Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire Read online

  A dash of sea-spray in my face pulled me back to reality.

  'Nowadays, thanks to modern know-how,' I continued, 'a six-month journey from England to India can be accomplished in four weeks.'

  A slight sneer seemed to caress the Doctor's lips.

  'Modern know-how? You humans are all the same. Would it surprise you to learn that the first canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was dug over two thousand years ago? Not much more than a furrow in the sand, but they only had small ships in those days, not -' and he looked around him' - miracles of technology such as this. That canal lasted for eight hundred years before falling into disuse. Do you think this one will last anywhere near as long?'

  He cocked his head on one side and looked up at me with a bright, sparrow-like gaze. I opened my mouth to stammer an answer, but he continued speaking.

  'Pharaoh Necho started to re-dig the canal a century later. The Canal of the Pharaohs, they called it. A hundred thousand men died in the digging.

  Perhaps they should have called it the Canal of the Dead. Necho was the son of old Psammitichus, you know? Lovely man: liked his drink, but then don't we all? Anyway, Darius took it over when Necho snuffed it, and my old friend Ptolemy took it over when Darius shuffled off this mortal coil. Or was taken upon the boat of the Night to join his ancestors, as I'm sure he would have liked to think of it. Ptolemy even built a lock in the canal: you probably thought that the English invented locks, didn't you?'

  I shook my head, but the Doctor wasn't looking. He seemed to have got himself into a rut, and intended to keep talking until the subject was exhausted.

  'Well, after about five hundred years the canal was impassable, and it wasn't until the Romans took over the country that anything more got done.

  They liked straight roads, did the Romans. They must have loved the idea of a canal. Emperor Trajan restored it, but a hundred years later it had silted up again. When the Moslems conquered Egypt the Caliph Omar ordered the governor, a little rat-faced man by the name of Amr-ibn-al-Aas as I recall, to ream it out again. They called it the Canal of the Prince of the Faithful, and it lasted until the eighth century. That was a thousand years ago. Your version of the Suez Canal has been open for - what? twenty years? -and you think

  you've given Mother Nature a bloody nose. What was it Shelley wrote?

  "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing endures, Doctor Watson, nothing endures.'

  He stopped abruptly. I felt chastened.

  'Your historical knowledge is exceptional,' I said eventually.

  'I pick things up, here and there.'

  'There's usually a trip arranged across land to see Cairo and the pyramids.

  You can pick up the ship again at Suez. Will you be signing up for it?'

  He chuckled boyishly.

  'I've had some nasty experiences around the pyramids,' he said.

  The flotilla of home-made craft had almost reached us by now, or we had almost reached them. The sailors in the lead were already holding aloft their wares and shouting out how fine a bargain they were for two handsome gentlemen such as us. The beggars who had hitched lifts with them, or who piloted their own boats, were crying out for alms.

  'Baksheesh!' they implored, their voices rising and falling like the wails of seagulls. 'Effendi, baksheesh!'

  'Breakfast?' I asked the Doctor.

  He grimaced.

  'With and without,' he murmured, 'have and have not: Then, pulling himself together, 'Yes, I'll take breakfast with you.'

  I was just about to lead the way when a lone voice seemed to rise above the chorus below. An English voice. A voice I recognized.

  'Watson! Watson! Save some breakfast for me!'

  I glanced over the side again. There, in the lead boat, was Holmes, dressed in a striped, one-piece bathing costume.

  'Good Lord,' I muttered inanely.

  'I saw him at sunrise,' the Doctor said. 'He said he was going to swim to shore for some exercise. He did ask me if I wanted to join him, but I declined.'

  'Do you swim?' I asked.

  He gazed up at me levelly.

  'If pushed,' he replied. He turned and walked off abruptly towards where breakfast awaited. I made to follow, but as I did so I noticed that the wood of the rail where his hands had rested was perfectly dry, and the spray from the waves had dampened the deck all around except for two footprints where he had been standing.

  Before we could even get to the hatch and descend to the saloon for breakfast, the vanguard of the local flotilla had glancingly docked with the SS Matilda Briggs. The crew attempted to fend it off with long poles, but a handful of entrepreneurs scurried up dangling cables and the anchor chain to the deck. There they proceeded to buttonhole the passengers and display the cheap gewgaws and gimcracks that they had brought with them.

  'Mr Mackenzie! Mr Mackenzie!'

  An insistent merchant in a ragged robe plucked hold of my sleeve. For some reason they always referred to gentlemen as 'Mr Mackenzie' and ladies as 'Lillie Langtry.' I pushed past him and was three steps down the stairs when I realized that the Doctor had paused to watch. The Arab scrabbled around inside his robe for a moment, and brought out a day-old chick. I had seen hulley-gulley men before: their conjuring tricks with livestock were superficially fascinating, but no better than a second-rate music hall magician could have managed and certainly not deserving of reward. I watched impatiently as, before the Doctor's eager eye, he passed a hand in front of the chick and made it disappear. The Doctor smiled in innocent delight. The smell of bacon drifted up from the galley below. I sighed.

  For the next few minutes, the hulley-gulley man plucked little cheeping bundles from his fist, his mouth, thin air, the Doctor's ears and the sleeves of passing passengers. He juggled with the creatures, carelessly dropping one over the side of the boat but carrying on like a trooper. He made them do tricks: running up his arm and back, weaving in and out of his fingers, climbing atop one

  another to form a rough pyramid. The Doctor was entranced. Eventually the conjuror finished, threw them roughly into his pocket and held out an eager hand to the Doctor, saying, 'You like, Mr Mackenzie, you like?'

  The Doctor nodded, beaming happily, and took off his hat. Reaching inside, he pulled out a large white rabbit and handed it to the astounded conjurer.

  As the man stared at it in bemusement, the Doctor walked over to join me with a quizzical smile upon his face.

  We quitted the deck and made for the dining room. Holmes appeared just as I was chasing the remnants of my fried egg around the plate with some toast.

  'I see that you haven't been wasting the morning,' he said cheerfully, pulling up a chair.

  'Swimming obviously agrees with you,' I riposted. 'You should do more of it.

  Perhaps a dawn dip in the Serpentine every morning. As your physician, I strongly recommend it.'

  'I have commented before upon your pawky sense of humour, Watson. I shall have to do something about it. Some bromide in your tea, perhaps.'

  He attracted the attention of a waiter and ordered a large breakfast.

  'I awoke early,' he continued, helping himself to a cup of coffee, 'and decided to take a constitutional swim. I encountered the local fleet on the way out and took the opportunity to test my spoken Egyptian.'

  The Doctor smiled slightly as he gazed at the table. He did not seem to take Holmes terribly seriously.

  'Baggage day, today,' I observed as Holmes's breakfast was delivered and he fell upon it like a wolf upon the fold.

  'Babbage day?'The Doctor frowned. 'I wasn't counting on that.'

  'Baggage day. The crew will bring the trunks containing our tropical wear up from the hold and replace them with the ones currently in our cabins.

  White drill suits replace black serge. Black cummerbunds oust waistcoats.

  Topees take over from trilbies.'

  'Very poetic.' The Doctor looked down at his lightweight tropical suit. 'No change here, I'm afraid.'

  I tho
ught for a moment. Had the Doctor brought any luggage at all on board? Had I ever seen him in anything apart from the clothes he stood up in? My memory was hazy: I was sure that I was missing something obvious, but for the life of me, I could not remember what.

  'Well,' Holmes said from around a mouthful of food, 'let us hope that this momentous day marks an end to the boredom of the past two weeks and the beginning of the ennui of the next two.'

  Boredom? I had not been bored, although I had been aware of Holmes pacing the deck and the Doctor sitting cross-legged in a deckchair for days on end, watching the waves. No, I had spent a large part of the journey chronicling the adventures which had taken place in London. The pages which you have already read were the result: written in longhand with a scratchy fountain pen in a ledger book brought with me for that purpose.

  The exercise had served to sharpen in my mind the questions that still remained: who was the hooded figure with whom Baron Maupertuis had met, and how did Maupertuis smuggle the books out of the Library of St John the Beheaded? As I had come to the end of the narrative, however -

  the section which detailed our discussions with Sherringford Holmes and his unusual guest in the Library - I found myself reluctant to write. I kept looking for excuses to leave my cabin. I would walk along the promenade, exchanging small-talk with the ladies and taking part in the daily lottery based upon the previous day's run. I would visit the bar and listen to the ribald talk of the men. I would sit out on deck with Holmes and the Doctor, trying to follow their abstruse discussions. I even attended the fancy-dress ball - the social high spot of the voyage although I would not normally be seen dead at such an event. I did not wish to write of that conversation.

  Now, some years later, I have gained a little perspective. Perhaps so many stranger things have happened to me since that I can recall the scene in the Library with less disquiet than before. Or perhaps I have forgotten much of what made me shy away from it. Whatever the reason, I now find it easier to cast my mind back to the week before we left London, to that oak-lined room, deep in the heart of the Library of St John the Beheaded, and the moment when the alien creature stepped out from behind the curtain.

  'Gentlemen,' it said in a hissy voice, 'we of Ry'leh need your help.'

  Mycroft Holmes, as I recall, spilled his wine on the carpet. Holmes leaned forward eagerly, his eyes scanning over every inch of the creature's flesh.

  Sherringford Holmes sat back smugly in his armchair and the Doctor, apart from raising his eyebrows, did nothing.

  And I? The floor seemed to shift beneath my feet, swaying as if in an earthquake. I could hear a faint buzzing in my ears, and a small, still voice in the back of my mind kept repeating a snatch of poetry by the French writer Victor Hugo:

  Every globe revolving round a star,

  Is home to a humanity near yet far.

  until I could hear nothing else. The only way I could snap back to reality was by considering the creature as a biological entity and using my medical knowledge to determine something of its life. You may gather from this that on one level, at least, I was convinced that it was real.

  'My name is K'tcar'ch,' it hissed. I noted that the voice coincided with the pulsation of a small membrane beneath its sack-like body. This I labelled as the creature's mouth, although I could see no method of ingesting food.

  'As the esteemed Doctor has explained, our planets are distant from one another in space, so distant that light itself would take many centuries to travel from us to you, and yet in the folds of what we call the spacetime continuum, we are only a step away' K'tcar'ch took a step forward. I watched with fascination how its spindly legs bent. Each of the five 'joints'

  was in fact composed of two hinges, one above the other, each acting in a different plane so that the limbs could move in any direction.

  'We are a peaceful race. We have no weapons, no armies, no desire to fight. All we have are philosophers. All we wish to conquer is the realm of thought'

  'Which planet did you say you came from?' the Doctor queried.

  'Ry'leh,' K'tchar'ch said. 'It is a world of no great cosmic significance. We keep ourselves to ourselves. We do not encourage visitors.'

  'The name is familiar,' the Doctor said, scowling. 'If either of my brains were working, I'd remember.'

  The three Holmes brothers stared at him.

  'Brains?' Mycroft said finally.

  'One for everyday use and one for best: The Doctor smiled sweetly at the alien. 'Please continue.'

  'Our rulers, the Great Cogitators, have known for many of your millenniums that travel between worlds was possible by using certain sounds which resonate at the basal frequency of the cosmos. These sounds can pull together areas of space which are separate, causing gateways which intrepid travellers can pass through. In that way we have met great scholars from many other races. Sherringford Holmes is one of them.'

  I noted in passing that K'tcar'ch's skin was a mottled grey colour, apart from a few hard red patches which were streaked with black veins. I speculated that they might be indications of old age, injury or illness.

  'How long has this been going on, Sherringford?' There was a tone of disapproval in Holmes's voice.

  'Some years now,' Sherringford replied.

  'And why did you not wish to tell us of this earlier?'

  Sherringford shrugged.

  'Would you have believed me?' he asked.

  Mycroft snorted.

  'I remember once or twice writing to you, asking if I could visit...'

  '. . . Whenever your guilty conscience got the better of you, dear boy,'

  Sherringford murmured.

  '. . . And receiving a telegram saying that you had company. I never realized,' and he took a sip of his wine, 'how far your company had travelled to be with you.'

  There was a short silence. A log cracked in the fire, making us all jump. All except K'tcar'ch. I became fascinated by what might be blood vessels beneath its skin, arranged not like the branches of a tree, as with humanity, but like a cobweb.

  'We became aware, not so long ago,' it continued, 'that others had discovered how to open gateways between our worlds. Reports reached the Great Cogitators that small bands of humans were appearing in the wastelands of our planet. They appeared to be drawing maps. It did not take us long to realize what their intentions were.'

  'Invasion,' Mycroft said. 'The first resort of fools.'

  'I have been aware for some time,' Holmes revealed, 'that the criminal underclasses seemed to be severely underpopulated. Several thousand thugs and bruisers appeared to be lying low. I now suspect that they have been shipped secretly to India as part of Maupertuis's army .'

  He smiled grimly.

  'I wonder what Professor Moriarty makes of it all,' he added.

  K'tcar'ch flexed its five limbs slightly, as a man might shift position to ease a cramp. I had been trying to work out how its musculature was arranged, but its baggy, canvas-like skin was thick enough to hide the movements of the muscles - if muscles they were.

  'We asked friend Sherringford for aid. We asked him to find out who was planning to destroy the peace of Ry'leh.'

  'I knew that Father had seen evidence of the joining of worlds,' Sherringford continued. 'It was by reading his journals that I had started experimenting, and it was those experiments that attracted the attention of the Ry'lehans.

  So I started with the Library, only to find that Father's journals had been stolen. And that's where you came in, Sherlock.'

  I wondered, but did not dare ask, why K'tcar'ch had been following me.

  'So where does this get us?' said Mycroft with characteristic directness, leaning back against the panelling. It creaked beneath its weight. 'If we accept the evidence of Mr . . . er . . . Mr K'tcar'ch, was it . . .?'

  The alien clicked in what seemed to be approval.

  ' . . And add it to what we already know, then Baron Maupertuis is attempting to raise an army and invade the peaceful world of Ry'leh. Now, I must poin
t out that Her Majesty's Government has no treaty or alliance with Ry'leh to my certain knowledge, and therefore, whilst we would treat any request for assistance with great sympathy, we can take no action that might result in an inconvenient diplomatic situation.'

  'You have summed the situation up correctly,' Sherringford agreed.

  The Doctor strode across to confront Mycroft. He was almost half the man's size and half his width, but in some strange way he seemed to tower over the diplomat.

  'And so while you debate, a world is invaded? Is this British justice? Has the Mother of Parliaments been replaced by a talking shop for indecisive milksops?'

  Mycroft glanced across to where Sherlock Holmes stood.