Falls the Shadow (8 page)

The last time he had approached the house, he had blundered badly. He had allowed his instincts to draw him into the conflict too early. He had wandered in without preparation, without thinking, without any real knowledge of the beings inside. He had gained nothing.

This time he would be cautious. He would wait and watch. Something would happen eventually, he had introduced instabilities into the situation which might force a reaction.

He frowned and turned away from the house. Something was happening, but it was coming from the woods rather than the house. A
shape
was moving through the trees. Its path was erratic, but nevertheless it was clearly moving towards the house.

The shape was
wrong
. It didn’t belong. It didn’t fit into the architecture of the cosmos as it should be. As it moved the universe jarred around it, like the creatures in the cellar, except that it had physical presence. And where the lights had been negative, this was positive.

No. Not positive. Neutral, perhaps?

The grey man stepped forward to meet it.

It looked human. No, it was human. A woman in her mid‐
twenties. Dark‐
haired, wearing a tight, black trench‐
coat. Where the man was invisible in the evening gloom, this woman looked like a tear in the fabric of the night.

The man raised a hand and called to her:

‘Stop. You should not…’

He got no further. The woman shot him through the head, killing him outright.

When his two captors launched into their inexplicable fight, the Doctor’s initial instinct was to run. Not a clever move, he realized as he hurtled down the cellar passage. He might have bluffed his way through it – as it was, the house would be on the look‐
out for him within minutes.

The anomaly had gone. The stairs were normal again. The Doctor paused for breath, but a glance back down the corridor persuaded him to keep moving. The two men had stopped fighting and were careering after him. They weren’t moving very fast admittedly – the young man was shambling as if he’d forgotten how his legs worked, while the masked man was laden with video equipment – but they’d catch him if he tarried.

He bounded up the stairs back onto the ground floor.

His immediate plan was simple. Get out of the house, out of the grounds. Then he could stop and take stock of the situation. There was a door in the scullery, if he could reach there.

He turned a corner and almost crashed into a man, the old man he’d seen earlier. He was, as the Doctor suspected, a tall man stooping in the low passageway. His features were worn with the passing of time, but his body was still lean and athletic. The ageing process had been kind to him. His skin was tanned, contrasting with his neat shock of white hair. He stared at the Doctor, eyes reflecting confusion and wariness.

‘Hello,’ the Doctor rattled before the man had a chance to speak, ‘I’m the Doctor.’

‘Doctor?’ The man’s face lightened, almost with recognition. He smiled and extended a hand. The Doctor took it, guardedly. The man had a strong grip.

‘Wedderburn,’ he said simply, in a vague London accent. The Doctor raised an eyebrow questioningly. ‘Charles Moore Wedderburn. Ah, of course, it isn’t me you’re interested in.’

‘It isn’t,’ the Doctor replied, voice neutral.

‘You
are
one of Keightley’s mob?’ Wedderburn went off at a conversational tangent. ‘Up from Cambridge to see how the whizz‐
kid’s doing? Not much of a kid nowadays. Not so much whizz either!’ Wedderburn laughed. The Doctor felt obliged to join in.

‘I’m afraid I wandered off,’ the Doctor said, avoiding a total lie. ‘I seem to have lost myself.’

‘Ah,’ Wedderburn nodded knowingly. ‘That’s to be expected. One of the side‐
effects. But you’ll know about that.’ He drew the Doctor aside and pointed to the door of what the Doctor recognized to be the scullery. ‘There’s a kitchen down there. I’m just locking up, so why don’t you pop along and put the kettle on. I won’t be a minute.’

The Doctor strolled towards the scullery. A snatched glance over his shoulder proved that Wedderburn really was locking up. He had been accepted as genuine.

A genuine
what
, he wondered.

The old man had changed since the Doctor saw him last. His movements were easier. When he’d opened the door, he’d been fumbling, his hands shaking. The Doctor put it down to age or a muscular complaint. Arthritis, maybe? Wedderburn’s smooth movements belied that impression.

The kettle was warming up as Wedderburn returned, apparently still convinced of the Doctor’s integrity. He seemed harmless enough, offering tea and conversation. He could turn out to be a mine of information, and maybe an ally.

The kettle began to scream. Wedderburn took it off the boil.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about Winterdawn.’

The song wasn’t budging, but Page was learning to live with it. She’d indulged in target practice on her way down – some old tramp nobody would miss – and found that she was still accurate. She’d slipped the gun away as she entered the grounds of the house.

There was no point to subtlety. Go through the front door.

It loomed before her. A great slab of oak masquerading as a door, decorated in brass. She stabbed the doorbell and was pleased to hear the sound of a simple bell. Nothing tasteless. No tinny attempts to mimic the national anthem.

She huddled in the porch, singing to drown out the bloody awful song.

‘The bells of Hell go ting‐
a‐
ling‐
ling for you but not for me.’

The door was opened by a woman. Mid‐
twenties, Page estimated. She stared at the newcomer with big, round baby eyes. She was wearing nothing more than a plain dressing‐
gown, showing slightly more cleavage than Page would have been comfortable with, clearly been thrown on hastily; Page felt a tingle of satisfaction as she realized that she might have interrupted a moment of special intimacy.

‘Hello?’

‘Avon calling.’ Page punched her smartly across the jaw. The woman crumpled. Page stepped through the door, across the body.

That was the easy part. Now. Winterdawn.

Ace was sticking close to the nursery. She wanted to be where the weird stuff was happening. Since she was also supposed to be searching for Benny she couldn’t waste time hanging round for the next bout, or for the Doctor to put in an appearance, so she decided to look round the rooms nearby. Fingers crossed the architecture wasn’t about to do another double‐
take.

The first she searched turned out to be a store‐
room. No sign of Benny, perhaps, but still interesting.

The room was large and undecorated, its walls painted an ugly shade of military grey. Dust was everywhere. The atmosphere wasn’t as tight or as heavy here as it had been in the children’s room. There were no imposing stained‐
glass windows, just a normal skylight. This
was
turning black, but only with the onset of night. Furniture, ornaments and decorations were all hidden under white dustsheets, the exception being a cabinet in the heart of the room. It was an ordinary mahogany box, decorated in a vaguely oriental style – stylized dragons were etched into the metalwork. It sat smugly, whispering two simple words;
valuable antique
.

Ace threw open the valuable antique, half‐
expecting a blaze of light to emerge and consume her. It failed to materialize. The cabinet was empty. It was just a box, smaller inside than out. Ace lost interest in it and began to inspect the rest of the items on offer. Sheets were pulled away with a flourish, revealing other antiques. Furniture, statuettes, ornaments, stacks of paintings; Ace thought they were nothing special. But hidden amongst the ordinary junk, there were more interesting things.

The first was a plant. It didn’t seem unusual at first, but gradually it clicked with Ace that it wasn’t ordinary. It wasn’t a Perivale household plant, it was tropical, buried under a sheet in an unheated room, and it was
thriving
. It was exotic even by tropical standards. Its blooms were a riot of colour – purple, yellow, blue, orange – erupting from all angles of the stalk. Its patterns were chaotic and zig‐
zagging rather than elegant or intricately repetitive. The stalk was thick and twisted, growing upwards in a spiral. There were other plants, but none were identical. Each was unique.

There were insects – dead where the plants were alive. They were buried under glass, graves marked by index‐
card epitaphs. The handwriting on the cards was near illegible but seemed to consist of names, dates and lists of unique characteristics. No two insects were the same; they were deformed. Nature had been over‐
generous to most, bestowing extra wings, limbs or heads. Others were less fortunate: wingless, legless or – Ace’s skin crawled – headless. Ace almost dropped the display case out of nauseous disgust.

There was something worse; a stuffed animal, a rodent. When she first saw it, Ace thought there were two, both mounted on the same stand, but there was just one. It had two bodies, one growing out of the stomach of the other.

Ace wanted to get out. An irrational desire – the animal and the insects were dead; in life they would have been harmless. But still she felt sickened. Benny wasn’t here obviously, and the Doctor would be fascinated by this stuff. Ace couldn’t see any connections yet, but she’d lay odds that the Doctor would. She turned towards the door.

The antique cabinet burst open without warning. Something emerged, seven feet tall, alien. Something that was simply too big to fit, that hadn’t been there when Ace had looked. Something thrusting between Ace and the exit. It was a bloody great insect. The fine hairs that covered its body were twitching, its complex mesh of wings folding and unfolding on its back, antennae flailing. It was
agitated
. Ace’s face was reflected a thousand times in its compound eyes. Ace watched it unfold before her, scrutinizing it with a mixture of revulsion and caution.

The creature reared up and lurched towards her.

Benny woke to find holes in her memory. She remembered leaving Cranleigh and his girlfriend to their own devices, crawling into the cellar, then… blank. In the cellar there had been… something evil, something that should have been etched into her memory.

It wasn’t. The thoughts had been stolen.

She remembered a man. A man in grey, she’d met outside the house. She’d collapsed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Snatches of the man’s intonations echoed in her skull, meanings eluding her. Now she was safe and well with half her mind missing and a headache the size of the Draconian empire in its place.

She was sandwiched into a corner where the wall of the house met a wall of glass – an extension beyond the boundaries of the house. Inside was gloomy, but she made out overgrown vegetation shapes silhouetted against the glass. It was a conservatory, with a door not two feet from her. She could get in without going through the cellar. She couldn’t face the cellar alone again. She’d find the Doctor and Ace. This required a team effort.

She got up, opened the glass door and plunged into the undergrowth.

Winterdawn. The Doctor found a name that went with the house. Professor Jeremy Winterdawn. Wedderburn implied that he was as famous in scientific circles as C. Moore Wedderburn was in botanical circles. The Doctor nodded patiently, sipping his tea.

Wedderburn imagined the Doctor was a colleague of Winterdawn’s, come to check his progress. The Doctor waited patiently for further elaboration that never came. Wedderburn assumed that he knew everything already.

‘How long have you known Professor Winterdawn?’ the Doctor asked politely, contemplating the unfortunately low level of tea left in his mug.

‘Since childhood. We were at school together,’ Wedderburn explained, helping himself to biscuits. ‘We both ended up in science. Physics for him, botany for me. We stayed in touch. It was Winterdawn who persuaded his college – your college of course – to fund my American jaunts.’

‘Botanical expeditions?’ the Doctor questioned. The tea level approached the dregs.

‘The one true faith. I was an environmental crusader. Partly, I wanted to see the rainforests while they were there. The research element was a part…’

‘And publicity?’ the Doctor asked smoothly.

‘Was the main reason.’ Wedderburn’s face lit with enthusiasm. ‘It worked too. We made an impact. Not great, but still a hit. That was the serious part of the expeditions. The research was good, it turned up some fascinating uncatalogued species and mutant strains. But the important work was getting people to understand what was happening. It still is now.’

‘You’re not angling for a grant, are you?’ the Doctor asked, getting into the feel of his role.

‘No.’ Wedderburn smiled ruefully. He was a compulsive smiler. ‘I’m too old. I’ll be dead when the last tree goes. Hypocrite that I am, I’ve lost the will to fight.’

‘There are others,’ the Doctor said, encouragingly. Wedderburn nodded, but didn’t reply.

‘I’ve never actually met Professor Winterdawn. I know him by reputation.’ the Doctor ventured, lying easily. ‘I’ve only recently joined Professor Keightley’s team. And I don’t quite understand why he isn’t working at Cambridge.’

‘Well, after the accident…’

‘Accident?’

‘Keightley didn’t tell you?’ Wedderburn clicked his tongue in mock irritation. ‘There was an accident five years ago. A domestic – a car crash. Jeremy and Jenny were driven off the road by some maniac. She went through the windscreen.
He
survived, just about. The moment he came out of hospital he handed over all his research to Keightley and took off. Resigned his seat, came back here. It was Jenny’s family’s house, but she’d left it to him.’

‘But he’s still working for them, for us…’

‘Keightley – stubborn female that she is – talked him round,’ Wedderburn explained. ‘Besides, his private research into the Thascales theorem uncovered a few things that set his mind racing. He’s a freelance. All unofficial, that’s why the mailing company was set up.’

‘Mailing company?’ the Doctor echoed.

‘Don’t you know?’ Wedderburn’s eyes narrowed, the first signs of suspicion nurturing. ‘You should.’