Doctor Who and The Exile From Hell.

 

 

 

Now between the Rust-red city of Ragnathlon and the Iron-black blocky towers of Banza-Xboth, there remained a pitiful creeping trade despite the sharpness of the obsidian plain, and the upwelling of lava from the lower circles. Ragnathlon exported the idolatrous to Banza-Xboth, where was practised a greater range of ironic ecclesiastical punishments, and in return swindlers, setters of unfair taxes and the drafters of small print user-contracts were transhipped to the fire-filled Moloch-pits of Ragnathlon. Despite this doubtless rewarding trade, these were third-rate citadels at best, far removed from the nighted towers of Dis, and less impressive in their way than the semi-professional, partly privatised, torturous Dukeholds of the middle-lowerarchy. This was the industrial hinterland: where dark satanic mills went to die.  At the time of my last visit: Ragnathlon was ruled by an under-fiend of the Abominations and Banza-Xboth was the tyrannised domain of a Lamia of the species Sculptorex Malgrifilant – neither of whom, it may be said, afforded me more than a martyrs’ welcome.

 

Virgil’s Visitors Guide To Dante’s World p34,711                                  Asbestos Press: Dis,

Year of Eternal Damnation:  75,304.

 

 

 

 

‘You cannae be telling me people come here for pleasure Doctor.  I mean if yon’s no

Hell, it’s surely Satan’s...’  Jamie hesitated, he’d not so long ago (subjectively speaking) suffered through an adventure with the Doctor in which he’d been subjected to everything the airport of Gatwick had had to offer in the way of comfort, and it had afforded him a view of modern torments ... ‘baggage checking area.’

            He folded his arms in Scottish dissenting disapproval of the whole Hieronymous Bosch landscape (Zoe’s description of it) that unfolded from before their eyes, from where the TARDIS stood butted against a supposedly red hot iron wall that seemed to be doing no harm to the apparent wood and blue paint of its deceptive exterior, even though the air around it rippled and distorted with every appearance of heat.

 

            Zoe though from a period far after Jamie’s origins in the Jacobite Rebellion of Ancient Scotland (as she thought of it) was no more inclined that he was to regard the scene before them, with pleasure.  It was all so unnecessary surely; hadn’t the scientific education of her own time done away with all this medieval nonsense?  To find it replicated in a giant space going cone in the 73^rd Century, for the purposes of tourism, was as mindboggling as, as, well she was sure she’d think of something it was as mindboggling as in a moment.

            ‘You have to remember Zoe,’ the Doctor had said gravely, ‘that people are complicated.  They like to be scared, and they like to affirm their beliefs on a large scale.  And when there’s a lot of people, it only needs a small number to really believe something, to make it worth someone else’s while to build it.  This whole, ah, Dante’s World, is no more than a Haunted House ride in a rather rundown amusement park, compared to the great megalostructures and special constructs of this century. No one here is actually suffering. That is,’ His natural honest compelled him to qualify his statement, ‘none of the visitors, are – unless they choose to.’ 

            ‘So why have the Time Lords sent us here, then – if it’s no more than a tatty auld fairground?’ Jamie asked.  The Doctor sighed, and sat down on a hummock. It moaned slightly and distended, and he jumped back up quickly uttering a quick apology and flicking a hanky over the now pinkly flushed mound. 

 

Privately Jamie thought he was looking older, even though their picking up of Zoe – during Victoria’s absence – had done a lot to re-invigorate him.   He wasn’t at his best these days.  He hated being at his mysterious peoples’ beck and call.  His parole, into this strange errand boy’s life, in which former companions were allowed only on sufferance and by the whim of the Tribunal, might be marginally better than the exile that still hung over his head, threatening it with an enforced change of features, (the Doctor called this threat the facelift of Damacles which Zoe had explained was a classical joke although she hadn’t had time to explain the reference before that business with the Autons) but it was still profoundly disheartening for someone as anarchic as Jamie’s old friend and mentor. 

            ‘Oh just the usual, Jamie – giving someone a good talking to and explaining why they’re wrong, and should be pleased to be told so.  All without my Masters getting their lily-white tongues dirty.’

            ‘Tongues,’ aren’t white,’ Zoe said, rolling her eyes.  She could be painfully literal at times (the Doctor had a wall on the TARDIS with a Venn diagram painted on it that showed that ‘jokes’ did not have to reside full within the circle marked ‘truthful statements about nominal reality’ but it hadn’t settled the issue.  She’d merely remarked that she did expect them to fall fully within the circle marked ‘being funny’ and had written ‘facelift of Damocles’ outside it with an exclamation mark, by way of counter-demonstration.

            ‘We’re going to meet a fellow exile’.

            ‘Who?’ Jamie and Zoe both asked.

‘Lucifuge Rofocale – Ex Prime Minister of Hell, now Dante’s World’s technical advisor.’  The Doctor beamed at Jamie and Zoe.  ‘He’s not an exile from my lot, he’s a disgraced Daemon.  I’ve always wanted to meet him.   (The Doctor explained quickly that the Daemons were an ancient space travelling species, and not at all actual Demons, at which Zoe felt somewhat reassured, but Jamie looked unconvinced. He also explained that they should on no account take any gift from the Daemon, especially of knowledge without agreed payment.  They understood this for it was only a week or so ago, they had encountered the sinister ox-bow train, in its own temporal backwater, and the rules of Fae and Hell are cut from similar cloth.) 

            ‘Why was he exiled?  Did he wander off like someone we know,’ Zoe teased.

The Doctor considered.  ‘It was a little more serious than that, Zoe. He was banished from the Daemons’ dark homeworld, a construct many times larger than this structure, because he discovered, rediscovered perhaps, a concept so strange, so outre that it was impossible for most of his species to contemplate it without a fatal brain seizure.  Before the pamphlet he wrote explaining it was suppressed he caused the deaths of roughly twenty thousand Daemons.’

            Zoe and Jamie were flabbergasted by this (possibly for different reasons) and the Doctor hastened to explain.  ‘He was very sorry afterwards – sorry as any of his people can be anyway - he really didn’t mean to do it.  He only proposed it as a theoretical construct too unlikely to be real, but even the hypothesis was functionally lethal to many of his less flexibly minded kin.’ 

            ‘What concept?’  Zoe asked nervously.  Her time was one in which rogue meme’s interrupted the telepress with fake-news on a daily basis and she knew how dangerous ill-expressed or chaotic thought could be. 

            ‘Altruism,’ the Doctor said. ‘Don’t drop it into the conversation he’s still deeply ashamed of it.  Come on, I can see his tabernacle on the plain.’

            ‘Oh, aye, yes one of those,’ Jamie said, in the hope of cheering the Doctor up. He could see full well that the tabernacle was a floating gold structure, like a light framework with banners depending from it, that was spinning lazily above the blood-red meadow.  Inside it a shadowy figure was spread-eagled, a limb pinned in each of the yellow cube’s corners.  Jamie blinked, as if through an invisible telescope, he could see the figure had four arms and four legs, as if two copies of a man had been run together in the middle.  It also had horns, its legs were those of goats and a pointed tail draped around the yellow latticework like a vine across a trellis.  He’d heard the Doctor say their contact was a ‘Damon’ not a ‘Demon’, but surely now the look of the thing was against him.  And twenty thousand of his kin dead.

            While they were taking in the sight of the construct the Doctor called a tabernacle, they were suddenly next to it as if it had suddenly zoomed into focus or the world had fast-forwarded through their walk across the blood-meadows.  Looking back at the vampire-poppies feeding on the pink hummocks between them and the TARDIS, Zoe shuddered.

            Jamie set his face in mulish disapproval. ‘I’ll just be sitting out here, Doctor – you go and convey your

 people’s message to the auld a’ill thing. I’ll nae stop yer, but I’ll no help yer.   An’ Zoe if your nay af yer heid,

you’ll hold yer wheesht  and wait with me.  Yon Clooties, nay a fair friend for any man, Time Lord nor  mortal.’ 

He always got more Scottish when he felt his goodwill was being put-upon or if the Doctor was walking into

trouble unnecessarily.

 

            ‘Well, I’m not a man,’ Zoe said teasingly, ‘and I’m not going to miss up the chance to meet a devil.’ 

  She linked arms with the Doctor, ‘come on then’.  And they entered into the tabernacle.  From a distance 

Jamie had seen into it clearly, but from up close, the air between the golden bars seemed to whirl as if the 

Daemon within was constantly revolving, but so quickly as to seem still until the supersonic whistle-lash

of the air around it was close enough to feel, like a prickling in his thumbs.

 

    Suddenly, a horrified cry - Zoe’s voice raised in terror, sounded from inside the yellow lattice.  Drawing his sgian-dubh, and muttering a quick prayer against all the imaginary devils and the single real demon of this place, Jamie plunged after her.

 

It was dark inside the yellow cage (and inside it was clear that a cage was what it amounted to), and it smelt of goat.  There was a glint of white in the dark and a clatter of bone on bone.  Jamie saw, in the shadows, the Doctor and Zoe tea cups and saucers in their hands.

 

‘Och, yer wee baggage, I should have known. Ye’ll cry wolf once too often one of these days my lass.’ 

‘He can’t do any harm, he’s all tied up look’.

The former Prime Minister, was indeed fastened to the interior vertices of the cube, and although it wasn’t clear how he was spinning while the Doctor, Zoe, and now Jamie weren’t – his bisectional symmetry seemed to be a product of persistence of vision. He was there at 180 degrees, and at 90 degrees, but between He wasn’t.  It made Jamies’ head hurt.

The Doctor finished the bite of blood-red muffin, that was in his mouth.

‘We were just, explaining to Lucifuge, that the Time Lords would be willing to negotiate for his release with the Powers of Damos, from what must be an inconvenient, if not a somewhat belittling imprisonment in return for His willingness to contribute a portion of His knowledge to their records.  He would surely find the position of Ambassador to the Homeworld, less trying than this feeble pastiche of his origins, which some might find extremely vulgar.  However’…the Doctor paused…’He seems to doubt my bona fides as far as being able to make promises for my people. Zoe of course vouched for me, but He seems to put great store by rules of three, and trinities.’

‘What we have observed three times, we take as true, Doctor – have you never heard that saying of us?  You have said you are to be trusted, and she has said it.  But what does this young man fingering his knife say?’

 

Jamie looked up into the incarnadine eyes of the creature that could never understand what it was to do something selflessly, without fear of consequences, because it was simply right.

            ‘She doesn’t know,’ he said, ‘she joined us again only recently. She’s never had any reason to doubt him’.

            ‘Jamie!’  Zoe was shocked, was this his response to the ruse that had persuaded him to enter the tabernacle? Surely he wouldn’t jeopardise the diplomatic negotiations of the higher powers in a fit of Scottish pique! 

            ‘Yon’s not the Doctor, not really.’

            ‘What are you saying, you hairy highlander,’ the Doctor’s voice was aggrieved, but his eyes gleamed in the darkness.

            ‘The Tribunal changed his face and sent him into exile on Earth, and they sent Zoe and me back to our own time and made us forget everything but our first adventure with him.  So for me I was back in the Highlands, I suppose, and Zoe there was back on her Space Wheel, and so it was for the Real Doctor, and the Real Jamie, and the Real Zoe too for all I know.’

 

            ‘And yet are you not real? I observe the three of you: most clearly?’

 

‘Well how they explained it to me: it’s like they took a cutting in time as a man might take a cutting from a tree.  And that cutting was this Doctor, aging in their service, and they took cuttings of me and Victoria (reaching into our own times to do it) and of Zoe. Maybe Ben and Polly too, with a Doctor all their own. But my father had orchards, and apple trees.  You can take a cutting and graft it into another stock and it’ll bear fair apples: and too all intents and taste they will be true apples of the first tree. But if you plant them in the earth, their seeds will not grow true.  The man with us looks like the Doctor, and mostly sounds like him, and so do we resemble ourselves.  But deep inside how can we know we’ve been made true to ourselves, and will not turn deceitful.  They might have made us to lie:  how would we know?  Given us other memories or thoughts, how would we know?

He’s done good since, and we have.  We’ve saved people, still. But is it their good we do, rather than our own?

 

‘What torment it is to live a pastiche of one’s own history.’

 

‘I kenned you’d see that.  If this world is really a fairground copy of your own, your people must have been cruel to pen you here.’

 

‘They are cruel, and theirs is a pitiless empire.  And thus it must be – for what is Goodness but an incomprehensible puzzle.  Why, for instance, did you tell me the truth?  The Lords who made you, will they not punish this transgression?

Where is the gain for which you risk this?  It cannot be your friends’ comfort, for behold they are shocked and troubled, nor your own for I see the guilt you feel at their self-doubt.  Incomprehensible.’

(A great and gusty sigh)

 

It is as well, that my mind is the strongest of my kinds’ :  and yet despite the thoughts I nearly grasp – what a vast wall stands between us.   You little things, in your false prison, and I in mine.

 

‘False or not, fake or not’, the Doctor said, ‘the offer still stands.  Say the word and you can leave this place.’

 

‘Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.  Thinks thou, that I who saw the Face of Satan, and tasted the Eternal Joys of Freedom, and not tormented with Ten Thousand Hells by being separate from all Things Real.  No realer yet than This your Master’s World.  I intuit it now: but one of Nine, soon to be lost to War.   Better a known illusion than a deeper falseness.’

 

The Doctor looked very old, and more pitiful than Jamie had ever seen him.  It took him and Zoe together to bundle him out of the yellow cage.  He patted Jamie on the shoulder.  ‘You did right.  Tell the truth…and shame the Devil’.

 

‘WAIT - ’ the voice of Lucifuge.  ‘Jamie you have risked the wrath of powers that might yet wipe you from existence – to tell me the truth.  We value truth, my kind – pursuing it with every kind of experiment and question.  I must repay my debt to you err you depart.   Know this.  Very shortly as you judge time, you will be sent to another Prison where people who also serve truth after their kind will be awaiting death.  Your task will be to free them, but if you are wise, they may yet free you, all of you.  Go, my little creatures, and when you are real again think of me with your perverse minds, in that strange mode you have - what is the word you use?  Think of me "kindly", when you are real.