Doctor Who BBCN16 - Forever Autumn (14 page)

and whipped out his sonic. As soon as he turned it on and pointed it at the dome, the crackling intensified.’ The Doctor adjusted the setting 92

and had another go, but once again the crackling altered, becoming deeper, more sonorous.

‘Oh,
now
I’m getting cross,’ he grumbled.

‘Can’t you get through?’ asked Martha.

The Doctor tried again, but although the flickering green dome dimmed and brightened intermittently, it remained stubbornly in place.

At last he stepped back and raised his head to the sky. ‘I suppose you think you’re clever!’ he shouted. Then he sighed and grudgingly admitted, ‘Which you are. Quite.’

‘What’s it doing?’ asked Martha.

‘It’s gazumping me,’ the Doctor said, and waggled his sonic in the air. ‘It keeps anticipating my moves, changing frequency before I do.’

‘You mean it’s alive?’

‘We-ell, not alive exactly, just. . . a bit brainier than most of the force fields I’ve met on my travels.’ Suddenly he pulled a face. ‘Urgh!’

‘What’s wrong?’ Martha asked.

‘The Necris is trying to break through the occult shield I created around it.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Hey, this is me you’re talking to, remember.

There’s no need to tart it all up and make it sound impressive. All you did was cover the book in salt like it was a plate of chips or something.’

‘Yeah, but I did it
brilliantly
,’ said the Doctor.

Martha smiled. ‘So how do you know it’s trying to break through then?’

‘Well, to use the technical term, it’s going all yucky and squirmy.

Here, catch.’

He tossed the book to her and she caught it instinctively. Sure enough the cover was rippling, contracting, which made her think of escapologists manipulating their muscles to break free from chains or ropes. ‘Yuk,’ she said.

‘Less of the technobabble,’ the Doctor scolded her. ‘Long words only confuse people.’ He tapped his sonic against his bottom lip, brow furrowed as he thought the situation through. Then he grabbed the book from her again and shouted, ‘Come on!’

93

‘Where we going now?’ she asked as he passed her in a blur of motion.

‘Somewhere else,’ he called.

‘Bet none of your friends have ever been fat, have they?’

she

shouted, and ran after him.

94

‘It’s just like in the movies,’ said Scott.

‘Huh?’ said Rick.

‘You know, those movies where the kids know there’s something weird going on, but the adults don’t believe them?’

‘I bet the Doctor would believe us,’ said Thad.

Scott rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, but the Doctor’s not here, is he?’

‘Well, maybe we should go look for him then,’ Thad suggested.

‘Oh,
great
idea, brainiac,’ said Scott scathingly. ‘That shouldn’t take too long. There’s only about ten million places he could be.’

It was forty-five minutes since Mr Everson’s disappearance. By the time Rick had managed to persuade his dad to break away from his work and come look at the hammer, it had long since ceased its weird light show. Rick had warned his dad about touching the thing, but Mr Pirelli had just given him an exasperated look and picked it up anyway. And of course, nothing had happened. The hammer was just a hammer.

‘You be sure to give this back to Dwight when you see him,’ Mr Pirelli said, and held it out to his son as if making a point.

95

Rick looked at the hammer as if it was a poisonous snake, but then he stretched out a reluctant hand and took it.

The thing is, sir,’ Scott said hesitantly, ‘I don’t think we
will
see him.’

Tony Pirelli fixed Scott with a look that made him squirm. ‘Really?’

he said heavily. ‘So
you
think he’s vanished into thin air too, huh?’

Scott shrugged, too intimidated to respond.

Thad said, ‘We know
something’s
happened, Mr Pirelli. We heard him cry out, but when we got here he’d gone.’

‘I see. So what’s your theory, Thad? You think Dwight was maybe snatched by a pterodactyl that slipped through from
The Twilight
Zone
?’

His words were steeped in irony. Now it was Thad’s turn to fall silent. Shaking his head, Mr Pirelli said, ‘You know what I think?

I think you guys have got a severe case of the Halloween heebie-jeebies.’

‘That’s not it, Dad,’ protested Rick. ‘We
did
hear Mr Everson cry out. And when we got here five seconds later, he’d gone. How do you explain that?’

‘Well now, let’s see,’ said Mr Pirelli, smiling indulgently. ‘How’s about Dwight was fixing up the lights when he caught his thumb a good one with the hammer? You guys heard him yell out, but by the time you got here he’d scooted off to find himself a band-aid?’

The boys exchanged sceptical looks. ‘So what about all the other weird stuff that’s been going down?’ said Rick.

Mr Pirelli sighed. ‘Such as?’

Rick glanced at Scott. ‘Dr Clayton for one.’

‘What about Dr Clayton?’

‘We heard he’d had an accident,’ said Rick. ‘We heard he was in the hospital and that no one was allowed to visit him.’

Tony Pirelli shrugged. ‘
If
that’s true, then what’s weird about it?

People have accidents all the time.’

‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘Well, what about this mist? You can’t say
this
is normal.’

‘It’s
unusual
, I’ll give you that,’ his dad conceded, ‘but I’m sure if you asked a weather guy he’d explain it to you like that.’ He clicked 96

his fingers.

The boys simply stared at him, unconvinced.

Sighing again, Mr Pirelli said, ‘Look, guys, I really haven’t got time for this. I have to get back to work. And maybe you should too. Maybe it would help take your mind off things.’

He stomped off, and a few minutes later the boys followed him. Getting back to work
hadn’t
helped take their mind off things, however.

In fact, the more they talked about Dwight Everson’s disappearance the more convinced they became that strange forces were at work.

Scott had just made his remark about there being a million possible places the Doctor could be when Rick said quietly, ‘You’re not going to believe this, guys.’

Scott and Thad glanced at him, then followed the direction of his gaze. The gangly figure of the Doctor was racing towards them out of the mist, the equally slim but shorter figure of his friend Martha at his heels.

‘Hey,’ Rick shouted, spotting what the Doctor was holding in his hand, ‘you found my book.’

The Doctor and Martha thumped to a stop. Martha was panting, but the Doctor wasn’t.

Looking at Rick a little wildly, the Doctor cried, ‘I need some iron!’

Bewildered, Rick said, ‘Some. . . ?’

‘Iron! Iron!’ the Doctor shouted. ‘Surely you’ve heard of it? It’s a malleable ductile ferromagnetic metallic element, found mainly in haematite and magnetite. Grappling irons are made out of it, and soldering irons, and. . . and horses and ages and fists.’

Rick was too flustered by the Doctor’s urgency, by the way the man was staring at him, to think clearly. ‘What. . . what kind of iron?’ was all he could think of to say.

The Doctor did a double-take. ‘Anything! Anything made of iron. A crowbar, a jemmy, an iron. . . pomegranate. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s iron.’

Rick suddenly realised that Dwight Everson’s hammer was still in his hand. He held it out. ‘Well, there’s this,’ he said.

97

‘Brilliant!’ cried the Doctor, as if Rick had performed the most as-tounding magic trick ever. He snatched the hammer from Rick with one hand and lobbed the book carelessly over his shoulder with the other. Martha stepped forward and caught it.

The Doctor produced what looked to Rick like a thin torch from his coat pocket and turned it on. The torch made a high-pitched warbling noise and a brilliant blue light shone out of the end of it.

‘Wow,’ Thad breathed as the Doctor used the torch to reshape the iron hammer. Whatever the device really was, it sliced through the dense metal like a sharp knife through a soft cake. The boys watched in awestruck disbelief as the Doctor melted and shaped the chunk of iron, forming it into a band.

‘What
is
that thing?’ asked Ralph.

‘Sonic screwdriver,’ said the Doctor absently.

‘How does it work?’ asked Thad.

‘Very well, thanks,’ said the Doctor, and reached behind him.

‘Martha.’

Martha placed the book into his hand. The Doctor laid it on the iron band, then used his sonic screwdriver to mould the band around it.

He made a few minor adjustments, then, when he was happy, sealed the band shut.

Finally he sat back on his heels. ‘Try getting out of
that
one,’ he said to the book and slipped the sonic back into his pocket.

‘So,’ Martha said, ‘tell us about the Hervoken.’

‘The what?’ said Rick.

‘They’re. . . oh,
so
ancient,’ said the Doctor. ‘When they’re oper-ating at full capacity they have the ability to transform matter, alter perception and shift time.’

‘Black magic,’ said Thad.

‘Just a different kind of science,’ said the Doctor. ‘They knocked around the universe for centuries, pretty much keeping themselves to themselves, until. . . ooh, millions of years ago now, they somehow became involved in a war with our old mates, the Carrionites.’

‘The Witchy Wars,’ Martha said brightly.

98

The Doctor flashed her a huge grin. ‘I
like
that,’ he said. ‘Aw, I wish my lot had called it that.’

‘
Your
lot?’ said Rick.

Casually Martha nodded at the Doctor. ‘He’s an alien.’

There was a beat of stunned silence and then Thad said, ‘Cool.’

‘So. . . these Hervoken guys,’ said Rick. ‘Have they, like, landed here in the Falls? Are they making all this weirdness happen?’

‘They didn’t
land
here exactly,’ said the Doctor. ‘They crashed. But not recently.’ Briefly he told the boys how the Hervoken ship had come down millennia before, how the majority of it was buried deep in the earth, and how the town had been built around it.

‘So the tree’s their spaceship?’ boggled Scott.

‘Well, it’s the tip the apex. . .

the crest. . .

the pinnacle. . .

the

peak. . . the –’

‘I think we get the point,’ said Martha.

‘Hey, how lucky are we to live on top of a whole bunch of aliens?’

exclaimed Scott, then withered at the look the Doctor gave him. ‘Or not,’ he said.

‘Luck had nothing to do with it,’ said the Doctor. ‘Your ancestors were drawn here by a psychic pulse. Nothing too extreme, just a gentle suggestion sent out by the ship. It waited and waited for you lot to get clever enough to help it, then it sought you out and planted instructions in your pliable little brains.’ He raised his hands and adopted a ghostly voice: ‘Build here, protect us, tend to our needs.’

‘By “tend to our needs”, do you mean the Hervoken forced the townspeople to. . . ’ Martha began, then glanced at the boys, who were all looking at her avidly ‘. . . you know?’

The Doctor looked at her incomprehension. Martha rolled her eyes.

‘You know,’ she said a little more forcefully.

But the Doctor simply pushed out his bottom lip and gave her a blank look. Martha sighed in exasperation and drew a finger swiftly across her throat in the hope that only he would see it. ‘You
know
.’

‘
Ohh,
’ the Doctor cried as realisation dawned, ‘offer a human sacrifice, you mean? Nah, don’t be daft. The pulse just got the people to create routes to the Hervoken ship, like the one in Etta’s cellar, so they 99

could keep things ticking over. Now and again someone was probably chosen to wander about in the corridors so the ship could suck up a few brainwaves. Low maintenance stuff.’

‘Oh,’ said Martha. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘No, it wasn’t really. Like I said, they’re not exactly life-and-soul types, the Hervoken. They prefer to keep a low profile.’

‘So how come they’ve woken up now?’ Rick asked.

‘Well, that’s down to you lot. Couldn’t keep your noses out, could you? Had to dig up old Nelly Necris here.’

He gave them a stern look. The boys looked back, suitably shamefaced. Then the Doctor said airily, ‘Though, to be honest, if it hadn’t been you it would have been someone else. It was all planned yonks ago – alarm clock set, teasmade primed, eggs on the boil.’

‘But why now?’ Martha asked.

‘Why
not
now?’ replied the Doctor. ‘I’m guessing it’s taken all this time for the ship to repair itself properly and the Necris to work its way to the surface. Plus, knowing the Hervoken, there’ll have had to be the right configuration of planets and confluence of whatnots and all that palaver before they could rise again.’ He uttered these last two words in a convincingly blood-curdling Vincent Price voice.

‘So what do the Hervoken want?’ asked Thad. ‘Are they here to conquer and enslave humanity?’

‘Doubt it,’ said the Doctor. ‘They probably just want to leave.’

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Martha. Then she saw the look on the Doctor’s face. ‘It’s not all right, is it? There’s a catch, isn’t there?’