Doctor Who_ The Death of Art Part 17

It was a woman. Roz managed not to look surprised when she realized she recognized her. She was Claudette. The one Tomas had changed. She looked different now. Ravaged, dazed, b.l.o.o.d.y. A white clay mask covered half her face. Had she just completed Tomas's programming, Roz wondered. It would be ironic if the dead priest had managed to strike down his tormentor in this post-mortem fashion. If Claudette was still open to suggestion she could be Roz's ticket out of here.

'Untie me,' Roz shouted.

The woman shook her head.

The mask fell away.

Dominic pointed to an iron door buried in the side of the sewer. The Doctor smelt the layer of oil that protected the door against rust. A series of water traps and artificial channels diverted the water from the metal.

"This is one of our main doors, Doctor.'

'Well, open it then.'

'Before I do, you must understand one thing. You have been a good friend to my son. I owe you my own life, if you set aside that it was only in danger because of you in the first place. Because of this, I will always be in your debt.'

'But if I threaten the Family in any way you'll kill me?'

'Erm, yes.'

The Doctor patted Dominic on the back. ' I ' m glad w e ' v e had this little chat. Push on.'

195.

Chapter 18.

There was the sound of hollow metal underfoot. Every step was a drumbeat. Dominic felt his own heart pound as his heels hammered on the iron staircase. The Doctor followed behind, and either his steps matched Dominic's own so precisely that their sound was masked in that of his, or he was the quietest walker Dominic had ever known. It was annoying. Worse, it was worrying. Dominic hated being beholden to anyone. It only stored up betrayals for the long days of winter.

Johann was on watch duty. Dominic could see his eyes gleaming in the shadowy vaults into which the stairs descended. One of the others was with him; Sister Sante Claire? Alphonse? Dominic could not make out the details at this distance. The figure was just a stick of shadow; loomed over by Johann's bulk. Tall by human standards, short next to Johann. Most probably Claire.

Fifty more steps downwards. The second figure was no one he recognized. A man dressed in rags. A thin young man with a shrouded face. A boy. Dominic stepped up his pace. The Doctor's footsteps still fell soundlessly, so soundlessly that Dominic was starting to doubt he was even there, but he was d.a.m.ned if he was going to turn round to see the man's irritatingly open face beaming at him. Irritatingly open, except for the eyes.

'Johann,' he shouted. 'It's me, D o m i n i c ' Just a courtesy.

Johann could probably count his shirt b.u.t.tons at that distance.

196.

'Who's the outsider?' Johann's booming voice echoed up out of the pits.

'Never mind that now. Emil's alive! Montague's over-played his hand at last. We can take him.'

The figure by Johann craned its head back to whisper upwards into the shallow hole where Johann's right ear should have been. Dominic saw a smooth bulge of white flesh wrapped around a mouth. No eyes. A tight grey membrane stretched over a brain. One of them was walking; communicating! It was a miracle. Afraid to break the fragile feeling by shouting into the echoes, Dominic waited until he was within proper talking distance to ask the question that was pressing on his heart.

'Whose is the child?'

'Sister Sante Claire's eldest. He felt well enough today to come with me on watch, didn't you Pietro?'

The stick figure buried its head in the cool surface of Johann's scales. Johann rubbed the boy's shoulders rea.s.suringly. 'Pietro's a little shy, I'm afraid. I wasn't expecting to entertain guests.'

Dominic nodded briskly. ' I ' m glad to see you up and about, Pietro. It gives me hope for the others.' He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice, but the bitterness was still there, like a bad taste in his mouth.

Johann leant past him, holding out his hand. 'And who is your guest, Dominic?' Dominic turned, antic.i.p.ating the Doctor's discomfort; even the bravest found Johann disturbing. It took long familiarity before it was possible to see the man under the beast. Even now Dominic watched Johann's hands with a mixture of fear and awe. Johann could crack walnuts between his smallest finger and his palm.

But the Doctor shook hands as if he was an archbishop and Johann a minor priest. For a second, a quirk of perspective - a combination, Dominic thought, of the light shining up from further within, and the fact that the Doctor was several steps up from Johann - made the Doctor look the fiercer of the two. Something inhuman in the shape of the cheek-bones under the skin? It was gone in the blink of an eye.

197.

Johann's fingers curled inward slightly as the Doctor released his hand. 'That's quite a grip you have there for a human.'

'I don't like to lose, even at arm-wrestling.'

Johann laughed, and made a joke of looking at his hand for damage. At least Dominic hoped he was joking. With his claws retracted Johann's huge hand suddenly looked clumsy and arthritic, its joints enlarged and sore. We are getting old, Dominic thought. Impossible to imagine, but true. Not all the powers of the Doll's House have stopped that clock.

'Except for Montague,' the Doctor said, softly, out of the side of his mouth into Dominic's ear.

Dominic flinched.

The woman's face should have been ruined. Its right side was a ma.s.s of bruises, and half-healed gashes scarred its white skin. It was still utterly beautiful. Uncannily so. The scars just outlined the artistry of the bone beneath. Planes and contours, cut with the mathematical brilliance of diamond, rounded into the face of a G.o.ddess or a Madonna. She was barely recognizable as the vapid daughter of the society hostess that Roz remembered. She was one step beyond the creature that Tomas had made her; another level of beauty entirely.

This close, it was hard to think about the likely causes of the effect. There was a sound like temple bells in the distance, and a scent of jasmine. Roz felt a thrill of desire run through her. She bit the inside of her mouth, and sought relief in the salt intimacy of her own blood.

This fire was not her. She had never felt the least inclination to same-s.e.x affairs. Bernice's cheerful acceptance of freewheeling s.e.xuality had always struck her as the childish-ness of someone raised in an age of historical decadence. As much an irritation in its way as the archaeologist's sense of humour. Never until now had she imagined she could have so, so unnatural an emotion. It was like pain. The woman's face was like a hand clutched round her heart.

Desperately she hunted for her old cynicism; for all the 198 rough-edged armour she had bolted on over the years in the Overcities; for the lessons her family's tutors had drummed in deep and early. The twofold purpose of procreation is the perpetuation of the clan and the forging of political alliances.

s.e.x is work. s.e.x is duty. Done for fun, it gets you involved. involved.

Get involved and you start caring. Start caring and you get hurt. Even in her rebellion she realized that she had followed the rules.

Crossing the line, sleeping with another adjudicator, was forbidden, yes, but if it was your partner there were standing conventions, levels of known expectation, laws in all but name. And if your partner understood the rules then it was safe. Martle had been safe. Safe in a way that Chris with his puppy eyes would never be. Of course Martle had also been corrupt and murderous, and she had needed to kill him, so perhaps her judgement of what const.i.tuted a safe relationship was not good.

Since Martle she had felt desire only in pa.s.sing. Men from other ages and other worlds. Maybe just a way of playing safe. Nothing too permanent; nothing too involving. Perhaps that was why she had shied away from the moments of intimacy she had shared with Chris. He was too irrationally optimistic to grasp the necessary degree of cynicism. She had told herself she did not want to hurt him, but really she could not afford to hurt herself. Not any more.

She could not afford this pa.s.sion.

There had to be more than neotony at work; pheromones perhaps, or subliminal variations in skin tone, or telepathic control of the pleasure centres of the victim's brain. It had to be more than the big-eyed girly look. It had to be more because of the l.u.s.t that swelled up in Roz's flesh when those eyes blinked in their languid snake-like motion. She clenched her hands under her bonds, trying to break the spell of Claudette's face. Something impalpable was being drawn out of her. An undercurrent of danger, the sense of a streetwise cop gets when something otherwise imperceptible is going down, boiled up in her brain. With an effort she flicked her eyes away from Claudette's, and back to the wounds on the 199 woman's cheek. With a sickening breaking of the beatific vision, Roz realized that Claudette's injuries were not the result of torture, as she had first unconsciously a.s.sumed, but were the clumsy self-inflicted damage she a.s.sociated with psychologically disturbed prisoners. Desire drained from her like pus from a sore.

Perhaps reading the pity that had replaced adoration, Claudette turned away, refixing her mask. Roz considered making a last plea for help, but Claudette was clearly incapable of offering any. A white lady in a broken shroud. A living ghost.

If Roz was going to get out of this she was not going to do it with help from that quarter, nor apparently from Chris.

Wait until she had the chance to debrief him on this. Back-up, what back-up? Roz's cracked laugh, barely more sane than Montague's, echoed out among the bones. She tore at the leather strips, futilely. Where was the Doctor when you needed him? Or Chris? Especially Chris?

In the workshop in Tomas's house, surrounded by exotic blooms, Chris was counting heads and Jarre was weigh-ing them, or at least listing their characteristics. The list was worrying. Top socialites, important politicians, all were notated under Jarre's omniscient eyes. Chris felt an unworthy sense of relief when he could not identify one: a bust of a man with blank staring eyes.

Could there be different types of beauty? The thought was uncomfortable. It felt bad. A guilty thought. A complex thought. It made his head hurt.

David watched the big-mouthed thing tugging at the yellow animal's skin; stripping it off the red spongy muscles, stuffing it into the whirlpool of its mouth. There was something wrong, if he could only fix on it.

There was no reason to prefer the smaller creature to the lamprey. Both were life. Vibrant amazing life. The big-mouthed thing had to be better. It was bigger and it, after all, was eating the furry animal, not the other way around.

200.

A dog. That was the name of the furry animal. No, that was the name of the kind of animal it was. Why was it so hard to remember?

He had had a dog once when he was a child. When his hands had been pink and soft. The dog's fur smelt like home; like comfort. He had loved it. Why could he not remember its name? Why could he not remember his own?

Confused, David staggered away from his guard post, Montague's orders breaking down under a wave of incipient memory.

Dominic's face blanched and, seeing his brother's fear, Johann set his claws at the outsider's throat. The man's skin felt clean and slightly slick. The pulse was slow, almost non-existent, like a snake's. Like Johann's own.

Johann's voice rumbled up from the centre of his barrel chest: 'We consider it very bad manners to go tiptoeing through people's minds unawares, if you get my drift.'

'That wasn't telepathy,' the stranger said, 'merely observation.'

'Indeed,' Johann growled. 'I think we'll see what Aunt Jessica thinks about that.'

The Family stronghold was a collection of chambers hewed into the rock. Miscellaneous furniture cluttered the floor, with rugs and tapestries predominating. Someone had run a line of pipes down through the roof; and gas fittings spluttered and flared in the first few rooms, giving way to reed torches as the party moved further in.

The Doctor noted the chalk markings on the walls.

Directions and messages; temporary and permanent maps of the underworld. He had seen similar arrangements before, in Chislehurst Caves in Kent where thousands of Lon-doners lived underground lives during the Blitz, and in the Megropolis Subterrania on Heiradi.

One part of the familiar graffiti was missing. There were no pictures drawn by children lower down the walls: no sketches of trees and flowers, of London landmarks, nor of Heiradi's 201 nine jewelled moons. The lower walls here were empty rock.

Johann led them down through the chambers. Curious family members glanced at the Doctor as he pa.s.sed. A gallery of distortions; but no sense of the alien. None of the taint that the Doctor a.s.sociated with possession or with external dominance of the human will.

Jessica's room was a cramped alcove.

Aunt Jessica was a brain in a jar. Under the ma.s.s of cerebral tissue, the Doctor could just make out tiny withered limbs. An impression of a face indented into the matter of the forebrain created the illusion of death. The Doctor was irresistibly reminded of the Turin Shroud.

His second impression was of an icy, ruthless intellect.

Still, there was no reason to believe that just being a brain in a jar was going to make Jessica any different from the other old ladies he had known.

Then her thoughts met his. The average electrical activity of the humanoid brain is barely greater than a fridge light.

Most natural human telepaths put out a signal using hardly a fifth of that energy. By comparison Jessica's mind was operating at the mean energy usage of Birmingham, during the Cup Final commercial break. Luminous needles of thought jabbed at the Doctor's mind; needles that ended in eyes, looking for weaknesses in his psyche. Less painful than a mindprobe; more organic. Probably harder to fool; but easier to block entirely. Ah, decisions.

Deftly he separated part of his brain, mapped the simplest contours of the wider whole into the part, and let a needle slip snake-like through into the placid interior of the separate section.

More subtle than a block.

He was spraining his metaphorical wrists patting himself on the back when three other thought-needles sliced through into the main part of his mind. Aunt Jessica was good, and he was not at his best. Everything smelt of cheddar cheese in his head, and the air tasted of soap and brimstone. He was almost used to it, but it still felt like someone taking a brillo pad to the surface of his cortex.

202.

He redirected one of the needles to an interminable memory of tedium in England: helping Sergeant Benton whitewash the Nissen huts at the back of UNIT HQ during the slow weeks after Liz Shaw had left. With a nanosecond flash of annoyance he scrabbled for something else harmless.

The annoyance turned into an increasing sense of desperation at how much of his life had been spent in dungeons or awaiting execution, or under easier-to-dodge mechanical mindprobes. When had he become such a meddler? Wasn't there a time when he had simply liked to stroll in a garden and smell the roses? Through a sensation of a billion ants with hobnail boots tap-dancing upside down on the inside of his skull, he realized he did not have enough peaceful memories.

He considered other options. He could read the trace memories implicit in the structure of the telepathic probes themselves and then feed back some of the questioner's own memories with a couple of twists. Good enough in most circ.u.mstances but no help when the interrogator was a female brain in a jar. What possible memories could they be expected to have in common? The idea amused him for a fraction of a fraction of a second, and he was reminded of the allegedly brief attention-span of goldfish. A goldfish looks into a mirror. Oh look, he's got the same seaweed and ornamental castle as me. He chided himself for the flash of bad taste. No more games then. He let the needles penetrate.

Aunt Jessica's limbs thrashed in their nutrient liquid.

She broke the contact, gill slits gasping.

'You can trust him.' Her words came rustily, from a larynx hardly used. Johann pressed his head close to the gla.s.s to hear them. 'Show him the children, tell him our history. He will help us.'

'He has already seen one of the children, Aunt,' Dominic said quickly. 'I do not think he needs to see the others.'

The wave of disdain from the tank was almost physical.

'I don't care what you think, Dominic. I am the oldest of our generation. By Family vote I rule here. Above ground your limbs -' the word flashed obscene in the stream of 203 images from the brain, a smeared pulse of twined flesh and shatterable bones '- provide you with the normality needed to represent the Family, but you are not in charge of us. Here you must learn humility. Unless of course you are willing to let me read your reasons from your mind?'

'Very well,' Dominic snarled. 'I will take him to the nurseries.'

204.

Chapter 19.

'I've the oddest feeling I've seen your Doll's House somewhere before,' the Doctor said, running a hand idly over the chalked directions on the walls.

Dominic tried to bite back his anger. Lock it behind his teeth, as if they were a portcullis. His frustrations were not the fault of this gnat of a traveller. The sound of the hand brushing the walls, like the leg of an insect on the ceiling at night, erasing who knew what vital messages or exchanges of endearments, was like an itch in his blood. Was that what this Doctor was? An irritant that fate flung into the worst situa-tions to force the people round him to react?

The sound ran its nails over his spine once too often.

Whirling, he grabbed the Doctor's flimsy jacket, pressing him against the wall, his face only centimetres from Dominic's own. He did not need to be able to see his own eyes to know that orange fire spattered from them.

'I don't care about your feelings,' he shouted. Flecks of spittle fell on the Doctor's face, only to evaporate before the kindling of Dominic's eyes. For a second, a mist hung in the underground air like breath on a cold day. Then, with an effort, Dominic unlocked the muscles in his hands and let the Doctor drop down the wall. He had been light, like a child.

Just like a child.

Dominic spoke softly: ' I ' m sorry, Doctor. I just want to get this over with. The sooner I can tell Jessica truthfully that you've seen the children, the sooner I can start putting them out of my mind again.'

205.