2

There was a blue police box almost directly opposite the statue of Henry Irving at the back of the National Portrait Gallery. None of the tourists gave it a second glance, though a few of the local traders were a little bemused by its sudden appearance. It had recently been announced that London’s police boxes would soon be phased out and demolished.

Jamie McCrimmon slowed as he rounded the corner of the gallery and then stopped. There were tourists everywhere; some were even taking photographs using the blue box as a background. A family of what could only be American tourists in florid shirts, matching shorts and sandals was standing right up against the door.

‘Ah, there you are!’

Jamie whirled round.

The Doctor was standing behind him, looking his usual rumpled and dishevelled self. Polly, one of the Doctor’s companions who had known him before he’d changed, once described him as looking like an unmade bed. Jamie thought it was a good description. The Doctor’s mop of thick black hair was uncombed, his collar was rumpled and a bow tie sat slightly cock-eyed round his neck. He was wearing a black frock coat that had gone out of fashion decades ago over black-and-white checked trousers, which managed to be both too large and just a little too short. It was impossible to put an age on him: he looked to be in his mid-forties, but the Scotsman knew that the Doctor was at least five hundred years old. Jamie still hadn’t decided if he was a genius or a madman. Or both.

The Doctor was licking an ice-cream cone. ‘What kept you?’

‘There was a wee spot of bother …’ Jamie began.

‘Did you get everything on my list?’

‘Nothing,’ Jamie said ruefully. ‘I went to all the chemists I could find – none of them had even heard of the stuff on your list, except the gold and mercury.’

The Doctor bit off the top of the cone. ‘Then we have a problem,’ he said, frowning, deep lines etching into his face. ‘A serious problem.’

Jamie nodded towards the police box. ‘I know. How are we going to get inside?’

The Doctor silently handed Jamie the half-eaten cone. He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a slender wooden recorder decorated in swirls of blue. ‘When I say run, run!’ he said. ‘Oh, and you might want to stick your fingers in your ears,’ he added, raising the recorder to his lips.

Even with his fingers jammed in his ears – and with cold ice cream dripping down the side of his neck from the cone clutched in one hand – Jamie could still hear the sound vibrating through the air. Pressure built up in his ears and all the nerves in his teeth protested. Birds nestling in the trees and pecking on the ground erupted into the air in an explosion of flapping wings.

‘Run!’ the Doctor instructed. He darted forward, head tilted towards the sky, finger pointing upwards. ‘What is that?’ he shouted. ‘There … just there.’

Everyone looked up, following the wheeling, darting birds.

The Doctor brushed past the staring tourists, stepped up to the police box and quickly unlocked it. He opened the door just wide enough to slip through and pushed it closed promptly after Jamie squeezed inside.

‘We don’t want anyone peeping in now, do we?’ The Doctor grinned and clapped his hands in delight. ‘See? Simplicity itself! There are very few things that a good diversion won’t solve.’

No matter how many times he travelled in the extraordinary machine, Jamie knew he would never get used to the idea that the Doctor’s ship – the TARDIS – was bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside. He had no idea how many rooms, galleries, museums and libraries were housed in the extraordinary craft. There was even supposed to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool somewhere in the basement, but he’d never managed to find it. Jamie stopped, suddenly conscious that the beautiful and ornate central console, which was at the heart of the machine, had been dismantled and lay strewn in pieces around the hexagonal room. The floor was scattered with coils of wire, glass panels and hundreds of oddly shaped cogs and wheels.

The Doctor tiptoed his way through the mess. ‘Touch nothing,’ he warned. ‘I know exactly where everything is.’ His foot struck a squat metal cylinder, sending it spinning into a little pyramid of ball bearings, which scattered in every direction, ricocheting around the room. ‘Well, almost everything.’

‘You can fix it, can’t you?’ Jamie said carefully. When he’d left a few hours earlier, the Doctor had been lying flat on his back, head buried under the central console, whistling softly to himself.

The Doctor stood in the centre of the mess and spread his arms wide. ‘Not this time. I’m afraid we’re stuck,’ he said ruefully. ‘The Time Rotor is damaged; I daren’t take us back into the time stream with it in its present condition.’

Jamie stepped over a coil of cable, which writhed on the floor trying to follow him. The Doctor had once told him that these ships were not made but grown, and were actually sentient in their own way. ‘Stuck. Now, when you say stuck …?’

‘As in stuck. Unable to move. Trapped.’ The Doctor’s humour changed in an instant. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t find anything on my list?’ he asked irritably.

‘Nothing,’ Jamie said. He carefully skirted round a wire honeycomb filled with tiny winking stones.

‘Can’t we buy the gold?’ enquired the Doctor absent-mindedly.

Jamie pulled the handwritten list out of his sleeve and unfolded it. ‘A ton of gold,’ he read. ‘Doctor, unless we rob the Bank of England, we’re never going to find a ton of gold. And, even if we bought it legally, it would cost a fortune. I checked this morning’s Financial Times. Gold is priced at around thirty-seven American dollars an ounce. I don’t know how many ounces there are in a ton …’

‘Thirty-two thousand,’ the Doctor said immediately.

Jamie tried to do the maths in his head and failed.

‘One million, one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars,’ the Doctor said in exasperation. ‘Didn’t you learn anything in school?’

‘I never went to school.’

‘Oh.’ The Doctor suddenly looked embarrassed. ‘No, of course you didn’t. Silly me.’ He waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the roof. ‘Money is not a problem. There’s plenty upstairs in one of the bedrooms. And there’s lots of jewellery we can sell. I’ve still got the pieces Tutankhamen gave me. I’ll never wear them.’ He nudged a spring with his foot. It bounced a metre into the air, pinged off a wall and danced around the room. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ He patted the gutted remains of the central console, then turned, leaned against it and slowly sank to the floor, legs stretched in front of him. ‘There’s only so much I can do for the old girl. I can put the bits back together, but if she’s going to heal, she needs the equivalent of a blood transfusion: gold, mercury and Zeiton-7.’

‘No one has even heard of Zeiton-7,’ Jamie said, scanning the list again. He sat on the floor alongside the Doctor. ‘Can’t you …’ He paused. ‘I don’t know … do something?’

‘I’m a doctor, not a magician.’ The Doctor looked around the control room and slowly shook his head. ‘We’re trapped in London, Jamie. We’ll be forever stuck in this place and time,’ he added softly. ‘And there was so much I wanted to see and do, so much I wanted to show you.’

They sat in silence for a long time. Jamie shifted on the hard, uncomfortable floor and something dug into his side. He reached into his belt and his fingers touched the soft silk wrapping round the strange little book.

‘I’ve got a present for you,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘Maybe it’ll cheer you up.’

The Doctor looked up. ‘I quite like presents.’ He frowned. ‘You know, no one has given me a present for a very long time. Well, not since my three-hundredth birthday, or was it my four-hundredth? What is it?’ he asked.

‘Well, I was given this as a reward for something I did this morning. It’s a book and I know you like books. I was told it was very old.’

‘A bit like me,’ the Doctor said, smiling. ‘Aged, like a fine wine …’

‘Or a mouldy cheese,’ Jamie murmured with a grin. ‘Here, I’d like you to have it.’ He slid the book out of the silk wrapping and handed it over. The leather felt slightly greasy and flesh-warm. The Doctor’s long fingers closed round the scuffed black cover. Almost automatically, his thumbs began to trace the raised design. ‘Interesting. What is that?’ he wondered aloud, tilting the cover to the light. ‘Looks like a type of cephalopod …’

‘A seffle-a-what?’

‘Octopus.’ Resting the book on his knees, the Doctor opened it to the title page, the thick parchment crackling as it turned. ‘I don’t quite recognise the language,’ he murmured, index finger tracing the individual letters. ‘This looks like Sumerian, but this here is certainly one of the Vedic scripts, while this is Rongorongo from Easter Island. No, no, I’m wrong. This is older – much, much older. Where did you say you got it?’ But before his companion could reply, the Doctor’s index finger, which had been following the words in the centre of the title page, stopped, and he automatically read it aloud: ‘The Necronomicon …’

With a shriek of pure terror, the Doctor flung the book away from him.

‘The Necronomicon.’

In a place abandoned by time, in the heart of an immeasurably tall black-glass pyramid, the words rang like a bell.

‘The Necronomicon.’

The sound hung in the air, trembling, vibrating off the glass to create thin ethereal music.

Three sinuous shapes wrapped in long trails of ragged shadow rose from a silver pool to twist through the rarefied air, moving to the gossamer music. Two more pairs detached from the four cardinal points of the thick darkness and joined the intricate mid-air dance. The seven curled and wound round one another, folding and bending to form arcane and ornately beautiful patterns, before they finally settled into a perfect black circle. The tower’s mirrored walls and floor made it look as if the darkness was alive with huge unblinking eyes.

‘The Necronomicon.’

‘Oh, Jamie, what have you done?’ The Doctor’s voice was shaking.

‘I don’t know … I mean, it’s just a book.’

‘Oh, this is more, much more, than a book.’

The Doctor and Jamie stared at the leather-bound volume on the floor. Caught in a tangle of wire and cogs, it was pulsating with a slow, steady rhythm.

‘It’s like a heartbeat,’ Jamie whispered. ‘Doctor, I don’t … I mean, I just …’ the young Scotsman said in confusion. He leaned forward. ‘Do you want me to throw it out?’

The Doctor raised his hand. ‘Don’t touch it!’ he snapped. ‘If you value your life and your sanity, you’ll not touch it again.’ He opened and closed his right hand into a fist. The tips of his fingers where they had touched the book were bruised and blackened.

The book’s cover suddenly strobed with dull red light and a tracery of thin lines flickered across it, briefly outlining the shape of a tentacled creature etched into the black leather. The heavy cover flew open and the thick pages lifted and flapped, blowing in an unfelt wind. It finally fell open at a page showing a black-and-grey illustration of narrow pyramids and towers. Abruptly, a series of tiny golden lights – like windows – appeared on the image. A spark leaped from the pages into the tangle of wires cradling it. A second spark – like a tiny yellow cinder – billowed up and hung in the air, before see-sawing into a spider’s web of fine silver wire on the floor. The wire immediately twisted and trembled, pulsating red and black. A fountain of sparks then erupted from the book and scattered across the floor, bouncing like tiny sizzling beads. Wires quivered and shifted with a surge of power; cogs and wheels turned and spun of their own accord.

And then the control console coughed.

It was an almost human sound, a cross between a breathy sigh and a wheeze.

‘Oh no, no, no, no, no, no …’ The Doctor scrambled to his feet and reached for the lever in the centre of the console. He pulled hard – and it came away in his hand. He looked at it blankly. ‘Oh! Well, that’s never happened before.’

The TARDIS breathed again: a rasping gasp.

The Necronomicon had now turned into a sizzling rectangle of sparks and the usually dry, slightly musty air of the TARDIS became foul with the stink of rotting fish.

‘What’s happening, Doctor?’ Jamie asked. He watched, wide-eyed, as the mess of wires, cogs, wheels and dismantled instruments was drawn back towards the central console, as if pulled by a magnetic force. He scrambled out of the way as a cable was sucked back under the desk, writhing like a snake. ‘Doctor?’ Jamie shouted.

But the Doctor was incapable of speech. The air was full of components, winging their way to the control unit. He danced out of the way as a thick tube of metal whipped towards him, plunging deep into the interior of the console. Black smoke filled the room.

‘I think we’re OK,’ the Doctor said, as the incredible movement died down. He grinned and shook his head. ‘For a moment there, I thought we were going to take off,’ he added shakily, ‘but there’s no power, there’s no way we can –’

The TARDIS lights flickered, dimmed and then blazed. And the ship wheezed again. A dry, rasping intake of breath, then a sighing exhalation. And again, faster this time. Then – a familiar, unmistakable sound. The TARDIS was taking off.

‘Impossible!’ the Doctor shouted.

‘I thought you said we were trapped?’

The Doctor waved his hands at the remaining knot of wires on the floor. ‘We are. We shouldn’t be able to go anywhere. We shouldn’t be able to move!’

The main lights dimmed and all the dials on the console lit up with a strange, sickly green glow. The faintest vibration hummed through the floor.

Jamie felt a shifting in his inner ear and then sudden pressure in his stomach. ‘We’re moving,’ he said.

‘And fast too.’ The Doctor rested his fingertips against the metal, feeling it shiver. ‘Very fast. I wonder where we’re going?’ He looked down at the book on the floor. The sparks had died away and the book had snapped shut. The black cover was leaking gossamer-grey smoke. The edges of the white paper were burned black, but the book seemed to have suffered no other damage. He made no move to touch it. ‘Where did you get the book, Jamie?’

‘I tried to tell you. I rescued an old man who was being robbed. Well, maybe he wasn’t that old. He gave me this book as a reward. I did tell him I would not be able to read it …’

‘… and so he told you to give it to someone as a present.’

Jamie nodded. ‘It was meant for you, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’

‘Have you any idea who it was?’

The Doctor shrugged. ‘When you’ve lived as long as I have, then you make the odd enemy or two.’ He nodded towards the book. ‘Though not that many who would be this powerful. However, there is one who was always fascinated by this terrible book …’ A thin thread of pain crept into the Doctor’s voice. ‘I’ve not seen him in a long time. The Necronomicon is the Book of Dead Names. It is a collection of dark and terrible lore. And it is … old.’

‘Even older than you?’ Jamie asked with a shaky laugh.

‘Older than the Earth. Even older than my homeworld. Older than most solar systems. It was written by one of the races who ruled the galaxy in the very distant past. This is the sum total of their knowledge and speaks of the Time before Time.’

‘And this race,’ Jamie said quietly, ‘I’m guessing they are not your friends?’

‘Oh, they are long dead. They exist only in the memories of a half-dozen scattered worlds, where they are still worshipped as gods. I’ve come up against their worshippers, though,’ he added softly. ‘They didn’t like me very much.’

‘Have you any idea where we’re going?’

‘None.’ The Doctor knelt and peered at the smouldering book, his nostrils flaring. ‘It stinks of old power and foul secrets.’ Then he sat back, dusting off his hands. ‘I’m reluctant to lay my hands on it again. My touch obviously activated it.’

‘I was able to handle it.’

‘But you’re just a human. Tell me,’ he said, ‘when you were given the book, was it wrapped in a cloth?’

Jamie reached into his belt and sheepishly held out the square of black silk.

The Doctor leaned forward until his nose almost touched the material. He breathed deeply and his eyes closed. ‘Ah, now there’s a familiar scent. This old man: tall, dark eyes, goatee beard touched with grey, black gloves.’

‘Yes, that’s him. And gloves, yes, he had gloves. He said his name was Professor Tas– Tascal?’

‘Thascalos,’ the Doctor whispered.

‘That’s it. Who is it?’

‘Someone I’ve not encountered in a long time. But at least we now know where this is taking us,’ the Doctor said grimly.

‘Where?’

The Doctor focused on gingerly wrapping the black silk cloth round the smoking book. ‘Why, to our doom, Jamie. To our doom.’

And the book pulsed in time with his words.