'Stealers of Dreams'
Here are two sections of the Doctor Who novel Stealers of Dreams by Steve Lyons to referesh the memories of any writers taking up my challenge.
Chapter Eleven
Rose fidgeted impatiently as her taxi hovered in a queue of traffic. Over the past hour she’d come to the conclusion that it would have been quicker to walk, but at least the taxi driver knew where she was going.
Or rather, her cab’s navigation system did. Every few seconds, it relayed an instruction in a clipped, female tone, occasionally adding a warning, ‘Please do not attempt to visualise this route.’
The driver thumped her horn in frustration, swore loudly and revved her hoverjets so that gravel chips flew up from the road to spatter the windows.
None of these aggravations mattered, though, because the Doctor was back.
Just the sight of him, sitting alongside her, made Rose smile. She still had that flaming itch in the back of her brain, somewhere to the right, but she wasn’t confused any more. The Doctor made everything seem clear.
She’d felt a bit guilty about abandoning Domnic, but the Doctor had insisted. ‘He’s another Mickey,’ he had said, ‘or an Adam. Like most of the apes that evolved from your planet. He wouldn’t cope.’ Rose had been torn, as she always was when he said things like that, between feeling slighted at the insult to her species and flattered because he had made her an exception.
He had soon cheered her up. She had laughed at his efforts to flag down a cab, jumping, waving, even haring out into the roadway and hammering on the windscreen of one that was stuck at a junction. It was as if the drivers couldn’t see him. As if he was invisible. She had stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled and a black vehicle had pulled up straight away.
‘Where’s it to be?’ the driver had asked from the other side of her glass partition as they’d climbed into the back.
‘Where are we going, Doctor?’ Rose had mumbled.
‘Big White House,’ he’d said.
‘Eh? Didn’t catch that. Speak up, luv.’
‘The Big White House,’ Rose had repeated loudly.
‘So what’s the plan?’ she asked the Doctor now.
‘Depends what we find when we get there.’
‘But the usual, yeah? Beat the monsters, put things right, set everyone free.’
He grinned. ‘Oh yeah.’ And he took her by the hand, and she felt electricity flowing through her body, and she was grinning too.
‘So why the Big White House?’ she asked.
‘No government,’ he said, ‘so who d’you think is keeping the people down, enforcing the status quo?’
‘The police?’
‘Guess again.’
Rose thought for a moment. ‘The media. The newspapers and the TV.’
‘Bingo!’
‘Like on Satellite Five.’
‘If you like.’
‘Is that what’s happening? Is it the Jagrafess again?’
‘Doubt it. Wrong time period. Anyway, when we last saw the Mighty Jagrafess of the Hadro-um-something Maxa-whatchamacallit, he was cooked meat. Doesn’t mean he was the first alien monster to cotton on to the power of the human media.’
‘As a brainwashing tool, right?’
‘As a means of spreading ideas, reinforcing a selective viewpoint. The question is, whose ideas? Whose viewpoint? If the media controls the people, who controls the media?’
‘Bet Hal Gryden knows.’
‘I’ll bet he does. He’s playing the official channels at their own game. S’pose he knows what he’s doing. I prefer the direct approach myself.’
‘The TV studios,’ realised Rose. She thought for a moment, then looked at the Doctor. ‘Only, that’s not where we’re going. . . ’
It took him a moment to answer. Maybe he was just giving her time to work it out for herself. ‘There are too many studios, too many publishing companies, too many people between us and the real power. This way’s faster. If you want to find a tyrant, follow the dissidents.’
‘To the Big White House.’
‘That’s where they take the people who still dare to dream. That’s where some of them learn to toe the line, and the others. . . Well, let’s see.’
‘Big White House,’ said the taxi driver in a surly tone, bringing them to a halt on a surprisingly quiet road. ‘And I hope you’ve come to check yourself in, luv. All that talk of satellites and jagra fish. . . ’
‘Oi,’ said Rose, ‘that was a private conversation. You weren’t meant to be listening.’
‘Couldn’t help hearing your side of it, luv. That’ll be two credits thirty.’
The Doctor dug out his card wallet. ‘I think this explains everything,’ he said, flashing it in the driver’s direction. She said nothing, just continued to glower at Rose. The Doctor looked chagrined. ‘Psychic paper’s not working, Rose.’
‘Well, try something else,’ she whispered, squirming under the driver’s glare.
‘Two credits thirty,’ she repeated sternly.
‘Haven’t you got any money?’
‘Hadn’t really thought,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh, that’s enough!’ snapped the driver, starting the engine again.
‘I knew I shoulda left you standing - one look and I could tell you were fantasy crazy. Well, you’re coming back to the depot with me, luv. We’ll sort this out there, give you a proper taste of reality.’
‘Doctor! What do we do?’
‘When all else fails, Rose. . . leg it!’
They reached for the doors - but at that moment Rose heard the solid thunks of safety locks engaging, and the taxi’s engines screamed as it sped away from the kerb with an acceleration that pushed her back into her seat. Simultaneously, a steel shield slid down in front of the driver’s partition.
‘Sonic screwdriver!’ cried Rose.
‘Out of juice,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve been meaning to recharge the power pack.’
‘Fat lot of use you’re being today!’
He was hammering on the window in his door with both fists, to no avail.
‘Here, brace me!’ said Rose, twisting around in her seat until she could attack the window next to her with her feet. The driver let out a cry of protest as her third double-heeled kick did the trick. She manoeuvred herself back into a sitting position and knocked shards of glass out of the frame with her elbow.
The taxi took a corner wide and came up against another traffic jam. While it was stalled, Rose reached through the broken window and fumbled for the handle outside. To her relief, the door gave, and she and the Doctor spilled out onto the pavement.
‘You won’t get away with this, you crazy geek!’ the taxi driver was screaming. ‘I’ve got your DNA on my seat, I’ll find you!’ They raced back in the direction of the Big White House, a stream of curses ringing in their ears.
‘You sure you can do this?’ asked the Doctor dubiously.
‘Champion gymnast, remember. Just give me a bunk-up.’
They were standing at the back of the Big White House, beside the three-metre-high wall that ringed the property. Normally, they’d have bluffed their way in through the front gate, but after the taxi Rose had suggested a sneakier approach.
The Doctor laced his fingers into a basket, then she stepped on it and let him propel her upwards. She reached for the top of the wall and thought she had it, but the next thing she knew she was back on the pavement, stumbling and almost falling.
‘What the hell just happened?’ she complained.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said the Doctor. ‘Ever thought of cutting down on the chips?’
‘Oi, less of the cheek, you!’
They tried a second and a third time - but again the Doctor’s hands just seemed to part beneath her foot to leave her back where she’d started.
‘Oh, honestly, Doctor,’ groaned Rose. ‘I bet you throw like a girl too.’
They found a bin in an alleyway across the road, waited till no one was looking and pinched it. They wheeled it up to the wall and Rose climbed onto it. The Doctor was meant to be holding the bin steady, but it almost slipped out from under her.
Now, though, she could reach the top of the wall with a short jump. Her hands clamped onto it. . .
. . . and a jolt of something cold stabbed up through her arms, into her chest and stomach. Rose gasped, lost her grip, fell, landed hard on the bin and bounced onto the pavement.
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.
‘Ah, what?’ she snapped at him, verging on mutiny. She picked herself up, waving aside his offer of a helping hand.
‘Ah, I thought there might be something like that. Force field, from the look of it. A more advanced alternative to barbed wire. You OK?’
‘I’m OK - and thanks for the warning.’
‘Looks like it’s back to Plan A,’ said the Doctor brightly.
‘The front gate,’ said Rose. ‘OK, how about you pretend to be a doctor and I’m a nurse?’
‘Wouldn’t work. They’ll have ways of checking, and without the psychic paper. . . ’
‘Yeah, what was up with that anyway?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Maybe there’s something about these people, makes them immune.’
‘Something our monster did to them.’
‘Could explain why so many of them go “fantasy crazy”.’
There was a short, awkward silence. Rose wondered if this was the time to come clean, to tell him about her own delusional episode. But she felt much better now and the zombies seemed like a long-faded dream.
‘S’pose we could say we’re visiting someone,’ she suggested. ‘A patient.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘If half of what we suspect about this place is true, I doubt they put out the red carpet for visitors.’
‘Well, d’you have any ideas?’
‘Yeah. I can think of one sure way of getting into a lunatic asylum.’ It took Rose a moment to latch on to his train of thought, then she grinned. ‘Oh, you’re joking!’
‘So, which of us do you think’ll make the best lunatic?’
‘It came on all of a sudden like,’ explained Rose to the bored guard at the gate. ‘He thinks he’s a doctor.’
‘I think I’m the Doctor.’ The Doctor fixed the guard with his most manic grin.
‘He thinks he. . . he’s 900 years old and he flies around the universe fighting farting aliens and pigs in space.’
‘I want locking up, I do,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m mad as a March hare, daft as a brush.’
‘You should take him to see your community physician,’ said the guard.
‘Oh. . . yeah, yeah, I know that, but he’s away, you see. Some conference on the other side of town. Anyway, he’s got a backlog. We can’t get an appointment for two weeks.’
‘Padded cell. Straitjacket. Throw away the key for all I care.’
Rose leaned closer to the guard, conspiratorially. ‘Thing is, he’s got this barmy idea that there’s a monster in this building.’ She had hoped to get a reaction to that, but the guard’s expression didn’t flicker at all.
‘It was either bring him here or wait for the police to do it. I mean, you’ve gotta see he needs help, urgent like.’
The Doctor walked up to the guard and stood so close that their noses almost touched through the bars of the gate. He stared at him intently for a moment, then broke out into an animated impression of a chimpanzee.
The guard looked right through him, his attention fixed on Rose.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said tiredly, ‘I reckon I do see that some form of medical intervention is needed here. Maybe you should go through to the house after all.’
Rose could hardly keep a big grin off her face as the guard opened the gate and waved her through. She couldn’t look at the Doctor at all, for fear that she would burst out laughing. They walked side by side down a path towards the Big White House itself, but they were still only halfway there when he muttered in her ear, ‘You realise he’ll have called ahead, don’t you?’
‘They’ll be waiting for us.’
‘On the plus side,’ said the Doctor cheerfully, ‘getting captured usually works - gives us a short cut to the big bad guy. Or we could. . . ’ Rose glanced back over her shoulder. The guard had returned to a little booth just inside the gate. She could see him through a window, with his back to her, apparently talking to someone on a vidphone.
She looked at the Doctor and they smiled at each other. He offered his hand and she took it.
They broke away from the path at a joyous run.
They found a door leading into the left-hand wing of the Big White House, but it was locked and didn’t seem to have been opened in months. Round the back of the building, two people in white kitchen overalls chatted outside another door, and Rose and the Doctor pulled back before they could be seen.
Beside them a row of windows gave access to a wood-panelled passageway. Rose tried one, but this too was locked. So were the second and the third - and as soon as she touched the fourth, an alarm began to shriek. She thought she’d set it off at first, but the Doctor pointed out that the staff inside had probably just noticed the disappearance of their new patient and his escort.
‘They know we’re in the grounds, but they don’t know where yet. Should give us a minute or so.’
‘You could help, y’know,’ said Rose as she tugged at a fourth window in vain. She could have screamed with frustration. She hadn’t realised how much she had come to rely on the Doctor’s bag of tricks to take them anywhere, any time he pleased.
He wandered up to a window that she’d already tried and peered through it. Without looking, he pointed to the left and said, ‘Next along but one. Looks like a broken latch.’ He was right.
Rose was clambering onto the window sill when the first orderlies came racing around the corner. One of them shouted something, but she couldn’t hear it over the incessant alarm. She scrambled into the building and turned to help the Doctor, but it was too late. He ran, just inches ahead of the orderlies’ reaching hands. A couple of them began to climb in after Rose, while two more set off after the Doctor towards the kitchen door.
Rose soon lost sight of them as she made two turns at random, hoping to shake off her pursuers, looking for a place to hide. Her heart sank as she spotted a spherical camera in a ceiling corner, rotating to follow her.
The Doctor was suddenly beside her. Rose couldn’t imagine how he’d got here so quickly - he must have found another way in. She saw no sign of the orderlies who’d been following him, but they couldn’t be far behind. She could hear more footsteps and raised voices from the right, so the Doctor took her hand again and led her to the left.
Normally she would have felt safer by his side, whatever the situation, but this time there was something nagging at her. Something wrong.
A large, arched wooden door was standing ajar and the Doctor made for it. They crashed into what appeared to be a patients’ common room. People were sitting around, hollow-eyed, slow to react to their appearance. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the orderlies inside the door - or of those who stood guard at another door, opposite.
Rose was herded into the centre of the room, a ring of black uniforms closing in. She had nowhere else to go, so she leaped up onto a table, causing a man who’d been leaning on it with his head in his arms to fall off his chair in surprise.
Simultaneously, another man threw himself at an orderly, with a desperate plea, ‘Help me! I can see them again! I can see the pretty girls again!’
A young woman with long, straight hair slapped him across the face. ‘Sinner!’ she spat. ‘Parading your smutty dreams in here for all to see!’
‘Formica!’ shouted another woman, before collapsing into a giggling fit.
It was taking one orderly to subdue the distressed man, another to keep the straight-haired woman away from him. Rose made for the gap between them and broke through, the far door in sight. She barrelled through into another long, straight corridor. . .
. . . but there were more orderlies ahead of her, coming for her.
She threw herself at the nearest door, feeling a surge of hope as it opened, finding that hope dashed at the sight of a cleaning cupboard, empty but for an overturned bottle of bleach on the top shelf.
And then she was overrun, and the orderlies’ hands were grasping at her, pulling her down, and she was trying to fight, but for every hand she batted away there were two to replace it, and that alarm was shrieking like a drill in her head, and the itch in her brain had flared up into a ball of pain.
As she was forced onto her knees, Rose caught one last glimpse of her trusted companion standing above her, seemingly unconcerned.
‘Doctor, do something!’ she spluttered.
‘Can’t.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought you knew - I’m invisible.’
And then she was lying face down on a white floor on which the recent application of a mop had just made wet dirt patterns, and the weight of three, four, five bodies was holding her down, and the alarm stopped at last and the world seemed to fall into a deathly hush as, out of the corner of her eye, Rose caught sight of the gleam of a sharp needlepoint. . .
. . . and felt it pricking into the side of her neck.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Situation?’ The Doctor strode through the empty panelled passageways of the ground floor of the Big White House, Captain Jack by his side, Domnic struggling to keep up with them both.
‘The building is in rebel hands,’ reported Jack, all clipped and efficient. ‘We released all the patients, apart from those in the secure cells on the top floor of the central block. Our forces number about 500. Discounting those who are deluded to the point of uselessness or zoned out on drugs or who just don’t want to fight, that number comes down to about 220.’
‘Hostages?’
‘Sixty-three. The orderlies here are used to outnumbering the patients. We took ’em by surprise. Some ran. The rest we locked in the fourth-floor dorms.’
‘Defences?’
‘We got our most rational guys watching the ground-floor doors and windows, but they won’t be so easy to hold. The rest of us are based up on Three. The only ways up are the lifts and two staircases. We’re doing the best we can, but we’re ill-equipped and ill-prepared. Frankly, we’re relying on the hostages to keep the cops at bay. We wouldn’t hurt them, but they don’t know that.’
Two patients were manning a lift each, keeping them down here with their doors open in case of need. The Doctor noted that the other two lifts were similarly locked on the third and fourth floors respectively.
‘Plan?’ he prompted, as they rode upwards.
‘Ah. That’s where we’re winging it a little. Primary aim is to gather intel, find out who or what is responsible for the anti-fiction laws. I’m guessing that, if we kick up enough of a fuss here, they’ll come to us.’
‘They already have,’ the Doctor murmured.
The lift reached its destination with a ping and the doors rattled open to reveal two more pyjama-clad sentries. The Doctor recognised Arno Finch, who acknowledged him with a weak smile as he passed and ventured uncertainly, ‘I’m doing it. I’m doing what you said, Doctor. Making a real difference. Aren’t I?’
He had only one question left, but it was the most important one. ‘And Rose?’
The third floor was abuzz with activity.
People were standing up beds to block windows, breaking up furniture to use as weapons, or just running around, caught up in the excitement and probably dreaming that they were anywhere else but here. One woman was in tears, believing the building to be under attack from bomber planes. She was led gently into a dorm and encouraged to have a lie-down.
Rose was a few doors away, huddled up on a bed in the dark. The TV screen in her room had been smashed. She greeted the Doctor with a smile and a ‘Hi’, but neither reached as far as her eyes. He was with her in two strides, assuring her that he was who he appeared to be and that she was safe now.
‘You found the monsters, then?’ she asked, forcing herself to sound cheerful but not quite succeeding.
‘Oh yeah.’ He tapped a forefinger against her temple. ‘They’re in here.’
Rose flushed. ‘What’s that s’posed to mean?’
The Doctor moved the finger to his own head. ‘They’re in here too. Micro-organisms in the air of this world. The settlers’ equipment isn’t sensitive enough to detect them and it’s been a long time since they looked anyway.’
‘Which means. . . what? We’re all just breathing ’em in?’
The Doctor grinned. ‘Yeah. Hold on, here comes the science bit. These organisms feed off electrical activity in the atmosphere. They were probably quite happy till human beings came here and offered them something a bit tastier.’
‘You mean our. . . brains? They’re eating our brains?’
‘Er, not quite. Just absorbing their neuroelectro-chemical signals. The right side of the adult human brain has the best flavour, apparently.
It’s like sugar to them. They’ve become quite the addicts, started colonising wholesale in there.’ He tapped Rose’s temple again. ‘Trouble is, too much right-brain activity - dreams, for example - and they get bloated. The surplus impulses are reflected back where they came from, creating a feedback loop.’ He was twirling his fingers in a hopeless attempt to demonstrate. ‘The dreamer finds his dreams amplified over and over again until the right brain reacts to them as if they’re real and communicates that information -’ he clasped his hands together and described an arc through the air - ‘to the left brain.’
‘Left brain,’ repeated Rose, still not quite following.
‘Yeah. Logic, reasoning, language, all that stuff. And memory.’
‘So that’s why they. . . they kind of half froze my brain. . . ’
‘So you couldn’t dream, yeah.’
‘All the muscles down my left-hand side. . . ’
‘Right side of the brain controls the left side of the body.’
‘But you can make it better - can’t you?’
‘Once we get to the TARDIS, yeah. I can flush the micro-organisms right out of your system. Till then . . . ’
Rose’s face fell.
‘You can get through this!’ said the Doctor. ‘If the people of this world can learn to live with it - well, most of the time - I know you can. You know what the monsters are now, Rose. You can fight them.’
‘Did. . . did Jack tell you. . . ’
‘That you tried to break into the Big White House cos you thought I told you to? Nope, didn’t need to. I read your note at the hotel.’ Rose avoided his gaze. ‘You must think I’m pretty thick.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Seeing things that aren’t there, though.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘And it’s like. . . like even after - after I knew what was wrong with me, yeah, I kept. . . We were letting the patients out, and the orderlies didn’t know what had hit them. I thought they were gonna tear some of ’em apart. There were people running and screaming and fighting, and it was like. . . I didn’t know how much of it was real and how much. . . ’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Doctor. . . You know last night, in the . . . when I said you were “mental”. . . ’
‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘Tell me something: was I clever?’ The question threw Rose. ‘Eh?’
‘When I brought you here. Was I clever?’
‘You weren’t. . . I mean, he wasn’t. . . ’
‘Real. I know, yeah. But was I clever? That version of me, in your head - was I resourceful and witty and charming and handsome?’ For the first time, a hint of a smile - a genuine smile - broke through her awkwardness. ‘Bit full of yourself, aren’t you?’
‘Bit full of yourself.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Pat yourself on the back, Rose Tyler - cos all that cleverness and resourcefulness and that wit and that charm, it came from inside you.’
‘And the handsome?’
‘Well. . . ’ said the Doctor, with a modest shrug.
And Rose remembered how to laugh.
Chapter Eleven
Rose fidgeted impatiently as her taxi hovered in a queue of traffic. Over the past hour she’d come to the conclusion that it would have been quicker to walk, but at least the taxi driver knew where she was going.
Or rather, her cab’s navigation system did. Every few seconds, it relayed an instruction in a clipped, female tone, occasionally adding a warning, ‘Please do not attempt to visualise this route.’
The driver thumped her horn in frustration, swore loudly and revved her hoverjets so that gravel chips flew up from the road to spatter the windows.
None of these aggravations mattered, though, because the Doctor was back.
Just the sight of him, sitting alongside her, made Rose smile. She still had that flaming itch in the back of her brain, somewhere to the right, but she wasn’t confused any more. The Doctor made everything seem clear.
She’d felt a bit guilty about abandoning Domnic, but the Doctor had insisted. ‘He’s another Mickey,’ he had said, ‘or an Adam. Like most of the apes that evolved from your planet. He wouldn’t cope.’ Rose had been torn, as she always was when he said things like that, between feeling slighted at the insult to her species and flattered because he had made her an exception.
He had soon cheered her up. She had laughed at his efforts to flag down a cab, jumping, waving, even haring out into the roadway and hammering on the windscreen of one that was stuck at a junction. It was as if the drivers couldn’t see him. As if he was invisible. She had stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled and a black vehicle had pulled up straight away.
‘Where’s it to be?’ the driver had asked from the other side of her glass partition as they’d climbed into the back.
‘Where are we going, Doctor?’ Rose had mumbled.
‘Big White House,’ he’d said.
‘Eh? Didn’t catch that. Speak up, luv.’
‘The Big White House,’ Rose had repeated loudly.
‘So what’s the plan?’ she asked the Doctor now.
‘Depends what we find when we get there.’
‘But the usual, yeah? Beat the monsters, put things right, set everyone free.’
He grinned. ‘Oh yeah.’ And he took her by the hand, and she felt electricity flowing through her body, and she was grinning too.
‘So why the Big White House?’ she asked.
‘No government,’ he said, ‘so who d’you think is keeping the people down, enforcing the status quo?’
‘The police?’
‘Guess again.’
Rose thought for a moment. ‘The media. The newspapers and the TV.’
‘Bingo!’
‘Like on Satellite Five.’
‘If you like.’
‘Is that what’s happening? Is it the Jagrafess again?’
‘Doubt it. Wrong time period. Anyway, when we last saw the Mighty Jagrafess of the Hadro-um-something Maxa-whatchamacallit, he was cooked meat. Doesn’t mean he was the first alien monster to cotton on to the power of the human media.’
‘As a brainwashing tool, right?’
‘As a means of spreading ideas, reinforcing a selective viewpoint. The question is, whose ideas? Whose viewpoint? If the media controls the people, who controls the media?’
‘Bet Hal Gryden knows.’
‘I’ll bet he does. He’s playing the official channels at their own game. S’pose he knows what he’s doing. I prefer the direct approach myself.’
‘The TV studios,’ realised Rose. She thought for a moment, then looked at the Doctor. ‘Only, that’s not where we’re going. . . ’
It took him a moment to answer. Maybe he was just giving her time to work it out for herself. ‘There are too many studios, too many publishing companies, too many people between us and the real power. This way’s faster. If you want to find a tyrant, follow the dissidents.’
‘To the Big White House.’
‘That’s where they take the people who still dare to dream. That’s where some of them learn to toe the line, and the others. . . Well, let’s see.’
‘Big White House,’ said the taxi driver in a surly tone, bringing them to a halt on a surprisingly quiet road. ‘And I hope you’ve come to check yourself in, luv. All that talk of satellites and jagra fish. . . ’
‘Oi,’ said Rose, ‘that was a private conversation. You weren’t meant to be listening.’
‘Couldn’t help hearing your side of it, luv. That’ll be two credits thirty.’
The Doctor dug out his card wallet. ‘I think this explains everything,’ he said, flashing it in the driver’s direction. She said nothing, just continued to glower at Rose. The Doctor looked chagrined. ‘Psychic paper’s not working, Rose.’
‘Well, try something else,’ she whispered, squirming under the driver’s glare.
‘Two credits thirty,’ she repeated sternly.
‘Haven’t you got any money?’
‘Hadn’t really thought,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh, that’s enough!’ snapped the driver, starting the engine again.
‘I knew I shoulda left you standing - one look and I could tell you were fantasy crazy. Well, you’re coming back to the depot with me, luv. We’ll sort this out there, give you a proper taste of reality.’
‘Doctor! What do we do?’
‘When all else fails, Rose. . . leg it!’
They reached for the doors - but at that moment Rose heard the solid thunks of safety locks engaging, and the taxi’s engines screamed as it sped away from the kerb with an acceleration that pushed her back into her seat. Simultaneously, a steel shield slid down in front of the driver’s partition.
‘Sonic screwdriver!’ cried Rose.
‘Out of juice,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve been meaning to recharge the power pack.’
‘Fat lot of use you’re being today!’
He was hammering on the window in his door with both fists, to no avail.
‘Here, brace me!’ said Rose, twisting around in her seat until she could attack the window next to her with her feet. The driver let out a cry of protest as her third double-heeled kick did the trick. She manoeuvred herself back into a sitting position and knocked shards of glass out of the frame with her elbow.
The taxi took a corner wide and came up against another traffic jam. While it was stalled, Rose reached through the broken window and fumbled for the handle outside. To her relief, the door gave, and she and the Doctor spilled out onto the pavement.
‘You won’t get away with this, you crazy geek!’ the taxi driver was screaming. ‘I’ve got your DNA on my seat, I’ll find you!’ They raced back in the direction of the Big White House, a stream of curses ringing in their ears.
‘You sure you can do this?’ asked the Doctor dubiously.
‘Champion gymnast, remember. Just give me a bunk-up.’
They were standing at the back of the Big White House, beside the three-metre-high wall that ringed the property. Normally, they’d have bluffed their way in through the front gate, but after the taxi Rose had suggested a sneakier approach.
The Doctor laced his fingers into a basket, then she stepped on it and let him propel her upwards. She reached for the top of the wall and thought she had it, but the next thing she knew she was back on the pavement, stumbling and almost falling.
‘What the hell just happened?’ she complained.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said the Doctor. ‘Ever thought of cutting down on the chips?’
‘Oi, less of the cheek, you!’
They tried a second and a third time - but again the Doctor’s hands just seemed to part beneath her foot to leave her back where she’d started.
‘Oh, honestly, Doctor,’ groaned Rose. ‘I bet you throw like a girl too.’
They found a bin in an alleyway across the road, waited till no one was looking and pinched it. They wheeled it up to the wall and Rose climbed onto it. The Doctor was meant to be holding the bin steady, but it almost slipped out from under her.
Now, though, she could reach the top of the wall with a short jump. Her hands clamped onto it. . .
. . . and a jolt of something cold stabbed up through her arms, into her chest and stomach. Rose gasped, lost her grip, fell, landed hard on the bin and bounced onto the pavement.
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.
‘Ah, what?’ she snapped at him, verging on mutiny. She picked herself up, waving aside his offer of a helping hand.
‘Ah, I thought there might be something like that. Force field, from the look of it. A more advanced alternative to barbed wire. You OK?’
‘I’m OK - and thanks for the warning.’
‘Looks like it’s back to Plan A,’ said the Doctor brightly.
‘The front gate,’ said Rose. ‘OK, how about you pretend to be a doctor and I’m a nurse?’
‘Wouldn’t work. They’ll have ways of checking, and without the psychic paper. . . ’
‘Yeah, what was up with that anyway?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Maybe there’s something about these people, makes them immune.’
‘Something our monster did to them.’
‘Could explain why so many of them go “fantasy crazy”.’
There was a short, awkward silence. Rose wondered if this was the time to come clean, to tell him about her own delusional episode. But she felt much better now and the zombies seemed like a long-faded dream.
‘S’pose we could say we’re visiting someone,’ she suggested. ‘A patient.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘If half of what we suspect about this place is true, I doubt they put out the red carpet for visitors.’
‘Well, d’you have any ideas?’
‘Yeah. I can think of one sure way of getting into a lunatic asylum.’ It took Rose a moment to latch on to his train of thought, then she grinned. ‘Oh, you’re joking!’
‘So, which of us do you think’ll make the best lunatic?’
‘It came on all of a sudden like,’ explained Rose to the bored guard at the gate. ‘He thinks he’s a doctor.’
‘I think I’m the Doctor.’ The Doctor fixed the guard with his most manic grin.
‘He thinks he. . . he’s 900 years old and he flies around the universe fighting farting aliens and pigs in space.’
‘I want locking up, I do,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m mad as a March hare, daft as a brush.’
‘You should take him to see your community physician,’ said the guard.
‘Oh. . . yeah, yeah, I know that, but he’s away, you see. Some conference on the other side of town. Anyway, he’s got a backlog. We can’t get an appointment for two weeks.’
‘Padded cell. Straitjacket. Throw away the key for all I care.’
Rose leaned closer to the guard, conspiratorially. ‘Thing is, he’s got this barmy idea that there’s a monster in this building.’ She had hoped to get a reaction to that, but the guard’s expression didn’t flicker at all.
‘It was either bring him here or wait for the police to do it. I mean, you’ve gotta see he needs help, urgent like.’
The Doctor walked up to the guard and stood so close that their noses almost touched through the bars of the gate. He stared at him intently for a moment, then broke out into an animated impression of a chimpanzee.
The guard looked right through him, his attention fixed on Rose.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said tiredly, ‘I reckon I do see that some form of medical intervention is needed here. Maybe you should go through to the house after all.’
Rose could hardly keep a big grin off her face as the guard opened the gate and waved her through. She couldn’t look at the Doctor at all, for fear that she would burst out laughing. They walked side by side down a path towards the Big White House itself, but they were still only halfway there when he muttered in her ear, ‘You realise he’ll have called ahead, don’t you?’
‘They’ll be waiting for us.’
‘On the plus side,’ said the Doctor cheerfully, ‘getting captured usually works - gives us a short cut to the big bad guy. Or we could. . . ’ Rose glanced back over her shoulder. The guard had returned to a little booth just inside the gate. She could see him through a window, with his back to her, apparently talking to someone on a vidphone.
She looked at the Doctor and they smiled at each other. He offered his hand and she took it.
They broke away from the path at a joyous run.
They found a door leading into the left-hand wing of the Big White House, but it was locked and didn’t seem to have been opened in months. Round the back of the building, two people in white kitchen overalls chatted outside another door, and Rose and the Doctor pulled back before they could be seen.
Beside them a row of windows gave access to a wood-panelled passageway. Rose tried one, but this too was locked. So were the second and the third - and as soon as she touched the fourth, an alarm began to shriek. She thought she’d set it off at first, but the Doctor pointed out that the staff inside had probably just noticed the disappearance of their new patient and his escort.
‘They know we’re in the grounds, but they don’t know where yet. Should give us a minute or so.’
‘You could help, y’know,’ said Rose as she tugged at a fourth window in vain. She could have screamed with frustration. She hadn’t realised how much she had come to rely on the Doctor’s bag of tricks to take them anywhere, any time he pleased.
He wandered up to a window that she’d already tried and peered through it. Without looking, he pointed to the left and said, ‘Next along but one. Looks like a broken latch.’ He was right.
Rose was clambering onto the window sill when the first orderlies came racing around the corner. One of them shouted something, but she couldn’t hear it over the incessant alarm. She scrambled into the building and turned to help the Doctor, but it was too late. He ran, just inches ahead of the orderlies’ reaching hands. A couple of them began to climb in after Rose, while two more set off after the Doctor towards the kitchen door.
Rose soon lost sight of them as she made two turns at random, hoping to shake off her pursuers, looking for a place to hide. Her heart sank as she spotted a spherical camera in a ceiling corner, rotating to follow her.
The Doctor was suddenly beside her. Rose couldn’t imagine how he’d got here so quickly - he must have found another way in. She saw no sign of the orderlies who’d been following him, but they couldn’t be far behind. She could hear more footsteps and raised voices from the right, so the Doctor took her hand again and led her to the left.
Normally she would have felt safer by his side, whatever the situation, but this time there was something nagging at her. Something wrong.
A large, arched wooden door was standing ajar and the Doctor made for it. They crashed into what appeared to be a patients’ common room. People were sitting around, hollow-eyed, slow to react to their appearance. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the orderlies inside the door - or of those who stood guard at another door, opposite.
Rose was herded into the centre of the room, a ring of black uniforms closing in. She had nowhere else to go, so she leaped up onto a table, causing a man who’d been leaning on it with his head in his arms to fall off his chair in surprise.
Simultaneously, another man threw himself at an orderly, with a desperate plea, ‘Help me! I can see them again! I can see the pretty girls again!’
A young woman with long, straight hair slapped him across the face. ‘Sinner!’ she spat. ‘Parading your smutty dreams in here for all to see!’
‘Formica!’ shouted another woman, before collapsing into a giggling fit.
It was taking one orderly to subdue the distressed man, another to keep the straight-haired woman away from him. Rose made for the gap between them and broke through, the far door in sight. She barrelled through into another long, straight corridor. . .
. . . but there were more orderlies ahead of her, coming for her.
She threw herself at the nearest door, feeling a surge of hope as it opened, finding that hope dashed at the sight of a cleaning cupboard, empty but for an overturned bottle of bleach on the top shelf.
And then she was overrun, and the orderlies’ hands were grasping at her, pulling her down, and she was trying to fight, but for every hand she batted away there were two to replace it, and that alarm was shrieking like a drill in her head, and the itch in her brain had flared up into a ball of pain.
As she was forced onto her knees, Rose caught one last glimpse of her trusted companion standing above her, seemingly unconcerned.
‘Doctor, do something!’ she spluttered.
‘Can’t.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought you knew - I’m invisible.’
And then she was lying face down on a white floor on which the recent application of a mop had just made wet dirt patterns, and the weight of three, four, five bodies was holding her down, and the alarm stopped at last and the world seemed to fall into a deathly hush as, out of the corner of her eye, Rose caught sight of the gleam of a sharp needlepoint. . .
. . . and felt it pricking into the side of her neck.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Situation?’ The Doctor strode through the empty panelled passageways of the ground floor of the Big White House, Captain Jack by his side, Domnic struggling to keep up with them both.
‘The building is in rebel hands,’ reported Jack, all clipped and efficient. ‘We released all the patients, apart from those in the secure cells on the top floor of the central block. Our forces number about 500. Discounting those who are deluded to the point of uselessness or zoned out on drugs or who just don’t want to fight, that number comes down to about 220.’
‘Hostages?’
‘Sixty-three. The orderlies here are used to outnumbering the patients. We took ’em by surprise. Some ran. The rest we locked in the fourth-floor dorms.’
‘Defences?’
‘We got our most rational guys watching the ground-floor doors and windows, but they won’t be so easy to hold. The rest of us are based up on Three. The only ways up are the lifts and two staircases. We’re doing the best we can, but we’re ill-equipped and ill-prepared. Frankly, we’re relying on the hostages to keep the cops at bay. We wouldn’t hurt them, but they don’t know that.’
Two patients were manning a lift each, keeping them down here with their doors open in case of need. The Doctor noted that the other two lifts were similarly locked on the third and fourth floors respectively.
‘Plan?’ he prompted, as they rode upwards.
‘Ah. That’s where we’re winging it a little. Primary aim is to gather intel, find out who or what is responsible for the anti-fiction laws. I’m guessing that, if we kick up enough of a fuss here, they’ll come to us.’
‘They already have,’ the Doctor murmured.
The lift reached its destination with a ping and the doors rattled open to reveal two more pyjama-clad sentries. The Doctor recognised Arno Finch, who acknowledged him with a weak smile as he passed and ventured uncertainly, ‘I’m doing it. I’m doing what you said, Doctor. Making a real difference. Aren’t I?’
He had only one question left, but it was the most important one. ‘And Rose?’
The third floor was abuzz with activity.
People were standing up beds to block windows, breaking up furniture to use as weapons, or just running around, caught up in the excitement and probably dreaming that they were anywhere else but here. One woman was in tears, believing the building to be under attack from bomber planes. She was led gently into a dorm and encouraged to have a lie-down.
Rose was a few doors away, huddled up on a bed in the dark. The TV screen in her room had been smashed. She greeted the Doctor with a smile and a ‘Hi’, but neither reached as far as her eyes. He was with her in two strides, assuring her that he was who he appeared to be and that she was safe now.
‘You found the monsters, then?’ she asked, forcing herself to sound cheerful but not quite succeeding.
‘Oh yeah.’ He tapped a forefinger against her temple. ‘They’re in here.’
Rose flushed. ‘What’s that s’posed to mean?’
The Doctor moved the finger to his own head. ‘They’re in here too. Micro-organisms in the air of this world. The settlers’ equipment isn’t sensitive enough to detect them and it’s been a long time since they looked anyway.’
‘Which means. . . what? We’re all just breathing ’em in?’
The Doctor grinned. ‘Yeah. Hold on, here comes the science bit. These organisms feed off electrical activity in the atmosphere. They were probably quite happy till human beings came here and offered them something a bit tastier.’
‘You mean our. . . brains? They’re eating our brains?’
‘Er, not quite. Just absorbing their neuroelectro-chemical signals. The right side of the adult human brain has the best flavour, apparently.
It’s like sugar to them. They’ve become quite the addicts, started colonising wholesale in there.’ He tapped Rose’s temple again. ‘Trouble is, too much right-brain activity - dreams, for example - and they get bloated. The surplus impulses are reflected back where they came from, creating a feedback loop.’ He was twirling his fingers in a hopeless attempt to demonstrate. ‘The dreamer finds his dreams amplified over and over again until the right brain reacts to them as if they’re real and communicates that information -’ he clasped his hands together and described an arc through the air - ‘to the left brain.’
‘Left brain,’ repeated Rose, still not quite following.
‘Yeah. Logic, reasoning, language, all that stuff. And memory.’
‘So that’s why they. . . they kind of half froze my brain. . . ’
‘So you couldn’t dream, yeah.’
‘All the muscles down my left-hand side. . . ’
‘Right side of the brain controls the left side of the body.’
‘But you can make it better - can’t you?’
‘Once we get to the TARDIS, yeah. I can flush the micro-organisms right out of your system. Till then . . . ’
Rose’s face fell.
‘You can get through this!’ said the Doctor. ‘If the people of this world can learn to live with it - well, most of the time - I know you can. You know what the monsters are now, Rose. You can fight them.’
‘Did. . . did Jack tell you. . . ’
‘That you tried to break into the Big White House cos you thought I told you to? Nope, didn’t need to. I read your note at the hotel.’ Rose avoided his gaze. ‘You must think I’m pretty thick.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Seeing things that aren’t there, though.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘And it’s like. . . like even after - after I knew what was wrong with me, yeah, I kept. . . We were letting the patients out, and the orderlies didn’t know what had hit them. I thought they were gonna tear some of ’em apart. There were people running and screaming and fighting, and it was like. . . I didn’t know how much of it was real and how much. . . ’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Doctor. . . You know last night, in the . . . when I said you were “mental”. . . ’
‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘Tell me something: was I clever?’ The question threw Rose. ‘Eh?’
‘When I brought you here. Was I clever?’
‘You weren’t. . . I mean, he wasn’t. . . ’
‘Real. I know, yeah. But was I clever? That version of me, in your head - was I resourceful and witty and charming and handsome?’ For the first time, a hint of a smile - a genuine smile - broke through her awkwardness. ‘Bit full of yourself, aren’t you?’
‘Bit full of yourself.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Pat yourself on the back, Rose Tyler - cos all that cleverness and resourcefulness and that wit and that charm, it came from inside you.’
‘And the handsome?’
‘Well. . . ’ said the Doctor, with a modest shrug.
And Rose remembered how to laugh.