Heart of Tardis Read online

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  HEART OF TARDIS

  DAVE STONE

  Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd,

  Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

  London W12 OTT

  First published 2000

  Copyright © Dave Stone 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC

  Format © BBC 1963

  Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

  ISBN 0 563 55596 3

  Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2000

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank all the people who offered advice and examples for dealing with the second Doctor as played by Patrick Troughton, what he might say and how he might be reasonably expected act in any given circumstances. All of that advice was good, and the fact that I’ve still managed to get things completely and utterly wrong is a reflection on my own stupidity rather than on that of anyone else.

  A number of the ideas in this book have been developed from a story I wrote for Perfect Timing II, a charitable publication which can be obtained in return for a fixed donation to the Foundation for the Study of Infant Death (FSID), of which one Colin Baker is chairman. Personally, I’d get it like a shot if I were you - if only for all the incredibly good professional and/or Who-related writers and artists who are in it and aren’t me. Details can be obtained from ‘Perfect Timing’, 70 Eltham Drive, Aspley, Nottingham NG8 6BQ, United Kingdom, or, for the Net-connected, http://sauna.net/perfecttiming/ - all profits go to the FSID, so if writing via Snail Mail, don’t forget the international reply coupon or SAE.

  Preamble

  Until comparatively recently, in novelistic fiction, it was a common practice to convey a particular kind of narrative break by way of three little asterisks, like this:

  * * *

  The form originated as a method of censorship, self or otherwise, in more circumlocutionary times. The daddy smouldering hero, for example, would be reaching for the winsome heroine, ripping off such bodices as appropriately needed to be ripped, bearing her towards the nearest available flat surface and...

  * * *

  ...we were suddenly catching up with them next morning, over kedgeree and a plate of kidneys and with no sign of the previous unpleasantness save for the resulting happy languor. With the post-Victorian increase of permissible frankness, however, the primary function of the form atrophied and it took on secondary, intentionally structural connotations. Instead of simply meaning later that day - for which, after all, you just have to say ‘later that day’ - it came to mean a distinct kind of break, a switch between two basic and entirely distinct states, a plunge, in narrative terms, over the lip of what topologists call a catastrophe curve. A fracture in place and time.

  * * *

  I mention all this simply because the form, of late, seems to have been devalued to the point where it merely crops up when a section break happens to fall at the end of a page, or as a facile typographic trick to set off every single section no matter what the context of transition - and which, coincidentally, helps bump up the page count like nobody’s business. Those are tricks I’m not going to play. So when you come across those three little asterisks in the following, be aware that they actually mean something.

  DS, London, 1999/2000

  How they strut and stammer, stagger and reel to and fro like madmen... A man once drunk with wine or strong drink rather resembleth a brute than a Christian man. For do not his eyes begin to stare and to be red, fiery and bleared, blubbering forth seas of tears? Doth he not foam and froth at the mouth like a boar? Doth not his tongue falter and stammer in his mouth?

  Doth not his head seem heavy as a millstone, he not being able to bear it up? Are not his wits and spirits, as it were, drowned? Is not his understanding altogether decayed? Do not his hands, and all his body vibrate, quiver and shake, as it were with a quotidian fever?

  Besides these, it casteth hint into a dropsy or pleurisy, nothing so soon; it enfeebleth the sinews, it weakeneth the natural strength, it corrupteth the blood, it dissolveth the whole man at length, and finally maketh him forgetful of himself altogether, so that what he doth being drunk, he remembereth not being sober. The Drunkard, in his drunkenness, killeth his friend, revileth his lover, discloseth secrets, and regardeth no man.

  Philip Stubbs, The Anatomie of Abuses

  A York man told Howden magistrates yesterday he felt

  ‘violent’ after seeing the James Bond film Thunderball. He pleaded guilty to stealing binder twine, assaulting a policeman, destroying a pigeon cote and damaging a police raincoat.

  1960s news story, Yorkshire Evening Press

  Gentlemen, of course I’m joking, and I know that I am not doing it very successfully, but you know you mustn’t take everything I say as a joke. I may be joking through clenched teeth.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

  Prologue

  The preliminary agronomy of cyclones

  Lieutenant Joel Haasterman wrapped his windcheater tight around him in an unconscious attempt to protect himself from the sodden air - it wasn’t the cold so much as the miserable dankness of the place that got to him. When Haasterman had first heard the term ‘peasouper’ he had never anticipated how literally and liquidly correct it was: he felt like he was stepping into an almost solid mass of filthy airborne sludge. It was a conscious effort even to breathe.

  In the middle distance off to one side, the winter night sky flared, the source of light lost in the haze of smog. There was the multiple crack of cluster-bomb detonation. Instinctively, Haasterman made to duck, then caught himself and grimaced ruefully With the memories of the Blitz so fresh, you’d think the Brits would have had quite enough of all things explosive, far less would congregate on parkland or unsafe bomb sites to let a bunch more off.

  The thought of it gave him a kind of queasy pang of unease that was hard to define, and it was a moment before he pinned it down. It was simply that fireworks in the early winter rather than in the height of summer felt wrong. It was just another of those things that the USAAC overseas-operational familiarisation movies, supposed to introduce you to British folk and their quaint and eccentric ways, had never touched upon. It was another little basic wrongness that made arriving in a country that supposedly shared a colonial language and culture more like finding yourself in one of those parallel worlds they liked to talk of in Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science.

  A grubby lee-tide wash of hat-and-overcoat-bundled humanity streamed past him, seemingly intent on picking him up and dragging him back down into Tottenham Court Road station in its wake.

  Despite petrol rationing, the traffic here on Oxford Street was heavy, crawling at a snail’s pace between cordoned-off and half-completed repair work to the road that barely allowed vehicles to travel in single file: squat black cabs and the occasional private car clotted bumper to bumper, their argon headlamps glowing balefully; the chugging, lumbering behemoth of a London bus.

  An hour from now these streets would be almost empty save for the locals, the inhabitants of Fitzrovia to the north, and the denizens of Soho to the south. They would be heading for the watering-holes that skulked secretively in the side streets, their lights displayed with an air of furtive tentativeness even though it was two years since the blackout laws had reason to be in effect.

  Haasterman could have waited, could for that matter have avoided the fetid horrors of the London Underground in the first place and come by staff car when the streets were clear, but he had an appointment to keep. An appointment for which the place and time was set and non-negotiable.

  For the moment, thou
gh, there seemed to be no easy way to even cross the street. In the end, Haasterman shouldered his way through the crowd and wrenched open the door of an idling and fareless taxi cab, crawled across the back seat and, oblivious to the indignant cry of the driver, stepped out the other side, slither-crunched his way to the pavement over a small pile of builders’ sand beside an exposed pipe and bore left into Tottenham Court Road. It was only when he was walking up it that he chanced across another exit from the underground, and realised he could have saved himself the bother.

  The warren of smaller streets running off the main thoroughfare were Haasterman became lost for a while and was after all late for his appointment with the Beast.

  The saloon bar of the Fitzroy Tavern confirmed almost every American prejudice about a London pub: the battered hardwood counter top, the gleaming beer engines, old regulars’ tankards hanging over the bar and, indeed, little caricatures of past regulars on the walls, drawn and framed and hung with varying degrees of care and accomplishment.

  The Tavern seemed to be the haunt of the upper-middle classes rather than the lower, and had a hint of Bohemia about it.

  Pipes and cigars and trilby hats were in evidence, as opposed to abstinence and bowlers or roll-up cigarettes and flat caps.

  The pub was relatively crowded and rather boisterous - but there seemed to be an edge of desperation to the air of heartiness and hail-fellow-well-met, in the same way that the hand pumps showed distinct signs of worn disrepair and, Haasterman noticed, the complicated myriad of exotic bottles behind the bar had gathered a substantial layer of dust.

  The only drink that seemed to be readily purchasable was beer. Of a certain and distinctly British kind. Haasterman accepted a pint pot of the warm and darkish, cloudy liquid from a barman obviously aspiring to the bit part of the Bluff Mine Host in a Noel Coward propaganda movie. At least a third of the drink was scum-like froth, but he had no idea if that was right or not and decided not to call attention to himself by complaining. He had probably been short-changed into the bargain.

  Haasterman sipped at the foul stuff, the froth sliming itself unpleasantly around his mouth and cheeks, and wandered through the throng and the insinuating smoke, looking for the man he had come here to meet.

  His instructions had been explicit and precise, he thought dispiritedly, with no provision either way, and the man in question was probably long gone.

  From outside there was another small explosion from a nearby bomb-site firework party. Haasterman felt secretly and vaguely pleased when he didn’t react to it in any way at all.

  ‘A not entirely uninteresting phenomenon,’ said a voice beside him. ‘The way that the postures and rituals remain while the old names are forgotten and changed.’

  Haasterman turned to a man sitting alone at a table, puffing insouciantly on a pipe that gave off a sickly smell quite other than tobacco. A small cut-crystal glass was at his elbow, filled with a deep red tincture that looked too syrupy to be wine.

  The man was elderly, bearded and gaunt, a shadow of the shaven-headed and plump figure Haasterman had first seen in the photographs in his preliminary briefing file, who had reminded him of a less avuncular Alfred Hitchcock. The white hair now sprouting on either side of the otherwise bald head was dishevelled, the disarray of one too old to bother, as was his tweed suit which had obviously been tailored years before for his former, more substantial frame. The eyes, however, were still the same and instantly recognisable. They...

  The eyes burned with - not so much a sense of vitality as with a white-hot force of will. A sense of self so powerful as to keep the body alive, if not well, and keep it moving through the world in the face of any number of failures of the flesh.

  ‘The Yuletide festivals of coming months are actually a time of hope and promise,’ the man said inconsequentially, as though he were merely passing the time of day. ‘A sacrifice to welcome back and nourish the reborn sun. Now, in November, is the time when we make noise and fires in a desperate attempt to drive off the wolves that are eating it - and burn our offerings in the vain hope that the wolves will treat us less harshly when the sun is at last eaten up. This is the year’s true festival of terror, the true and ancient meaning of All Hallows Eve - which in your country, I understand, is celebrated by sending children out to eat apples spiked with razor blades.’ He chuckled dryly. ‘Guy Fawkes and his fiendish plot have merely given us the opportunity to once again conduct the age-old rituals in the proper manner.’

  Haasterman looked down at the old man. ‘You’re not serious.’

  The other shrugged. ‘Sounds plausible enough - and when you know as much about the Hermetic Arts as I do, you’ll know that plausibility is almost everything. Sit, Lieutenant, sit. I’d all but given up hope on you?

  Surprisingly, given the relatively crowded state of the saloon, an empty chair was positioned invitingly across from the old man. A small part of Haasterman’s mind wondered why it hadn’t been taken - had some influence prevented another drinker from appropriating it, or was this merely an example of the well-known English reserve that made the moving of an item from its assigned place unthinkable?

  He sat, and glanced behind himself a little nervously.

  Sitting with his back to a room made him slightly uneasy, even though he knew he was probably the only person in the room who was carrying a firearm.

  It’s a bit of a public place to meet up, don’t you think?’ he said. understand that you’re a famous man.’ ‘Notorious’ had been the word used in the briefing, but Haasterman wanted to start things on a friendly note. While the section had no intention of obtaining this man at all costs, a distinct interest had been expressed if the practicalities of the matter were possible. It would be a mistake to louse things up prematurely.

  ‘The joy of coming to London,’ the man said, ‘is the anonymity it affords. It’s easy to become lost in the faceless crowd.’ He gestured sardonically to take in the saloon bar. ‘And strangely enough, my notoriety is more of a problem in your own country than my own. I gather I’m a positive cult over there, amongst those who have read so little as to lack even the most basic understanding of my works and precepts extant.’

  He took a measured sip of fluid from his glass with the regretful control of one who, in happier days, would have been happy to swallow the lot in one gulp.

  ‘This establishment is perfectly suitable for our needs,’ he said. ‘At the turn of the century it was the haunt of genius, of writers and artists. Now it’s the haunt of second-raters, backstreet journalists and latchkey so-called novelists too wrapped up in their own minuscule world to even notice, much less care about, anything not of their paltry and attenuated clique. I shudder to think of the state to which the Fitzroy Tavern might be reduced in another fifty years. Radiophonic actors and pulp-periodical writers, I have no doubt...’

  ‘Besides,’ the man continued ‘for several years now, I’ve had a homunculus filling in for me in Hastings, taking care of my public appearance while I continued my true studies. Just a little something I knocked up from fungus and a word of power. In any event, of course, it’ll have to die soon. I have plans for a funeral service well in hand as we speak. In Brighton, I think.

  It should be something of an interesting spectacle, given the rather overly strict bylaws in effect for public conduct...’

  Haasterman attempted to bring the old man’s ramblings back towards the matter in hand. ‘And your reasons for requesting, uh, repatriation are...?’

  The man snorted. ‘Look around you, Lieutenant. Austerity has turned this country into a bleak and commonplace purgatory.

  Such a psychic environment is utterly inimical to my evocation - and damned little fun on the personal level, I might add, to boot.’ He sighed. ‘One had such hopes for Britain under National Socialist rule - did you ever meet the Mitford sisters? No, I suppose not. You people never quite understood how deeply spiritual Nazi ideology was, and still is in certain quarters - utter nonsense in the specifics, natura
lly, but the iron gullibility of the Wehrmacht would have given me all the power and, ah, material resources I should ever need.’

  Haasterman found that he was growing angry despite himself, more at the old man’s completely unapologetic demeanour than at what he was unapologetic about. ‘You’re talking about collaboration? Working for those bastards?’

  ‘Oh grow up, Lieutenant, do. How many missile scientists have you spirited away by now? You’re surely not going to tell me that your own hands are clean? Yours personally, the army and air force command that you claim to represent and the, ah, Section superiors who are in actual fact your masters? We all of us make the best use of such opportunities as the world presents.’

  The mention of the Section took Haasterman by surprise.

  His activities in Britain took place under more ordinarily covert operational guises, with no mention of the Section even by word of mouth. His surprise showed on his face; the other noticed it.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised at some of the things I know,’ the man said casually. ‘I have a little man whose business it is to tell me these things - and I do, in a quite literal sense, mean a little man. That’s one of the problems, in fact. If the war taught us anything it was that the sloppy, piecemeal way of doing things just won’t hold water any longer. We have to think in larger terms these days, and for that I need the resources of patronage.

  And I happen to know that your Section operates under that precise same remit.’

  He grinned suddenly - it was as if the comers of his mouth had been tugged up on threads and then instantly released. ‘Of course, another reason for my haste is that England is becoming a little too “hot” for me, as I believe you’d term it.