Chapter 9: In Darkness

[clocketpatch]

Empty.

My nest, my night.

Feed me. Feed me your children. Feed me your souls.

You killed us, you tortured us. But I will reign again, and my night will never end.

I am coming. You are so feeble against me. Thinking you can stop me. I will scatter your bones to the stars.

To see me is to tremble. To see me is to fail. My time is coming.

You think you are so wise.

Idiot lords of time.

I have you.


*

The tracker in Martha’s hand screams and bursts, scattering glass and fizzling wires across the mud. It’s sudden. Martha didn’t have time to let go and now there is a burn and a cut across her right palm. It stings terribly, but she barely feels it. She’s spinning, turning in place, calling out:

“Jack!”

But he’s gone, and so is the Doctor, and Benton. There’s just the eerily quiet road, the grass shifting in the breeze, and the still tableau of the UNIT jeep and Bessie standing like props on a stage before the curtain is drawn and the players step out. Somewhere, a cricket chirps.

“Where are you?” asks Martha, her sanity slipping. “This isn’t funny!” It’s not, and she knows it’s not a joke. Her footsteps echo off the pavement as she runs between the two vehicles searching and not finding. Her hand is bleeding freely and, calming herself, she rummages an aid kit out of the back of the UNIT jeep. It probably needs stitches, but she does the best she can with antiseptic, clean cloth, and a few painkillers. Her hand taken care of, she searches out the jeep’s radio.

She doesn’t know the right channel or the military codes to recite if she finds it, but she gleaned some practical knowledge of shortwave over the year. She flips through the frequencies. All she gets is static, and she knows that can’t be right; all of the channels can’t be dead.

“This is Martha Jones,” she says to each crackling flick of the dial, “I’m with UNIT. We have personal down. Requesting back-up.”

Nothing.

“Why won’t you answer?” she pleads. She puts down the receiver but leaves the radio on. She steps out of the jeep.

“Doctor, why do you always have to disappear just when I need you?”

She wanders back to the rutted dirt track. She looks at the remains of the tracker, half sunk into a mud puddle. There’s nothing else for it; she takes a brave breath and steps forward.

There’s a rickety structure at the end of the winding track, Martha can’t decide if it’s a shed, a barn, or something else entirely. She noticed it before. Even without the tracker, Martha is sure that the leaning building is the source of the time distortions. It glowers, and hunches, and gives off all the stereotypic airs of a haunted house. As Martha approaches she feels like she is being watched.

A smell stands on its head in the warm summer breeze; something unnatural and electric with a faint back-breath of rot. Martha can see nothing but dark between the building’s widely-spaced slat walls. She creeps around its side to the door.

It opens easily, swinging back on loose hinges, and the stink multiplies. Martha gags, but catches herself with a deep, shuddering breath. She has smelled worse things in her life. The stink is bad, but not overpowering. She can cope. She lifts the collar of her shirt over her nose and takes a few steps forward.

The barn seems averse to light. Despite the open door, the cracks in the walls, and the cheery noon sun outside, it remains dark inside. Straw, or something like it, shifts and pops underfoot. Martha blinks in the gloom, analysing shapes and forms. She knows what she sees. She knows, but several moments pass before the fact clicks into her mind and she realises that she is leaning hard against a crooked, wide-spaced wall gasping into the fresh air and sunlight on the other side of the gaps.

She is a doctor – almost. Death should not bother her. She saw many worse things than this over the year that never was, but that’s the problem again. She saw so many things that now a feather knocks her over, and this is a very harsh feather: bodies, lots of bodies. They are laid into a circle, heads facing in, legs splayed out like petals or pinwheel spokes. Their eyes…

Martha swallows hard and forces herself to look and continue her analysis, hard, unemotional, and disconnected. The bodies have no eyes. They stare towards the barn’s broken ceiling with bloodied holes. Martha looks up and sees stars through the much-perforated roof. They are not normal; they are silver droplets in an infinite ocean of black, and she feels herself slipping. She’s seen those stars up close. She’s sailed that ocean. There’s a terrible pain behind her eyes and at first she thinks it might be the beginning of tears, but it’s more sinister than that. It increases and it’s like the stars are playing tug-of-war with her retinas.

Martha quickly averts her gaze and blinks a few times to clear the after image. Her head is groaning and she has to fight the desire to look up again. When she peeks out through the gaps in the wall she sees daylight and rolling moor. The electricity in the air gets sharper and Martha feels her hair being buoyed up by the static.

She looks again at the flower of eyeless bodies. Their heads frame a little patch of dirt floor. The earth in that small space is pulsating like something is trying to push its way through. Martha thinks on the Doctor – the white-haired, capes and frills Doctor – and his words: an utterly destructive extra-dimensional anomaly. It’s already taken Jack, and Benton with his dopey half-smile. It’s taken the Doctor, both of him, and she wonders if she will be next and if this will be the way it ends.

Something grabs her shoulder and she can’t help but jump. The hand is cold and somehow familiar. She turns her head to see a well-built, but short man with a salt and pepper beard and distinguished eyes. His hand is not hard on her shoulder, and it quickly withdraws. Martha finds herself drawn in by the man’s eyes. There’s a clarity to them, a glimpse into infinity that she associates with the Doctor, and she wonders momentarily if this might be him… another him, or the same him, or him rebuilt from the desperate pin-striped creature she’s grown to love.

“My dear,” says the man, and his voice is kind, but his breath is heavy with cigar smoke and there is something vaguely unsettling about the way he doesn’t blink, “whatever could you be doing in my castle?”

In that moment Martha realises who the man must be. She knees him in the groin, bursts from the darkness of the barn, and runs for her life. 

 

Comments

[bewarethespork.livejournal.com]

Nice.

A couple of things:

Her footsteps echo off the pavement as she runs between the two vehicles, searching and not finding.

“This is Martha Jones,” she says to each crackling flick of the dial, “I’m with UNIT. We have personal personnel down. Requesting back-up.”

There’s a rickety structure at the end of the winding track,; Martha can’t decide if it’s a shed, a barn, or something else entirely. She'd noticed it before.

As Martha approaches, she feels like she is being watched.

Now, most of that is just me being picky about commas, but I thought I'd point them out anyway. Otherwise, this was as brilliant as usual, and I can't wait for more.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Oh!!!

This is dead exciting!!


As well as the two things that bewarethespork has pointed out, I'd like to mention

gives off all the stereotypic airs of a haunted house

It should be "stereotypical" not "stereotypic".