And he, Alex, would be the privileged one. The first of the candidates lining up again outside the temple would be brought inside, and he, as leader (again the thrill as he relished the word), would be the first to taste the joy and the deep fulfilment he’d already sampled illegitimately in London.
He lifted his hands in the air to quieten the murmurs coming from the arena. In the silence he raised his voice and called across to the guard standing by the entrance. The time has come. Bring in the first of the faithful!’
At last he’d managed it! He was first in the queue. But Jeremy had found that it wasn’t quite so simple as he’d expected.
He’d idly watched - to tell the truth, getting a bit bored after a while - as the guards, with reinforcements garnered by walkie-talkie, ministered to the injured and carried away the dead.
They did seem to be very slow in going about it. But there you were, it was the same all over. Mama was always complaining that you couldn’t get the right sort these days.
The faithful retainer was an endangered species, she often said, like the mountain gorilla.
He liked gorillas.
He didn’t like being kept waiting.
He was seriously thinking of making his way down to the village to see what was going on when he saw them all coming back through the rocky bit into the clearing, shepherded by a lot of guards, who were being very officious, pushing people into line ready to go up the steps.
Including him.
‘I was here first!’ he’d complained to the big fellow who looked like a Red Indian, who’d manhandled him into the line about twenty from the front.
All he’d said was ‘Tough titty’ - which was hardly helpful -
and turned away.
By the time he’d got to the top, Jeremy had slipped back another dozen places, and was as fed up as the day he’d lost his wallet in the Burlington Arcade and had to go home on the tube instead of taking a taxi as he usually did.
But then he remembered. Whenever he’d flown anywhere with Mama, she would never get to the checkin at the proper time, just to stand at the back of the queue. She’d arrive as late as possible, wander up to the very front of the line, and engage whoever was standing there in animated conversation, as if she was with them, part of their party.
They always seemed a bit bewildered, but the rest of the people behind just accepted it - and only once had anybody objected when she stepped up to the desk first; and then she’d given him one of her looks, and he’d shut up.
Why hadn’t he thought of it? It worked a treat. The faithful at the front were a couple of rather weedy females he’d never seen before. But when he started chatting about the guns and stuff, they just let him stay. As soon as they opened the big doors, he’d be in there.
Thank you, Mama.
‘Why, there you are, Jeremy!’
He turned in surprise. Coming up the outside of the queue was his girlfriend - well, sort of - Emma.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, daarling,’ she drawled.
Gosh! And there he’d been thinking that maybe she didn’t like him after all.
Chummily taking him by the arm, she gave him a luscious smile. He could feel her body through the thin muslin. She wasn’t wearing a bra!
Feeling wobbly in the legs, he opened his mouth to answer...
...but couldn’t think of anything to say.
Luckily, at that very moment, one of the great doors swung open, and a guard appeared. ‘First one,’ he said, looking at Jeremy.
This was it! He’d made it!
‘See you around,’ said Emma sweetly, and walked inside.
No! He made to follow.
The guard put a hand on his chest. ‘Just the one,’ he said, and closed the door in his face.
So what now?’ asked the Brig, grimly.
Good question, thought Sarah.
‘Half ahead together. Steady as she goes, Cox’n,’ said Pete.
‘Let’s get away from those rocks.’
‘Steady as she goes. Aye, aye, sir.’
Pete turned to the Brig. ‘I was just about to ask you that.
We don’t carry any more missiles. That was the lot.’
Thank goodness for that, thought Sarah. At least they weren’t going to kill the Doctor.
‘We’ve got a few hand grenades...’
It was Bob Simkins joining in. A joke? Yeah, a joke.
They could all thank their lucky stars for Bob (and she didn’t give a toss if that was a cliché). As he’d been down in Gunnery Control, he’d missed the blue fog entirely.
The silence had gone on for quite a few minutes after their narrow squeak. Once the
Hallaton
had come to a stop, Bob had cut the engines and brought the wheel amidships. The ship was rocking gently in the slight swell coming from the west. For the moment she was quite safe.
Bob had turned from the wheel and looked at his CO. At last he’d spoken. ‘What the...?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Pete had said.
Bob had turned to the Brig. He’d just shaken his head.
Sarah had come to their rescue. After all, they must be feeling like a couple of right Charlies. And yet it wasn’t their fault. ‘It was that mist, like before,’ she’d said.
That had broken the dam, and Bob was swamped by words coming at him from every direction, even from Bert the signalman. They weren’t just explaining to Bob, they were explaining to themselves.
When the torrent had dried up, there was another awkward silence, until Pete had realised that they were still nearer to the shore than he would have liked and did something about it, and the Brigadier had asked, ‘So what now?’
After Bob’s rather feeble joke, which made nobody laugh, there was another silence.
They were the experts, thought Sarah. Just because she was stumped that didn’t mean...
‘Revert to the landing party?’ said Pete, at last.
‘But it must be too late,’ said Sarah.
‘We can’t know that. I don’t see that we have any option.’
‘And end up in another pea-souper?’ said the Brig. ‘They’ll have us dancing a fandango before we’re finished.’
There was a baffled silence.
‘Hah! Of course! ‘Gas masks?’ said Sarah.
The time has come. Bring in the first of the faithful!’
The Doctor turned away from the window, where he had watched the return of the flying Skang.
Dame Hilda - Mother Hilda, as he had to think of her now -
seemed not to have heard Alex. She was slumped in her chair, utterly defeated.
‘There is a big enough gap for us both to be able to see,’ he said.
Of course she knew that. But if she heard him, she gave no sign. The grief he felt as he turned back was not for her, nor yet for the stunning beauty who was being ushered in through the front entrance. It was for the world, for all the worlds, and the pain that lay at the heart of things.
He was about to see a ritual murder. Before his eyes, the perfect body of this trusting child would be reduced to nothing but a bag of bones.
And yet... there was no way that he could experience in himself the hatred that he knew his companions would be feeling for the Skang. They weren’t fiends from some alien hell, but creatures with as valid a right to existence as humankind, or the natives of Gallifrey, or any other race from the kaleidoscope of living beings he’d met during his epic journeys through time and space.
The ‘first of the faithful’ had halted at the top of the steps leading down into the arena, a dismayed hand to her mouth as she saw the upturned faces.
But after the original hesitation, she drew herself up and, with her chin in the air, descended the staircase and walked down the aisle to the stage and the waiting leader of the Skang with a confident stride, the air of the high-couture catwalk, which said ‘I’m-me-and-be-damned-to-you’.
Hilda’s room, as befitted her position, was the nearest to the platform, so the Doctor had a profile view of the meeting, and was able to hear the murmured voices.
‘Don’t be afraid, my dear.’ It was the golden voice of Alex Whitbread encouraging her as she hesitated once more at the bottom of the aisle.
Gazing up with the wide-eyed innocence of a neophyte at the living figure of the being who had taken possession of her mind and her heart, she slowly mounted the steps to the stage and gracefully knelt, bowing her head in submission.
A hand under her chin, gently lifting.
‘What is your name, my child?’
‘Emma.’ There was no tremor in the voice.
‘Are you ready to receive the reward your devotion so richly deserves?’
‘I am.’
The Skang put his head back and closed his eyes, murmuring some words. Was he praying? Or delving from the depths of their united being a structure, a ritual, which translated itself into human speech?
Emma’s face was already blissful. She closed her eyes as the Skang took her lightly by the arms, and touched the nape of her neck with the needle tip of his proboscis. As it entered her flesh, there was a simultaneous sigh of satisfaction from every member of the watching group.
Emma didn’t even flinch.
It wasn’t plunged in like a giant dagger but glided through the satin skin as gently as the touch of a loving husband with his virgin bride.
At once Emma’s peaceful countenance changed. She opened her eyes and, with a gasp, took a deep breath; and as the sharpness entered her further, she uttered a sound very like a moan, but expressive of a delight beyond imagining.
The Doctor dropped his eyes. If he’d been a near-voyeur before, now he felt that he was illicitly present at an intimacy deeper than any sexual encounter.
The sound of Emma’s voice grew louder as the moan changed into a crescendo of ecstasy so exquisite it pierced the mind. At the very top of the cry, when it was beginning to seem that there was no limit to the exaltation that she could reach, her voice stopped.
Despite himself, the Doctor lifted his eyes to see. Sagging in the arms of the Skang, Emma’s body was impaled as deeply as it was possible to be.
There could be no doubt of it. She was dead.
Everything stopped. The audience... the
congregation
- the Doctor found it difficult not to categorise the watching Skang in some such way - had all risen to their feet at the same moment, the moment that silence came, as if they were going to join in a standing ovation. But after a deep exhalation, they remained quite still, watching with their great eyes.
The waiting seemed to last only a minute or so, but with the utter lack of movement or sound it was difficult to judge, and afterwards the Doctor reckoned it must have been more like five minutes before he realised, with a gulp of nausea, that the dead girl was growing thinner, and that Alex’s grip on her arms was tightening until the muscles on his arms stood out like a weightlifter’s, and his Skang body was trembling.
A strange sound, like a sob from many voices, called his attention to the watchers in the arena. He could see that they were shaking too. Were they sharing the satisfaction, the consummation, they could see before them?
It didn’t take long. In a matter of minutes, the proboscis was withdrawn, and the corpse, now no more than a covered skeleton, allowed to fell to the ground.
Alex sat down on the immense throne behind him, and the rest of the Skang also sat down. All remained quite still as two guards appeared and carried off Emma’s poor desecrated body to the side and into one of the caves in the volcano wall.
A temporary storage place, a ‘chapel of rest’? Or was it destined to become a charnel house for the victims of the coming massacre? How would they dispose of nearly two hundred?
The Doctor wasn’t quite sure what would happen next. If the Prime Assimilation was to trigger the coming of the Beloved, he would have expected it to arrive within a few seconds. Nothing can travel faster than light, but even in those terms the moon was less than one and a half seconds away, and Hilda had said that the swarm that formed the Great Skang was on the other side of the moon. On the other hand, it couldn’t be entirely composed of psionic energy; there must be a physical component, no matter how tenuous.
That in itself would slow it down.
What actually happened was a surprise. As Alex Whitbread
- the Doctor found it almost impossible to think of the thing on the stage by that name - as it sat there with its great head bowed, it started to sweat.
But this wasn’t the glow of perspiration you’d see on an athlete who’d run his course. It ran off the Skang in streams, in rivulets, in waterfalls; so much that puddles were forming on the ground beneath.
Surely the act couldn’t have been so strenuous? If it took so much energy, as the sweat implied, then it was difficult to believe that the absorption could be worthwhile.
But then the Doctor realised. The human body is about seventy per cent water. It had to go somewhere.
If all the faithful were to ‘get their reward’, each of the Skang below him would be ingurgitating the insides of some nine bodies. More if the guards were to be included in the final total. Each Skang would have to get rid of well over a hundred gallons of water... or burst.
The Doctor’s thoughts were broken into by a new sound, like a distant wind. It was growing louder and louder, until the howl of a hurricane assaulted his ear - or was it heard only by the mind? Certainly the tops of the trees growing on the outer slopes of the volcano showed no sign of disturbance.