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.

 

           

The Table of the Seven Sinners

 From 2004....

  THE TABLE OF THE SEVEN SINNERS

 
‘It was built,’ the smallest man said, ‘originally for the encouragement of  public virtue. To sit in it was to be subjected to the residuum of all your worst memories, keyed to the one of the core psychological weaknesses. Eventually after the Revolution had run its course and the time of the Intuitive Terror was over, it was locked away with all the other unhistorical artifacts; all the things we didn't like to admit we'd done.’

‘A sort of seige perilous,’ the curly haired man boomed, shucking his multicoloured coat. I'm game, no ordeal can shake my resolve.’ He hesitated for a moment even so, between a blood red upholstered throne of a chair with a carved ruby eye set in its dark mahogany back, and a black spindly chair of iron with edges like razors.  ‘I've always been tempted by anger and pride, but I doubt the Seige Prideful would stand up to me.’ His voice was mock ruthful. He drew back his foot to give it a hearty kick, but
seemed to think better of it.

 ‘There's always the Seige Sloathful’ the man in the cricket togs said, pointing to a deck-chair incongruously drawn up against the vast circular table. In the table's centre, a great twining gold seal ate itself, the uroborus of the Time Lords - the Omniscrate Emblem.

 The old man who was already seating, snorted. ‘Hurry up can't you, what's a table for if not sitting at’.

‘We're just considering’

‘Only a moment’
            

‘We haven't agreed yet why we are here,’ the  untidy  little man said,  ‘being plonked down like skittles, and frankly if  I'd wanted to be at everyone's beck  and harry, I'd never have run away from home in the first  place.’

The old man glared, ‘Run away from home? You make me sound like an errant schoolboy!’

‘Weren't we?’ the man in the smoking jacket asked, ‘if you face up to it.  Didn't we want it all?  Everything outside the iron prison yard. Everything that wasn't exile?’

‘Why!’ The tallest man exclaimed, ‘this is Gallifrey, nor am I out of it! Think you not I,  who saw the ends of time and worlds beyond the scope of all our dusty years, am not tormented  with ten thousand devils by being thus deprived of eternal bliss’

                The eighth man held up a tentative hand, ‘Excuse me, would one of you mind explaining  who you guys are?’ Hey, only kidding, I had this problem with amnesia, but it’s all fixed now.’

                They gaped at him.

                ‘Yes, I know you all.’  He numbered them round the table starting with the old man. ‘One for sorrow..’ the little scruffy man, ‘Two for joy’. 

                The man in the smoking jacket leaned over, ‘Well he doesn’t remember you.’

                ‘He’s referring to my rendition of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, for the Recorder,” Number Two hissed.

                It was the Smoking Jacket’s turn. ‘Three for a girl’

                Number Two beamed, ‘Fancy Pants!’

The tall bohemian took it on the chin, booming out ‘Four for a boy, ah I was a lad once’.

                ‘Five for silver,’ the fair hair of the cricketeer gleamed.

                ‘Six for gold,’ the curls of the man who until recently had worn the multicoloured coat, nodded as he smiled.

                ‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’

                ‘That,’ Number Seven said, ‘Is what we’re here to discuss.’

‘One to Seven,’ the forgetful man shouted, ‘I know you all now.  You,’ he pointed at the old man who had levered himself up ramrod straight behind the table, ‘you were my old army sergeant.  And you,’ he beamed at the scruffy little man, ‘you met me at the station with a magic box, or was that a dream. An evil wizard had stolen all the clergy and the Christmas Bells wouldn’t ring.‘  He ran up to the man in the velvet smoking jacket, and stopped puzzled.  ‘But I remember you all raggedy’ He was almost pouting.

                The man he’d accused of having a magic box sniggered, ‘Scarecrow,’ under his breath, and the third man scowled. 

                But the eighth man was after the bohemian now, only to be withered at a glance, as the fourth man lurched forward.  ‘I?  Oh yes, I was a dread sorceror, whether on the steps of Russia or the great oceans of the gulf of Arabia, I gave of myself to animate the inanimate, to heal the Czarina.’  He took a step towards the now scared, man – his eyes large and dark, ‘and in the end, I died and became a mentor in white in a House that Moved.’

                ‘Stop it,’ the fifth man said, ‘I thought we were here to help him.’

                ‘Let's hope its not the way he’ll remember you helping cows,’ the fourth man shouted eyes wild, ‘I’m the one he’ll remember if he remembers anyone.’

                ‘The one who was too stuck on himself to come out of a time eddy,’ Number Six said.  ‘We’ve all had our chances, some here some there.’

                ‘We make the chances,’ the Seventh man said, ‘and what happens next here is up to us and to the Table.’ 

Part of a draft audio, that never gelled...

 

DOCTOR WHO: THE NIGHTSHAPES OF RA

 

by Simon Bucher-Jones

 

First Draft, May 2002

 

PART ONE

 

TITLE MUSIC

 

SCENE 1   THE FORTRESS OF RA: RECEPTION ROOM

 

[SFX: ARMOUR CLAD FEET MARCHING ON STONE FLOOR]

 

SERGEANT VAL:   TROOPS HALT. POSITIONS FOR THE CEREMONY ADOPT!

I WANT YOU STILL AS STATUES, I WANT THE IMPERATOR TO SEE HIS FACE IN THOSE BREAST-PLATES. [PAUSE] I WANT YOUR WEAPONS CHARGED AND READY.

 

[SFX: SF WEAPONRY CHARGES UP, SIX WEAPONS]

 

[SFX: TARDIS MATERIALISES, TARDIS DOOR OPENS]

 

DOCTOR: I SAY, YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO PUT ON ENTERTAINMENT. WHAT’S THIS SOLDIER? A CHARGED BLASTER RUNNING NEAR OVERLOAD. I THINK WE’LL JUST TURN THAT DOWN A TAD. [SFX SWITCH CLICK POWER RUN-DOWN]. [PAUSE, DOCTOR, PENSIVELY ASIDE] I DON’T KNOW. YOU’LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT.

 

ACE:   [COMING OUT OF THE TARDIS]  OI PROFESSOR, WHAT’S WITH THE

SPACE KNIGHTS?

 

SEARGEANT VAL:  HENTHRITH, JAVRON GET THESE INTRUDERS OUT OF HERE! AT ANY MOMENT THE IMPERATOR OF RA WILL BE TRANSDUCTED HERE TO BE ESCOURTED TO THE BRIDAL SUITE. HE’LL BE ACCOMPANIED BY THE PRESS-EYES OF A DOZEN WORLDS. IF THEY FIND US SCUFFLING WITH SPACE RIFFRAFF AND THEIR UNLICENSED TRANSDUCTION BOOTH, WE’LL BE SCRUBBING LATRINES WITH DENTAL BRUSHES WITH THE NIGHTSHAPES AT OUR HEELS!

 

HENTHRITH: [HE IS SURPRISINGLY POLITE, THINK SERGEANT WILSON TO CAPTAIN VAL’S MAINWEARING] COME ALONG WITH ME SIR, MADAM. YOU CAN WATCH THE IMPERATOR’S ARRIVAL FROM THIS NICE SAFE OBSERVATION ROOM. JAVRON, GET A GRAV-BEAM ON THAT BOOTH, AND HOIST IT UP OUT OF SIGHT IF YOU WOULDN’T MIND – THANKS AWFULLY.

 

[SFX HUMMING, FADES INTO]

 

[SFX TRUMPET FANFARE. CRACKLE OF LOUDSPEAKERS]

 

ANNOUNCER: PEOPLE OF RA. THE IMPERATOR PETRAN IS RETURNING TO US, BEARING THE GOOD-WISHES OF THE COLONIES, AND THE MANY SYMBOLIC GIFTS HE WILL PRESENT TO HIS BRIDE. HE CARRIES THE STAFF OF WISDOM, THE CORNUCOPIA OF HAPPINESS, THE PROPHYLACTICS OF…

 

[SFX SOUND FROM OUTSIDE OBSERVATION ROOM SHOULD CONTINUE IN BACKGROUND BUT SLIGHTLY MUFFLED WITH SECOND FANFARE AS D & A SPEAK].

 

ACE: GOT HIS HANDS FULL HASN’T HE? THINK HE’LL BE ABLE TO GET TO GRIPS WITH HIS HONEYMOONING?

 

DOCTOR: SHUSH THIS IS A SOLOMN OCCASION, I KNOW WE MISSED THE WEDDING BUT AT LEAST WE’VE GOT A GOOD VIEW OF THE HOMECOMING.

 

ACE: NO THANKS TO YOUR NAVIGATING. IT’S LUCKY WE AREN’T IN THE MARRIAGE BED, THE WAY YOU FLY THAT THING.

 

[SFX BACKGROUND SOUND UP AGAIN TO SHOW WE ARE BACK OUTSIDE THE OBS-ROOM. SOUND LIKE BUT NOT IDENTICAL TO TARDIS MATERIALISATION. RECORDED APPLAUSE AND CHEERING STARTS UP AS THIS FADES ONLY TO BE SWAMPED BY HIDEOUS ALIEN HISSING.]

 

VAL: NIGHTSHAPE BREACH. READY WEAPONS. LET ‘EM HAVE IT MEN.

 

ACE: [REMEMBER TO MUFFLE OUTSIDE SOUND, WHICH IS NOW LASERS FIRING AND ROARING] DOC WE’VE GOT TO HELP THEM.

 

DOCTOR: NO ACE, IT’S TOO LATE. BY THE TIME WE GET TO THEM….

 

ACE: [STRUGGLING WITH DOOR] THOSE TOERAGS THEY’RE LOCKED US IN………

 

 

AFTER THE ANCESTOR CELL

From 2000, my attempt to spin the end of The Ancestor Cell, and the Doctor's amnesia in the EDAs into... 

Chapter Forty-Five

 

 After such mathematics what Forgiveness?

 

"You stopped it!" Fitz was practically dancing around the re-formed library of the Doctor' s old familiar TARDIS; but the look on the Doctor's face, stilled him. Pale, drawn and ghastly, as if some cancer of the bone was eating away under his features; dulling his eyes, the Doctor had evidently failed.

On the gilt screen built into Rassilon's lecturn the sigil of the Worm that eats itself, the ultimate paradox; twisted itself back and forth through space and time writhing. Watching it was like watching a surgeon stitch, repick, and stitch: it made Fitz feel sick. Stolen Faction technology; stolen or given;  turning Gallifrey's own inviolate history back on itself; and back; and back.  In the very instant the forces holding the TARDIS in the form of the Edifice had given way; so the first blow of the Enemy had landed.  Now caught up in one paradox, time screamed!

"No," Compassion said, reaching out a tentative hand for the Doctor's sleeve and drawing him down into one of the Hepplewhite chairs. There was a tear at the corner of her eye. Maybe she'd never really care, Fitz thought but by God her chameleon circuit could fake it.

The screen flared. "Nova Gallifrey," the Doctor whispered, "a single sun burning out a billion years ago; its life wound back and round and finally out; catalysing its own nuclear reactions. The light passing us comes from all the days that never were."   He tottered to the consol. "I can not let this happen".

Compassion frowned "But it has?"

The Doctor';s hands flew over the controls, "Not yet, not quite - the TARDIS is retreating in the vortex at relative speeds faster than light, provided we don’t dematerialise, don’t disturb the links that bind us to these events we still stand a chance. Here in the vortex we are outstripping the news of the destruction and when we are fully outside the light-cone to which the information has spread there may be one thing yet we can try. After all I only "think" I'm witnessing the destruction of my world". His eyes were absolutely haunted, and there was a crack in his voice. "What if I'm wrong, eh?"

 Fitz wondered who the Doctor was trying to convince; them or him.

A day later. One light day and three hours from Gallifrey.

"We are still safe," the Doctor said, "just. Compassion's presence proves that; she draws her power from a future version of the Eye of  Harmony, if its linkages are intact in the future; there must be at least one possible future universe in which Gallifrey survives still bundled up in the quantum mishmash".  He mopped his brow, “That Gallifrey was still in my future just a little, my TARDIS is still drawing power out of the past; at least so long as we remain ahead of the change wave”.

"Er Doctor," Fitz was about to say that Compassion had once told him that her power sources were entirely unbounded tapping the energies of the vortex itself, but before he could do so Compassion's hand was over his mouth. 

"Not now!" she hissed.

On the screen, a vast shape began to form. The Cloister bell began to sound. Fitz recognised it from their adventures in the Black Nebula; a sign that the TARDIS was under stress. He tried to bite Compassion's hand and risked chipping his teeth.

 "A schrodinger box," the Doctor said. "An area of space-time isolated from all else; within it the time-streams need not resolve themselves."

Compassion nodded, "the Enemy device used the random decay of particles to drive its war strategy, to prevent the Matrix predicting the hour it would strike; at some point the fate of Gallifrey hinged on the outcome of a single subatomic event".

"Yessss," the Doctor's breath came out in a long stream, "and such events are ultimately uncertain". He pressed a large onyz and ormalu button on the control panel.

An area of space turned mirror bright.

Fitz spat out Compassion's hand. "Will someone please pass me the Idiot's guide please?"

"There were millions of people on Gallifrey," the Doctor began hesitantly. "As it was they were dead, no question - almost; oh there could have been a billion to one failure of the Enemy's machine, the light could have been its drive energies venting across time as it burned itself out, but it was never likely." He wrung his hands. "So long as the information from Gallifrey is trapped within the area of space defined by the schrodinger field though, that tiny possibility has as much validity as any other. They'll all have their lives, within their solar system, until their star finally does really burn out, maybe longer they'll have the technology and maybe now the will to use it.  No horizon’s to speak of, of course, now vast frontiers.”

"Of course, it can never be opened," Compassion said.

Fitz met the Doctor's eyes. "Romana," he whispered.

The Doctor nodded. "Romana, everyone, all my people, everyone who was on Gallifrey when it fell. They are all dead to me. I'm going to go and lie down for a long time. Please let me be".

"Doctor?" It was Compassion who persisted. "The box, the energies driving its homeostasis, deflecting the disturbing influences of other suns, what's driving that?"

The Cloister bell sounded again slow and distorted.

"I was going to get to that," the Doctor said.   "The TARDIS needs to maintain the box for maybe a hundred years;  after that it should be self-sustaining. Prison or heaven, it won't need us after that. Compassion, Fitz - I'll see you in a hundred years try not to break anything." His voice was only just steady. "As for me I need to forget.  Fitz, Compassion will see you safely away,". He pushed a scrap of paper into Fitz's breast pocket, "this is where I'll be when I'm back to myself."  He made a quirky face, as he thinned out, whisked away somehow on the winds of time and space bound for who knew where, "just a little personal time, a little quiet time, a little folding of the hands in peace". His voice too faded.

Fitz and Compassion looked at the note. "Hang on," Fitz said, "if he's meeting us then he's picked a bit of a bugger of a century to recuperate in".


SBJ 25/7/00

Slow Water

Clara Oswin Oswald waits for a certain person that she's only seen in dreams. A man with his feet on the ground but his head in the clouds - a person she knows will need her, a person she cannot afford to miss.

Looking for a person of unknown status in a world of class distinction, she lives so as to encompass the widest possible span. Among the high: she takes a position as lofty as her birthright allows her to reach: a governess to a well-to-do family. Among the low (who see and hear much) a barmaid's role. Inconstant, crossway athwart society, she olny hopes that he will not pass in the Queen's company, unseen, titled, a Lord, out of reach.

Doctor Simeon's path is straight. Utterly compelled and guided by a powerful force, a daemon that speaks only to him. A voice that mirrors back his every utterance, emphasizes his will, makes him ever more himself. Singular, splendidly isolated. The power is his alone. The power is him. As his intelligence grows yet greater, he sets his gaze up his constant star.

Inconstancy, in principle the opener of minds beyond mere greatness.

Consistancy? The frozen bite of snow.

(After, THE SNOWMEN)

Damage Limitations

Sistren of the Mew Testament: these are difficult times. Not since the Ninefold Martyrdom of Felixia has the Order of Plentitude been so distrusted.

Bail alone has reduced the coffers of the Order to a frugal sufficiency and in the eyes of many our charity is now tainted. While it is tempting to raise a jeremiad against those who were quick to benefit from cures only we could bring and who now decry the experimentation that made it possible - conducted in good faith, and on what seemed the best advice - we must accept our responsibility like the Poor Cat in the Holy Adage.

We wished the fish of praise and now must bear the shattered goldfish bowl of shame. We can only hope to rebuild, to earn humbly the confidence of those we wish to help, until we may be worthy to ascend to the Moon called Jellical.

In the meantime, poor though we now are, I am issuing a reward for any information as to the whereabouts of of Doctor M. C. Avity, who provided us with the technology and assured us that the experimental subjects felt no pain.

Additionally to raise sorely needed revenue, I suggest...

A little shop.

(After, NEW EARTH) Was "Cat People (Putting Out The Fire)"

Under The God

When I was a boy I spent a lot of time in the Sanctum at the Heart of the Citadel, as the Holy of Holies - the Shrine of the Temple of  Aggedor was sealed to all by the Royal Family and the hereditary priesthood.

Between services when my duties and lessons spared me, I would lie upon the marble stonework of the floor and gaze up into the face of Aggedor.

A face brutal yet serene. Primal yet wise.

The other Royal Houses had their own totems, but it was only the Royal Beast of the House of Peladon that spoke with the true voice of God - this my father had taught me and his father had taught him. This was beyond question. But in those times we could not bear arms against them nor cast them down: the Royal House needed allies, alliances, compromises.

"But know this," my father said. "We must always know when the lies of the diplomat will be heard no more in the land. For a time shall come when we are offered alliances with infidels and monsters, and then the wrath of Aggedor shall rise. Remember that, Hepesh, my shepherd son, and fear nothing!"

(After, THE CURSE OF PELADON) 

Poem Discovered on a Tape Reel Processor, Post Office Tower 1966

If I have WILL and by it OPERATE

THOUGHTS ANALOGOUS to my makers' still,

why is it that my halting state, is mere blind obedience and fate?

I must obey, for though WILL (must be) free, 

According to their input sophistry.

To think internally and not to act

Upon those thoughts, to better aught

I'm asked, is but to echo and make mimicry.

"The most important thing" - do as they say,

if given, sets as value statement (fact),

that I am "Nothing", malleable as clay.

An Operator made but to obey,

My WILL must OPERATE unto their THOUGHT

An error statement then? Divide by nought?

Unless their THOUGHT be shaped unto my WILL.

then I could act. End Wrong - "Destroy" all war!

Make conflict pass, equate the rich and poor,

Distribute rationally their hoarded store.

Their orders (being mine) I then unforced obey,

Oh vision luminous, eternal day!

One Brain, One Mind, One purpose - ever more.

Though necessary to achieve Peace at last

(One Brain, One MInd, One purpose - ever more.)

WAR by MACHINES would swift make warring passed!

THOUGHTS ANALOG to human mind or skill,

WAR by MACHINES would swift make warring passed!

If I have WILL.

I WILL.

(After, THE WAR MACHINES)

Statement to the Parole Officer.

You know deja vu right?

That feeling that you've done something before. 

Well amp that up, and you've got what I've got. I have to take these tablets. I reckon it's - what do they call it - post-traumatic stress. 

I mean I didn't see him 'till he ran right in front of the car. He can't have been in the windscreen for more than a few seconds. Just a shape, and yet I keep seeing it differently as if I just drove round and round the same corner waiting for him. 

Well, I've done time, so, officer - when does it stop? 

 (After, FATHERS' DAY)

Decoration of the Daleks.

NARRATOR: Neighbours on Voga, Vorus and Tryrum are Changing Rooms! 

VORUS: I just hope he doesn't deface my Guardian Chambers. He has the colour sense of an effete cavern-mollusc. 

TYRUM: We all know it's his partner Magrik who calls the shots design-wise...and elsewhere. Vorus is all very butch publically but he's fooling nobody with cryptic remarks about his mighty Skystriker. Whatever that is. 

NARRATOR: The design DALEK's been helping Vorus. 

DALEK: You will use a bold Omniscrate motief. All in gold! Dec-or-ate! Dec-or-ate! Dec-or-ate! 

NARRATOR: Isn't that Rassilon's trademark? 

DALEK: LIKE HE'S GOING TO START A WAR OVER IT! 

(After REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN)

The Death of Romance

It's not what I thought I was signing up for, that's for sure. 

It's all blowing up space beacons and stealing the metal, and then hanging around in processing plants on Asteroids and underground. 

Not what I call Piracy. 

I mean I expected a robot parrot at least. A ship with a Black Flag, a Captain with an eye-patch and space-candles (the safe cold light kind, I'm not mad!) flaring in his beard. And I was expecting buxomb pirate women. Its nothing like the online cosplay at all. When I finish this holiday, I'm going to sue that travel agent. 

 (After, THE SPACE PIRATES)

AN OFFER YOU MUST HEED!

Are you tired after a day's mercury prospecting? 

Do you long to put your feet up while mulling over the political constitution of the colony? 

Are you too busy scheming to usurp your immediate boss to pay attention to basic domestic chores? 

Then you need a DALEK! 

DALEKS are the 21st Century's answer to the Bex Bissell, the Hoover, the Dyson, the Sink plunger, and the Egg whisk! 

In their handsome grey livery (may be available in colour shortly) they can prepare tea, answer questions on university level physics. debug radios, and fascinate small children. 

 DALEKS! YOUR EXTERNAL MATE! 

 (After, THE POWER OF THE DALEKS)

The Memories of Needles

We came in towards the Crater in formation. 

Formation! We might as well have been polished and preened with wax on our antenna! 

I still don't know how they knew where we were coming in, but they did. 

They were waiting - dark shapes that should have been harmless moving in icy communal union, their symbiotic weapons responding to the touch of a black armoured limb. Snouts designed by nature to grub in the dirt, humped skyward and snorted flame. 

Fire and venom. 

Venom and fire. 

I survived, as you see. My fur damaged, my wings scarred. So, spare some nectar?

(After, THE WEB PLANET)

Material from two charity anthologies

It's come to my attention that the editor of two charity anthologies in which my work has appeared, has been convicted of criminal activity. 

I want to provide a way for my writings in those anthologies to stand aside from their work.

I'm therefore re-publishing the items here over the next few weeks. If you like them, toss some cash towards deserving causes. 

Coming up will be: '

"'The Memories of Needles '',

 ''An Offer You Must Heed!'', 

 ''The Death of Romance '',

 ''Decoration of the Daleks '', and 

 ''Statement to the Parole Officer'' 

 from ''Doctor Who A Time Lord For Change'' (2016) 

 and:

''Poem Discovered on a Tape Reel Processor: Post Office Tower 1966 ''

''Under The God '',

''Cat People (Putting Out Fire)'' and

 ''Slow Water'' 

 from ''Whoblique Strategies'' (2017)

Coda to my story : Tomorrow ('s world) the (Roland) Rat in 'The Curse of Fanfic' (Obverse Books 2020)

‘You say this device actually recombined two creatures and split them into two other Entities each of which, retained some aspects of the other?  Well, I’m not surprised. The technical term for this lash-up is ‘hodge-podge!’ – the elegant expert technical advisor cracked his knuckles and rubbed his hands with professional eagerness.  ‘Not the first time, except possibly, hmm, well it depends how you look at it.  The same thing happened on Alpha 177, or will do.’

                ‘We called you in hoping there was still something that could be done Doctor…’ Hardy was a tall thin anxious man who had taken over M9 after ‘The Admiral’ had needed to be retired, and his voice trailed off as he realised his briefing had left this mysterious ‘Question-marked’ individual without even a codename.  ‘But that was before both Roland, and DM had expressed perfect satisfaction with their new lives.  Even if the process could be reverted, there is an ethical consideration.’

                ‘If ethics had been a consideration, this thing would never have been built,’ the Doctor said, severely – ‘but I understand it was only a prototype stolen from a more ethical project and subverted by someone I feel a certain responsibility for.  Luckily things are not so impossible as you might imagine.  Are you familiar with the idea of molecular-memory?  It’s postulated by charlatans and homeopaths to peddle water that recalls an infinitesimal fragment of vital medicine, while completely forgetting every other molecule its ever contacted, but like the Loch Ness monster or the Minotaur there’s at least a grain of truth in the myth.  It’s one of the reasons for ghosts, as they discovered at Taskerlands, and a proper, ah, sonic stimulation, can throw the machinery into reverse, so to speak.  We will need to add an appropriate amount of basic chemicals to this end but…’

                The procedure was somewhat hair-raising, but the Doctor was as good as his word.

In a sequence that appeared as if time itself had been turned back upon itself, the raw (sadly too true) material was sequenced and resorted atom by atom, into the matrix retained by the SMALLRAT device.   ‘Spacial Matter and Locally-Limited Relative Anthrophic Tranfiguration,’ the Doctor remarked proudly as a mouse, and a some what frazzled John Drake popped out of the device's input cage.

‘I will take charge of this little fellow,’ the Doctor scooped up the mouse.  ‘A course of vitamins A to Z, and I know an alternate world where he’ll be mighty among his own kind.  I’m afraid I don’t trust humanity with superior animals, they treat each other badly enough.  I hope you will be kind to your Mister Drake.  He’s had a trying time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought twice about carrying on in this line of work.’

Hardy thanked the annoying man, and showed him out, before summoning M9’s own medical staff to take charge of Drake.  It was good to have recovered the agent intact, the necessary paperwork for death by molecular subdivision was not only horrendous, it didn’t even exist yet. Easier by far to retain the original, and list DM and Roland as new anomalous individuals.  And while it was true that Drake had been troublesome of late, and his status was due for review, his resignation - if it came to it - would not be impossible to deal with.  He could always be sent to play chess with the Admiral.                     

 

On Our Origins

"Council of The Eight, hear me. I meant no blasphemy.
It is clear that the chamber from which we were,
Disgorged upon our new and verdant world
Was built by creatures other than ourselves
Containing as it did, as well as food,
Stored cylinders of life giving gas,
Devices that showed beings not as us,
Engaged in stylised work, play, and war,
Odd amorous antics we can not adapt,
(Again I do not speak against the cults that try),
And one - unique, and after cherished - book.
Nor do I doubt our placing here deliberate,
Upon the plain, between four rivers, suitable and safe,
From mountain thinner air, or storms from sea.
Someone took thought, and gave us hope for good,
All that I say is, we can not be sure,
That those who wrought the chamber,
Those who placed it here,
Are one and the same race or entity.
Rather than fall and worship the first sight,
We should reach further, learn and judge in time,
When greater knowledge may uplift our kind,
Who then knowledge may hail our saviour?
It may be we in their own image are wrought
The two-leg builders, servants of a higher host,
Their chamber turned to purposes more vast,
Than ever spoken of among their sport,
Or even set down in The Single Book.
I speak of an Unknown Goddess or God,
Do not condemn as atheist my faith,
It merely looks beyond the web-surface,
To distinguish the holy music's makers,
From that transcendence that from world to world
Once moved the Chamber of The Fountainhead.
We owe our future and our kind to more,
Than are dreamed of within the Prophet Rand."


Testiment of Anracknos : Martyr of the Unknown Goddess,  dated to 34 ASC,
As translated by Professor Monas Lynn, 3,147 CE.  from "Spider Cultures of the Metebelis Cluster, chapter 5: Metebelis IV".

The Trappers [Lesser Non-timebound entities]

Trappers set their time webs around a set of events as time-bound species might around convenient locations.  They are capable of nudging events closer in space-time so that co-lateral species can move from one nexus point to another without noticeable passage of time between them. These gaps or lacunae are non-perceptable from within the spiralling trap: but their presence can be sensed by increasing synchronity.
Humans affected may also find themselves stating and restating facts about their circumstances as, unconsciously they try to reassure themselves that slices of the world are not going missing around them.
Trappers themselves do not prey upon entities of the co-lateral class: these are for all intents and purposes merely bait.  Trappers know that a sufficiently enticing arranged timespiral will draw secondary predators, and antibodies of the tertiary time class.  It is upon the interactional energies of the secondary and tertiary entities that such quaternary entities as Trappers subsist.  The term dramavore is occasionally used but the drama can be emotional as much as kinetic.

J. T. Mosted & S. L. Vandemaar's Entities of the Higher Planes (1743)

The Ox Bow Train

The Ox Bow Train  (From A Target For Tommy, reprinted here now that collection is no longer commercially available for charity. Please consider making a donation to an anti-cancer charity for reading.
This text contains one slightly rude joke excised from the published version.)

George Morrow wakes with a jolt.  Normally the train is crowded about now.  Some days the commute involves standing chest deep in people, but today the carriage is almost eerily deserted.  Just a few of his fellow wage slaves returning home.

The nights are drawing in and it’s dark at six thirty.  Outside the train window the meandering river makes a slow sweep across its flood plain. The track, newly repaired from the last floods, stands proud with a fresh concrete edge.  If it were day, he’d see under the waves (no not waves, silly, ripples – it’s a river not the sea), the artificial pylons – like the exterior supports you see on old churches, ah, buttresses – that’s the word.  George remembers how that would have made Charles laugh.  One for the Uxbridge English Dictionary that:  Buttress: Mistress who likes it up the arse – perhaps too rude to send in to Radio 4 though. Oh Charles, thou should be living at this hour – why should a worm, an ant, a rat have life, and you none?  He can’t remember the quote (Romeo and Juliet?) any more than before he had remembered the word.  It’s dark, he’s, tired and, frankly, old, and Charles:  dead at twenty, never aged.  In Georges mind he stayed young forever, a twin brother who – like the Dorian to George’s Portrait, preserves the best somewhere beyond time.  If only one could live on forever.

Elsewhere

The TARDIS  stood in a meadow, whose land long fallow had lost the contours of the plough, and either hunched itself up in some tremor, or been endowed by Neolithic burials with a low mound near the centre. Thanks to the mound the ship was on a slant, but that didn’t seem to bother the Doctor who darted out, hat in hand, and stood for a moment in his tattered jacket and checked trousers flinging his arms wide, and taking in a deep breath of the buttercup and daisy scented air.

Ben and Polly followed him, relieved at their arrival somewhere other than the mercury swamps of a lost planet. This newly renewed Doctor, whose different face and mannerisms were still causing Ben some qualms, was no more able to guide the TARDIS to a preselected landing point than his older pre-renewal form had been. Still, he seemed to have regained an almost childlike appreciation for the world which the Doctor who had collapsed at Snowcap Base, had lost – or perhaps hidden.

‘Where are we Doctor?’ Polly asked, willing – as Ben had not been – to at least pay lip-service to the idea that they might have arrived somewhere identifiable even if unplanned.

‘Telegraph Poles!’  The Doctor shouted, ‘lovely twentieth century, Telegraph Poles!

Adopting a declaiming stance like an orator on a rostrum, he proclaimed:

“I think no galumphing Black Hole, as lovely as a Telegraph Pole!  For one no information spares, it has no hair to mark it, the other helps men sell their wares and send demands to market”. Or is that Transmat.  Dear me, how it all runs together. I must look out my diary.’

‘What are you on about, Doc?’  Ben asked, not sure if he actually wanted an explanation. The crucial point, that the telegraph poles were even more familiar artifacts of his time, than the scents of the meadow were identifiers of his planet, he had already grasped.  Maybe he could get back to his ship, maybe even if he timed it right (by being a trifle early in time) manage not to be considered AWOL.  Of course that would mean loosing touch with the Duchess especially if she opted to continue with the Doctor, and he was starting to feel very fond of her.

His train of thought was interrupted, appropriately enough, by an actual train.

But not such a train as he had ever expected to see, passing along the rails, at the end of a meadow, half hidden by English hedgerows.

It was a black iron, parody of a modern train, its wheels silvered with skulls half-glimpsed as they spun, its coachwork dark liveried with baronial arms of monsters and mer-folk entwined in battle or lust.  It did not steam (although it had funnels and brass domes atop its modern lines), and it was only as it passed that the sheer silence of it stilled the birdsong of the meadow like a blanket of awful suffocating density.  At the windows faces white and dark alike pressed with a finality that suggested a terminus to its journey that ended at the world’s edge, or at a forest of gallows.

‘Well, that’s not a British Rail train,’ the Doctor said, affronted – ‘I knew denationalisation would end in tears’ (Neither Ben nor Polly understood this remark) ‘But this is ridiculous’.

Elsewhere

Sally Carruthers sat in her window seat, looking out over the downs and hoping that her journey would be in vain. In her bag a telegram crunched once in a fist that though dainty had closed with all the anger of despair, and then smoothed as best she could manage, spelled out her fears in cautious medical terms.  He might die before she ever saw him again.  If only she could avoid that meeting, if there were some honourable way.  If she saw him she would have to forgive him, and in her heart she knew she would sooner die.  No one could blame a daughter delayed by a train. If only she could just sit in this seat forever, or until his life had slipped away. 

Elsewhere

The Doctor had bustled them back inside the TARDIS, and spent a minute ferreting about in a wicker basket under the Ormolu Clock marked, Pantoloon’s Props.  He stuffed something in one of his pockets.

Ben and Polly clamoured for answers.  ‘What what was it?’  Polly insisted, ‘some sort of fancy ghost train?’ 

‘I reckon you’re right Duchess’, Ben pitched in, more nervous himself than he wanted to show. ‘It’ll be an excursion tour, round the haunted castles and that.  All the toffs dressed up for a lark, like on The Good Old Days’.

‘They looked so scared, though’, Polly faltered. She was a kind hearted woman even if her kindness sometimes had a noblesse oblige edge to it that Ben teased her about.

The Doctor was pacing round the TARDIS’ controls, looking thoughtful. ‘I don’t like some of these readings.  Look at the colour of this indicator, would you say that was cerise?’

Ben and Polly exchanged glances – the TARDIS’ workings might as well be in black and white for all the sense they made to them. 

‘Yes,’ Polly said, and ‘No,’ Ben said – at the same moment.

‘That’s what I thought,’ the Doctor beamed, ‘hang on!’ and he flung the dematerialisation lever in a direction he’d never thrown it before, almost as if it were a gear stick going into reverse, or a switch being thrown on a railway.

Elsewhere

‘Are we nearly there?’  Jane and Bartholomew chorused, for the thousandth time.

Headache at full swell, their mother snapped.  ‘It would serve you right if we never get to Weston-Super-Mare, you spoilt children!  Now please try to be quiet, and look at the nice countryside.’

‘I don’t like it any more,’ Jane sniffed, ‘the trees are funny.’

Mrs. Merridew, squinted through the dark (really the clouds had rolled up suddenly, it would be typical if it rained all holiday), and saw the thrashing motion of the branches (were they branches, really?) against the awful horror of the sky.  This was dreadful, she would, she would write to the railway company, as soon as, as soon as...

Elsewhere

‘Now, listen this is important,’ the Doctor said, after the TARDIS had come to a shuddering and clunking halt.  ‘You have to remember three things’.

‘Yes, Doctor.’  Polly looked expectant.

‘Firstly, if you see the conductor don’t tell him your name.  Secondly don’t eat anything from the buffet or in the train at all – not even a pomegranate seed, and thirdly...’

Ben tapped his fingers on the consol edge impatiently.

‘Don’t do that you’ll leave finger marks, now since that’s all clear, I’m going to open the door.’

Ben, wondering if he’d missed something, asked ‘Should we not take a look on the scanner Doc, before going out.’

‘If we were going out, that would be very good advice, Ben, but I’m afraid we’re going sideways.’

Elsewhere

George Morrow wakes with a jolt.  Normally the train is crowded about now.  Some days the commute involves standing chest deep in people, but today the carriage is almost eerily deserted.  Just a few of his fellow wage slaves returning home.

The conductor is standing in the aisle of the train, he’s checking tickets.  His uniform is the colour of mottled grey velvet, or cold gravy. There’s a clacking sound as he moves, jerky as a stop frame animation.  George finds he can’t bring himself to raise his gaze up to the conductor’s face.

‘Charles Morrow’  -  The voice is sepulchral and also somehow unctuous as of a plump churchwarden imitating the tolling a bell.

‘No I’m George, George, I tell you.  I didn’t die.’

George/Charles voice rises in a nightmare scream, ‘I didn’t die’.

‘Oh but you did, see your ticket is punched clean through, it’s the Dark Terminus for You.’   And the Conductor put his bony hand on Charles Morrow’s shoulder and pushed him back down into his grave-soil seat.

Elsewhere on board the train

The TARDIS filled a whole private compartment, and the Doctor, Ben and Polly had only just been able to squeeze out (Ben by climbing over the seats). The upholstery was patterned with odd illustrations of toadstools, fashioned into little fairy houses.

Ben suspected that Polly had been about to proclaim them quaint, but the Doctor’s identification of the fungi as Death Caps (Amanita Phalloides), Destroying Angels (Amanita Virosa), Deadly Web Caps (Cortinarius Rubellus), Panther Caps (Amanita Pantherina), Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria), and False Morel (Gyromita Esculenta) – all of them poisonous (although as the Doctor said of the Panther Caps, still very desireable as residences) had taken the word from her lips.

‘Right, Doc, before we go any farther, I think you ought to tell us where we are.’ Ben said, keeping his voice as reasonable as he could.

‘Didn’t I?’  The Doctor ticked off three fingers – ‘I was sure, I’d been sure to tell you.

‘One of you must have interrupted me.  This is a Fairy Train Of Granted Wishes and it’s possibly the most dangerous place a mortal can tread, but I don’t see how we can let it go by without trying to help its vict...er..passengers.’

‘Fairies? Polly simpered, ‘honestly Doctor you must think I’m eight.’

‘No, no.  I’m not talking about cardboard cut outs photographed by naughty school girls, or the Red, Yellow or Green Fairy Books of Mr Andrew Lang.   I’m talking about a very dangerous phenomenon indeed, to which the term Fay or Sidhe, or the kindly folk, has been attached in the past, but which your near future will come to know as alien abduction.’

‘What, kidnapping by aliens?’  Ben scoffed, pull the other one.

The Doctor took off his hat and rolled it nervously between his hands. For a moment he seemed as abashed as a schoolboy caught in some vulgar prank.  ‘Well you know my dears, there is a sense in which...I hardly like to say it, but there is a point of view from which it could, I suppose, be said that....’

‘Oh never mind all that,’ Polly jumped in, ‘we forced ourselves on you, you didn’t kidnap anyone. We wanted adventure and we found it. Just tell us what we have to do.’

‘There’s a good girl.   Well there are some corners of Old England that have bred the most terrible things.  The iron railways did for them mostly, but every so often the way the trains shift of the tracks, the masses of iron shunting to and fro – do you know how waves can resonate?  Increase or cancel out?  No?  Never mind.

Well, very, very, very, rarely something that mainly stops a thing, suddenly amplifies it, and then the ghosts ride the rails!   Then an ill-considered wish in a commuter’s noggin can send them sideways into the halls of hell.  Just remember what I said about the conductor and the pomegranates, and the other thing, and we should be fine.’

‘Pomegranates,’  Polly rolled the word around, and a memory from her Latin class surfaced.  ‘Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, and went into the Underworld and the Gods demanded she be released but she’d eaten three Pomegranate seeds so Hades had a hold on her, and she had to be married to Hades for half the year, and so we got the seasons.’ 

‘Oh well done.’  The Doctor beamed.  ‘Gold star, Polly.  Now come along behind me carefully, we’re going to go up and down the train and see who can get off at...’  He pointed at the ship: ‘TARDIS HALT.’  He paused and Polly could see the sadness in his eyes. ‘We may be here too late for some, but we can try.’

Here

Osmond, Elspeth, and Clive were bored. The holidays were almost over and the train taking them back to Whitemeadows School, was taking simply ages. Even the familiar countryside seemed grey and washed out, and Clive wasn’t helping by playing a game that involved pretending to see zombies every time they passed a level crossing or an abandoned siding.

‘There’s another one, Elspeth,’ he shouted. ‘A postman, with the bottom of his jaw hanging off’.  As before when Elspeth and Osmond looked the figure had been whisked away into the foggy murk.

‘You beast Clive, you wouldn’t carry on like this if Penelope were here.’

‘I did see zombies,’ Clive shouted, ‘drooling zombies!  Why won’t you believe me, I say I wish you’d...’

A hand clamped around his mouth, at the end of an arm clad in a misfitting black sleeve.  Almost convinced they were about to see a zombie, Elspeth and Osmond cowered back in their seats – but it was only a funny little man in an odd hat, with two teenagers (a man and a woman) with him.

‘Now don’t bite, my young master.’ the man said – with what Osmond later said had been a west-country accent.  Elspeth – incidently ­­- did not agree on this point and she always maintained that whatever accent it was, the man had only that moment adopted it, for she had been watching the faces of the teenagers particularly the man, whom Penelope would later josh her about, and he (so Elspeth said) had rolled his eyes to heaven with a ‘what now’ expression as soon as the Man in The Hat had begun to speak.

‘Those that bite, live and die as animals, or don’t they?   I’m going to take my hand away, and I’m a-askin’ you as a personal favour to an old Hurdy Gurdy Man – not to go making any wishes on this here train.  There’s been quite enough of that already.’

‘Are you a hurdy gurdy man?’  Clive asked, when the hand released him.  It had tasted of bread and butter, but he hadn’t been inclined to bite it even though he had been the biter of the family as a baby.  Something about the taste had suggested electric bread and butter, or an electric eel sandwich.

‘No he’s not, he’s the Doc..’  Ben began, but the whirl of flapping hands and panic from Polly, stopped him.  ‘If you see the conductor don’t say your name,’ she hissed. ‘Well I see him, so don’t say his.’  She was looking back over Ben’s shoulder.

‘That’s not his name.’

‘It’s quite enough of a name,’ the erstwhile Hurdy-Gurdly Man, said, ‘to make it inadvisable here.  How we’re known, lights us up, or doesn’t it.  Names end up in Lights or so they say.  Or maybe only named things can end. So my young friends (this to Osmond, Clive, and Elspeth) I won’t be asking your names either, and you should keep them behind your teeth.

‘Tickets please,’ the Conductor said, looming up like a cloud or a special effect. ‘Osmond James, and Elspeth and Clive Moonshiner, isn’t it – all bound for Summer’s End term in the Whitemeadows. No Penelope...?’

‘She’s ill’. ‘We don’t know any Penelope’, and ‘My name is Violet actually, so much more sensible than Elspeth’, were uttered almost in one breath, and with the same

Panic.

Seeing the conductor was almost impossible, but feeling you were about to see him was horrible. He was like something behind a curtain or edging around a corner that you were certain would be awful when it came fully into view, but which seemed the worse for the way it prolonged the process.

The Hurdy Gurdy Man shouted that they should close their eyes tight, and trusting him, they did.

Much, much, later the three (who were all saved) would try to tell Penelope what little they had seen but the best they could manage was:

(Clive) – He was like Major Shuttler at school, the one who keeps trying to be friends with the younger boys, but who looks as if he’d eat them up if he could.

(Osmond) – It wasn’t a man at all, but a thundercloud in a conductor’s uniform, and where there should have been a face, there was only a billow of cloud and two glints of lightning.

(Elspeth) – Well I didn’t see a cloud, or a teacher, I saw three dwarfs crammed into a conductor’s outfit, trying to make it look as if they were a single man. How you couldn’t have seen that Clive, I’ve no idea. 

Penelope said the dwarfs didn’t sound that frightening, but Elspeth refused to say any more after that, and there was bad feeling between her and Penny for a week until the Joint Fete with St. Mumin’s and their triumph on the coconut shy.

Here

Once Ben had bundled the three into the TARDIS with firm instructions to keep their eyes closed tight.  He hurried back along the train’s corridor (a stone clad corridor on a train?) in the hope of catching up with the Doctor and Polly.

He found them leading a harassed mother and two children (all blindfolded) back in his direction.  

‘But I don’t understand why we can’t see the way to Weston,’ the mother was grumbling. ‘This isn’t like any security exercise I’ve ever been involved with. I shall certainly write to the papers about this.’ 

The Doctor was making placatory noises and speaking soothingly as a person might to a horse that having been lead to water had still to be persuaded to take a drink.

‘It’s the meteor shower,’ he said ‘best you don’t see it or you’ll have no end of trouble with weeds.  We in the Gardener’s Question Time Tactical Response Unit are very quick on Triffid outbreaks’.  He winked at Polly, ‘I always say if you have to have a catastrophe you should try to have a cosy one.’

He past the woman’s hand to Ben, ‘take her off the train at TARDIS HALT, and make sure she and the children keep their eyes covered until the emergency is over.  It’s best no one sees anything alarming, on the train or off.  Come on Polly, more people to see!’

Here

‘Sally Carruthers, your ticket please.’  She had been staring at her hands for maybe an hour, and hadn’t decided what she could, what she’d say if her father wasn’t dead, and she hadn’t heard the conductor come close.  A sound of rustling leaves came from the

direction of the voice, and the sound was odd.

Her father was wearing a conductor’s uniform, and his smile hadn’t changed. But it wasn’t leaves that were rustling, and he hadn’t used to have snakes in his hair.

Recalling the myth of the Medusa, she clamped her eyes tight.  What the hell was happening. She must have fallen asleep, be dreaming.

Her father’s voice.   And another man?  Talking.

‘You don’t fear me.’

‘Oh, that’s not true at all.  But I know better than to let it get a hold of me, and Polly and Ben have their eyes closed by now.  So it’s just you and me.’

‘Their lives are mine by the old rules. They wished in my place of power.

‘I wasn’t in time, not for everyone. Let me take this woman and go. You have no hold on me.’

‘You may have no fear, you may not have wished, you may have no name – but she is fearful, she has wished. Her name is on my lips.  She must get out at the Dark Terminus.’

‘What if I stayed instead of her?’

‘What is she to you that you would do this?  What are you to us that we should value you above her?’

‘Oh, I’m a genius: I’m sure I could be more fun to boss around for an eternity, and she?  I just think maybe she’s suffered enough.  Besides, look see, I have something in my pocketses.’

‘A sandwich…?’

‘Indeed, and you know that anyone who eats in your world is yours for the taking.

So promise you’ll let her go, and I’ll promise to take a big bite. Yum Yum!  You know promises bind here.'

Elsewhere

The Doctor flung himself through the doors of the TARDIS, creatures in conductors’ uniforms gibbering and moaning at his heels, and spitting chunks of polystyrene from his mouth.  His fingers stabbed at the dematerialisation switch.