The Drosten's Curse Read online

  The Doctor was being much less careful – of course – and was showing no curiosity about sea creatures. He was talking about food, reaching for food, asking for extra food, or cramming food gleefully into his mouth while still trying to discuss it. He was like a very tall toddler in a sweet shop. ‘Mildly hungry….’ He inhaled a small stack of elegantly crustless cucumber sandwiches and reached out for his sixth scone. ‘Not exactly starving…Not far off, though.’

  Out in the little garden, Honor and Xavier were playing catch between the rosebushes and managing to look like any number of greetings cards depicting delightful children having lots and lots of Summery fun. While Bryony watched, Xavier leaped up and snatched a Frisbee out of the air with remarkable agility and speed. Just then, both twins paused and span round to look in through the windows. Something about their warm smiles and slowly extending arms seemed impossible to resist.

  ‘Ah, Doctor…Maybe we should give you a bit more room,’ suggested Bryony.

  ‘Yes.’ Putta was on his feet before her. He seemed equally keen to get outside and enjoy himself with this strange Earth disk-throwing game. To be honest, the combination of Bryony looking and sounding like Bryony and the snug fit of her new suit (and even the rubber boot thingies she was wearing were terrific) all in close proximity to so many tiny ornaments that he could break if he got nervous or overexcited was making him feel hysterical – as was the tickling of the odd, heavy tweed of his plus fours. ‘We should let you get on with eating everything else, Doctor.’ He realised this sounded quite rude after he’d said it – and braced himself to endure a spot of shouting, or the usual kind of complaint about insensitivity and being a waste of breathable gasses that he’d always get from his broodfather or his brothers. But the Doctor just nodded his sugar-and-cream-daubed face and waved goodbye.

  JULIA FETCH, QUIETLY DRESSED in immaculate tweeds and a cashmere cardigan, smiled benevolently at her guest. This was almost exactly the kind of tea she wanted to have every day and maybe she did. There were times when previous teas seemed so far away they might never have happened. On other days – or maybe just today – she was completely convinced that lovely gatherings of friends happened all the time. And sometimes they had just finished swimming and needed a change of togs – it was good to have chaps about the place in familiar clothes…tweeds, flannels, stout brogues, straw boaters for the summer and motoring caps for the winter…The Doctor was clearly delighted with all the treats she kept ready for guests every day – at least that seemed to be what she did – and now he was even chatting in just the way that people were supposed to over tea.

  ‘Fetch…’ The Doctor half-grinned and looked at her sideways while flapping his hat slightly. ‘You have, if I might say, a slightly ominous last name.’

  ‘Do I…?’ Julia giggled in a way that she hadn’t since she was a girl, or perhaps since she had flirted with those dashing young men who had once flown all her aircraft and driven all her cars: her Antoinette, her Curtiss and her Sopwiths, her Hudson Roadster, her De Dion Bouton, her Benz Motorwagen…she had owned so many things in her life. And she had watched so many well-set-up young chaps dancing and going to regattas and being jolly and alive…‘I wasn’t aware of that, Doctor. I suppose Doctor isn’t that happy a name, either – one only sees a doctor usually when one is unwell…’

  ‘Dear lady…’ The Doctor smiled and swam his left hand suavely through the air, just missing a tiny glass Amphioctopus marginatus. He picked up an Eccles cake, studied it for a moment and then swallowed it in one. ‘Oh, you look terribly well, though…’ His voice was briefly a bit raisiny. He swallowed. ‘But the word fetch – it always interests me. It used to be another word for ghost.’

  ‘Heavens, how exciting.’

  ‘Or the ghostly image of a person…’ The Doctor gave Julia one of the fast, clever looks which tended to make people think – if they noticed them – that the Doctor might not be the dispensable idiot he liked to seem. ‘And have you lived here long…?’

  Julia Fetch frowned as if this question was somehow too slippery to grasp. It seemed to have layers that she didn’t want to explore – and depths, too. There were definitely depths. While the Doctor darted another highly intelligent glance her way, she mumbled, ‘Long…?’

  ‘It is a difficult question, I’ll admit,’ burbled the Doctor. ‘Long as my arm, long as your arm, long as a long piece of Betelgeusian twine…Hmmm…’ His head was getting foggy again and that metallic taste was back. Far away…a long, long…It was a strange word, wasn’t…? A long way away he seemed to think that having a metallic taste in his mouth was a very bad idea and he should stop it at once. The Doctor posted an entire éclair into his resilient but currently rather strained digestive system and then abruptly lost his appetite.

  From that long, long, long way away, he could hear Julia Fetch’s voice.

  ‘Doctor?’ she asked. ‘My memory has become unreliable over the years, but I seem to have met you before somewhere. Have we taken tea together before?’

  ‘Mmmm…?’ He set down a buttered teacake on the arm of his chair and sighed. He had been – he thought – acting exactly as one should during a tea party and keeping everyone at their ease, but – in a distant way – he could tell that he was worried. He’d just eaten his own body weight in fat, sugar, starch and thinly sliced pieces of cucumber and yet he hadn’t actually been hungry, not exactly. It was more that he had felt as if someone else was being hungry using his body. And his head…It was almost as if some tendril, some intelligent hand, were rootling about behind his left eye and rearranging things, shifting memories, scooping some possibly important items out and just making them disappear. Whatever he’d told Bryony earlier, he was sure that their troubles weren’t over. Even if the creature that produced that massive psychon field had gone, the residual energy was bound to create some serious after-effects. Then again, he knew from very long experience that if you told Earth people they were in mysterious and most likely fatal danger they tended to break things, or scream a lot, or faint.

  FAINT.

  Once again, a large word, an impossibly loud word, squeezed its way into the Doctor’s remarkably roomy consciousness and made it feel like a bedsit in Weymouth. For some reason he was recalling the exact proportions of a specific bedsit in Weymouth and the width of a stasis chamber on a Basic Type VI Interstellar Transport…It was as if his mind was being encouraged to distract him…‘Have we…?’

  ‘Met.’ Julia Fetch smiled peacefully, as is traditional in sweet old ladies who are taking tea. ‘Before.’ She blinked.

  The Doctor peered across at her and thought that the air in the quaint little room seemed greenish, or foggy, or just wrong. And it hurt his eyes. ‘Have we met before…? Well, you know, I do get about a bit.’ Because the Doctor travelled in time as well as space he was very used to this kind of question and the various ways to answer it tactfully without going into how complicated life can be when you may – in the present – not have met someone before and yet may also – in the future – go back to the past and – in the past – meet that same someone in a manner that affects their future and, for example, the topics of conversation – in the present – which they might feel they’d already covered with you at an earlier date. ‘Now, let me think…’ The thing was, today, he didn’t feel able to manage all those complications: the time streams, the sheer remembering of so many thousands and thousands of faces and names and customs and histories and…For a second he felt something flicking through those faces and names as if they were files, infotabs, neurolinks – as if he were a record-keeper for an absent master. One of many things the Doctor couldn’t stand for was having a master.

  SCREAM. FAINT.

  He could see Julia’s eyes observing him with concern.

  ‘Doctor, you look rather unwell. Would you perhaps…?’

  BREAK. SCREAM. FAINT.

  The Doctor tried to shake his head and clear it, but that just seemed to make his frontal lobes clap togeth
er painfully inside his skull and so he nodded, carefully and murmured, ‘I think…yes…It’s this way, is it…Your bathroom…? With your taps…? And your water…? Yes. If I run my head under the tap for a moment.’ His long form rose up and swayed along to Julia’s enormous bathroom – the unsteady sweeps of his scarf missing every glass model as he left in a way that was almost miraculous.

  She didn’t watch him go, only sat recollecting what a wonderful tea party this was, how perfect in every way.

  OUT IN THE SUN-KISSED and rose-scented garden, Putta was discovering that he was as bad at disk-throwing as he was at every other game he’d tried. The twins seemed almost to float over the lawn, lithe and graceful as young Peltain hawks. Bryony was also springing and laughing and catching like every other carefree, confident life form Putta had encountered on his travels. That was the thing about seeing the universe, rather than staying on your home planet – it gave you so many more opportunities to realise how clumsy and miserable and ugly you were in comparison to everyone else. And his new jacket was weighing him down…Putta watched the bare feet of his opponents scampering and dodging, employing skills he would never have, and suddenly tasted Maillindian Fever Beans and felt angrier than he ever had.

  Bryony glanced across and he watched her smile curdle as she looked at him and noticed that she threw this Fizz B thing (was there a Fizz A?) over to him, as if she was skimming it towards a short-sighted child which had forgotten its glasses and was wearing thick mittens. She expected him to be pathetic and fumble and drop it.

  He did.

  And then, before he could stop himself, he had picked up the horrible piece of plastic and flung it back at her before fully realising that he had aimed it directly at her beautiful head – at her beautiful nose, to be precise. He watched her eyes register this fact and felt his heart break into a selection of jagged pieces and start scraping down the inside of his chest in despair.

  THE DOCTOR HAD HIS own problems. He was now inside Julia Fetch’s magnificent marble bathroom. The marble surfaces, the gold-plated taps, the marvellously soft Egyptian cotton towels were all of the finest quality and highly impressive. And if the Doctor had ever been that interested in luxury fixtures and fittings, the TARDIS would probably have provided them while he rattled across the universe. But he wasn’t. So she hadn’t. He’d now spent many lifetimes in adventures away from his ship, sleeping in caves, scuffling about on grubby floors with amazingly violent beings and scrambling up and down the dusty or muddy paths and scree slopes of the incredibly large number of planets which looked mostly like abandoned quarries. This meant that underfloor heating and Italian ceramics had rarely been available to him – while also never being a personal priority. He was mainly really pleased if there was sometimes a bit of soap available on loan near his location. Or clean water. Both being in the same place on the same day (or other convenient chronological unit) were usually a cause for celebration and elaborate thanks – if there was time for that kind of thing, what with all the scuffling and scrambling…

  BREAK. SCREAM. FAINT.

  The monstrous thoughts were back – punching into his skull, like a fist the size of an office block. And it was impossible to recall a number of details, including the ways in which a dashingly handsome genius Time Lord might need to spruce himself up now and then, just to maintain standards.

  The specially imported mango onyx marble of the walls had started to sway back and forth as if the room was breathing. The floor was also beginning to swash up and down like a thick liquid under the Doctor’s abused shoes.

  BREAK.

  He staggered across towards the massive central bathtub, fell to his knees – because that felt more secure – and realised that his hip had thumped heavily against the side of the bath. In his hip pocket the Doctor almost always kept a bar of emergency Kin-Dahl Mint Cake. (It was amazing how many civilisations had developed a sucrose cake of similar type in a kind of parallel confectionary evolution.) Unmistakably, he felt the bar break.

  Then his head was clamped by an incredible pain.

  SCREAM.

  He reached out blindly with what was very probably a shaking hand and tried turning on the cold tap so that he could splash water on to his face. He could halfway remember that sometimes this was a good idea.

  The tap obligingly turned.

  And turned.

  And turned.

  He couldn’t feel any water.

  He looked up – the effort of this making a sort of red blur run across his field of vision. There was the tap. No water was emerging from it…And yet…The tap itself was beginning to move, to flow…

  The shining, tubular end of the cold tap was no longer frozen metal, drooping down to aim water into the bath. It had reared up, horribly flexible and undulating, stretching and flaring – almost as if it were looking at him. And now the hot tap, too, had flexed into life and was snaking upwards, dancing with its fellow and making threatening little sallies towards the Doctor’s horrified face.

  For a moment, the end of one tap closed over his eye. It felt like a warm, soft, wet little mouth, testing, perhaps tasting, trying to understand him.

  He batted it away, the motion making his neck tingle with pain and his head swirl.

  Both taps now lunged towards him and he covered his eyes as fast as he could, while – he was pretty sure about this – he let out as loud a scream as he ever had.

  FAINT.

  But the taps weren’t interested in his eyes any more. They sleeked past his sideburns, brushed through his unruly hair and found exactly what they were after.

  The Doctor kept screaming as he felt the press of each tap swiftly burrowing into his ears, deeper and deeper, making his whole body shudder.

  At which point, he did indeed faint, just as the Big Thought had predicted.

  BACK IN THE GARDEN, Putta was so horrified that time seemed to have slowed and extended around him so that he had a considerable opportunity for anguished reflection. The only time I throw something with any kind of speed and energy and it’s going to really hurt my doomed love. At least my love for her is doomed. She shouldn’t be doomed at all. Until I hurled a sharp-edged flying disk at her, there was nothing doomed about Bryony Mailer. I really am a waste of breathable gases…

  He would have gone on self-pityingly like this for a good while had he not been interrupted by a number of events. As it turned out, Bryony was a remarkably athletic woman and, although she was slowed by her shock as she watched the savage flick of Putta’s wrist and the first threatening approach of the Frisbee, she was still able to flinch out of its way enough to receive no more than a glancing – but still painful – blow to her cheek.

  Putta flinched almost as if he him self had been hit and had just enough time to feel very guilty and to hear Bryony yelp, ‘Putta! What the–!’ before he was gripped with immense force, as if he were being restrained in a maxsecure chair at some kind of HyperLocked facility.

  When he managed to look away from Bryony, who was glowering at him and rubbing her zygomaticus major and zygomaticus minor muscles, he realised that Xavier and Honor had caught his arms and shoulders powerfully with what looked like slender and graceful child-fingers. Now those same fingers had him in their grasp they seemed to be much closer to high-tensile arachnid webbing, or maybe steel…

  He examined their perfectly calm faces, puzzled. They were still apparently two lovely young Terran humans, with willowy limbs and endearing features. But Putta saw in their eyes an absolutely blank darkness. It was as if he was gazing at two pairs of glistening rounded stones – stones filled only with night and the empty indifference of the universe – and expecting them to be sympathetic. And then he felt his feet being lifted off the ground.

  ‘Wwhooo…?’ Putta waggled his feet feebly as they left the grass and those two pairs of hands began to crush inwards around his arms more and more powerfully. He began to worry if his bones and muscles would survive this kind of treatment.

  And, for the fir
st time in his life, the being who was called Putta Pattershaun 5 turned to another being that he absolutely loved with all his massively underused heart and felt her frown at him with slight continuing annoyance but also real concern and – beyond that – genuine affection.

  He liked someone and they liked him back.

  Putta suspected this kind of information might have meant he ended up suspended in mid-air anyway. For a few seconds he felt like a tall, powerful and noble hunter of monsters, like a successful and agile hero, like the great and mighty Yakts of old who had strode across Yinzill like –

  At which point he was dropped back to earth when he wasn’t expecting it and his weak ankle went a bit wobbly on landing and so he fell over in a highly unheroic manner and ended up in a heap with his head in some kind of slightly prickly shrub.

  He was aware of Bryony above him, making a small concerned noise while also giggling. He extracted his face from the herbaceous border and sat, blinking up at three completely friendly faces, all trying to seem helpful while being on the verge of laughing. Six hands reached out to him and hauled him upright with only the usual levels of strength. Six hands then brushed him free of small leaves and patted him, while saying things like…

  ‘Goodness. That was a bit of tumble. Are you all right?’ (Honor)

  ‘My heavens, old chap. You need to be more careful. And perhaps we shouldn’t have played such a rough game. Would you be better at cards, or perhaps chess…?’ (Xavier)

  And ‘Oh, Putta…You do look an idiot. One minute you’re trying to break my nose, the next you’re leaping up and then throwing yourself into the flowerbed…Come and have some more tea and sit down before you actually break something – like your leg…’

  And then – which was odd – Putta said, ‘If I’d broken my leg I’d have screamed and then fainted.’ At exactly the same time that Honor, Xavier and Bryony said, ‘If you’d broken your leg, I’d have screamed and then fainted.’