Falls the Shadow (5 page)

‘I’m turning back now, the Doctor and Ace are bound to have found something more substantial than corridors. Something more substantial will have found them.
He’ll
be surrounded by a death‐
squad led by a fascist whose pet hate is confident, charismatic fast‐
talkers.
She’ll
be locked in a dungeon about to be married off to and‐
stroke‐
or ritually sacrificed by a drug‐
crazed alien mastermind who doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for…’

She closed her mental diary and turned, shining her torch down the corridor. She stared briefly, swore and dropped the torch. The light went out to the sound of cracking plastic. She scrabbled round for it in the darkness, finding it quickly, not surprised to find the lens smashed and the bulb badly damaged. The light was a dim spot glowing in the dark, the torch sizzling as it shone. She swore again, louder this time.

‘Hello again diary,’ she said bitterly. ‘Have just vandalized the torch. It’s giving off less light than something very dark indeed, and I get the feeling it’s going to explode in my hand… I’m not bothered, I can get back though it’ll take a bit longer and I’ll be making nose‐
contact with more than one wall on the way. It’s just…’

She paused, trying to remember what she had seen – the brief glimpse down the passageway.

She saw the passage behind her, spreading away in a straight line back to the door where she had left the Doctor. She hadn’t exaggerated the rambling nature of the corridor, the fiddly confused turnings. So if they suddenly weren’t there any more…

‘What a terrible blow, the archaeological world has been robbed of the mind of its finest student,’ she said finally. ‘No, it’s nothing, a trick of the dark.’ She was talking louder now, trying to reassure herself. ‘I’ll find out soon enough.’

She edged forward through the darkness and collided with an oak‐
panelled wall. Her confidence flooded back. Her sanity was no longer in question.

Casting round for the right direction, she saw the light.

It was a thin strip of brilliance, running along the ground where the floor met the wall. It didn’t illuminate the passage, but it was there. It had to be a crack; a slight gap between the wall and the floor. And if there was light coming from it, Bernice reasoned, then there had to be something more than bricks, mortar and plaster finish behind it. Since she hadn’t noticed a single door here before, there must be a hidden entrance, concealed by the panels.

She edged along the wall to the light, hands brushing across the panels in the vain hope of finding some sort of handle. A hidden door would have a concealed opening mechanism, and that would be hard to spot
with
a torch. She was on the verge of turning away when it occurred to her that there had been no light when she’d gone past; she couldn’t have failed to notice it. Therefore, it had been turned on recently, after she had passed this section.

Which meant that there was someone in there.

She considered heading back to find the Doctor, but the light might be turned off in the meantime and she would have no chance of finding it again. Besides, she’d never been reliant on the Doctor to take the initiative.

She rapped her knuckles against one of the panels.

The wall swung open to an accompaniment of squealing hinges. Light filled the corridor from the open doorway. It framed a tall and handsome man, stooping slightly. Benny estimated that he was in his mid‐
twenties, though something worn in his face suggested he was much older. The youthful spark in his eyes and the innocent smile wouldn’t have looked out of place on a three‐
year‐
old. His appearance careered towards the unkempt, enhanced by the uncombed mess of dark hair and about two days’ worth of unchecked stubble. He was dressed plainly in fading grey trousers and a baggy, off‐
white shirt which, Benny noticed neutrally, was wrongly buttoned.

He stared at her until she felt uncomfortable, then lost interest and began gazing distractedly round the passage.

‘Oh,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve been expecting you, haven’t I? Come in.’

It was an ordinary mug – decorated in blue and white stripes – cold and quite empty. Bernice could see a vague reflection of her face swimming on the smooth white surface at the bottom. Wondering what to do with it, she looked up, leant back in her wickerwork chair, and smiled questioningly at her host.

The man raised an identical mug to his lips and smiled back at her.

‘Drink up, Laura,’ he said. ‘It’ll get cold.’

He smiled again, dangerously toothy this time. Bernice raised the hollow vessel to her mouth and pretended to sip. She glanced around, drinking in the simplicity of what was – for want of a better expression – her host’s cell.

It was a plain room, though not an uncomfortable one, decorated in a tasteful shade of pale pink. Most of the available floor space was consumed by furniture; a couple of chairs, a desk covered in writing materials and reams of much scrawled‐
upon paper, a small bookcase sitting innocuously in one corner, straining under the weight of hundreds of books. There was even a wash‐
basin built into one wall. The bed devoured most space, squashed into a corner. There was also, her host assured her blithely, a wardrobe hidden behind a couple of doors set flush in the wall. The other door was the one through which she had entered, equally well hidden on this side of the wall. Her host had been very secretive about its opening mechanism and so, Benny realized, there was little chance of making a quick get‐
away. Though her host seemed charming and harmless, there was something about him which made her teeth itch.

She couldn’t pin down exactly what it was that disturbed her. Perhaps something in the way he moved. His body language was too loose, too smooth, lacking the stiff, jerky movements most people affected in social situations. He was too easily distracted – his eyes never focused even in the middle of conversation. He had been expecting her, but knew nothing about her. There had been little things but nothing tangible that she could latch onto, until he had started pouring non‐
existent tea from an imaginary pot.

That was it. The man was a fruitloop.

Benny grinned, pretending to enjoy the tea, finding it best to humour him until the Doctor and Ace arrived and she had numbers on her side.

‘My name isn’t Laura,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s Bernice.’

‘Cranleigh,’ the man responded, grinning happily. ‘My name,’ he added, like a child trying to impress its parents with a newly learned scrap of knowledge. Benny nodded and made exaggerated gulping motions. Cranleigh was leaning forward towards her – not paying her much attention, but looking as if he was poised to spring if she made the wrong move. She resolved to be careful and moved lazily across the room to the bookcase, where she made a show of studying the titles on the spines.

Eliot,
Wuthering Heights
,
The Man In The Iron Mask
, Coleridge. Any moment now the Doctor and Ace would come down the passage looking for her, see the light, investigate.
Northanger Abbey
,
The Prisoner Of Zenda
,
To Kill A Mockingbird
,
The Condition Of Muzak
. She seemed to remember leaving the remains of the torch outside too; they couldn’t ignore that. Lewis Carroll,
The Magician’s Nephew
, Blake,
Melmoth The Wanderer
. She glanced at Cranleigh, and a chill coursed through her body when she saw that he was absently toying with her torch. She returned her gaze to the books.
The Man Who Was Thursday
,
Foucault’s Pendulum
,
The Dice Man
.

‘They’re left over from my days at university,’ Cranleigh pointed out proudly. ‘I did a couple for the degree.’

‘Which university?’ Bernice asked, running through the names on the spines. There was something reassuring about Cranleigh when he was talking, something unnerving about his silences.

‘Cambridge, Laura,’ he replied. ‘Where we met!’

Suddenly Bernice preferred the silences.

‘My name is
Bernice
,’ she snapped. She fell silent – realizing that she could hear other voices. Distant and muffled but still distinct, the Doctor and Ace were calling her. Obviously they’d tired of waiting and had come searching. Their cries were hardly circumspect or inconspicuous. Benny found that oddly reassuring.

‘You have friends,’ Cranleigh said, cutting off Bernice’s attempt to call back to them. He’d lost the cheerfulness and innocence. It was still a pleasant, even tone but suddenly dangerous. His mouth twitched into a humourless smile. He rose and crossed to the light switch.

The lights went out, plunging the room into gloom.

‘Perhaps they won’t find you. Just because you can see a door doesn’t mean… doesn’t mean that anyone else will. Do you think?’

His loose movements were gone, swept away by a different set of dangerous, tense mannerisms. The new deep shadows of the room emphasized them. The stooped, almost hunched figure before her didn’t seem entirely human any more.

‘You’re mad,’ she said simply. There was no point in adding anything else. Mad said it all.

‘I’m as sane as a hatter,’ Cranleigh protested.

‘You must be mad,’ Bernice pointed out, trying to sound relaxed, aware that it wasn’t working, ‘if you think I’m not going to shout back.’

‘Yes,’ Cranleigh said, more a gesture of the lips than a sound. Then, suddenly, he moved. He threw himself forward, far quicker than Bernice had expected. He lunged at her, throwing her back against the bookcase. Caught off‐
balance in a shower of tumbling paperbacks, Bernice found herself pinned against the wall by Cranleigh’s light bulk. He was a wiry man and Bernice realized that a well‐
timed shove could send him sprawling. She almost managed it.

Then he pressed the kitchen knife against her throat and she decided to keep very still indeed.

She had no idea where he had got the knife from, or when he had picked it up but frankly she didn’t care. The fact of the knife was enough for her. There was no pressure – it barely touched her skin – and that was reassuring. He wasn’t really trying to kill her, he just wanted her to be quiet. He was a loony with a knife, but maybe he wasn’t really a violent loony. Maybe he was a good loony. Maybe he could be humoured.

No. The knife was there. It was brushing her skin, but it was enough. The thin sharpness of the blade against her neck was so light it tickled, but it might dig tighter at the slightest provocation. Cranleigh could kill her on the spot, given reason. He might not want to, but he could. And would.

Bernice froze. Discretion was the better part of valour, and if she was really discreet, she might get out of it alive. She hoped.

‘There is a method by which the vocal cords of the subject may be severed without causing undue damage to the subject’s person,’ Cranleigh continued, voice as bland as the presenter of an archaeological documentary. Bernice had fallen asleep to voices like that, though none of the commentators had Cranleigh’s advantage. ‘This method is specialized. I’m not a medical man, and if I attempt it the result will probably be fatally messy. I don’t want to make you dead; there are simpler methods of keeping you quiet. Understand?’

Bernice understood. The Doctor and Ace’s shouts grew louder. Benny closed her eyes and kept quiet, even when Ace yelled right outside the door. The volume of the cries gradually dropped away. Finally there was silence.

Dear diary, I’m up shit creek.

‘Well now everything’s hunky‐
dory,’ Cranleigh said, smiling like a toddler. The knife remained bristling at Benny’s throat.

‘Up,’ the Doctor decided. ‘She must have gone up.’

Bernice had disappeared. The Doctor and Ace had expected to find her at the meeting point before them, her face a parody of impatience, ready with a joke about the failure of certain Time Lords to live up to their title.

She hadn’t been there. After five minutes of waiting they decided to search for her. They’d agreed, jointly, that she wouldn’t have gone back to the TARDIS while her curiosity was aroused, so it seemed probable that she’d forgotten her self‐
imposed time limit and was wandering round the passages somewhere, wrapped in her own thoughts. It was the sort of thing Benny would do.

Ace suspected that she’d walked straight into trouble. That was also the sort of thing Benny would do.

They’d followed the entire length of the main corridor – a plain, straight and unbroken passage. It was wrapped in cryptic darkness but was still unmistakably empty, devoid of human life in general and Benny in particular.

Ace started the shouting. The silence in the cellar was setting her teeth on edge. It was a death‐
silence, a well of noiselessness, as if the life had been sucked away, leaving only the shadows.

…sucked out by that thing in the wardrobe…

She tried telling herself that she wasn’t scared, but she wasn’t being honest. She could lie to other people but not to Ace. Why bother, she already knew the truth. At the moment the truth was that Ace was terrified. There were voices at the back of her head. Voices like the sound of finger‐
nails scraping down a blackboard. They weren’t a comfort in the darkness; they tempered the silence with new inflexions. This house had a deeper power than any haunted venue from her childhood.

She had yelled suddenly. It made her feel better, and – who could tell? – maybe Benny would hear it. The Doctor hadn’t liked it, suggesting that it might also attract the attention of any passing maniac. But he joined in eventually.

The oak panels of the passage gave way to exposed wooden beams, to the framework of a room – the bottom of a shaft that extended to the top of the building. It was a stairwell, tapering with perspective towards the distant roof. Countless wooden steps wound along the walls, escalating towards the heights of the attic. Even the dusky gloom that filled the shaft couldn’t dispel the awesome sense of distance. It provoked an impressed whistle from Ace.

‘Four storeys at least.’ The Doctor craned upwards then turned to Ace, looking like a man with uncomfortable news to divulge. ‘We’ve not passed Benny. She’s not answered our hardly inconspicuous calls. And this is the only way she could have come. So…

‘Up.’ He aimed a finger roofwards. ‘She must have gone up.’

Ace had already worked that one out.

‘I think we should go after her,’ she said after a moment’s consideration. ‘Go through the house one floor at a time. Keep a low profile. Could be risky, but it’s better than abandoning Benny.’ The Doctor was nodding his agreement.

‘Whatever’s going on here, Bernice has probably walked right into the heart of it by now. That curiosity’s going to kill her.’

‘Like the cat?’ Ace asked, unable to help herself. Shit! Cliché!

‘True, but that doesn’t mean that curiosity isn’t worth it,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Besides, I like cats. Shall we begin?’

‘I’ll take the first, you take the second, okay?’ Ace suggested, and was taken off guard by the Doctor’s scowl.

‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Benny’s an archaeologist – a scientist – she’d do this methodically. She’d start from the bottom and work up, or…’

‘Start from the top and work down,’ Ace interrupted impatiently. ‘Right, one of us takes the top floor and works down. The other heads up from the ground. We’ll meet in the middle.’

‘It sounds simple, doesn’t it?’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘I’ll work up from the ground.’

‘Hey,’ Ace protested, ‘it’s going to take bloody years to get up top!’

‘It was your idea,’ the Doctor reminded her. ‘Think of your reputation! You’re not going to let a few flights of stairs daunt you? Besides, your legs are younger than mine.’

Ace shrugged and gave up. The Doctor smiled roguishly at her and bounded up the stairs, three steps at a time, to the first half‐
landing. There he stopped and turned round, eyebrows arched with curiosity. Ace followed him, preferring to stroll up a sturdy wooden ramp that took up half the width of the steps. She’d been like that as a kid – climbing the inclines rather than the stairs. It had always seemed more fun. Still did.

‘What do you make of it?’ the Doctor asked.

‘Easy on the feet.’

‘As a functional feature of the house?’

‘Comes in handy if you’re moving heavy gear up and down stairs?’ she suggested, glancing at her feet. Judging by the criss‐
cross patterns of wheel tracks impressed on the wood, it was being used frequently, ‘Maintenance work, a lot of it. Be a bastard getting a barrow up the stairs without it.’

Further up the steps sprouted a threadbare and tasteless carpet, its colours and patterns worn down into near‐
greyness by years of use.

‘My mum had a carpet like that in her room,’ Ace said. Strange how details like that stuck in her mind.

‘Well, it accounts for your disturbed childhood,’ the Doctor mused. Ace smiled strainedly, and began up the next flight of stairs. Might as well get a lead on the Doctor while she could.

‘See you in the middle.’

‘Ace,’ the Doctor called, a sober inflection to his voice. ‘This house is a dead place. I’d never forgive myself if any of us were to join it.’

Cranleigh’s cell was buried in silence, punctuated only by the harsh, desperate sound of his breathing. To Bernice it seemed that he was more terrified than she was. She was a captive audience to his distraught, exaggerated mannerisms. Every twitch, every nervous shake of his head, his haggard stare – it was almost a performance. The knuckles of his knife‐
hand were white and trembling, and Benny was certain that he might start hacking away at her throat out of sheer panic. She remained calm and did nothing which might provoke him. One of her legs was going numb, but she didn’t dare move it.

‘It’s okay,’ Cranleigh said. ‘They’ve given up on you.’

‘They weren’t good friends,’ Benny risked a lie. If Cranleigh thought that the Doctor and Ace weren’t going to put much effort into their search, it might calm him.

‘You should get better ones.’ Cranleigh stepped back. Benny relaxed.

But only slightly.

‘Would you like me to kill you?’

‘No.’

‘Okay,’ he nodded. He was still close and tense enough to launch himself at her at a moment’s notice, but Benny took the opportunity to move around, shaking the blood back into her dulled leg. Cranleigh watched her warily, but he held the knife as though he wasn’t entirely certain what it was for.

‘Laura,’ Cranleigh began. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Laura?’

‘By all means.’ Humour him, Benny.
Laura
it is. Why not?

‘You can call me Justin. Justin Cranleigh – good name, good initials. Justin time. Justin case. Justin this. Justin that. Justin sane.’ He giggled at a private joke. ‘Me. A good name. If I was a girl, I’d have been called Kate. Kathryn with a “K”. Like “Laura” but spelled differently.’

‘My name is Laura,’ Benny replied cautiously. ‘So who am I?’

‘Just a name on a list,’ Cranleigh answered, a wistful quality in his voice. ‘The girl in the room next to me, the same seminar as me. The attractive girl. A good friend. The girl going out with me tonight. My first serious girlfriend. An angel. A memory. Gone.’

‘What happened to me?’ ‘Laura’ continued with a sense of trepidation.

‘You died,’ Cranleigh said, his monotone unsullied by emotion. ‘Suddenly but without pain, in your sleep.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Bernice dropped the imitation. It was too sad and personal, like wearing the clothes someone had died in. ‘I’m not Laura. You just want me to be.’

Cranleigh nodded slowly, whispering as if he wasn’t strong enough to manage anything louder.

‘After she died, I think I went mad. I’m told I’m mad now. Everyone tells me now.’ He was rambling but Benny clung on to every word. ‘Different colours of madness. Now I’m living in a kaleidoscope. I see everything as red and green and purple. I can see things you can’t see. I couldn’t then; everything was a grey shade of madness. I hurt people, women, girls who thought I was looking for permanence, when all I wanted was a couple of nights. I couldn’t hold onto them, could I?’

Benny shook her head noiselessly, unwilling to interrupt.

‘After you there was only the one. The serious one. Lots of others, but only one serious.’ He glared at Benny, daring her to challenge him. ‘I wanted to let her go, but she almost died too. Well, I couldn’t let her go, could I?! She was screwed up. So like you – pure, innocent, stupid and lovely. In every way like Laura. You understand?’

Bernice didn’t, but she nodded anyway. It was the answer he expected.

‘Okay,’ Cranleigh said, sounding more rational than many others Benny had known. ‘I confess my madness. The doctors tell me, but they lie. All doctors are liars. I’m not really insane at all,’ he continued, leaving Benny to struggle with the contradiction. He leant forward and spoke in the voice of one revealing a terrible secret of the cosmos: ‘I have been
spiritually ransacked
!’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Benny replied, echoing her thoughts.

‘It’s true. True. True. True man. Tru‐
man. Truman. Truman. It’s Truman,’ he insisted, flexing his jaw earnestly. Watch out for him, for his face. Don’t let him fool you.’

‘Truman?’ Bernice asked, even more lost than before.

‘Truman’s taken everything of mine and twisted it into his own. He’s taken my life, my reason, my voice. He wants
her
too. I can see what he thinks. He wants to take her and use her in the same way I did, because she’s mine. He’ll have everything and I’ll be a mindless husk of a body, howling for my lost marbles.’

Benny couldn’t think of anything sensible to say.

‘Mind you, he’s going to have to die one day.’ Cranleigh waved the knife meaningfully. ‘Maybe I’ll repossess him. Maybe it’ll kill me. I don’t know what happens. It’s his face. That’s the only part of him that isn’t mine, you see. It’s everything that he
is
. Not that you’ll see it.’ He gradually faded into total incoherence, words degenerating, becoming shapeless. Benny kept listening. She could almost hear the meanings – thoughts and imaginings spilling from his mouth as gibberish.

‘Justin?’ A new voice cut through his mutterings. The gentle but precise tones of a young woman.

‘Oh my God!’ Cranleigh jerked back to coherence, if not sanity. His eyes darted around, panicked, before settling on Bernice. ‘It’s her! Hide! She’ll go mad if she catches us together.’

Not so much because we’re together, Benny thought, more because I’m here at all.

‘Hide!’ Cranleigh hissed again, chewing at his knuckles. Benny agreed – there was no point in giving herself, and the Doctor and Ace, away to any sane people. Where to hide though? The room was devoid of cover – unless she scrambled under the bed.

‘Where?’ she asked, urgently.

‘Wardrobe.’ Cranleigh pointed frantically at the doors he’d indicated earlier. Benny nodded. ‘Take this.’ Cranleigh pressed something into her hands. Benny nodded again and ran to the doors. They opened smoothly.

‘Justin, let me in.’ The voice was outside.

Benny pulled the doors closed after her, carefully leaving a gap small enough for light, air and eavesdropping. Once inside the cramped safety of the wardrobe, she relaxed. From outside came the sounds of the cell door opening and indistinct greetings. It sounded normal.

She glanced down and saw her fingers wound around Cranleigh’s knife.

The knife he’d been holding to her throat.

She suddenly felt incredibly self‐
conscious and had to fight the urge to laugh uncontrollably. She thought of her childhood games of hide‐
and‐
seek when she would give herself away with a burst of stupid laughter. She’d grown into a teenager, the hiding became more serious and the giggling less sensible. She’d controlled the urge then. She managed to control it again, smothering it in the back of her throat.

The wardrobe became a shrine. A cubby‐
hole of desperate, holy hush broken only by the gentle beating of Benny’s heart beneath her ribs. For a paranoid moment she felt certain that they could hear this outside.

She emptied her mind and tried to listen. This proved to be hopeless. Cranleigh and his girlfriend were having a heated and probably interesting conversation out there, but it was too low to hear. Cranleigh was a born mumbler and the woman’s voice was soft, treating him as gently as possible.

The next thing she heard was a lengthy and passionate sound, filled with an obvious pleasure. Cranleigh and the newcomer
kissing
and taking a great deal of time about it. Benny suddenly felt a stab of guilt. She was listening to something private and intimate and she felt dirty. She leaned back against a wall and waited for it to end.

It occurred to her that it might not end. Hadn’t Cranleigh said something about this woman being his only ‘serious’ girlfriend? How serious, she wondered? What if they were meeting for something a little more intimate than a snog? If this woman was Cranleigh’s lover they could be there all night. That was fine, she was happy for them, but it meant that she would have to spend the whole night hidden in the wardrobe. She was trapped by something more subtle than a maniac with a knife.

This was stupid. She got the urge to break down and laugh again. Good thing she hadn’t hidden under the bed. No, it was serious.

She allowed her eyes and mind to wander. Both gravitated to the opposite wall, drawn by a dark irregularity in the texture of the wood. She leant forward, pulling away the piles of clothes which obscured the shapes, and uncovered a hole.

It was a hole into a lightless nowhere. Benny judged that she would be able to squeeze through with minimal difficulty. An escape route. A coincidence perhaps, but a wonderful one. Better than that – judging from the preponderance of yellowing brick visible through the hole beyond the wardrobe wood, it led into an area of the cellar similar to the place where she had left the TARDIS. Maybe even the same place. This wasn’t mere coincidence. This was synchronicity!