Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 14

Her heart had hammered inside her chest at the thought of their abandoning her to this chaos. Her new, powerful heart, thudding away in panic as the bus vanished. She had stared at the spot as the sound of dematerialisation faded away.

Then the owls rose as one and started screeching again. It was as if the bus's disappearance had freed them into action.

They attacked the boy Icarus.

They fell upon him, shrieking.

He disappeared under the blur of wings.

There was a storm of white plumage and then scarlet.

Daedalus howled.

The Ghillighast were frozen in horror and their dogs were silenced and stilled.

Chapter Forty.

Iris Had Come Down...

Iris had come down at last, looking rather blotchy and red.

But she had rallied through their first course and began to regale her audience with stories about parapsychology, which she absolutely believed in.

The mind could play some funny tricks, she said.

Then, gamely, between courses, and picking over the shredded remains of the duck carca.s.s, she moved on to cryptozoology; a much-maligned science, she claimed. Bigfoot was absolutely real, too. And And she's had first hand experience of loch monsters and alien incursions of all kinds. she's had first hand experience of loch monsters and alien incursions of all kinds.

Fitz excused himself and went out into the back garden to smoke.

On the way he picked up the Aja'ib Aja'ib; which had become a sort of talisman to him.

In the garden he inspected the herb garden again and found that Sally's dog, banished out back, was eating the wild thyme.

'Hey boy; stop that. Stop!'

The mangy dog looked up at him quizzically.

'What did Sally call you again? Something tautological, wasn't it?'

The dog coughed wearily. 'Canine. It's purely descriptive. Nothing tautological about it at all.'

Fitz's mouth dropped open. 'You can talk.'

The dog rolled his eyes. 'Why should that be such a surprise to you? Look at that book you're reading.'

'This old thing? It's all fantasy.'

'Yeah, yeah,' said Canine.

'But it is! Look at the things it talks about. All of it is meaningless. The Shaft, the Obverse... the Enclave. Those terms make perfect sense in the book... but not in the everyday, the rational world outside this book.'

'Oh?' asked the dog, sounding rather withering. 'Listen, Fitz. Learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can't contradict each other because, in the end, they're all made up. Nothing can take precedence then. All right?'

'I'm not sure I know what you're on about.'

'Well, you reckon the world you live in takes precedence over the world you're reading about. So you've established a hierarchy, yeah?'

'Of course! I'd be out of my tree not to!'

The dog was looking sceptical again. He gave a kind of shrug and started nibbling the herbs once more. 'Maybe. But think how happy you might be if you didn't have to make those choices about what you should invest belief in. Here in the Obverse you can think of it all as a kind of fugue.'

'Fugue?'

'Hmm,' said the dog, chewing. 'No contradictions anymore. Every story holding equal sway. It means there are always alternatives. And it means no natural ending.'

Fitz took his last drag on his cigarette and ground it out on the window sill.

'I don't believe it.'

'No?' asked the dog.

'No. One reality has to be more valid than the other. It has to be realer.'

The little dog laughed and said, 'Well... what if you found out that the one you're in was the less real one? What if you found out that you yourself are less than real?'

Fitz laughed and looked at the moon.

'You're one h.e.l.l of a dog. Do you know that?'

'Oh, yes,' said Canine primly.

Chapter Forty-One.

After I'd Had A Few Drinks...

After I'd had a few drinks and managed to blot out my panic over dinner and also the nagging pain in my leg which seemed, at times, to be reaching an almost unbearable pitch I decided to come clean with Sally.

Around the table, the others fell quiet as I turned, rather blearily, towards her and said, 'I did read your book, you know. Every bit of it. I read it twice. I stayed up four nights running with it. Sat up in bed, afraid to go to sleep.'

She looked shocked. 'Then why did you lie to me? Back there?'

'I don't know.' I cried out then, as the pain dug in harder. They all looked at me.

'Are you all right?' Iris frowned.

'It's my leg.'

She glanced under the table. 'You should see a doctor.'

I needed to explain to Sally.

'It's very hard, when someone you know writes something. Especially when it implicates you. And you have to say what you think. I mean, what if it wasn't what you expected... or you're disappointed? Or it's actually really good and you can't depend on your own ability to say why you think it's good and you come across sounding all insincere?'

Sally smiled. 'I just wanted to know what you thought. I wanted your honest opinion. I'd respect that.'

I went on.

'I was afraid to go to sleep because of the dreams I'd been getting. But the dreams I'd been getting were just like your book. How did you know, Sally? How did you know what went on in my head?'

The Men of Gla.s.s with their ruby hearts, the Scarlet Queen of Jam, the Mock Turtle, the Bearded Lady, the savage owls, the angel boy, the demoniac elephant all of them from my dreams.

The ones I was meant to suppress.

Even the twin confrontations at the close of both halves of the book, in the equivalent throne rooms at the heart of Hyspero and Valcea even these oddly mirrored denouements were all too familiar.

And, above all, Iris. She had been the biggest shock of recognition.

'I made it all up,' said Sally simply.

And it was Iris who tipsily replied, 'Darling, there's no such thing.'

Chapter Forty-Two.

As The Doctor Waited...

As the Doctor waited for Iris to take them all back to the precise moment they had left, he already knew what he had to do.

The owls. He would persuade them not to kill Icarus.

Icarus and his father would be sent back to the Federation. Daedalus would stand trial.

The Enclave would remain secret.

He would find out what the Obverse truly was.

He would find out where Iris came from.

He would find out where Daedalus had come from, and how Iris knew him.

He would engineer some way for the Ghillighast, owls, Steigertrudes and Sahmbekarts to return peacefully to their own, secret worlds.

He would never let Compa.s.sion out of his sight again.

He would tell the owls to look after their remaining egg. To never let it hatch.

He would have to look into the destiny of Icarus.

He would find out what bearing he was meant to have on the universe the Doctor knew.

He would find Blandish.

He would...

'We're arriving,' said Iris, plunging the dematerialisation switch.

The Doctor took a deep breath, watched the swirling mists dissolve, and turned to tell his companions to wait aboard as he went off to solve everything.

He paused first, however, to see that the throne room appeared around them in precisely the manner it was meant to.

He waited for the glowing light of that chamber. The smashed gla.s.s and the a.s.sembled alien species. The owls and bats and giant squid.

Instead, outside, were winter woods.

Black trees.

Silvered snow.

Howling wind.

He turned, speechless, to Iris.

'I'm sorry, Doctor,' she said.

Blandish and Timon had arrived in the outskirts of the ruined City of Gla.s.s.