Doctor Who BBC N06 - The Stealers of Dreams Read online

  Jack thought about leaving the gun – he couldn’t retrieve it without sticking his head into the line of fire. It was all he had, though.

  It might only hold the cops off for a few more seconds, but each 81

  one would count. He dived for the weapon and scooped it up, coming away with the brief impression of a stairwell crowded with black uniforms, too surprised to react to his brief appearance, still picking themselves up after their bomb scare.

  Jack felt a surge of elation as he raced through the doorway, into. . .

  . . . emptiness. No studio, no crates – just space, stretching out before him.

  He kept going, because he couldn’t quite believe it. There had to be a secret room or a lift. Just something, somewhere, because if there wasn’t. . .

  If there wasn’t. . .

  He came to a helpless stop in the centre of the floor. He heard shuffling on the stairwell and automatically sent three shots in that direction to discourage pursuit, though there seemed little point now.

  He could see right through to the boarded-up windows on all four sides of the building, and Gryden had dropped to his knees and was holding on to Jack’s legs and giggling hysterically.

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Jack urgently, though he was sure he knew the answer by now. ‘You said there was a studio here. Where is it?’

  ‘It’s here,’ sniggered the tramp. ‘It’s all around us. Can’t you see?

  There are the lights up there, and the cameras standing there, there and there. We’re on air. The whole world is watching us, and you’ll tell them,won’t you, Cap’n? You’ll tell them how things are, and they’ll never be able to ignore us again because we’ll be famous, won’t we?

  We’ll be famous!’

  Jack laid down the gun with a sigh and kicked it away from him.

  The police approached with caution, suspecting a trap, but still they approached. They formed a circle of raised guns around the two fugi-tives.

  Captain Jack put up his hands. The man who had called himself Hal Gryden was no longer laughing.

  As four officers came for them and pulled them apart from each other, the tramp began to panic again.

  ‘Cap’n, don’t let them do this! Why are you just standing there? You said it’d be OK. You said if I came with you, you could fix everything.’

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  Jack avoided his eye, staring stubbornly at the ground. He felt disgusted, and he couldn’t face his betrayer, didn’t want to tell him what he was thinking, because he knew it wasn’t really the old man’s fault.

  He was ill. So Jack could only feel disgust with himself, for not seeing it in time.

  ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ growled a voice in his ear.

  ‘Anything you do say had better be the truth, or you’re for it!’

  They were spray-cuffed and marched to the stairs, Jack maintaining a resigned silence as the tramp babbled in fear: ‘Listen to me, you’ve got the wrong man, it’s not my fault. It was this man. . . This man, he told me he was a captain of a spaceship, and I thought. . . I could see he was fantasy crazy, but he made me come with him, he made me steal for him. He had a gun and he wouldn’t let me go. He said he was going to spread fiction to the whole world, but I didn’t listen to his stories, I didn’t. You can’t take me to the Big White House, I’ve done nothing wrong. I know what they do to you there, and I can’t face that. I’d rather die, do you hear me? I’d rather die, and that’s the truth!’

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  Domnic had never met a girl like Rose Tyler. In his job he spoke to dozens of women every day, and most of them were the same: self-absorbed, uninterested. His co-workers went straight from the office to a club, where they stood, not talking, swaying in time to an overbearing drumbeat. The music had no melody, no lyrics. Its only purpose was to drown out reality, when Domnic knew that music could do so much more.

  He couldn’t see the world their way and they ridiculed him for that.

  They called him a geek, and probably worse behind his back. Some of them – and he could see this in their eyes when he approached them, hear it in the hush that so often presaged his appearance – were scared of him, scared that one day he might freak out.

  When he’d joined the reading group, he had hoped to find a soul mate, someone who shared his perspective.

  At first, there had been Manda. Mad Mand, they had called her.

  She had never had the discipline to write her ideas down, but when the mood struck her she would take centre stage with a series of ad hoc and increasingly extravagant tales, losing herself so deeply in the fiction that her recitals left Domnic breathless.

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  He had found his tongue tied whenever she had spoken to him. She just seemed to know what he was still trying to learn. She seemed to get it.

  But gradually her stories had lost any grounding in reality. They’d become longer and more rambling, lacking in structure – aimless flights of fantasy that made sense to no one but herself. And now, when the others had called her ‘mad’, it had been with concern in their voices rather than admiration.

  Mad Mand had smashed up a restaurant one day. She had threatened the customers with a table leg. The staff had tried to restrain her, but they’d said on the news channels later that she’d had the strength of ten. In the end, in desperation, the chef had reached for a knife.

  Manda had still been laughing, in her baritone boom, as she was carried into the ambulance. She had died in a traffic jam, halfway to the hospital.

  Domnic had shunned the reading group for a month. It had taken him that long to come to terms with what had happened. The media had seized on the incident, citing it as an example of the danger of fiction, but that wasn’t right. It had been the danger that had seduced Manda to start with. She hadn’t been interested in the stories for their own sake, just in the thrill of dicing with insanity. If fiction hadn’t killed her, she would have found something else to do the job.

  At least, that was how Domnic rationalised it to himself.

  Later, thanks to the news channels, they had found out a lot about Mad Mand – about her parents and a succession of bad boyfriends.

  They had come to see why it was that she had been so scared of reality.

  Domnic, in the meantime, had returned to the group to find Nat.

  Poor, sweet Nat. Seventeen years old and so nervous, approaching each new story with trepidation, always feeling that she was doing something terribly wrong. Domnic had had to talk her out of leaving a few times. She’d stayed because she said a love story made her feel sort of liquid inside. She had written one once and had wept as she read it out loud. She hadn’t read Domnic’s stories, because she said they were too violent. She had been scared of ending up like Manda.

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  When she and Domnic had kissed, that one time, he hadn’t been sure if she had been kissing him or some idealised image of the male romantic hero.

  The doctors had Nat now. They would make her feel like a criminal, when she had done no harm to anybody. Even if she was released from the Big White House, he knew he’d never see her again.

  And then there was Rose, and she’d been everything Domnic had ever wanted or wanted to be: bright, enthusiastic, confident. She had thrown herself into fiction in a way that Nat would never have dared, taking the good but leaving the bad, letting it energise her but not control her. Unlike Mad Mand, she had still known what was real.

  She had balanced both worlds, and made it look easy. Until now.

  Until, to Domnic’s horror and dismay, Rose Tyler had fallen to pieces before his eyes. Until she had started to swing a plank of wood at thin air and to shout at nothing. And she had that wild, frightened look in her eyes as they flicked from side to side, looking for imaginary terrors everywhere.

  She was fantasy crazy. The news channels had been right all along.

  And all those other women. . . For the first time, Domnic really under-stood what it was they had been so scared of.

  He
tried to tell Rose there was nothing there, that the yard was empty, but she wasn’t listening. He took her by the arm and made to guide her away, but she shrugged him off. Then she whirled round and her face lit up with relief. And she cried out a single word: ‘Doctor!’

  She made for the metal staircase behind them coming back for Domnic when she realised he was watching, dumbfounded. She took his hand and dragged him up the stairs after her, but came up short as if there was something in their path. ‘No,’ she warned, ‘don’t touch it!’ And she stared around with those wild eyes again.

  The stairs bent back on themselves, and Rose climbed onto the handrail and jumped for the one above. She caught it and pulled herself nimbly up and over. She turned to reach for Domnic and cried his name in alarm as she saw that he had taken the easy way round.

  Her face clouded with confusion, just for a moment.

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  ‘OK, Doctor,’ she called, ‘we’re coming!’

  She shouldered open the door into the building.

  They barged

  through a small, untidy storeroom and into an office area, where a prim-looking woman leaped up from her desk and demanded to know who they were. ‘No time to explain,’ said Rose, ‘just get out of here.

  Get everyone out! There are zombies behind us!’ And then she was gone, leaving Domnic to mutter an embarrassed apology as he hurried after her.

  He caught up with her downstairs, in a short passageway from which several doors led, presumably into more offices.

  She clutched at him in desperation. ‘Where’d he go? Did you see where he went?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Doctor!’

  ‘I didn’t see any doctor.’

  ‘How d’you think we got out of there? He was up on the stairs. He used the sonic screwdriver, and he. . . I don’t know, he confused the zombies or something.’

  ‘I didn’t see any. . . zombies.’ Zombies?

  ‘You been walking around with your eyes shut?’

  ‘I mean there were no zombies. You imagined them.’ And it was all his fault. His comic strip. He’d planted those images in Rose’s mind.

  She looked incredulous. ‘You heard them. You said.’

  ‘I heard the cops. I thought they were following us. But it was fiction, Rose.’ He was shaking her, as if he could shake her back to reality. ‘Don’t you see? There were no cops. There are no zombies, no doctor. . . ’

  He thought he’d been getting through to her, but now she broke away from him.

  ‘The Doctor isn’t fiction. What are you doing? Why’re you trying to confuse me? I can’t think straight.’

  ‘OK,’ said Domnic, ‘OK, you’re under treatment, I get it. So tell me where. Tell me where this doctor’s practice is and we’ll go there. We’ll get help.’

  ‘I don’t know where,’ insisted Rose. ‘He was here, but he’s gone.’

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  ‘He wasn’t here. I didn’t see him.’

  ‘The TARDIS. I can show you his TARDIS. It’s out in the jungle.

  C’mon, you’ll believe me then. The TARDIS, it’s the Doctor’s ship.’

  ‘ His ship? Then who was that “Captain Jack” guy?’

  ‘The Doctor travels in time. He fights monsters. There were these shop-window dummies that were alive and they were going to kill me, and the Doctor was there, and we’ve been to the past and the future and. . . ’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Rose. Does this sound right? Does it sound like fact?’ Had he been like this last night? Was this how he had seemed to her? He’d always told himself he could handle it, but now. . .

  ‘They were real, Domnic. I could smell them, like rotting fruit. I even felt a chill from the one on the stairs as I climbed past it.’

  ‘Forget about the zombies, Rose. I. . . I’ve seen this sort of thing on TV. They give you advice. They say you should. . . You should focus on something real, something you believe in.’

  ‘The Doctor.’

  ‘Not him. Your home. Your family. Just think about them, nothing else. Or. . . or something like. . . that table over there. That table’s real, Rose. You can see it, I can see it. Concentrate on the table.’

  ‘Home!’ said Rose. She was rummaging in her pockets. ‘I can phone home. I can talk to Mum. She’ll know. She’ll tell you. And she’s met the Doctor. I can prove it to you. I can prove he’s real.’

  ‘What on earth is that?’ asked Domnic as Rose produced a boxy device, not dissimilar to a TV remote control.

  ‘It’s my mobile. My. . . er, vidphone. Without the “vid”.’

  ‘It’s the size of a brick!’

  ‘Wait till you see what it can do.’

  She pressed a couple of keys, then held the phone up so that they could both hear the ring tone on the other end of the line. It repeated eight times before it was cut off by a crackle and a tired, husky, irritable voice: ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Mum, it’s me.’

  A long silence.

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  ‘Rose? Rose, what’re you. . . Where are you? D’you know what time it is?’

  Rose was grinning, almost in tears. ‘Mum, I don’t know what day it is there.’

  ‘Did he bring you home? Tell me he’s brought you home.’

  ‘Mum, listen. . . ’

  ‘Though if he did, I s’pose I’d be the last to know. Cardiff, Rose. It’s only up the motorway. You could’ve given me a call.’

  ‘I can give you a call from anywhere. From here.’

  ‘I saw Mickey. What’ve you done to that poor boy, Rose? I mean, I mightn’t have had much time for him before, but all he’s been through for you.’

  ‘I know. Mum. . . ’

  The grin had frozen into a grimace. Rose pressed the phone to her ear so that Domnic could no longer hear the other side of her conversation. For the next minute or so she just listened impatiently and occasionally tried to break in.

  At last, she said, ‘It’s just. . . I needed to hear your voice. . . No, Mum, there’s nothing wrong. . . Look, I’ve gotta go. . . Yeah, yeah, soon, I promise. Bye, Mum.’

  And she cut off the connection and stared at the phone glassy-eyed.

  Domnic felt he ought to say something, but the more time passed the harder it got. Finally, clumsily, he asked, ‘This Mickey. . . is he your boyfriend?’

  ‘Not any more,’ sighed Rose. She took a deep, steadying breath.

  ‘I know what’s real now, Domnic. Mum’s real. Mickey’s real. The zombies – they weren’t real. I can see that now, but at the time. . . ’

  ‘And this doctor?’

  ‘The realest thing I’ve ever known. And you’re right, we’ve gotta find him – but he’s not at some practice and I’m not going running back to the TARDIS. The hotel! We should go back to the hotel.’

  Domnic felt a tingle in his spine as they crossed the hotel lobby.

  They ran into a cleaner outside the lifts and he half expected him to raise the alarm, but he passed them by without a glance. Last night, this building had been alive with shadows and threats, but they had 90

  been fiction. Today, the same corridors, the same rooms, were dingy and mundane.

  ‘You know, this world had a name once,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It was called Discovery – because that’s what it was to the pioneers.

  Something new, something special. I’d love to have lived back then, when life was an adventure. Now it’s just a way of getting from birth to death.’

  In Rose’s room they found a note she had written to the Doctor, untouched. There was no sign that he’d been here.

  ‘What if they got to him too?’ she asked worriedly. ‘What if they managed to drive him crazy? I’m serious, Domnic. Whatever’s behind this. . . If anyone’s gonna find the monsters, it’s him, and if they’ve caught him. . . ’

  ‘Something real, Rose,’ urged Domnic. ‘Focus!’

  ‘The Doctor’s real,’ she muttered to herself fiercely.

  He’d turned
on the TV and was fiddling with the tuning controls again.

  ‘D’you think that’s a good idea?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Hal Gryden will know what to do,’ said Domnic. ‘He’ll make things clearer.’

  ‘. . . Hal Gryden. . . ’ said the TV, like an echo.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Rose. ‘Is that Static?’

  ‘I don’t think. . . ’ Domnic was looking at a familiar newsreader and a channel ident that read ‘8 News’. But he hadn’t imagined what he had just heard. . . had he?

  – drama plays in which the police are portrayed as inflexible, corrupt monsters with a hidden agenda. The cumulative effect of exposure to such fiction –

  He grabbed the remote control and flicked through the official channels.

  ‘– man is dangerous. His description is unknown –’

  ‘– changes his appearance –’

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  ‘– Gryden –”

  This couldn’t be happening. His heart was beating against his chest.

  ‘– station is a huge undertaking and somebody must know –’

  ‘– must be apprehended for all our –’

  ‘– Hal –’

  ‘– outbreaks of violence, ranging from –’

  ‘– urge our viewers not to listen to this man’s lies –’

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Rose.

  Domnic had to swallow before he could answer. He couldn’t believe it. He could hardly find the words. He’s done it. He. . . he’s made the news. Hal Gryden’s made the news!’

  ‘So? I thought everyone knew about him already.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. . . of course. But don’t you see? It’s official now.

  All these years, the police and the media have been ignoring him, pretending that Static didn’t exist, when everyone knew. . . Well, look now, Rose. Look what’s happening. Hal Gryden is on every single channel.’

  Rose was just beginning to understand. She came to kneel beside Domnic, hypnotised as he was by the TV screen.