Chapter 7
Darkrise
I often have an actor in my head when I’m writing a part.
Occasionally I’ve been lucky and actually got the actor in
question, but it just helps both me, and maybe the director,
to nail down the type of character. In the late 1980s for
Lungbarrow, I was thinking of the late Patricia Hayes, all
wiry and with a fearsome energy, as Satthralope, Michael
Maloney as the charming, but deeply nasty young version of
Glospin (who has mysteriously turned into a McGann lookalike
in the book) and I fantasised that Peter Cushing might be
lured out of retirement to play Quences. These days, I’d kill
for Leslie Phillips. Innocet, I saw as Angela Down, who’d been
so genuinely lovely as Princess Maria in the BBC’s War and
Peace. Today I’d go straight for the very wonderful Gina
McKee. Alternatively, these days I’d be tempted to insist that
all the Cousins were played by the League of Gentlemen, with
Mark Gattis as a magnificent Auntie Val sort of Innocet.
Cousin Satthralope: The housekeeper is the medium between
the House and its inhabitants. She’s in telepathic empathy
with the living building, responsible for the rituals and
day-to-day running of the place and the Drudges are her
servants. She embodies the House’s possessiveness and sense of
familial duty. There’s a remnant of the ancient female Pythian
rulers of Gallifrey in her role.
Ordinal-General Quences: The Kithriarch, head of the
Family. The elderly parent who only wants the best for his
offspring. He recognised the Doctor’s potential long ago and
had a career all mapped out for his protege. Unfortunately the
Doctor had his own ideas... An alternative Quences turns up in
The close of the
chapter, with Arkhew spinning on the orrery-like clock, the
Cousins in complete panic below and the dark rising up the
windows, was the very first visual image I had of Lungbarrow,
before I even knew the story that went with it.
