahead of the wall, I could see the sun rising out of the mist. There were shapes in the mist too, but I couldn't make them out against the sun. I had this urge to go back through the doors. I suppose that means I'd already come through them, but when I tried them they were shut tight.

'And then there was a woman there, all in brown - in a sort of mass of brown gauze veils. Her face was brown too, sunburnt and stretched tight. She was matronly - is that the right word? I don't know where she came from. She was just there.

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'She said the doors were the Door to the Past. So I looked through a spyhole and on the other side, the landscape was all lit red in the sunset. If it really was the Past, then it was all dripping with blood like some sort of schlock-vid battlefield and the clouds were made of bone. And the brown woman told me, "On the other side, the doors are the Gate of the Future." It was weird, but she smelt of roses. I never smelt things in a dream before, but she smelt of honey and roses. Like summer's supposed to smell in books.'

'Very poetic,' observed the Doctor. 'Is that all?'

'No. That's just the start of it. I could hear voices singing. They were children's voices. They were singing something about Eighth Man Bound.'

The Doctor cleared something uncomfortable from his throat:

'Eighth man bound
Make no sound
The shroud covers all
The Long and the Short...'

His voice trailed off.

'That's it,' said Chris. 'How did you... how did I know something you knew, but I'd never heard?'

'You must have heard it somewhere,' said the Doctor smoothly. 'A nursery rhyme at your mother's knee?'

'She always sat us in front of the holovid.'

The Doctor frowned. 'Schlock-vids?'

'Maybe. It's what most families do.'

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A pained expression slid across the Doctor's face. 'Well, a race memory then,' he foundered. 'I take it there's more.'

'The woman in brown said the voices belonged to the unborn children. The ones waiting to be born. Waiting to live. And then she lifted her veils.' He faltered in sudden realization. 'That was what it was like. It was like a shroud. Like in the song. And under it, there was an old hag crouching on the ground. She was in filthy black rags, more like a vulture than a woman. Her face was all skinny wrinkles and her nose was all beaky and she had an eyepatch.'

'And what did she say?' asked the Doctor.

'Something about, "He's gone away, the gatekeeper." Her voice was like a croak. And then she said' (he paced it out carefully), '"The Door to the Past is locked. Nothing gets through. It's forbidden." And then something about, "The past is for the dead."

'That made me really angry, you know? Don't know why, but I started hammering against the bronze doors. But they wouldn't give. The woman in brown had cleared off, but the crazy old hag was still there. She kept cackling at me. "You know me," she kept saying. "I haven't forgotten you." A couple of the vulture birds had landed on the pavement behind her. They kept craning their necks out like they were sizing up dinner. Then she opened her wings above her - they were all tattered feathers - and she ran at me, beating them, and the stench of rotting carrion was coming at me in gusts. I tried to beat her off, but she grabbed me with her talons. Her claws had rings all over them with masses of jewels - and she perched on me. Her claws cut right in. Then she dug her filthy beak into my chest and tore out my heart.'

He realized he had grabbed his right side of his chest again and dropped his hand down awkwardly.

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The Doctor glanced quickly at the console and then back to Chris again. 'Then what happened?'

'I yelled myself awake and fell into the bath,' said Chris sheepishly. 'What more do you want?'

'I'd like you not to worry. Perhaps it was something you ate. Cheese or something.'

'You ate all the cheese,' said Chris.

'Ah.' The Doctor looked thoughtful. 'How do you feel now?'

'I need some fresh air. I thought we were going to Extans Superior.'

'We were. But the co-ordinates got changed.'

'Don't look at me. I was in the bath.'

'Yes.'

'So when do we get there?'

'It depends what you mean by there.'

'Goddess,' complained Chris with mounting frustration. 'Have we arrived anywhere yet?'

'Oh, yes,' said the Doctor. He seemed to be expecting a reaction of some sort. 'We've been here for nearly two hours. I'd have told you, but you were in the bath.'

Chris reached for the scanner control. 'Then let's see.'

'No!' snapped the Doctor.

Chris pulled back as if the control was rigged.

'Leave it. I forbid you to touch it!' The Doctor's face was a tight knot of anger.

Chris moved back slowly. No sudden moves. He crouched by the Doctor's chair and said gently, 'OK. So what would you like me to do?'

The Doctor's eyes darted at him. 'We stay put. I'm thinking.'

'OK,' said Chris. 'You have a think. I'll get us something to drink.' He stood and walked quietly from the console room.