Falls the Shadow (35 page)

By the time Ace reached the ground her exhilaration had given way to a heavy sense of foreboding. On the roof she had been close to the sky, she could see across the city and felt free. Once her feet touched the earth, she had become shackled. The city was tight around her. She no longer had any way of gauging where she was or where she was going. The streets and alleys were endless and meandering, the buildings close and distracting. She slipped through the city, trying to keep track of herself in her mind, trying to move ever closer to the square where she had seen the TARDIS.

The city came in short bursts around her. She caught fragments of architecture, of signs and symbols, of shapes in the distance, but no movement, no sound. There was diversity here but it was sterile. She lost interest in what the city had to offer, preferring to concentrate on her own ends. The variety gradually become numb. Even the occasional bonfires of corpses slowly lost their morbid sting. She tried to ignore them, finding it disturbingly easy.

She turned a corner. A figure, robed and masked, loomed before her, covering her with a revolver. She tumbled aside instinctively before relaxing. The figure was as dead as anything in the city. He was held upright by a rope tied to a lamp‐
post and strung round his neck. The gun swayed as his arm swayed as his body swayed on its makeshift gallows.

‘Oh Christ,’ Ace pronounced, frustration welling inside her. It was not the bodies or the death that disturbed her, it was the tragedy, the injustice. This city had risen up and slaughtered itself. There was no telling why. The only expression she saw was death.

‘What did you do?’ she asked the corpse, as she prised the gun from his stiff fingers. It was an old‐
fashioned military revolver. She checked the chambers. Six bullets. Shrugging off the sensation of distaste, she pushed the gun into her belt and moved on, leaving the corpse swaying pendulously.

After that nothing seemed to touch her. The city flowed by. She ignored it and it ignored her.

It opened into a square. The TARDIS sat on the far side. Ace stopped, regarding it without emotion. She had spent so long searching for it and it hardly seemed worth the effort. The Doctor wasn’t here. Benny wasn’t here. She was beginning to doubt that they were alive at all.

Still, here was the TARDIS. It was better than nothing. She moved across the square towards it, trotting round the chasms, avoiding the bodies and bounding over the rubble.

She stopped, listening. From nearby, she caught sounds. The crash of water, screams of delight and excitement. Innocent sounds. She turned towards them, half‐
suspicious, half‐
fascinated, searching for their source.

She climbed a mound of rubble and found herself overlooking an expanse of water. It was almost a lake, settled in a depression that had opened in the square. The water was an unhealthy shade, choked with black plants.

Gabriel and Tanith were paddling in the stagnant pool, jumping and kicking and splashing to make ripples and waves. They had their backs turned to her, seemingly preoccupied with their fun. They laughed frequently – long and healthy giggles and squeals of happiness. Ace watched them with a bitter eye, waiting for the moment to break. Her hand hovered around her gun.

Gabriel and Tanith were dressed as if this was the seaside. Their clothes were strewn casually along the shore, swapped for brief and colourful swimwear. Ace cast round, half‐
expecting to see deck‐
chairs, beach‐
balls, wind‐
breaks and ice‐
cream‐
wielding tourists bursting out of nowhere to fill the desolation. The city remained drab and bleak and for a moment Ace found herself preferring it that way. She turned back to Gabriel and Tanith, wondering whether their incongruous behaviour and clothes were just another obscure weapon they were using against her.

They were displaying themselves, Ace realized. Their beachwear was incongruous because it
meant
nothing to them. It wasn’t part of their style, simply something they happened to be wearing. They were showing off their bodies – their wonderful, custom‐
built, desirable bodies – flesh sculptures built from corpses. Gabriel was so sexy it hurt to watch him, Tanith had a body worth killing for (
she
had
killed for it
). Ace felt them pull at her emotions, jerking them to their whims and desires. She felt her body grow tight, hating them for manipulating her so casually, hating herself for enjoying the manipulation so much.

Her palm pressed against her gun, learning its shape.

‘You two have got
severe
body fascism!’ Ace howled at them.

They turned. They stared at her. Ace bit into her lower lip, feeling her body loosen and shake. They had snared her and she was lost.

‘Only perfect people,’ Gabriel said blandly, ‘should do perfect things.’

‘Of course,’ Tanith added. ‘Perfection comes in infinite packages. But we like this brand best.’

They turned to each other, pulled their bodies together, became one body, and kissed. Ace watched all the gory details, sneering.

‘You’re sick,’ she called when the scene became unbearable. Tanith broke the kiss, broke the embrace.

‘If you’ve not got anything constructive to say then kindly go and boil your head and let other people get on with their lives.’

Gabriel shushed her, pressing a forefinger to his sister’s lips. It lingered there and Ace felt her insides churn with disgust, and perhaps a little frustration. She trotted down the slope to the shore, cautious of getting too close but anxious not to lose her grip. Her hand still danced round her gun, wondering how it might be put to most constructive use.

‘We could make you perfect,’ Gabriel said suddenly. Ace looked up, realizing he was addressing her.

‘You’re too late,’ she said grinning. ‘I beat you to it. I
made
me perfect. I made myself Ace!’ She quite liked that one.

Gabriel and Tanith wore patronizing smiles. They began to wade towards the shore, water glistening off their unblemished flesh and finely set muscles, the grim light catching their eyes and smiles. Tanith shook her head slowly and a fan of loose droplets opened around her. Ace squeezed her forearms defensively, wondering why this seemed so familiar.

Gabriel and Tanith met her at the water’s edge. They seemed vividly real and colourful now, larger than life, dominating the drab square. Ace could smell tight damp skin and feel the close warmth of their bodies. They were overpowering her with their selves.

‘We are going to make a new world,’ they said together in a single, melodious tone, ‘a world of fragments and bridges, of infinite experience and eternal delight. It will be our world and you can share it with us.’

‘You can have a palace,’ Tanith whispered seductively, ‘a shining pearl of a building with turrets and spires and flags and everything. To keep you company we will fill its halls and passages with an army composed entirely of stereotypes, or amusingly anthropomorphic furniture, or anyone you desire.’

Ace shuddered, not so much at the nature of the vision, but the allure with which Tanith spelt it out.

‘What about the Doctor,’ she asked, clinging to reality, ‘and Benny?’

‘A room of your own, Benny next door and Doctor makes three? Don’t be so obvious. They’re squalid people. They won’t want to be perfect!’

They took her arms. Confused, she didn’t resist. She allowed them to lead her into the heart of the pool. The water lapped round her waist, clinging to her clothes and staining them grey. Her legs grew sodden, heavy, uncomfortable. She didn’t let it concern her, keeping her attention fixed on Gabriel and Tanith.

Tanith stood behind her, hands clasping at her forearms in a manner that was either friendly and reassuring, or designed to restrain her should she make a break for it. Possibly both. Gabriel stood in front of her, hands pressed against her thighs, warm eyes smiling down on her from what seemed like an impossibly distant height. Ace felt small in his shadow, crushed between their two bodies.

Their hands were warm and wet. That was the most disturbing part.

‘We will show you something,’ Gabriel hummed. ‘If you are ever lonely we will take you out on a dry, baked plain. We will walk for hours and chat about our feelings and memories, and we will come to a great overhanging rock. And we will take you into the shade of that rock, where we can be together for hours or days or weeks or years, forever. Doesn’t that sound like perfection, peace, freedom?

‘There’s a price,’ he warned. ‘Perfection costs.’

‘It’s not much though,’ Tanith reassured her. ‘Only a little thing.’

‘Yeah? What?’

Gabriel and Tanith smiled. They spoke in unison.

‘We want you to
like
us.’

Ace considered. Gabriel’s face loomed over her, smiling benevolently, warm and caring, framed against the sky. At that moment it could have been the face of God smiling down on creation from a crack in an impenetrable cloud. His hands were tight at her hips and his promise seemed strange and attractive in Ace’s ears.

She grinned viciously and spat into Gabriel’s eye.

‘That’s a no,’ she added.

Gabriel and Tanith howled and tipped her up into the water.

She felt herself fall, the hard impact of her body with the pool’s surface, the sudden dragging, the dirt‐
water clinging to the exposed skin of her face and her hands. Dreamlike, unreal sensations. It was only when she was fully submerged and her eyes began to flood with wet greyness that she realized what had happened. It came in a short self‐
conscious burst. It was happening now, not in some distant memory. It was happening to her.

This wasn’t an unfamiliar experience. The water was still and brackish and she was cautious not to swallow, but she didn’t panic. She shoved at the ground with her feet, kicking herself up. Her head burst back above the surface and she caught her breath.

Gabriel and Tanith grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back under. Again there was the shock of coldness and dampness and water flooding into her ears, deafening the world. Gabriel and Tanith’s voices reached her ears, muffled. Their hands still pressed down against her shoulders. One pushed her neck down, holding her head under the surface. She thrashed with her arms and legs, flailing at random. She kicked herself upwards. The couple’s grip remained firm.

How much air did she have? Enough to last a couple of minutes. It depended on how long Gabriel and Tanith planned to keep her there.

After a couple of minutes their hands remained clutched round her. Ace’s world had become dizzy and came in short bursts between blackness. She would have panicked but her lungs were empty and her energy at a low ebb and Gabriel and Tanith weren’t letting go.

Two thoughts came quickly.
Don’t swallow the water
and
Don’t pass out
.

She let her mouth open and fill. The world slipped away.

I am a quantum physicist. I deny what I see.

Winterdawn sat with his back to the window, unprepared to move. With his legs limp and useless he was incapable of rising from his chair, but he was also stilled by fear. He didn’t want to turn and catch a glimpse of the place which had eaten his home.

He distracted himself by reading. There was a book within reach, a miraculous survivor of the bibliocide he had wreaked on the room. C. Moore Wedderburn’s
The Trail of the Black Orchid: A botanical and zoological guide to the journeys of George Cranleigh
, inspired by the author’s own expeditions. Winterdawn had never bothered to read beyond the subtitle before, and now he regarded with some guilt his feeble pretence that he had. Wedderburn was dead now, and the dead deserved a little honesty.

As he read, he wondered if there was any family connection between Justin and Wedderburn’s historical antihero. He doubted that Justin would ever admit to it.

Sandra had tried to write a novel once, before the inconsistency of her sight defeated her. He’d read scraps of it without her knowledge and had been a little shocked to find it full of elaborately deployed sexual descriptions. Sandra had never finished it. Maybe if he’d been more supportive she would have. Then maybe her death wouldn’t have been so total. Even Wedderburn’s dead words – dead criticisms of a dead man – were a snatch at immortality.

Winterdawn no longer feared death, though he sensed it was close. He welcomed it cautiously, wanting to be forgotten.

The door opened. He looked up, expecting to see Cranleigh returned from his exploration. He was wrong. It was a woman dressed in black. Her face was concealed behind a blood‐
stained blindfold and she fondled a stubby, ugly pistol carefully. Winterdawn didn’t know her at all. The woman’s head shook randomly as if feeling the shape of the room from behind her mask.

‘I’m looking for the Doctor and Summerfield,’ she said coolly.

‘Who are you?’ Winterdawn croaked. ‘What are you doing in my house?’

The woman turned towards him, alerted by the sound of his voice.

‘My name is… No,
no
, call me Jane Pain. Page. I am an instrument of justice. A killer, assassin, alive. Your house? You’re… Winterdawn?’

Winterdawn couldn’t bring himself to reply. The woman’s lips curled.

‘Winterdawn,’ she gasped. ‘At last.’

She danced forward and lashed out, her blow bouncing against the side of his head. Winterdawn reeled, pain singing inside his skull. The woman wrenched him from his chair, dashing him to the floor. Wedderburn’s book fell to one side, abandoned, unfinished. The woman slipped onto one knee, raising her gun so that Winterdawn could see into the barrel. He felt and understood nothing. This didn’t seem real, it couldn’t
be
real.

‘Am I aiming at you?’ the woman asked. Winterdawn nodded slowly, waiting for the end – almost excited by the prospect. He kept nodding, before realization dawned and he broke into a stupid, final giggle.

‘Jane Page?’

It was one voice and a thousand. Each was slurred. The voices came from multiple mouths on a proliferation of heads that sprouted on the surface of Justin Cranleigh’s body. He no longer resembled anything human. His flesh was viscous and shifting, creeping like liquid, never still. He lingered in the doorway, skin seething and melting and moulding into new forms.

‘We’re dying!’ The creature’s heads grew twisted from its neck, easing towards the woman.

‘Good,’ Page said coldly, quietly. ‘You deserve it.’

‘Perhaps.’ Mouths rippled and burst from interlocked faces. ‘But who are you to say that? You just love being able to dictate who lives and who dies.’ Cranleigh oozed closer. Page half‐
turned, inching her gun round to train on the closest of the unstable faces.

Winterdawn was so close, it was so clear. He had a perfect view of Page’s tightening, closing finger. He heard the shot echo. He saw the foremost of Cranleigh’s heads collapse into itself.

‘Don’t bother.’ Another of Cranleigh’s faces blossomed out of the demolished head. ‘His nervous system’s gone. You owe for the flesh. Join us.’

Page fired again. Again. Again. Wounds opened in the fluid surface of the shape. Again.

The gun fell silent. The disgust that shook on Page’s lips became fear. Cranleigh’s shadow fell over her. New inflexions rose up on the surface of his skin, flowing around Page, smothering and absorbing her.

There was no sound. No screaming. No thrashing. Winterdawn watched, unable to help himself. It was fascinating. It was beautiful. When Cranleigh pulled away, Page was gone. Her coat hung across the front of the flesh‐
form, and there was a long red smear on the carpet.

And it seemed to Winterdawn that Cranleigh was larger than before.

Mouths opened on the surface of his skin, howling in one voice:

‘Unclean!’

Page’s voice.

Winterdawn coughed violently, forcing sickness from his mouth. Thick dollops of blood came with it, hitting the floor in Rorschach patterns. Winterdawn stared at the mess he had made, trying to make sense of it. It didn’t seem to fit the world. There were no answers – just fragments of death and bile scattered without meaning, without hope of interpretation, without hope of redemption. He felt
useless
.

Someone was beside him, hugging him gently, raising him back into his chair. For a moment he thought it was Jenny or Sandra, and for that moment they lived in his mind. When he looked, he found it was the Doctor’s friend, Bernice. He recalled that she was supposed to be dead, and felt a little melancholy reassurance.

‘We saw what happened,’ she said quietly. Winterdawn saw the Doctor over her shoulder. ‘Cranleigh’s going to have trouble. Page isn’t a good mixer. I expect she was the sort of girl who cried at her own birthday parties.’

Winterdawn tried a weak smile. It hurt.

‘The Doctor seems to think he can stop Gabriel and Tanith,’ Bernice continued blithely. ‘He’s the patron saint of lost causes.’

‘Good luck to him,’ Winterdawn whispered. ‘How can I help?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Bernice shook her head and smiled again. ‘We don’t need your help. You can be safe. You don’t have to do anything.’

Winterdawn had been patronized too frequently to take offence, but there was something about this calm dismissal that
irritated
him. Bernice was smiling at him and telling him he was useless. He was an old man with no legs who had to be bundled into a corner out of harm’s way. He resented that. Her smile, her words confirmed everything that Winterdawn felt he knew. But his body was weak and battered and he was in no position to resist. He resented that too. He sank back wearily.

‘It’s you we need,’ the Doctor was saying, addressing the untamed and daring mass that had been Cranleigh. ‘All of you. I need a favour.’

‘What do you want?’ the multiple voices sang.

‘I want you to die for my sins.’

A siren blared across Cathedral. It filled the air with ugly noise, with sterile muzak, the last discord of the city.

The Doctor and Benny heard it. Benny’s teeth shook in accompaniment to the howl. The Doctor’s expression became dangerous.

Gabriel and Tanith heard it and grinned like wolves. They dried themselves with their thoughts and dressed for the occasion. They prepared props: a knife taken from Bernice, a gun from Ace, a half‐
conscious body lying on the water’s edge.

Ace half‐
heard it in her drowned delirium. She dreamed of Gabriel and Tanith and the world they would make for her. The siren added a welcome sour note. Ace grumbled and moved closer to wakefulness. Soon Gabriel and Tanith would kick her awake, but she had this moment to herself.

Cathedral heard, and understood, and waited.

The Cruakh had collapsed as the city died. What had been the highest tower in Cathedral had sunk into itself, caving inwards and downwards until it was no more than a stump, rotten inside. The siren hummed off its walls. Benny recalled the endless walk she’d taken to the top of the tower with the grey man. This looked much less daunting and – now she had legs to worry about – much easier exercise. It was the shaking that worried her.

‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor said blithely. ‘It will collapse, but not until it’s finished. When it collapses it will be the end.’

‘So,’ Benny grinned, ‘we’re going to bring the house down, are we? I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist that…’

‘We’d be worse off without your sense of humour, Benny,’ the Doctor replied obliquely. Benny frowned, wondering frantically if she’d missed his sarcasm, wondering until she itched with paranoia.

‘They’re coming,’ the Doctor said abruptly.

There was movement in the gloom. Shining white shapes moving.

‘Please,’ the Doctor said quietly, ‘whatever they do, be calm. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

Benny nodded responsibly.

The shining shapes stepped from the darkness and became solid – Gabriel and Tanith dressed in suits so immaculately white they glowed. Their hands and their faces, so vibrantly fleshy, were drab by contrast. Their movements were translated into flickering white light. They were never still, as if stillness could trap them.

Ace walked before them, her hair matted and damp, her expression sullen and single‐
minded. Gabriel held a knife at her throat – the same knife, Benny realized as they moved closer, that Cranleigh had once used to threaten her. Tanith had a revolver, swinging from the back of Ace’s head to the Doctor, to Benny, and back to Ace.

They were props. Gabriel and Tanith didn’t need guns and knives. This flaunting of weapons was derisive, a facetious gesture of strength.

Ace looked aggressive but defeated. There were bruises on her cheek. Benny struggled to keep her anger in control.

‘Is this it?’ Gabriel pronounced. ‘The whole gang together?’

‘Isn’t it great!’ Tanith enthused. ‘The greatest show ever performed!’

‘It starts tonight! Near you, everywhere!’

‘This one will run and run, forever!’

‘The Cabaret Physical!’ they screamed together, voices chiming and swaying against the single monotone of the city siren.

‘Feel free to join us.’ Tanith offered them a grin wide enough to swallow the city. Benny’s eyes flicked coldly from her face, to Gabriel’s, to Ace’s sharp features. Beside her the Doctor trembled and stepped forward. Benny felt her legs move, she slipped in alongside them.

‘We’re glad you could make it,’ Gabriel told them. The Doctor smiled sickeningly. Benny flattened the feeling in her stomach and said nothing.

‘Are you all right Ace?’ the Doctor asked slowly, self‐
consciously.

‘She’s fine. We had to pump her stomach out but she’s right as rain now, and really looking forward to the fun.’

The Doctor ignored Gabriel and Tanith, cocking his head towards Ace.

‘I’m alive,’ she replied. Benny sensed suppressed danger in her voice.

They moved. Ace went first, the knife at her throat, the gun at her back, the Doctor and Benny flanking her. Gabriel and Tanith followed, suits gleaming like beacons in the night. Together they climbed the Cruakh tower. It was not as easy on the feet as Benny had hoped. This time the company was less polite, though hardly less interesting.

The Cruakh chamber was changed. The darkness lent it a greater dignity and obscured the more disturbing decorations, Better yet, none of the Mandelbrot Set remained. Benny had been afraid that some might have hidden while the others destroyed themselves, but she realized that none would have had the imagination. Their absence was pleasing to eye and ear. What had seemed gaudy the first time around now seemed austere.

But not pleasant, she realized, biting her tongue.

Someone, somehow, had erected a seat in the chamber, in the shadows. It was a minimal metal frame with a plastic back and seat. Axles stuck out of either side, seeming small and forlorn without wheels attached. Instead the throne had been raised on a pile of bricks. A few Gothic ornaments aspired vainly to disguise its true shape.

‘That’s it,’ Tanith said without reverence. ‘It’s a symbol, important when you know what it means, what’s attached to it.’

‘It means Cathedral, it means everything,’ Gabriel added. ‘And it’s ours to take. The only catch is who’s going to have to sit on whose lap.’

‘It’s not yours by right,’ the Doctor suggested, mutedly.

‘It’s not anyone’s,’ Gabriel continued smoothly. ‘There is no right.’

‘All power, by definition, is abuse,’ Tanith added. ‘And abuse is something we’re very happy with.’

She was smiling, her face broken by a triumphant grin that was almost innocent and almost content. Gabriel wore a similar smile. Benny stared from face to face expecting them to say something, to act, to effect their triumph. They didn’t, they stood immobile, watching their throne. Only after a long, lazy silence did Benny begin to feel that something was wrong.

The Doctor was gripping her arm, squeezing quite tight. His breathing became loud and grating. She glanced at him, seeing his attention fixed on the chair. She turned, not certain of what to expect.

Professor Winterdawn was sitting on the throne, his face obscure in the shadows.

‘Jeremy,’ the Doctor said softly, moving forward.

‘Quiet,’ Winterdawn snapped. The Doctor froze.

‘It’s funny,’ Winterdawn continued, his voice wavering between hard certainty and fear. ‘I never liked this chair. I always used to think it trapped me. I never imagined that anyone could see it as a symbol of power. Funny.’

‘Excuse me,’ Gabriel purred. ‘You wouldn’t mind moving…’

‘I can’t move,’ Winterdawn retorted. ‘It was never the chair that was the problem. It was my legs. They were dead. End of story. I wanted to change the world. I can sit here and change anything I like.
Anything
.

‘But I’m not going to. You want to take the world apart. You want to throw away everything, tear down the icons and the temples and install nothing in their places!’

His hands came together, clapping slowly, loudly, deliberately.

‘Bravo! I wanted my children to take after me, and you have learned. But you’ll get this chair over my dead body, because your new world sounds so very much like the old one. You’re spiteful, you’re ignorant, you act for your own gratification and
then
…! Then you try and tell me that your leadership is going to be
different
from anything before.