The Tomb of Valdemar Page 13

  Kampp attempts to cut into the flesh. Something distracts his attention, something at the edge of his vision. He tries again. His hand trembles, he cannot hold the cutter still.

  For some reason, he cannot take his sleek eyes off the guard’s face. That expression... what did he see? What did he see? He feels a certain envy that something could have engendered such fear. It was a professional job, whatever it was.

  This autopsy is personal; Kampp needs to know what killed the guard. He is never averse to learning new tricks.

  At last, he gets his hand under control. He lowers the cutter to the guard’s white chest. With his left hand he smooths the skin. It is warm beneath the glove. He draws a red line with the cutter.

  Again, that thing, whatever it is, distracts him. Kampp blinks, as if a light is behind his eyes. What is wrong with him?

  The guard’s body should not be warm. Kampp spreads his hand, just to check. Impossible. And now it starts to glow, as if lit from inside. The contours of the body seem to warp and change, to expand into shapes he knows are impossible.

  Something is crawling into his own eyes. The light burns, burns right into the pain centres of his brain. Something in his head strains for release, a white-hot scorching needle. It pumps through his eyes. Screeching, Kampp drops the cutter. Blinded, he reaches for his eye sockets.

  ‘Oh, you beauty,’ he purrs, impressed, as his mind is flooded.

  The Doctor is racing to the library of the Old Ones, with Miranda Pelham in tow.

  ‘That was unpleasant,’ she huffs and puffs after him.

  ‘It’s going to get a lot more unpleasant if we don’t do something about it,’ he barks back, skidding into the vast repository.

  ‘What exactly are we looking for?’ Pelham asks, as she looks up at the thousands of brass cylinders on the wall.

  ‘And how the hell are we going to find it?’ She leans against the long table, trying to get her breath back.

  The Doctor rubs his chin. ‘It’s a question of knowing the referencing system. Once you know what you’re looking for, the library itself should find it for you.’

  ‘Simple as that?’

  ‘Simple as that,’ he affirms.

  Pelham is finding the palace a cold and unwholesome place. For the first time, she is realising just how alien and ancient it all is. ‘What about Huvan? That was a dirty trick of yours, making Romana look after him. God knows what he’ll do to her.’

  The Doctor is marching along the rows of cylinders, looking for something she can only guess at. ‘He’s developed some kind of emotional attachment to her...’

  Pelham gives him a wry smile. ‘Emotional. Yeah, right. Not the adjective I would have employed.’

  ‘She is our only chance of containing him.’

  ‘You mean Valdemar.’

  The Doctor stops and faces her. ‘There is no Valdemar. The sooner you realise that, the bigger your chances of staying alive.’

  ‘But he spoke. We saw him!’

  ‘No, we saw Huvan flexing his psychic muscles. He has presumably been indoctrinated into believing in Valdemar.

  He has absolute faith that this is a fact. I’m sure Neville saw to that when he brought him up. Now his psychic powers have been awakened, the strain on his mind is too much for him to comprehend. His subconscious has converted this new power into something he can understand. To keep his sanity.’

  ‘Ahh...’

  ‘You understand now?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Never mind. I think I do.’ The Doctor has found a tiny socket, no more than a screw hole, in the wall. He points at it and stares wide-eyed at Pelham. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  he asks.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Pelham is saturated with information. She doesn’t think she can take in any more.

  ‘It’s a library ticket. A fail-safe in case of problems with the telepathic circuits.’

  ‘Really? How does it work?’

  The Doctor shrugs. ‘I suppose I could try sticking my finger in it.’

  ‘Isn’t that awfully dangerous?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m always sticking things in places I shouldn’t.’ He jams in a digit. He smiles. ‘Aaaahhhh!’ he bellows.

  Somewhere in the wall, something electronic fizzes. Pelham makes to haul him back but he waves her away, his face creased in agony.

  ‘I think that’s right, yes. Should see something now.’

  The library comes to life. Pelham looks up to see previously hidden cogs and wheels and slats and slots churning and moving. The cylinders are filing themselves along discreet, oiled pipes. The noise is relentless and echoing. She claps her hands to her head.

  The Doctor removes his finger from the socket. He licks the digit, as though it had been burned. ‘That should do it,’ he says smugly.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Help us to find the psychic inhibitor that we need to suppress the effects of the higher dimensions.’

  ‘You know,’ Pelham sighs. ‘I wish I hadn’t asked.’

  Two cylinders pop out of pipes to settle next to them.

  Pelham sees they are like vacuum flasks, with ornately decorated heads. Exactly what the library of Valdemar should look like, she thinks.

  ‘Come on,’ says the Doctor, picking up the cylinders.

  She places a gentle, restraining arm on his shoulder, determined to stop him. ‘Look, give me an idea, at least. If I just know what to look for, two of us will find it more quickly than one.’

  He thinks about it. She really believes he would rather get on with it on his own. However, reason gets the better of him and he offers her a seat, dropping the cylinders on to the floor with a clang. ‘Whoops,’ he smiles sheepishly.

  ‘Who is Valdemar?’ she asks, directly, with the uncomfortable feeling that everything she has ever done with her life is about to be cruelly swept aside. ‘Be gentle.’

  The Doctor toys with the lid of one of the cylinders. He is having trouble getting it open. ‘Valdemar is an experiment,’

  he says. ‘The product of fantastically complicated trans-dimensional physics. The Old Ones were phenomenally advanced and that was the end of them. Why can’t I get this lid off? It’s perfectly simple.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re doing the wrong thing. Perhaps it’s not supposed to come off. If Valdemar isn’t in the tomb, what is?’

  ‘Nothing. The tomb is a gateway. You see, this planet, the whole of Ashkellia, is a gigantic particle accelerator. You know what a particle accelerator is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Designed to smash a hole into the fabric of reality.’

  ‘I said no, I didn’t understand.’

  The Doctor is not listening. He places the cylinder on the table and glares at it. ‘Good. To punch a hole into the higher dimensions, you need an awfully big fist. An unbelievably muscular fist, in fact. Even my lot never really got to grips with it.’

  ‘Your... lot?’

  ‘Too dangerous, you see. Three-dimensional life...’ He sits up and looks at her, thinking something through, ‘... even four-and five-dimensional life, is unable to perceive the higher dimensions. We lack the necessary sensory apparatus. I mean, there are theories that suggest that these organs lie dormant in the brain but... ah!’

  He snaps his fingers.

  ‘What?’ asks Pelham.

  ‘Telepathy! Perhaps that explains telepathy and why only certain people are rumoured to have the gift. Perhaps the sensory organs in some individuals are better developed. I suppose it’s possible that telepathy, in fact all psychic phenomena, are utilisation of the forces of the higher dimensions.’

  ‘So what happens if we get exposed to these higher dimensions without these extra organ things?’

  ‘You’ve seen it, in the tomb. The man who attacked us.’

  Pelham remembers. She realises, guiltily, that she has not thought about Erik at all.

  ‘In both a mental and physical way, exposure to the higher dimensions drives us mad.
’ He is concentrating fully on the cylinder in his hand.

  ‘I can understand that. About being driven mad. So this particle accelerator thing kicked it all off. If it’s all so dangerous, why did they do it?’

  ‘Curiosity. Insatiable curiosity. There was nothing left for them to learn. They were an ambitious species and they didn’t know when to stop. Millennia ago, the Old Ones must have punched a hole in reality. That hole grew and grew until it threatened to swamp the universe we inhabit. A shadow, spreading like a cancer, breaking down the barriers between dimensions. It consumed the Old Ones, it must have consumed nearly everything.’

  At last, Pelham is beginning to see. ‘Which explains the myth. So,Valdemar was just a hole in space.’

  ‘What? Just a hole! Not just space either. Time, thought, imagination, everything. Every life form it encountered experienced total perception. The results must have been catastrophic.’

  Pelham can imagine the catastrophe. Her imagination is salivating. She thinks of whole planets, whole star systems consumed by this plague. ‘I see, I see.’ Something hits her.

  She turns, but the Doctor seems to be humming at the cylinder. ‘So what stopped it?’ she asks.

  ‘Mmm... look, I think I’m on to something here. I think the cylinder reacts to telepathic communion. Half of what I just told you, I didn’t tell you, you understand. It told you through me. What did I say?’

  ‘I’m asking you... it a question. What stopped the spread?’

  The Doctor pauses. He stares at the deceptive-looking object in his hands. ‘It doesn’t know. Perhaps we need a different cylinder. Somehow they found a way. The Old Ones found a way.’

  ‘And got themselves wiped out in the process. Doctor, what the hell are we doing here?’

  He hurls the object across the library. ‘Finding a neural inhibitor!’ He bellows up at the gallery. ‘Where are you? Show yourself. You know it’s all your fault! A million years ago you found a way. Somehow you sealed up the gateway. Tell me!

  Tell me now!’

  Pelham shies away from him. A cold thought has just entered her brain. The way he’s acting, his obsession. He’s just like Paul Neville.

  He turns to her. ‘We’ll have to search the cylinders one by one. This is going to take a while.’

  Pelham picks up the second cylinder. She stares at it, desperate to calm the Doctor down. ‘OK, OK,’ she says. ‘We’ll find it. Just stop shouting.’

  ‘Stay calm? Stay calm?’ He is astonished by her scolding.

  For a moment, Pelham thinks he going to start on her again.

  Instead, he sags in realisation, looking so sorry for himself that she can’t help giggling. ‘Was I shouting? I’m terribly sorry. It must be the cylinder. It must leave some sort of psychic residue in the mind.’

  Pelham nods sarcastically. ‘Oh yeah? I think you just had a tantrum and you’re trying to make excuses.’

  ‘You know, I think you might be right. Come on!’

  Laughing, Pelham stands and starts to help the Doctor pull the cylinders out of the walls.

  Chapter Nine

  There is someone living inside his head. This, he has long suspected. His mind stings, rings from the blasts of the ritual. If he opens his eyes, he can see little but a red haze, and odd floating dots. He prefers to keep them closed, and look with his mind.

  Sometimes he hears music, out amongst the stars. The man in his head, the dark man with Neville’s face, tells him this is the music that binds the stars together. Like invisible strings, oscillating strands of white sound.

  The dark man has opened up so much to him, taken him out of that body he hates. This is what he has waited for all his life. He hardly remembers the golden-haired boy, cannot recall at all what he did to him. Only that overwhelming flood, that tide that came from within. Had been hiding inside him for so long. He felt his mind slip away, that white-out he used to get when absorbed in composing his poems, when the muse descended, but a thousand times more powerful.

  There is so much passion in him, so much energy. Scores to be settled.

  The someone inside his head is laughing, egging him on.

  This must be Valdemar, he realises, come for him.

  ‘Huvan?’ comes a distant voice, from his old life. He tries to hang on to the music but it is fading, fading fast. He wants to cry out, shut out the voice. He doesn’t want to return to their fragmented, incomplete world. He can no longer live separately from the whole.

  ‘Huvan?’

  Yet there is something in that voice, something he remembers. The sound of that word, once his name, spoken in such a manner. He is drawn back, chasing the bait.

  The lights and the music and the man in his head fade away. The dark man licks his lips in anticipation of when he will return.

  Huvan opens his eyes.

  Romana is not thrilled to be following the Doctor’s orders.

  ‘No,’ she had stated categorically. ‘Ask me anything, but not that.’

  They had been standing in the ruins of the cabal. Shock had them rooted to the spot until the Doctor realised Neville had disappeared.

  Huvan had slumped forward, apparently unconscious, over the table. The rest of the pathetic coven had scattered.

  The Doctor had run to the boy, hauling his head back. He pulled open his eyelids, revealing the dark retinas within.

  ‘The psychic energy running through him must have burned out a mental fuse. He’s lucky to be alive. Poor soul.’

  ‘Poor?’ Pelham had shrieked, clutching the drapes. ‘He was going to kill us all!’

  ‘We haven’t much time,’ said the Doctor. ‘If he wakes up and I’m not ready, he may well kill us all. We need a way to keep him calm. Find someone he can trust.’

  He looked up at Romana and she could see it, could sense that vile idea germinating in his mind.

  ‘Romana...’

  ‘No,’ she stated categorically. ‘Ask me anything, but not that.’

  And now, here she is, back in Huvan’s room, paper and other less savoury items strewn all over it. Gingerly, she drops a cold compress on to his head. Over and over in her mind she revisits the image of Stanislaus coming apart. She has never seen anything like that, not even when the Sontarans were strutting through the Academy, no one daring to halt them in their atrocities.

  She wonders how much the Doctor has seen, has witnessed through his many lives. What had it been like for him, the first time? She feels like she has entered a war, a war where unimaginable realities must be sublimated, dealt with, taken for granted. The idea that she might become blasé sickens Romana.

  Mind you, the idea that she now has to return Huvan’s pathetic crush is equally appalling. She is certain the Doctor had the ghost of a smile on his lips when he suggested it, and Pelham turned away completely. Five minutes ago, this was the child, claiming to be an ageless dark god back from the dead, who turned an innocent young man inside out. Now, she is supposed to simper and fuss over him. As far as Romana is concerned, this is melodrama of the lowest of the low-brow.

  ‘Huvan?’ she forces herself. Lighten the pitch, add a few sobs of concern, ignore the fact that perhaps it is an emotion more primeval than repulsion that is making her tremble.

  That for once the Doctor might have underestimated his opponent.

  ‘Huvan?’

  The boy’s eyelids flicker. He groans. ‘Romana?’ he utters.

  ‘Don’t leave me...’ He goes on to deliver a speech so bathetic, so choked with childish self-absorption, so stuffed with cackhanded adolescent craving, that she can only assume he has rehearsed it.

  ‘Hush now, Huvan. Yes, I feel the same.’ Come on Romanadvoratelundar, at least try and sound sincere. ‘You must come back to me. You must tell me what happened to you.’

  Huvan is awake. He looks up with glistening eyes. ‘I don’t know. I felt... live, like I was being electrocuted. But it was nice. I didn’t do anything wrong, did I? Was I... was I all right?’

  He grips her a
rms. Romana smooths his pitted forehead.

  Well, if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it properly. She gazes into his eyes, those eyes so recently altered, and shamelessly says, ‘Huvan, you were marvellous.’

  And the coven? And the guards? Just what is the upshot of Valdemar’s apparent return?

  Let’s start with the lower levels and work up. And that’s not just for show, for as the night outside gets darker, the palace itself is continuing its emergence as a character. The scattered tenants hear all sorts of strange far-off (and not so far-off) noises, not all of them mechanical. Lights appear in the distance, glowing balls that dance and bobble, inviting you to chase, to follow. The lifts become erratic, sometimes not working at all. Nobody uses them any more; they are sticking to their own levels.

  Down in his artist’s studio, Kampp rises to his feet. Black, coral-like scale has grown over the sockets of his eyes like the shiny carapace of a beetle. Ignoring the body of the dead guard (who remains dead, whatever you might think was going to happen), he staggers out into the corridors, looking for someone. He comes across the duty guard – a dull-witted, heavy man called Srohan, deemed fit only to act as jailer and night-watchman down here.

  This slow-wittedness manifests itself in his sleepy failure to recognise the alterations crawling all over the advancing Kampp. Instead, fatally, he leaps to his feet and salutes, just as the butler is on him. In time-honoured fashion, Srohan doesn’t even have time to scream.

  And then there are two of them.

  At about the same time, probably and correctly on the stroke of midnight, the scattered children of the cabal cower in their quarters. The palace is no longer their playground.

  Through Huvan, a boy they have tormented without cessation since they met him, Valdemar has returned. With the deaths of their two friends, they understand the extent to which Paul Neville has betrayed them.