Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 1

The Blue Angel.

by Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad.

the blue angel arrives with thanks to...

Joy Foster, Louise Foster, Mark Magrs, Charles Foster, Peter Hoad, Rita Hoad, Jonathan Hoad, Rachel Hoad, Nicola Cregan, Michael Fox, Lynne Heritage, Pete Courtie, Brigid Robinson, Paul Arvidson, Jon Rolph, Antonia Rolph, Steve Jackson, Laura Wood, Alicia Stubbersfield, Sin Hansen, Paul Cornell, Bill Penson, Mark Walton, Sara Maitland, Meg Davis, Ewan Gillon, Amanda Reynolds, Richard Klein, Lucie Scott, Reuben Lane, Kenneth MacGowan, Georgina Hammick, Maureen Duffy, Vic Sage, Marina Mackay, Jayne Morgan, Louise D'Arcens, Julia Bell, Lorna Sage, Ashley Stokes, Steve Cole, Jac Rayner, Pat Wheeler, Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum, Dave Owen, Gary Russell, Alan McKee, Phillip Hallard, Nick Smale, Helen Fayle, Mark Phippen, Lance Parkin, Anna Whymark, Chloe Whymark, Stephen Hornby, Stewart Sheargold...

...and companions on the bus past and future...

Welcome to Valcea, everybody...

Love, Paul and Jeremy Spring 1999 Norwich

Chapter One.

Door's Stiff. Frozen...?

Door's stiff. Frozen?

I haven't been out the back for over a week. It's been too wet. Soaking. Chucking it down constantly. I've barely been out of the house. Sent the others out for shopping. I've kept the central heating on and hidden myself away. Only thing to do.

But I want to check on the garden. See what damage has been done. All that planting and transplanting and the tender loving care we gave it at the end of the summer. I want to see if the weather has ruined it all.

Today there's no rain. Too cold to rain. The sky is full and grey, the colour of Tupperware. Someone's put a Tupperware lid over the town.

Our garden is tiny, walled in by bushes and redbricked walls. You can't even see into next door's either side or over the back. We have a secret garden. In the few sunny days we've managed to have here, I sat in a deck chair and read, bang in the middle of the lawn. I sat for hours while Compa.s.sion set about making us a path from fragments of flagstone she found in the shrubbery. She can be a good little worker when she wants. She dug out a curving shape for the path and dug it quite deep. Filled it with the rubble and dust from chipped plaster that we had bags and bags of after we did the downstairs walls, and then she put the paving stones on top. Scooped the earth in and, hey presto, we had a path. She made it a curve so as not to disturb me from my reading, in my chair, in the middle of the garden. So it's in a kind of S-shape or, as Fitz has pointed out, a reversed question mark.

Actually, it's more than cold today. It's absolutely freezing. The gra.s.s is silvered and I can't smell the honeysuckle at all.

That's when I crouch to examine the herb garden, expecting the worst. The rosemary is dead, I can see that at a glance. Black in my hands, the needles like blades. And worst of all the bush that we moved to a place where it would be in shelter, treating it so carefully, so solicitously, even Fitz pitching in to help the wild thyme has been split right down the middle. Its branches are snapped. In two halves, both lolled flat on the ground. Quite dead.

I straighten up and sniff the air and realise that it's going to snow. This idea makes me s.h.i.+ver and that, I suppose, is because I've been dreaming about snow rather a lot lately. It's figured everywhere every scene I can recall having dreamed just recently. As if the seasons changed sooner in my nightmares.

There is a bang then as the window two storeys above my head is flung open. I look round to see Fitz glaring down, his palms on the wet sill. He isn't even dressed yet. In the T-s.h.i.+rt he slept in, his hair tangled up, unwashed, a furious look on his face. Three days' worth of stubble.

It was all some time ago. Now the worst had pa.s.sed and this was his quiet time. He hadn't had a funny spell in ages. He was still learning to be calm, however, and not let his mind tick over too quickly. His Doctor had warned him about the dangers of that. His private Doctor to whom he paid out vast sums of money. That Doctor worked from a Georgian town house by the North Park, across town.

One Doctor to another, eh?

Indeed. I hadn't thought of that.

Well, sometimes we all have to see a specialist.

And with a flourish, his private Doctor wrote him out an indecipherable prescription, at which he stared, all the way down the street, back into the centre of the town. He didn't know what he was taking, but the Doctor seemed to think these funny green pills were just the ticket.

I should be more curious. Don't you think, Fitz?

Oh, probably.

I used to be more curious, didn't I?

You used to be insatiably curious.

Hmm. I thought so.

He could still remember the things he said then, at the time he was having his funny spells. The things he went around saying in the thick of it all. But he couldn't remember where he had been, what he had done, exactly who he had said these things to. Still the words came back to him, thick and fast, his irrepressible words of warning. His gift of the gab, his sixth sense, his gift for being seventh son of a seventh son. He had the knowledge and wanted to pa.s.s it on. His words had the ineluctable force of truth and he had to let them out. But people never listen. They told him these words were lies, just his lies, and none of them convinced anyone.

That had made him more anxious than anything.

Anxious was exactly what he wasn't these days. He had learned to calm down.

Is the garden wrecked, Doctor?

My herb garden's looking a little shabby.

It's nearly winter. The whole lot would die then anyway.

No, no, no, Fitz. It would be all right. I'd see to it.

But it's too late now.

The thyme is split completely asunder.

What?

The wild thyme. Dead. Lolling on the gra.s.s.

It's too cold to hang about here all day. I'm going back to my book.

He remembered telling everyone who? about the men who were made out of gla.s.s. Whose hearts were scarlet and could be seen, pulsing, alive, through the sheeny see-through skin, muscle, sinew of their chests. These hearts, it could be plainly seen, had faces of their own malign and watchful faces. These men of gla.s.s sat in golden chairs which ran on wheels and shot bolts of fire at those who stood in their way.

The Doctor was convinced swore blind to anyone who would listen that they were coming here. Heading to this world out of revenge. They were coming specifically after him.

It is winter now and this is my new house. In the mornings the windows are mapped in careful lines of frost. I suppose you could say I laze about. I like to cook. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

My watchword is optimism.

We've painted the kitchen bright orange, and all the crockery and utensils are cornflower blue. I had crates and crates of kitchen things, far more than I'd ever need. I can't remember actually buying any of them. These blue things were bought in Italy, in Florence, and I don't remember when I was there. A side effect of the green pills, I imagine. One of many. Very strange.

I cook and I put on the same CD again and again, shuffling and repeating. It's the incidental music from all the Bette Davis movies between 1938 and 1953. I like a little drama.

I live optimistically with my lodgers, Fitz and Compa.s.sion. I call them my companions. That's what they're like. Compa.s.sion isn't very well. She's been having funny spells too, just lately. Fitz is languid, somewhat sarcastic. Sometimes he looks at me quizzically, as if there's something he wants to ask me. We have a floor of this new house each. I don't mind sharing. The attic is full of my boxes. I can't be bothered unpacking all that stuff yet. Maybe I'll do it on Christmas morning, and pretend someone has sent me presents.

Fitz has been up there, poking around among all my books. He's a great reader, it turns out. Lately he's been poring over an ancient leather-bound volume he found in a trunk in the attic. A warped and frangible text that he says is called the Aja'ib Aja'ib. He spends all day reading that.

I think... I think it was my grandfather who brought that book back from the East. I'm sure that it was. My mother pa.s.sed on to me all my grandfather's things. When Fitz has finished with the book I'll take a look at it and find out.

At least the dreams that the Doctor was having were under control. That was the main thing. His private Doctor in the Georgian house by the North Park told him not to worry. Ever. There was nothing at all to be anxious about. Indeed, sometimes his Doctor would phone him in the middle of the night just when the dreams were becoming perplexing and murmur a few words of consolation. The Doctor thought that was very good value indeed. He felt he was being monitored all around the clock. That his welfare was being seen to.

He has a healthy imagination that's what the Doctor tells himself. But one that needs controlling and tempering. That's all it is.

And you don't want any more episodes, do you?

Oh, no! No more episodes for me!

Funny thing is, his private Doctor even infiltrates the dreams that he does still have and gives him words of advice there, too. Is nothing sacred? His private Doctor is an avuncular presence. A deeply lined face and a shock of silvery hair. He wears frilly s.h.i.+rts and bow-ties to work, his opera cloak flung on to the consultation couch. A touch of the old Empire about him. We'll crack this little problem, Doctor. Nothing to it. Have more pills. He speaks winningly and sometimes he hypnotises his patient, spinning a kind of golden pendant in his face. He sings a sort of nursery rhyme half familiar, terribly exotic.

The Doctor believes he is getting his money's worth.

He hasn't had an episode in ages.

These men of gla.s.s lived in a city called Valcea, which, the Doctor would insist, he had visited. An impossible city of gla.s.s, set up at an incredible height. He had gone there and visited the Gla.s.s Men and learned how brutal and s.a.d.i.s.tic they were. Their city had black-and-white parquet floors, which the Gla.s.s Men's golden chairs couldn't leave at all, because they seemed to run on something akin to static electricity. Something like that but, at any rate, this circ.u.mscription meant that the world the real world was safe from their incursions. The Gla.s.s Men were too precious to endanger themselves by leaving Valcea.

Yet, having foiled their plans that first time their plans to destroy the Ghillighast, the race with whom they shared their world the Doctor returned home. Soon he learned that the Valcean Gla.s.s Men were working on schemes to make themselves more powerfully mobile, so they could transport their avarice elsewhere.

They had discovered the means to motivate themselves, and could detach their gla.s.s city from their world and set it free, to float like an iceberg detaching from its mother berg in the frozen north. The city of Valcea was free to swim across vast expanses of murky s.p.a.ce, to come to Earth after the Doctor, to come to this world. And he knew they were coming after him.

At the height of his queer, excitable spell, the Doctor had taken to alerting everyone friends, relations, the authorities, people on the street that the Gla.s.s Men were coming, and it was all his fault. He had led them to this world. Curses on his travels and his endless curiosity!

Any day now. That is what he suspected.

But the pills his private Doctor gave him calmed him down, calmed him down, calmed him down.

Chapter Two.

The Ladies Were Having a Day Out...

The ladies were having a day out. It was the worst day of the year they could possibly have chosen. They set off first thing that morning in Maddy Sharp's off-white Morris Minor and even before they'd left town the snow was three inches deep with no sign of letting up. But they weren't to be deterred.

Big Sue was wedged in the back seat, gazing at the clogged sky. 'I reckon we should turn back now, Maddy. This is madness.'

Maddy didn't like to talk when she was driving. She fixed her elderly friend with a quick glance in the rear-view mirror. 'Look, Sue, we're out now. It was enough of a job getting out this b.l.o.o.d.y morning. And it's Christmas. So cheer yourself up.'

Big Sue was wearing a knitted tea-cosy hat, mustard-coloured. It was clamped down over her wig, which, in the dim light of the morning, looked as if it had been dyed indigo. Sue was using the mirror to check both hat and wig were straight. She tutted at Maddy for her stubbornness and sat quietly sulking for a while, sucking her teeth.

Beside Big Sue, the boy stared serenely ahead. He made no comment about Maddy's determination to get them to the mall in all the snow. He had every faith in his mother. She wouldn't let them down. Maddy gave him a quick smile, which he returned automatically, and turned back to the task in hand. Every time she looked at the boy she felt stronger. It was strange. He made her feel brave.

Secretly, though, as they rumbled through the undisturbed snow on the route out of Newton Aycliffe and rolled on to the country road that would take them to the A1, she was wondering if the trip wasn't foolhardy after all.

The radio had promised Snow Chaos this morning. And here it was. Listeners had been warned not to leave home unless the trip was vital. Maddy had been doing her hair in the living room with hot tongs and she turned off the weather report before it could finish. That was when the boy came downstairs, wearing the blue, diamond-patterned tracksuit she had bought for him from the market. He gave her a strange look for turning the radio off so abruptly. And in that moment Maddy just knew that she and her little party had to go ahead with the planned shopping trip today. Somehow she knew how disappointed the boy would be if she didn't make the effort.

'I think it's nice,' said the other woman in the back, Nesta, who was daft and skinny and glad to be rid of her kids for the day. 'I think it's like a proper magical Christmas adventure, seeing all the countryside like this.'

Big Sue grimaced. She wasn't keen on Nesta's company at the best of times. Nesta had this habit of getting herself involved in whatever was going on. She was a scrounger, too, always knocking at the back door, asking for milk or sugar. Begging off a pensioner! It was the pits, really. And Big Sue had seen Nesta stocking up on ciggies and cider at the small shop round the corner a couple of times in the past week. Big Sue thought Nesta was letting her kids do without. Nesta was meant to be living on the breadline, but she was keen as any of them to get out to the mall to do some shopping.

Big Sue looked across and watched Nesta staring entranced at the snow. They were pulling through the winding country roads outside of Chilton now. They hadn't been out chucking grit on the roads yet. You could feel the Morris Minor's tyres sliding on the fresh snow, and Maddy was wrestling at the wheel. This was going to be a stressful drive, and there was Nesta looking entranced out of that window. She was probably singing Christmas songs to herself. She was that type. Never lived in the real world all her life. The usual trials and tribulations just pa.s.sed her by.

Big Sue was tutting when she realised that the boy was, in turn, staring at her. He was looking straight into her face with those wide, bright-blue eyes. An honest, searching gaze. His hair had flopped into one of them. There wasn't the slightest expression on his face. She looked away.

Sometimes Big Sue found that the boy gave her the heebie-jeebies. She couldn't help it. Usually she got on really well with kids, even the awkward teens. But this one, Maddy Sharp's new son... well, there was something not quite right about him. He looked blankly at everyone, staring unashamedly into their faces. Everyone except Maddy Sharp, of course, his adoptive mother. On her he bestowed the most sickeningly sweet and loyal smiles. Maddy in turn glowed with pleasure. So you couldn't really tell Maddy you thought there was something wrong with him. You just had to be happy for her. And Big Sue was happy for her friend. The boy had done her a power of good.

Soon they were on the motorway. It was easier here, pus.h.i.+ng on in the wake of the lorries, letting them clear the snow ahead, churning it into toffee-coloured mush. They could stay on the motorway now until they reached the Mall. No more winding roads. Maddy allowed herself to relax a little.

Half an hour and they would be there.

It was as light now as it would be all day. Everyone had their headlights on. You could feel the day turning, slipping back towards twilight already.

'Everyone all right in the back?' she shouted over the noise of her motor. The car rattled and roared and it was freezing inside. She glanced back and checked on her neighbours and her son. They grinned at her Big Sue nervously, Nesta dreamily and her son enthusiastically, as if he couldn't think of anything nicer than being taken out shopping in a blizzard by his mum.