Doctor Who BBCN16 - Forever Autumn (16 page)

Fully kitted out, he clomped over to the full-length mirror beside the counter to see how he looked. It was awkward walking in the giant shoes. He had to lift his feet quite high off the ground, bending his knees so they were virtually at right angles with each step. He couldn’t imagine wearing this costume for a long time. As well as becoming quickly exhausted with all the exaggerated walking, it would also be only a matter of time before he would start to feel claustrophobic in the hot, rubbery mask.

He couldn’t deny he looked good, though. He filled the costume out well. This was one occasion, Jim thought ruefully, when his paunch actually enhanced the sartorial effect.

He admired himself for a few seconds longer, then decided it was time to take the mask off. It was getting hot; already he could feel sweat trickling down his face. To remove the mask, though, he first had to remove the big white gloves. He tucked one of them into his armpit and tried to yank his hand out of it. But for some reason the hand was stuck; it wouldn’t budge. He tried the other hand, with the same result.

Ridiculous, he thought, and tried again. But his hands were well and truly stuck. It was as though they had been super-glued into the white gloves. He started to feel a bit panicky. His head was full of the 108

stifling smell of rubber. He was finding it difficult to breathe.

Maybe he could pull the mask off with the big white sausage fingers.

It was only loose rubber, after all. But as soon as he raised his hands, he felt the mask sealing itself to his face.

His panic didn’t build slowly this time, but leaped into his head, fully formed. Gone was the serenity he had experienced minutes before, the sense that he was doing the right thing. He clawed at the clown face, but it was no use. He could feel it tightening on his skin, suffocating him. Even worse was the sense that somehow, contained within the rubber, was a vast and evil intelligence. Jim felt it forcing its way into his mind, subsuming his thoughts. He struggled against it, fought to regain control, but it overwhelmed him, crushed him.

He felt his thoughts changing, a new personality taking over. In the instant before he was swamped completely, he sensed the nature of this new personality and was horrified by it. It was alien, murderous, utterly deranged. . .

As soon as they set foot on the pavement outside Harry Ho’s, the mist closed in around them. Immediately Martha’s head began to dart left and right. She even looked up at the sky, wondering where the first attack would come from. She was hugging the Necris to her chest, both arms wrapped around it. The iron band that the Doctor had fashioned with the sonic and secured snugly around the book seemed to be keeping it quiet for now, for which she was grateful. It was creepy the way the Necris had been contracting and expanding before

– like holding a lump of living flesh in her hands. The Doctor had told her that iron was an effective defence against the Hervoken’s power, even better than salt. It blocked and deflected their energy or something. Though to be honest, Martha wasn’t too bothered
what
it did as long as it worked.

Flanked by the boys, she crossed the square and began walking past the line of shops on her right. There was a dry cleaner’s, a drug-store, an electrical store and an old-fashioned barber’s shop with no customers (Martha could see the portly figure of the barber in the brightly lit interior, sitting in his own barber’s chair, reading a news-109

paper). Next was a sandwich shop with a ‘Closed’ sign on the door, and next to that was a fancy dress place called Tozier’s Costume Emporium. They were walking past this when Rick stopped so suddenly that Martha almost stumbled into the back of him.

‘Oof,’ she said. ‘What you doing?’

Rick was staring at the window display. Surrounded by pumpkins and plastic skulls and a couple of broomsticks, and framed by a black sheet festooned with rubber masks and plastic spiders and woolly swathes of cobweb, was a six-foot clown. It had big white hands and a multicoloured harlequin costume and a madly grinning face.

‘There’s something weird about the clown,’ he said.

Scott snorted. ‘Come on, man, that dude’s been there all week.’

‘Yeah, I
know
that,’ Rick said with a scowl, ‘but it’s different to how it was before. More real somehow.’

‘Aw, you’re just –’ Scott began.

But then Thad said, ‘Nah, Rick’s right. Look at its eyes.’

They all craned forward to peer through the mist. Instead of the previously blank eye sockets, the clown had what appeared to be real, gleaming, staring eyes. What was more, the eyes seemed to be glowing with a soft green light. Thad put his hand flat on the window and leaned forward so that his nose was almost touching the glass. . .

. . . and that was when the clown opened its grotesquely wide mouth and grinned at him, revealing a set of gleaming silver teeth, pointed like knives.

As Thad reeled back with a shocked cry, the clown raised its huge hands. Before their eyes its fat sausage-like fingers, encased in snowy-white gloves, suddenly extended into long, bear-like claws.

Scott uttered a single girlish scream and ran off in the direction they had come, his bulky frame swallowed by the mist within seconds. A split-second later, Thad spun round and took off too, cutting diagonally across the square, his actions belying his brave words of only minutes before. Rick, however, simply stood there, staring at the clown, apparently too stunned to flee. Shifting the weight of the Necris into the crook of her left arm, Martha reached out and grabbed his hand.

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‘Run!’ she said.

They ran up the street, passing a whole bunch of other stores that Martha didn’t even register. Behind them she heard the shattering of glass, and glanced back to see that the clown had simply jumped through the big plate-glass display window. She saw it standing on the pavement, shaking itself like a dog, shedding shards of glass which tinkled onto the ground around it. Then it came loping after them, its big shoes slapping the pavement as it gave chase. Martha heard it giggling maniacally, but there was nothing jolly in the sound. It was purely and simply the gleeful blood-lust of a predator running down its prey.

Across the square they ran, and up several more streets. Soon they were fleeing through the residential area of Blackwood Falls, along tree-lined pavements edged with picket fences, beyond which pretty clapboard houses nestled at the ends of long, well-clipped lawns. The streets were mostly silent and deserted, and the houses themselves swathed in mist, though dotted here and there Martha could see the faint orange glow from the occasional Halloween pumpkin sitting on someone’s front porch.

Despite its vast shoes, and the fact that Martha and Rick were running at full speed, the clown seemed to be keeping pace with them easily. Above their own panting breath, they could hear the rapid slap of its relentless pursuit, each of its footsteps like the crack of a whip.

They could also hear its hideous, insane chuckling and the occasional splintering crack of wood as the creature slashed at fences and trees with its curved white claws. Martha tried not to think how much damage those claws would do if the clown got close enough to use them on her, tried instead to concentrate on how they might get out of this without having to give up the Necris, how they could possibly turn the tables or give the creature the slip before they arrived at Rick’s house.

What would the Doctor do?
she thought, and almost immediately the answer came to her: he’d make use of the available resources.

He’d keep his eyes peeled, his mind alert and his senses tuned to his surroundings, in the hope of spotting something – anything – that would give him an advantage.

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She looked around as she ran, her eyes scanning the pavement, the road, the lawns. This little patch of suburban America, however, was annoyingly featureless. Where were the twig-covered pits when you needed them? The giant nets that dropped from trees? The trip-wires?

Just as this last thought flashed into her mind, Martha glanced to her left and saw a selection of toys that a child (a girl, she guessed) had left carelessly strewn on her front lawn. There was a pink bike with a white seat and handlebar-tassels, a plastic ball brightly emblazoned with images from The Little Mermaid, and a red-handled skipping rope.

It was the rope which gave Martha the idea. Judging that the clown was maybe fifteen seconds behind them, she panted, ‘Hang on a sec,’

then vaulted the low fence and snatched the rope up off the ground.

Jumping back over the fence, she tossed one end to Rick. ‘Quick,’

she said, ‘get behind that tree there, and hold on tight to the handle.

When I shout “Now”, pull as hard as you can. OK?’

Rick looked scared, but he nodded and scampered to conceal himself behind the tree that Martha had indicated. Holding the other end of the rope, she ducked below the low hedge separating the rope-owner’s property from the one next door. As the clown lolloped towards their hiding place, still giggling like a loon, Martha tensed, her stomach roiling, her mouth dry. Every instinct screamed at her to jump to her feet and run like hell, but she resisted, and hoped fer-vently that Rick would be able to do the same.

Martha’s muscles bunched as the clown came closer. She could hear the scythe-like swoosh as its claws whistled through the air. She glanced across at Rick, but his face was a blur in the mist. All she could see of his expression was the glint of his wide, scared eyes.

As the clown came parallel with their hiding-place, Martha screamed, ‘Now!’ and threw herself backwards as if engaged in a tug of war. For a second she was terrified that she’d yanked the rope right out of Rick’s hands, but then she felt a corresponding tug on the other end. The rope, which had been lying slack on the ground between them, tautened, rising into the air. Martha gritted her teeth and held 112

on for all she was worth as the clown’s giant shoe became tangled in the rope and it pitched forward, like a diver doing a belly-flop into a swimming pool.

The clown landed flat on its great, grinning face, its hands slapping the ground. It might have been her imagination, but Martha was sure she heard a comical honk as the creature’s bulbous nose connected with the pavement. In one slick movement, she let go of the rope, grabbed the Necris, which she had put down on the ground beside her, and rose to her feet. She leaped onto the pavement, swung the Necris and brought it slamming down on top of the clown’s head, just as it was in the process of bracing its clawed hands on the ground to push itself back to its feet.

There was a flash of green fire, which threw Martha backwards.

She went clean over the picket fence and landed next to the pink bike on the toy-strewn lawn. For a moment she lay there, dazed, wondering whether she had been struck by lightning. Then she heard a muffled groaning sound and propped herself up on her elbows. The groaning was coming from the clown, which was lying on its back on the ground, holding its head.

From the murky gloom on the other side of the pavement, a dark shape crept forward. It was Rick, a wary expression on his face. He looked down at the clown and then at Martha.

‘I think you broke the spell,’ he said. ‘When you hit him with the book. I think you bust a connection or something.’

‘Careful,’ Martha said as Rick took a step closer.

‘I think it’s OK,’ Rick said. ‘I think he’s just a regular guy in a mask now. Look at his hands. They’re back to normal. And his face. It’s just rubber again. It doesn’t look alive any more.’

Martha scrambled to her feet. Still feeling woozy, she shook her head. She handed the Necris to Rick and said, ‘Give him another whack if he makes any sudden moves.’ Then she stepped forward, grabbed a handful of the spiky orange hair and tugged upwards.

The clown mask peeled away to reveal a plump, red-faced man with a bushy white moustache. He blinked confusedly up at her.

‘Mr Tozier!’ cried Rick.

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Her heart still thumping with reaction, Martha said, ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess – you would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for us meddling kids?’

The plump man seemed to have no idea where he was. ‘Huh?’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Martha,’ replied Martha, holding out a hand, ‘and despite the lump on your head I reckon I’ve just done you a favour. Welcome back, Mr Tozier.’

The Doctor strolled into the central chamber, his hands in his pockets.

‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

The Hervoken drifted towards him, surrounded him. Their leader towered over him, hissing softly.

‘It’s all right,’ the Doctor said, ‘you don’t have to pretend to look surprised to see me. You knew I was coming, and I know that you knew I was coming. I wouldn’t have got this far if you lot hadn’t wanted me to. Which is an encouraging sign. It indicates that you’re willing to talk, or at least that you’re naturally curious about me, which is almost as good. Unless you just want to kill me, of course – which isn’t so good. Well, not for me anyway. But I’m willing to take that risk. I mean you’re an intelligent bunch. You wouldn’t just bump someone off for the hell of it. Er. . . would you?’

He smiled up into the wide, squashy face of the Hervoken leader.

The alien made a number of odd gestures and seemingly arbitrary sounds, which – thanks to the clever old TARDIS – the Doctor understood perfectly.

‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I’m here to talk. I would request parlay in compliance with the Shadow Proclamation. . . but I doubt whether that would mean much to you lot.’

The Hervoken leader made another series of gestures and sounds, which the Doctor interpreted as a question:
What do you want to talk
about?
He sensed a certain sneery attitude in the way the question was phrased, however, and suspected that a more literal translation would be something like: What could you possibly have to say that would be even remotely interesting to us?

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The Doctor dropped the bonhomie and adopted a more business-like approach.

‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ he said, ‘a once-in-a-lifetime offer.