Falls the Shadow (25 page)

He knew their names.
Knew
.

They were both beautiful from a humanoid point of view, perfect. The Doctor had never cared for perfection.

‘Get out of my way,’ he heard himself say.

Gabriel and Tanith moved aside, and the Doctor continued his journey. He didn’t look back. He was afraid something terrible would happen if he tried.

The Doctor reached the top step gasping for breath. There was a pain under his ribs too, there had been one for most of the climb. He’d had the determination to ignore it on the way up. Now, at the summit, he felt it burning beneath his hearts, a burst of hot agony every couple of seconds. He let the pain cut him, waited for it to subside.

After a minute, he realized it wasn’t going away, and pressed on regardless. A door flew open. He barged into the room beyond.

It was an ugly cubbyhole afflicted with a draught and a lingering smell of offal. In the centre of the room was a chair. Strapped securely into the chair was something that might once have been a woman. The Doctor recognized her, after a moment. The thing in the chair had once held him at gunpoint. Her head lay as far back as it could go, swaying slightly in the draught. A square of white cloth lay across her face, its shape moulding round her features. Two jagged pink stains had swelled and smeared on the surface of the cloth, discolouring it.

The head of the thing rolled to one side, falling to face the Doctor. The cloth slipped away. Carefully the Doctor retrieved it and tied it into a blindfold across Page’s face. He was trembling as he drew the knots tight. He remembered Ace and Bernice, and shuddered.

The lips of the thing twitched, formed tortured words.

‘Who… is… that?’ the thing said, each word an effort, a new pain.

‘Me,’ the Doctor said blandly. ‘The Doctor,’ he clarified.

‘Heard… you were… dead,’ Page continued.

‘The report of my death was an exaggeration,’ he replied coldly. Page forced herself to smile. The Doctor felt sick. He moved forward, tearing at the knots that tied Page’s arms and legs to the chair. Despite her new freedom, she remained slumped in the chair.

‘I… can’t see,’ she said, slightly puzzled. The Doctor bit his lip.

‘No,’ he said calmly.

He looked down and found that he was holding one of Page’s hands clasped between his own. Her hands were small and cold and delicate and he felt more than one broken bone. He closed his palms and waited, in silence.

Quite how long he waited he was unable to remember. Perhaps an hour, perhaps longer. It seemed to slip by.

Eventually he released the woman’s hand, letting it flop.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Don’t,’ Page slurred.

‘I have to find Ace and Benny,’ he insisted.

Page jiggled her head sharply as if it was too much of an effort to nod.

The Doctor strode away from what remained of Jane Page. He crossed to the door on the far side of the room. His fingers tightened round the handle reluctantly. On the one hand, there was the guilt of leaving Page to suffer. On the other, there was fear of finding something worse on the far side of the door.

He twisted the handle.

It was another bare room. A shape lay huddled in the far corner, a human shape wrapped into an embryo ball, knees tucked under its chin. Between the shape and the Doctor was a curtain of cobwebs. The Doctor ploughed through them, letting them fall to dust in his effort to reach the shape in the corner. Spiders chattered on the edge of his hearing. He ignored them, driving himself through older webs in his effort to reach the shape.

It was an Ace‐
shape. Her eyes opened to deliver a bleary stare.

‘Benny,’ she hissed.

‘I’m going to find Benny now,’ he said, trying to mask his worry and his relief. It didn’t matter. Already she had slipped back into unconsciousness.

The Doctor straightened up. His eyes fell on another door.

The next room, he was surprised to discover, was the room in which he had first met Winterdawn – the unlived‐
in, dusty place which Winterdawn’s wife had once used. There was a warmer feeling to it now, as if a great deal of activity and emotion had been crammed into this tiny space during his absence. November evening light was filtering through the window.

Professor Bernice Summerfield lay on what had once been Winterdawn’s bed.

Cautiously the Doctor approached the bed. He reached for Bernice’s pulse and found nothing. He checked her breathing but her chest was still and dead air hung around her mouth and nostrils. Her eyes were dull orbs. Her body was cold, stiff.

He looked upwards, bitter eyes turning to the ceiling.

‘How did she die?’ he asked. His tone was even and banal.

Silence answered him.

Professor Bernice Summerfield lay dead on what had once been Winterdawn’s bed. The Doctor stood by the corpse, and closed his eyes, and waited.

Jane Page’s body lived pain. Sometimes it was a knife slicing her nerves, a fire consuming her skin, steel driving through her marrow. The softest, most intense pain slobbered in her eye sockets.

Jane Page’s mind lived pain. It danced round her soul with deceptive grace, striking delicate blows that paralysed her with agony. The instruments of mental pain were subtler. Old memories rose from her subconscious and into the hands of her torturer.

The memories were hollow. They were real, but the events they described were false. Page vividly recalled a life she had never lived. That torture was worse than anything Gabriel had done.

She remembered herself at school. A serious little girl studying the innocent faces of her classmates, watching for their weaknesses. A distant voice called her name. Her name. She tried to catch it but the voice was weak. The girl who was not yet Jane Page rose behind her desk, repeating a mantra drummed into her from birth.

Nation is strength. Dum‐
de‐
dum.

Blood is strength. Dum‐
de‐
dum.

Pain is strength. Dum‐
dum.

Nation is strength.
That was the best joke Page had heard in years. Page’s nation had never existed and never would beyond the confines of her mind. It was a worthless concept, save for the value she lent it. She stared through a girl’s untouched eyes at the Union Flag on the class wall.

Blood is strength.
That was better, Page had blood. It was young blood, less than a day old and borrowed at that, but it was blood. Her strength was there, running through her veins.

Pain is strength,
Page thought,
so I am strong.

Girls grow up. Page grew to understand the meaning behind the mantra, the logic of society. She
believed
it. That was odd. She stared at the faces of the self‐
seeking bastards around her and wondered why she alone was so pure in intent. She’d learned to distinguish the extent of liberty, the need for strength to expand to its full capabilities, the fine distinction between freedom and the baseless chaos of anarchy. She understood the need for the national symbol, the role that racial and cultural purity played in the definition of strength, the need to establish arch‐
realism to purge the individual of idiosyncratic morality. She had made herself strong, the Strongest Woman on Earth, on an Earth that didn’t exist.

The pain led her to the core of her beliefs. The pain showed her how little she was, how
weak
she was. Page screamed and raged and denied it with all the energy she could muster. But it was true.

‘I wish,’ she said, wistfully, ‘I was a girl again.’

She wanted to cry, but there were gaps where her eyes should have been. Her face remained dry.

She heard footsteps, dragging along the corridor outside the door. This would be how she would have to live from now on – by sound. She would have to learn the fine distinctions between sounds, the subtle shades of silence.

The door was opened and footsteps pulled into the room. Then the door was closed. The newcomer stopped moving, became a voice.

‘There you are.’ Page recognized it.

‘Cranleigh?’ she hissed.

‘No,’ came the reply in Cranleigh’s voice.

‘Then who are you?’ she asked cautiously, afraid it might be Gabriel.

‘Cranleigh is part of us,’ Justin Cranleigh said. ‘His mind was clean and new. We were dragged into its purity. We made him one of us, both of him. It is no longer the glass that focuses us, it is Cranleigh himself.’

‘I see,’ Page spat, considering sourly. ‘You’re my fellow shades then? People without worlds? Might‐
have‐
beens?’

‘We are. I am Qxeleq,’ Cranleigh continued, his voice briefly becoming more relaxed and casual. ‘I used to be a student, I must be going up in the hive, eh?
We
know you. You’re a part of us. You belong with us.’

Page considered. The prospect was repulsive. It would be a descent into a crucible of impurity, losing herself in the heterogeneous mob.

‘Join you?’ she replied, coldly. ‘That would be defeat. You’re the weak. So weak you couldn’t hang on to your own reality! It’s survival of the fittest, remember, survival of the strong.’

‘Where I come from, we call it survival of the luckiest,’ Cranleigh‐
Qxeleq spoke. ‘Being in the right place in the right time.’

Page purred. She pushed her body forward and shrieked into the darkness:

‘I’m myself! Jane Page and no one else!’ Her voice vanished with the sound. She couldn’t see the
effects
of her words. Living by sounds wouldn’t be enough. There would be no artistry to killing. She couldn’t watch TV or see a sunset or a portrait. She could never read again. That struck hardest. Without eyes, without sight, without words.

She sank weakly into the chair in which she had been tortured.

‘I am my own woman,’ she insisted.

‘So we gather.’

‘I…’ Page began.

‘We can’t have you arguing. You two should be all smiles and kisses and cuddles.’

Tanith’s voice echoed through the shimmering blackness of Page’s world. She hadn’t heard the woman enter. She assumed that Gabriel was with his sister, but the thought didn’t move her. She felt nothing for him at all, not even hatred. Gabriel and Tanith were unpredictable, their actions pitched on such a higher level of thinking that attaching blame to them was unthinkable. She might as well rage against a storm, against the ocean, against the sky.

Gabriel coughed, disturbing her brood.

‘Little Ms Page is an individual. She should be allowed to do her own thing. I’d prefer to talk with Cranleigh.’

‘Yes?’ Cranleigh replied suspiciously. Page sensed tension.

‘The Doctor and Winterdawn have returned. They won’t like us at all. Go. Be our eyes, our hands, our agent in the midst of their camp.’

Silence ensued, short and tense.

‘You want us to work for you,’ Cranleigh considered carefully.

‘In a nutshell.’

‘Why?’

‘You
owe
us. We imagine you’re keen on honouring debts.’

‘No,’ Cranleigh said sharply. Footsteps followed, out of the room.

‘Well, what do you make of that?’ Tanith said, faking offence.

‘They’ve rejected us,’ Gabriel continued, and Page felt certain that it was she who was being addressed. ‘Our creations have cast us into the darkness. O tragedy, tragedy, all is tragedy.’

‘They haven’t the nerve to stand with you,’ Page spat. ‘They’d have to keep checking their shoulder‐
blades for unexpected protrusions.’

‘We love our children. We would do nothing to harm them. Not much…’

Page felt someone’s hands on her shoulders – gentle, smooth hands – it could have been either Gabriel or Tanith. She couldn’t quite tell which. She felt something heavy drawn up onto her shoulders, sweeping round her like a cloak. She reached for it, her sore fingers finding thick, textured material wrapped over her forearms.

‘What’s this?’ she asked cautiously.

‘A little something,’ it was Tanith’s voice at her ear, ‘to match the pretty pattern on your knickers.’

‘A flag,’ Gabriel snapped.

‘The Union Jack,’ Tanith intoned, lending the words a significance that thrilled Page. It also annoyed her.

‘
Flag
! Union Flag! We’re fifty miles inland!’

‘No one’s perfect,’ Tanith purred. ‘You’ll be wanting a trident and a lion next.’

Page turned away from her, grinding her face up into a sour glare.

‘Why?’ she growled, not expecting a sensible answer.

‘Do we need a reason?’ Gabriel asked, closer this time. There was a casual arrogance in his voice that appealed to Page.

‘Your only meaning is to have no meaning,’ Page announced, more to clarify her own thoughts than to question the unseen pair.

‘Exactly,’ Tanith clapped her hands behind her. ‘You don’t approve.’

‘Perhaps not.’ Page adopted a twisted smile. She seized great bundles of the fabric hanging round her neck, drawing it tighter. She imagined her knuckles tensed and white. ‘This is something different.’

‘Well,’ Gabriel said lazily. ‘Better red, white and true blue than dead. My country, left or right.’

‘And right is might, yes?’ Page asked, imagining herself to be in the heart of a complex labyrinth of argument and counter‐
argument, a vocal maze where every syllable was laden with deep inflexions and meanings. This, as far as she was concerned, was the key question.

‘Whatever you think, little girl,’ Gabriel replied. It sounded like the key answer. Page nodded obsessively, feeling new forms of understanding blossoming in her mind.

‘I think I want a gun,’ she said simply. ‘I have a job to do.’

One of the couple – she knew which – pressed the butt of her pistol into her fist. She weighed the gun, running the fingers of her other hand over its harsh shape. It was perfect. Untampered with and ready to fire. It would be simple enough to rake the room with bullets, smash Gabriel and Tanith’s bodies beyond repair, but Page knew better. Gabriel and Tanith were… ambivalent, but not her true enemy.

‘I am the last of my race,’ Page recognized the quiet obsession in her voice, an obsession that might hold nations together. ‘This flag is meaningless. I must give it meaning. There must be a reckoning, a reassertion of strength and purity.’

‘You’re right of course.’ Tanith sounded humbled. ‘How could we have doubted you?’

‘I am the Republic of Britain. I am the Flag,’ Page continued solemnly. ‘I am the Charter. I am the Executioner of State. I must seek out those who would seek to destroy me from within, the cancer on my body politic.’

‘Attagirl,’ Gabriel was encouraging. A true subject.

‘I
am
Britannia!’ Page declaimed, rising from her throne, wrapping her flag around her. She was determined to see justice done, her image and wealth restored and her enemies’ thrones crushed beneath her size sevens. Gun in hand she swept from the room. Behind her Gabriel and Tanith broke into a rousing chorus of
Rule Britannia
. This was followed by a burst of what initially sounded like mocking laughter, but which she realized must be a round of applause and cheering, distorted by the acoustics of the house.

Jane Page, assassin and Englishwoman, had found a new resolve.

It was nice to have some sanity restored to her life.

The first thing Ace saw when she returned to the cellar was the tetrahedron in the centre of the room, still emitting its pale blue glow, though its gentle throb seemed to have become less regular. Maybe it was just reacting to the chaos it had helped create. Ace couldn’t care less. She knelt down and scooped it up. She selected the most offensive expletive in her vocabulary and whispered it into the light. It did not react, so she tossed it away without a second thought.

She looked round, seeing grey walls, seeing the sarcophagus against the wall, seeing Winterdawn. He was sitting in his chair, hugging his daughter to him, demonstrating an affection which couldn’t be denied. Ace felt jealous for a moment, then dismissed the thought angrily. She hadn’t needed affection. She had grown up in a loveless world and it had made her what she was – basically okay. Good for her.

She still suspected Winterdawn. Of what, she wasn’t certain. Compared to Gabriel and Tanith, Winterdawn was almost likeable – but the suspicion lingered. This was a man capable of more than he seemed, Ace was certain. Perhaps the creation of Gabriel and Tanith hadn’t been an accident. Perhaps he had planned it. The timing of his disappearance and the appearance of the couple seemed to fit together far too snugly to avoid suspicion.

He loved his daughter. Ace knew this and almost felt guilt. Almost.

She turned, seeing the Doctor loom in the doorway. He was a dark shape, like a solid shadow. There was something about his introspection that infected the whole of his environment, creating patches of shadow in the brightest of rooms. Patches of silence too – he hadn’t said much since returning from the gap. He slunk into the room like bad news, squatting down on the floor with his back to a wall. Ace joined him. She rarely admitted fear but the Doctor’s mood was scaring her shitless. She could handle him when he was ranting – silence wasn’t something she could cope with. She lost track of what was going on inside his skull.

‘Did you find anyone?’ she asked tentatively. The Doctor replied with a curt shake of his head. His face was bloated, rank with despair.

‘What about Benny? Did you bring her… her body?’

The Doctor inclined his head away. When he spoke his voice was a drone.

‘I couldn’t bear to touch her.’

Ace said nothing. She knew the darkness he felt.

‘Ace, when – if – this is finished, I’d like you to stay here. I don’t want you travelling with me any more.’

Ace shook her head coldly. The Doctor continued insistently:

‘The thing is, I’m thinking of returning home. It’s time I settled down, high time. You wouldn’t like Gallifrey.’

Ace scowled, trying not to feel too offended by this show of weakness.

‘You’re over‐
reacting. Lot of people you know’ve died. Lot of people out there still
need
you. They don’t know it but they do.’

The Doctor closed his eyes and again inclined his head away from her.

‘You know that if you – any of you – were in danger then I would tear out the cores of planets to help you. Believe me.’ He made it sound like a demand. ‘I can’t go on. Benny’s the
last
, she must be.’

‘This isn’t about Benny, is it?’ Ace spat, keeping her voice restrained and whisper‐
low – it sounded dangerous that way. ‘This is just another guilt trip. You’re a total shit – understand that.’

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully.

‘Of course I feel guilty,’ he said wistfully. ‘I’m bound to feel guilty.’ An edge crept into his voice, lining his words with new sharpness. ‘But I’ve spent the last couple of years of my life with Benny. And if you dare suggest that I haven’t felt her death then our friendship is over. Now.’

Suits me,
Ace heard herself say, but only in her head. She didn’t like the way it sounded.