Doctor Who: The Many Hands (9 page)

The prisoner held the twitching hand, their fingers
interlocking as if they were young lovers. His wand
was in his free hand, pointing it at the creature and
reading the report through a pair of thick-rimmed
spectacles.

McAllister looked around the church, and saw
that everybody was watching the prisoner, even his
own men. He stepped forward and cleared his throat
meaningfully.

'Don't worry, Captain,' the prisoner said. 'It
isn't hurt. The sonic screwdriver shocked it into
letting go, but can't do it any real harm. They're not
compatible.'

'One is sonic, and the other static,' McAllister
repeated.

'Exactly.'

McAllister nodded. 'So the wand is no use to us as
a weapon,' he said.

The prisoner gave him a dark look. 'That's why I
carry it,' he answered.

Then he went back to examining the hand and his
wand, pulling his spectacles down so that he could
peer over the top of them.

'Strange,' he muttered to himself. 'It's not really a
hand at all: it's some kind of organic machine. Looks
like it can reproduce asexually – which explains why
there's so many of them. There's some kind of deep
level programming in here, but it's all messed—'

There was a loud thud from the door behind
them.

'What was that?' asked a voice from the
congregation.

McAllister spun around, but the window beside the
door was completely blocked by something outside.
Several somethings. More deep thuds began to sound
out from the door, and the stonework of the walls
started to scrape and whine as the creatures outside
tried to pull the stones out one by one. He had no idea
how many of the things there might be out there by
now: St Cuthbert's had been here since long before
McAllister's father had been born, and its churchyard
was well stocked.

'They're trying to get in,' McAllister said.

'Ah,' said the prisoner. 'That might be my fault. If
they know that I've disconnected this one from its
host... It could be the same protective instinct that
made them attack your men.'

McAllister looked around the church one last
time. The walls were old and crumbling, and it had
been in need of rebuilding for several years now. If
he managed to escape, he might even mention that
to the Lord Provost. But it was no fortress now, and
he knew there was no way that they would keep out
a determined army of indefinite numbers for very
long. The parishioners were starting to get twitchy.
Presumably, they'd come to the same conclusion as
he had, but knew there was nowhere safer for them
to run to.

'Is there a crypt under the church?' McAllister
shouted.

No one answered.

Very well.

'Howkins,' he said, spinning back to the nervous
soldier by the door. He looked back guiltily, obviously
considering his chances if he ran. 'You're the youngest
married man in the guard, yes? What's her name?'

'Sir?'

'Your wife, Howkins.'

'Betty, sir,' Howkins said.

The soldier was barely more than a boy, and he
kept twitching every time the sound of a blow hit the
wall behind him. Given time, he would make a brave
soldier, McAllister was sure. He had moulded worse
than that in his time. He thought briefly of his own
Rosalie waiting for him in their turnpike house on
Fleshmarket Close. But she had always known this
day might come, and there was nothing to say to
make it any easier for her.

'When the enemy gains entry,' McAllister said
firmly, 'you will lead these civilians away from the
church. Their safety is your responsibility, do you
understand? Once they are safe, you will go home to
your wife and tell her you love her.'

'But the creatures—' Howkins stammered.

'The enemy will be held in the church,' McAllister
shouted, a general order for the rest of his men.
They watched him pale-faced, and nodded their
understanding. 'For as long as is possible, anyhow.'

Howkins swallowed. Something in his eyes
made McAllister sure that the soldier understood
exactly what he had just been given: a life, children
and happiness – exactly what the rest of them were
sacrificing so that the civilians could keep theirs.

'There is another option,' the prisoner said, stepping
forwards.

McAllister looked at him.

'I can go out there and show them that the hand is
all right.'

'They'll tear you apart,' McAllister said.

'They only seem to attack in self-defence,' the
prisoner said. 'And if they don't, I don't think I'd stand
any less of a chance out there than I would in here.
You should at least let me try.'

McAllister looked the prisoner up and down.
He remembered his earlier assessment of him, that
he had seen military service somewhere in his life.
Obviously, they had trained him as well as McAllister's
old sergeant had trained him. McAllister nodded, and
turned to Howkins.

'Open the door,' he said, handing Howkins the
minister's key. 'As we pass through, you will close
and lock it again. If we don't come back, my previous
orders still stand.'

'There's no reason for you to come as well,' the
prisoner said. 'You should stay with your men.'

McAllister just stood by his side.

'You are my prisoner,' McAllister reminded him.
'It is my duty to keep you safe until the Lord Provost
decides that we can hang you.'

The prisoner smiled.

'Well, when you put it like that...'

'Open the door,' ordered McAllister.

And they stepped out.

'I found it,' Monro told Martha. 'A long time ago. It
did not look like my hand then. It was different:
mechanical, less human. I found it.'

He remembered it, just as he knew his other self
would. Thirty years previously, a brewster selling
her ales on the Closes that bordered the Loch had
brought it to him. It had not looked like a hand at all,
the brewster told him, not until she had picked it up
and it had shifted. Suddenly, it had become a sleek
blackened steel five-digit shape. The brewster had
been paid for her trouble, and Monro had begun to
study the strange hand.

'As I picked it up,' he said, hearing his younger
self's impatient tutting, 'its nails dug into me, drawing
blood. I fainted clean away. When my wife found me,
the hand had released me. When I held it again, it was
the mirror of my own.'

'We don't need to tell her this,' his twin said
sharply.

Not for the first time, Monro wished that whatever
strange process had created his twin had also left
him with the ability to read his mind. Would he find
the mirror of his own thoughts there as well? The
excitement that his plan was so nearly complete, and
that father would soon be with him. The desire to talk
and delay that moment as long as possible, because
of the nagging fear that it would go wrong. That it
was already wrong, much more wrong than anything
could ever be?

'It responded to electricity,' he continued, ignoring
his younger twin. 'Specifically in its static form.'

'Aren't they both the same thing?' she asked.

Poor thing. Perhaps it was foolish to expect a
woman to understand the intricacies of science.

'I began experimenting,' he told her. 'Testing the
hand's responses to the electricity. At first, it seemed
to have a detrimental effect, but soon there were
surprising results. On contact with the current, the
hand split itself in two, each a perfect copy of the other.
On my next experiment, one attached itself to my leg,
and nothing I could do would make it release.'

His poor Isabella. How scared she had been.

How scared he had been.

The first day, he had told himself that nothing had
happened and tried to keep it from his wife. Every
moment that passed, the lump on his leg seemed to
grow larger by degrees. There was no hiding it from
her, and he had been forced to confess it all. She had
kissed his forehead, and told him they would do
whatever it took.

By the morning, they had been parents.

'What happened?' Martha asked him.

His other self replied.

'I was born from his thigh,' his young face sneered.
'Twice born, like Dionysus himself. With all my
father's knowledge up until we were separated, and a
new young life to put it to use again.'

'And you want to do that to your father?' the woman
asked.

'You have seen the hands' other properties,'
Alexander said. 'We intend to reanimate our father
and, once he is living, we can use the hand a second
time to copy him. He will be returned to use as a babe
in arms, ready to resume his work the moment he can
talk.'

The woman's distaste was plain to see.

'Please,' Monro said to her. 'Please. You are young
still. Don't think any less of me: there are still so many
things I wanted to do. Now I have another life to do
them with. How could I deny my father the same
blessing?'

She shook her head.

'Another life? Well, maybe.' She gave his other self
a look of pure disdain. 'But yours? He might look like
you, but he's only got your memories up to a point,
hasn't he? Can you tell me what he's thinking now?'

Monro looked at his younger self. The sneer was
still on his face, and he was edging ever closer to where
Martha stood. She stood at the edge of the stage, alone
and vulnerable. It made him automatically think of
her as a student, to feel the need to explain how it
worked until she brightened with the understanding.

He could only hope his other self felt the same.

'He's just a copy,' she said. So reasonably. 'He's not
you. He might still be here when you go, but will that
make any difference?'

Monro simply bit his lip.

Martha could see Monro thinking about what she
was saying, could see him agreeing. She had to stop
herself from holding out her hand to him and telling
him to come on and stop being silly. Partly because
she didn't want to break the faint hold she had on him,
and partly because it would have brought her closer
to Alexander. She didn't trust him not to grab her and
tie her to the operating table. There was something
there in his eyes: there was no way the two men were
the same.

'Your dad wouldn't thank you for this,' Martha
said.

Just for a moment, she thought she might have
him.

Suddenly, Alexander moved. He didn't come for
her, but she jumped nonetheless and found herself
looking for the nearest exit. Instead, he had suddenly
fallen to his knees, grabbing the two disembodied
hands that were scuttling around his feet. He held
them aloft, struggling like two crabs trying to avoid
the cooking pot.

'If you are going to stop us, then stop us,' Alexander
growled at her. 'If you are going to run and bring the
bailies, then do it. But we have work to be doing, and
no more time for your prattling. Are you going to
assist,
father
, or are you not?'

Monro shuddered at the harsh tones of Alexander's
voice. He didn't look up, didn't catch Martha's eye.
Instead he shuffled over to the coffin on the table, and
started to pull off the wet wooden lid.

'Wait!' Martha called.

Alexander just leered at her.

'My father was a great man,' he said sternly. 'You
will thank us when you meet him.'

And he turned away, back to his coffin.

Martha wondered what to do. She knew that
playing Frankenstein in the middle of the afternoon
wasn't going to turn out well, but there was only one
of her, and two of him. The only advantage she had
was that they didn't think she had any advantage at
all. That was usually enough for the Doctor. Perhaps
it would work just as well for her?

'Alexander,' she said.

Monro looked up, but Alexander didn't turn.
Instead, he started shaking his arms as if trying
to dislodge something. Martha could see the two
disembodied hands he held, fingers locked tight into
his: they were holding on and they weren't going to
let go.

'Alexander?' she echoed.

He spun around then, a look of panic on his face.

'Something has—'

Alexander broke off as the fingers in his chest
suddenly twitched. He gave a loud scream, and Martha
watched as he dropped to his knees, his own fingers
hit by a convulsive spasm. The two extra hands he
held still clung on tight, twitching and vibrating and
digging their nails in so far as to draw little beads of
blood. Monro abandoned the coffin and ran to his
clone's side.

'Alexander? What is it?' he asked.

Alexander just shouted again.

'What's that noise?' asked Martha.

She could hear it, just at the edges of perception: a
low, bass rumble that was shaking the floor beneath
her. She looked around, but the whole room was
vibrating now and it was impossible to judge just
where the sound was coming from. It sounded like a
tidal wave was sweeping its way through the building.
The Doctor had said the Castle was built on an old
volcano – was it erupting after all this time? Surely
that was something even the Doctor would have
thought to mention.

The hairs on the back of her neck started to rise,
and Martha managed to get a bearing on where the
sound was coming from. There was no way that this
was going to be good.

'Mr Monro,' she said cautiously.

Monro turned to look at her. His mouth fell open.

The doors burst open.

Martha turned around as fast as she could, but they
were already at her ankles before she even registered
what they were.

Hands scuttled all over the floor, all over the walls,
over the seats and into the auditorium. Hundreds of
them, maybe even thousands. Some of them had to
be the ones from the cell she had been kept in, but
not all of them surely. The room just wasn't that big.
Even the lecture theatre seemed too small to contain
the horde of hands that was pouring through the
doorway and rushing towards her.

And past her.

Monro gave a scream.

Martha spun back again, all thoughts of escape
forgotten: the two Alexander Monros needed her
help. The hands were pretty much ignoring the elder
but, as they fought and flurried to reach the younger,
many accidentally struck him just as hard as if they'd
meant it. The old man barely seemed to notice. Instead
he clawed and pulled at the hands, crying out as they
attached themselves to his clone. Alexander was fast
disappearing beneath a mass of writhing grey flesh.

Martha knew there was nothing they could do:
even as Monro managed to get one hand to release its
grip, another five had already clung tight. Alexander
himself didn't even seem to be struggling, but then
he had that extra hand buried in his chest – had it
somehow been preparing him for this moment? It
didn't matter: Martha jumped forward and grabbed
hold of Monro's arm, pulling him sharply away.

'We've got to go,' Martha shouted.

'But—' the old anatomist tried to argue.

'Now!'

And Martha pulled him again, away from the door
at the far end of the auditorium and towards the side
entrance they had brought the coffin in from. She
could only hope that there was another way out from
back there, and that it was one that wasn't already
blocked by more hands scrabbling towards them. At
least Monro seemed to realise the inevitable, and gave
up trying to pull away from her. He gave one last look
over his shoulder at the ball of flesh that had buried
Alexander, and then he bolted for the door.

Martha paused only to scoop up a stray hand, and
then ran.

Its fingers flexed as she ran.

The hands threw themselves at the loci, acting on pure
animal instinct and nothing more. Fingers clutched
at fingers, and hands grabbed wrists, and slowly
the mess of writhing digits began to take the shape
of something else. As each hand touched another,
tendrils of electricity and intelligence reached out and
joined. Slowly, the intelligence was taking shape. The
understanding that the hands had been damaged –
were still damaged – began to emerge. The knowledge
that in their confusion they had each been attaching
themselves to a different loci, when they should have
been merging and joining around a single whole.

Then the pain, and the sudden clarity.

The sonic burst that had repaired them.

It took a few minutes for the emerging intelligence
to begin to distinguish between what was inside itself
and what was out. It felt the wood under its skin, and
it felt the cold damp air, but it didn't quite understand
yet that these were things that weren't a part of it. It
felt the sparking panic of the loci suddenly subsumed
under the creature's growing awareness. Of itself, as
one.

As its understanding grew, it began to sense those
hands that were still outside of itself, and called them
all to it. It knew it could only reach the stage of truly
knowing what it was once it had the critical mass that
every hand could provide. It also knew that it was not
alone in the room, that there two others in the room
that weren't it. It felt, as one of them reached down
and grabbed a struggling hand from the floor and
then ran from the room.

It didn't yet know itself, but it found that it could
know anger.

So it grew legs and gave chase.