" I " m the Doctor, and these are . . . " The man looked round at the empty street as if he had mislaid something. "Well, I " m sure my friends Roz and Chris will be along shortly. I wonder if you could help me. I " m looking for a psychic field-generator powerful enough that its after-image can drive hardened secret agents into a Womb without a View. It would probably look something like a doll"s house."
Emil felt his headache returning. How did this man know about the Doll"s House? He clutched at a thread of sanity.
"You said I was being watched. W h o by?"
The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a small hard red ball. "Cricket," he said absently, "not boules, I"m afraid. Could you hit the cornice of the bakery opposite the toyshop with this? It probably won"t bounce very well. It"s been in a vacuum."
Emil put down the top of the flask and took the ball as someone might take an object in a dream. He threw the ball hard, with all the power of his a.s.sa.s.sin"s muscles. On the surface of the brickwork something squirmed out of the way.
A distortion of the stone hunched itself up into a visible shape and then flattened out again.
"What was that?" Emil asked, aghast. The shape had been like nothing he had ever seen before. Like no shape he had ever a.s.sumed.
"Something bred to watch. A human foetus re-engineered with an outer layer of mimetic silicon, at a guess. I think we should get out of its sight, don"t you?"
The creature that was watching the toyshop melted its body back into the contours of the ancient brickwork of the bakery 125 opposite. The scarlet flicker of movement that had triggered the defensive response was gone. So were the two humans. It did not care.
Wholly pa.s.sive in an ecstatic state of reception, it relished the harsh pressure of the stone on its nerves. Waterproof in its layer of silicon, and immune to boredom so long as the pleasure centres of its brain reacted in their warped fashion to the exercise of its powers, it would watch forever if need be.
It did not care what it saw, or whether anyone would ever reach out to learn what it had seen. It only watched. It had no name or purpose other than watching.
"I don"t think you ought to do that," Emil said as the Doctor poked irritably at the bulky iron lock of the toyshop.
The Doctor glanced over his shoulder. "I don"t think we"re going to have the option." Three men in long robes, each carrying a long butcher"s knife, detached themselves from the shadows.
"No, I mean I have a key."
"Why didn"t you say so?" the Doctor snapped, flipping his hairpin back up his sleeve like a stage magician whose trick had started offering him a choice of cards.
Emil was startled by the pa.s.sion in the strange man"s voice.
"You didn"t ask me."
"Why do you have the key?"
Emil looked behind. The men - if they were men - were getting nearer. This was not a time for a rehearsal of his life story. He slapped the key into the Doctor"s hand. "I used to live here."
Thrusting open the door, Emil bundled the Doctor into the warm clove-smelling interior of the toyshop. In the small amount of moonlight that penetrated its shuttered windows, the high shelves of dolls lay grey and undisturbed like tomb images. The smell of sandalwood and camphor rose from the polished wood of the long counter, and the rows of dark wooden doll"s houses. In daylight, Emil knew this place would be brightly coloured, and he had on the whole good 126 memories of the Family"s time here, except for his disagreements with his father.
The Doctor had positioned himself at the bow window, and was peering around the red velvet curtains and the wooden shutters. "They"re rather clumsy with those knives.
Real knife fighters don"t cl.u.s.ter together like that. If they start swinging those things, they"ll chop bits out of each other."
"They are probably just hirelings."
"Or they usually rely on other weapons." The Doctor"s voice was grave.
Emil edged over to the window. "Why do you say that?"
His question petered out as over the Doctor"s shoulder he saw the first of the robed men combust. The surface of the man"s clothes boiled with a blue-white fire that ran in wreaths around his body. Emil clutched at the Doctor"s arm.
"Flamers! They"re going to burn us out."
The Doctor"s face was a mask of pure curiosity. "Now just how do they do that, I wonder?"
"Does it matter?" Emil shouted. "We have to stop them!"
"How are we supposed to do that if we don"t understand what they are doing? Try and think, young man."
Emil winced at the rebuke, but somehow the very unworldli-ness of being asked to speculate in the face of death cleared his mind. "When I was away from the Family," he said slowly, his fear fighting with the appeal of the Doctor"s transparent and childlike desire to know, "I studied the natural sciences in an effort to understand our natures. I would say that they are taking a naturally reactive substance from within the body, like magnesium or calcium, and exposing it to the air at their skin." He waited for the Doctor to ask about the Family. Oddly his fear had quite gone.
The Doctor shook his head. "An ingenious hypothesis but hardly sustainable. They can"t be fuelling that reaction with their own bio-ma.s.s. I"d say it was a psychokinetic channel-ling, probably utilizing energy from an extra-dimensional source. Can you smell ozone?" Emil gaped, trying to make sense of the Doctor"s words. "Psychokinesis" was a Latin 127 compound word meaning, he supposed, imparting movement by means of the mind. Such a term could well be applied to the power, although how coining a word to refer to it helped in understanding it he was not sure. The rest was meaningless. How could energy be extra-dimensional? Surely Aris-totle and the astronomer Ptolemy had settled forever that only three spatial dimensions were possible; and what did ozone have to do with anything?
The Doctor nudged him. "This shop may be something of a curiosity, but as a house it"s not sufficiently bleak to suggest it requires spontaneous combustion."
" S o ? " Emil felt he was missing part of the conversation.
"So we ought to stop them, don"t you think?"
Emil looked at the four burning pillars that were approaching the shop. "Well, if we don"t we"ll be lucky if they only burn us to a crisp."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows frantically, sending his hat rocketing up and down on his head. "And if we"re unlucky, Mr Veber?"
"Then they might wake my father."
"You must introduce me to your family. When we"re not about to be lightly grilled. First things first. Show me the Doll"s House."
Enemies approaching, hooded, horrible. Things with the heads of locusts and the numb eyes of sheep. Things that burnt like he did. Shame mingled with power in the night.
The power flowed through his veins like blood. Heat and light suffused the marrow of his bones and burst in a great shout of anger from his whitely luminous skin.
Monsieur Dominic Montfalcon awoke. The sheets of his bed were smouldering, and a layer of grey ash smoked off his plump aged body. He had burnt off the outer layer of his skin in his sleep. He hoped that was all he had burned. He breathed deeply, waiting for the familiar smell of charbroiled flesh and molten bone-marrow to congeal at the back of his throat. Nothing. Thank the Bon Dieu. It had just been a dream.
128.
He listened to the sounds of the old shop, hoping to be lulled back to the pleasanter dreams that he had been enjoying before the nightmare had come upon him. It was impossible to sleep. Something was very wrong. There were noises downstairs.
A minute later he was out of bed. He knew that there were worse ways to die than being burnt up in his sleep. There were things in the world that would swallow a fat toy-maker up and spit out teeth and gallstones. It could be the Brotherhood downstairs, and the Doll"s House lay unprotected. He had neglected to set the traps since the disappearance of Emil. It had not seemed worth it somehow. The Family was failing to breed true, and the Doll"s House seemed no help.
He remembered the eyeless things in the cribs. Oh Emil, in you all our hopes died.
He crossed the room as quietly as his arthritic legs allowed and, puffing slightly from exertion, took the Russian cavalry sword from the brackets over the mantelpiece. Even without a light he knew how to reach it quickly. Guns were useless against the things the Brotherhood had bred. He had seen a slug from a French army rifle stopped cold by the leather skin of one of their warrior drones in the sewers. He was well aware a sword was useless too, but at least he could flourish it. Perhaps kill a drone, if he was very, very lucky. Kill one for Emil. Perhaps he could do it without getting angrier.
He was spitting sparks as he approached the stairs in the dark. He had ceased to delude himself that he would have any chance without drawing on the energies that anger raised in him. He hated this, but while his power was not as great as the Brotherhood"s it was useful, and he could not deny it. He thought of the manifest injuries done to the Family by the Brotherhood, and nurtured his anger. It grew now, like the tightening of a steel band around his head, until it seemed his eyes must open wider than the full moon and turn inwards, paler than the skin of the dying children. His foot came down on a loose board. The creak in the dark was the clashing of swords against leather in the sewers. He shuddered involuntarily as his anger grew into a black thickness that threatened 129 to pour from his throat. Wait, wait, he thought. Let it grow.
He tasted his own blood in his mouth.
He looked down at the main room of the shop, consciously adjusting the wavelengths of light to which his eyes were sensitive. He had never had his son"s flexibility in the use of the power; in him it found expression more in destruction than in creation, but such minor changes were easy even for him.
A body lay on the hard stone flags of the emporium"s floor, dressed in a tattered artist"s smock, its right hand grasping the minuscule window shutter of a ma.s.sive antique-looking doll"s house, one of many which rested in an alcove to the right of the long mahogany counter. It took Dominic a moment to realize it was the Doll"s House, so carefully had he made the duplicates that surrounded the original.
Another man lay down at a tangent to the first body as if anxious not to get too close to it. He was a grubby ghost against the dark floor, and a hat lay in the dust near his dark-haired head. His lips appeared to move in a whisper.
Dominic wished for his son"s gift of hearing.
Suddenly the artist"s left arm convulsed, thrashing wildly against the air. Blood flowed from where the arm struck the raised slab on the floor of the alcove in which the Doll"s House rested. The dark-haired man grabbed the arm and held it flat against the flags. It went limp almost at once. This was a dangerous way to treat a fit, and Dominic knew enough medicine to know that, but this clearly wasn"t an ordinary convulsion. What the h.e.l.l was happening? Were they Brotherhood agents, and if so were they Montague"s men or the Grandmaster"s? He shifted his weight and looked out of the tiny window at the head of the stairs, trying to see if there were others on guard outside. The street was full of grey drifts of ash. Dominic felt sick, and remembered his waking burst of the power. Had he grown so reckless that he could reach out and kill without consciously being aware of the danger, or had something else prompted him? Both possibilities were disturbing.
130.
Emil grabbed the Doctor"s shoulder. His grip felt like iron.
His eyes were open, staring unblinkingly straight up, like the porcelain eyes of the dolls on the high wooden shelves at the back of the shop. The Doctor took a slim flashlight from his breast pocket and shone it into Emil"s eyes. The pupils did not dilate any further.
The Doctor got to his feet slowly and carefully like an invalid, brushing sawdust from his trousers. "Creak," he said, gesturing with surprised hopefulness at his knees. " I " m getting old." He sought a pulse in Emil"s wrist. The gesture was surprisingly tender. Temperature normal. Pulse normal. Skin-conductivity normal. Every visible sign of normal REM sleep. The Doctor scowled. Sleeping didn"t involve an abnormal ability to stare at the ceiling and a general appearance of being laid out by a team of trainee embalmers; at least not when humans did it.
The Doctor cleared his throat, and began to tick off points on his fingers. "We came into the shop in the dark," he said loudly, carelessly, his voice deep and Scottish, "to escape the people outside. Mr Veber here, if that is really his name, which I frankly am starting to doubt despite his resemblance to the painter, stumbled in the dim light and touched that." He gestured at the doll"s house, a clumsy mansion-house affair in miniature, all stucco and crenellations. "And whoosh, the unfortunate men who chased us in here are doing their best human torch impressions!"
Sighing, he turned to greet the fat man. The man whose light step on a creaking board, minutes since, had signalled that he and the paralysed Emil were being watched.
131.
Chapter 11.
Dominic watched the man with the ridiculous hat from the landing halfway down the staircase where he was concealed.
He had heard only half of what the little man had said to himself and most of that he had not understood. But it was clear that some of it at least had been intended for his ears.
The man must have heard his mis-step and wanted him to think that they had just blundered into this shop, of all shops; just stumbled into touching the Doll"s House, of all his doll"s houses. As if it was reasonable to suppose that Paris was full of people happening to enter locked shops at night.
Oh no, Dominic was not stupid enough to believe that. The unconscious man and this newcomer must be cat"s-paws, in the pay of the Brotherhood. The shop was deliberately cluttered with doll"s houses, both around the counter and in the store-rooms at the back. They must have known which one contained the power. The unconscious man must be neither of the Family nor of the Brotherhood, but a normal man brought to test the house. That was clever. They would have needed to differentiate it from the decoys. He had left the real house in plain sight, on the a.s.sumption that the Brotherhood might believe that it was a replica and so that at least he could be sure it was not missing during shop hours. That had been a miscalculation.
He started to move down the staircase. The anger he had summoned up to force himself to battle tasted like metal in his mouth. It was at the point of spontaneous release. He must not lose it because the intruder was only a little man in a 132 stupid hat. Evil could dwell in a harmless-looking body, as well as in an ill-favoured one.
The man stared up the staircase, unafraid. "Well, come down if you"re coming," he said. "Some of us have better things to do than convincing irate shopkeepers of our bona fides."
Darkness. A rolling motion like a ship. Roz realized she was slung over a shoulder. The hot stink of fur and blood told her who was carrying her. It had to be David Clayton. Her light-headedness told her at least some of the blood was hers.
She fought against shock. The sudden flare of a match striking against a white ma.s.s on the wall startled her. Chalk, she thought, and then she realized that chalk was too soft to strike a match against, and that the wall was cut into shallow alcoves.
A rat spilled out, pained by the light, its eyes albinotic and useless. The finger-bones it had been gnawing clattered to the floor. In the other alcoves, figures moved. Row upon row of ghouls, moving among the skeletons of the dead. Meat-people, in the bone-people"s embraces.
The old man she had seen in the chapel capered into the light, standing upon a promontory of bone. He looked younger, stronger, less rational.
"Well, my children. My moppets, my precious, precious, lambkins. What should we do with this b.i.t.c.h who s.n.a.t.c.hed away Daddy"s morsel?" He ran his hand along Roz"s neck.
His hand felt as ancient and solid as a wooden block.
Roz twisted out of his grasp. "What is this place?" she demanded.
"She doesn"t know." "She doesn"t know." The whisper echoed among the bones, picked up by a hundred distorted voices. Voices of clicks and stutters; voices of sibilants and gutturals; voices of angels and voices of machines.
"Ah." The ancient man affected to drop a tear. "The voice of the people is the voice of G.o.d. Hush, my moppets," he added genially. "I will tell her. These are the bone-yards under Montrouge. The vast and plentiful fields under the Red Hill 133 of Paris. Here bodies rot in the dark, and here are the piled enamel houses of over a hundred years. Years of plague and famine and war, years of plenty and of peace, all have led here, to the ossuaries and the sepulchral vaults. Here, I made my dominion. Welcome, my dear. Welcome to the vats."
And the things cried his name like a litany: "Montague, Montague, Montague."
The doors and windows of the doll"s houses slammed throughout the shop, as if a million argumentative mice sought the last word in a million domestic arguments.
Dominic"s fury burst into a maelstrom of light and sound.
The after-images of a thousand electrical discharges hung like blue-white veils in the air. Sc.r.a.ps and tufts of debris, the stuffing of raggety dolls and the shavings from wood-carvings turned and turned in the blue strobe-light. The heads of a thousand china dolls revolved with a sound like matter being tortured. The cool of the shop became bitter and hot with ozone, and the Doctor"s hair stood on end like a dark halo.
"Yes, but it"s not new, is it?" he shouted, backing towards an empty alcove as sparks of static danced around his shoes, approaching flash potential. "A little poltergeist activity, a bit of telekinesis, a touch of biochemical paranoia. Have you ever considered a career in the theatre, Monsieur Montfalcon?"
A bolt of blue-white fire sizzled past his ears, and blew a harlequin doll into a shower of black and white confetti.
"Or politics?" the Doctor shouted.
Tucked away in a dark alcove of the shop, a box of penknives flexed open its cardboard heart. Each knife shuddered and clicked open its longest blade. Dominic was on the ground floor now, his power touching and inhabiting almost everything. He strode towards the stranger. Although he could barely see the man through the red mist that hung before his eyes, he didn"t need to see. He felt with the material of the shop itself. He was it, and it was him. He was the dolls, and 134 he was the knives. And he wanted to cut and stab, and cut and stab. The knives, hovering for an instant, prepared to dart into the intruder"s unprotected back.
The night was calm and crisp, and from the trees along the banks of the Seine, the scent of non-genetically engineered greenery pressed itself in upon Chris Cwej like the dawn of the world.
Chris eyed Jarre"s back nervously as the grey-coated detective strode along the waterfront. He had been ill-prepared for the accusation that Jarre had thrown in his face, but dishonesty being, as he had once heard the Doctor put it, the second-best policy, he had set his blandest expression and lied like a criminal under a psychoprobe. That is to say, if his internal feelings were any guide, he had lied embarra.s.singly badly with the feeling that the top of his head was swelling up and blinking on and off like a traffic indicator.
He had feared that Inspector Jarre, being without the skull-piercing, memory-decanting tools of the thirtieth-century investigator, would have to have some compensating instinct. Some near-mystic rite of primitive detection that would have seen through the lies at once. An irrational image of the detective as a tribal shaman had spun into his mind.
Ordinarily it was easy to forget, when travelling with the Doctor, that the past had depth like an ocean. A thousand years before Jarre, men had consulted entrails to find out murderers, a thousand years later they had peeled minds like grapes. Where in the evolution of the policeman was Jarre?
How mad was it to feel that he might spot a lie like a sniffer-out of witches, or a cackling soothsayer?
When Jarre had lowered his eyes, hooded under his beetling brows and heavy eyelids, and help out his broad bony hand for Chris to shake, a great feeling of surprise that he had got away with it had swept over Cwej, threatening to make him giddy with excitement. Excitement, and underneath it a twinge of guilt. He was lying after all, and even in the best of causes he could feel his father"s cool disapproval, back in the past that was the future.
135.
He noticed, sheepishly, that Jarre had stopped and was looking at him sideways from a doorway. "That is it."
Chris looked through the iron grating in the dark wood door. "The Cafe Fantomas," he breathed softly. The lurid magazines he had perused in the TARDIS library in his hurried research had sketched the smoke-etched lines of this building into his imagination.
Jarre nodded. "The worst dive and parlour of vice on the quai St-Bernard. The house where Vidocq organized his cut-throats and made himself a thorn in the fleshy side of the Gendarmerie."
"I thought Vidocq was a detective?"
"He was, the greatest detective. First, though, he was the greatest thief. He was a ruffian, a coiner, a card-sharper, a murderer by repute if not in fact. The Prefecture of Police at the time recruited him as an agent provocateur, agent provocateur, and the eventual founder of the Surete Generale, in this very h.e.l.l-hole. We aren"t supposed to put this part in our moral homilies." and the eventual founder of the Surete Generale, in this very h.e.l.l-hole. We aren"t supposed to put this part in our moral homilies."