Trenchcoat 0: Shepherd Moons - Part 3
Friday (night) to Saturday (early morning)
Summer in the city, and we have it on good authority that at night, it’s a different world. The moon rises; elsewhere it shines full silver in the cool country air, but here, a dull faux-harvest glow seeps through the mass exhalation of traffic and climate control units, casting a baleful or indifferent glare across the teeming millions as they go both about their business and through other people’s.
It shines down on the crowds of clubgoers on College Street, who have heard about what’s going on but have stepped out into the night anyway. Under the bronze light of the moon and the streetlamps, the asphalt outside the Café Diplomatico is a darker shade of black, and everyone knows why. Suicide, the whispers say, but that’s just a word, not an explanation. They’ve all heard of the rush on Union Station and the crowds on University, and the talk on the streets is turning back to millennialism and the end of days, even though the millennium turned nearly two decades ago. These people have nothing new to say, no insights to share, and it’s dangerous out here for reasons they don’t understand; but being out here with others is better than being alone with nothing but their thoughts. The clubs seem just as loud as ever, because music doesn’t have pheromones and the pulse-pounding beat, the lifeblood of the nightlife, stops for nothing. But there’s an edge to the party tonight, a new kind of desperation and fear that wasn’t there before one of their own walked blindly into traffic last night.
To the north and the east, the moon passes behind the trees as a young man and woman, both just shy of twenty years, stroll side by side down the paths of the university campus and talk of the “theatrical experiment” they’ve just watched. Thick metal stalks stretch up to the sodium stars lighting the cobbles and grass, patchwork pieces of sunlight floating in the summer-night warmth. Out loud, the couple is discussing the political relevance of adapting Oedipus Rex for an all-female cast. To herself, the woman is thinking how good this is, how rare to find a man who will talk to her on this level, a real friend with whom she can relax her barriers and feel entirely safe. The young man is thinking of the smell of her hair as she sits beside him in class and how the lamp has burned out in the alley between this path and her dormitory; but he won’t force her, he would never do that, he’s not that kind of person, he’s just going to be… assertive. They’re getting closer to the dark place now, and my, what big eyes he has.
The moon reflects from the outside of the Stern Building on Richmond, which is where Trish’s friend Isabel works and where the offices of InterWorld are located. Isabel walks past them every day on her way to her own office, and never gives them a second thought; today, her mind was chasing its tail, Trish and her mute lover and the dying man in the underground mall clamouring for attention, and she didn’t even give InterWorld a first thought.
Which doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly vanished. The night shift workers are in, and so is something else, something even the moon can’t see — not in here. Something following a trail of thought, like an imaginary friend following the idea of breadcrumbs through a fairytale forest.
There’s a buzzing noise on Joyce Carrefour’s headset, the angry shouting of a man who can’t accept that InterWorld won’t pay to repair his computer just because he put their access card in upside-down and can’t get it out again. As it happens, he actually subscribed to an entirely different service provider, but Joyce is never going to know that, because she’s bone-tired bored of answering the same questions with the same answers, night after night after night after two days off after night after night. She taps a pencil on her desk and stares glassily at the soothing picture of the baby seal which she’s put on her cubicle to help her relax, unaware that management is planning to announce that personal decorations in the cubicles are too distracting and are therefore forbidden.
She mouths the same old platitudes about static on the line and lets her mind wander, and because there’s carpet on the floor here nobody notices that Luis in the cubicle next to her is tapping his foot in time to the beat of Joyce’s pencil against her desk. Minds wander, and something else replaces them.
Hello, my name is… Hello, my name is… Hello, my name is… Hello, my name is…
And the shift supervisor, whose name is Kevin, wakes with a sudden start, unaware until now that he’d dozed off staring at his charts and spreadsheets. He’s dreamed of swimming with sharks, and not in the normal sense of working in telemarketing. He can’t get the images of teeth out of his mind. Something has brushed past him, burning bright like a comet as it flees in terror from the things, predators, the wolves outside the campfire, the sharks circling the raft, the things that caused people to build tools so they wouldn’t have to hide in the trees any more. Things with teeth, building up their courage, and now, at last, lunging in to taste.
He’s spilled coffee on his datebook, and when he hears the screaming outside his office, he isn’t even remotely surprised.
Things just got worse.
? ? ?
Saturday (morning)
Something was wrong with the sunlight. Someone had squeezed the life from the sun, stretched it and wrung it out and left it to hang in the sky, wet and white and cold. Moonlight sunshine, joylessly banishing shadows but casting no warmth.
That was me, thought John, I did that.
Then a hundredweight of memory dropped onto every muscle in his body at once and he realised he was looking at a fluorescent light.
John groaned, closed his eyes and sank back into his crisp, white sheets. Into the embrace of freshly laundered linen in a room with a fluorescent light in the ceiling. This wasn’t his home. This wasn’t his bed — this wasn’t a home at all, not if there was any truth to the picture his brain was piecing together from the glimpses he’d caught before squeezing the world back out of his eyes. Sight and sound and other impressions, and a familiar presence close to him, one which he couldn’t deal with at this point and, God, she was going to speak to him—
“Hey, sleepy.”
A voice too warm for words, burning with kindness. An arm resting on his, fingers weaving into his own, holding him back, pinning him here. The grey was so near now after waiting for so long. So easy to sink into the thick woolly embrace of it and never come out again.
He opened his eyes.
“Trish,” he said. “Wasn’t this supposed to be the other way around?”
She smiled, a sunlight-sparkle smile — teeth glinting in the darkness, an uneasy reminder of a dark shadow in his memory, of something that had brushed by him before. “I thought we’d lost you,” she said. “Are you all right? John, what happened to you back there?”
“I…” He hesitated. Memories were bubbling up in his mind; weird, impossible images of helicopters and crowds and fireworks and a thin man with a face like a closed book and a dancing lobster wearing a top hat. Actually, he was pretty sure that last one had been a dream after all.
“I don’t know,” he concluded. “Are we back in the hospital? It looks different.”
“Sort of,” she answered. “It’s actually the sickbay at Downsview military base. The Doctor brought you here. He wanted to ask you some questions.”
Military. Brought in by the military for questioning.
After all these years, John thought, it’s happened at last. He felt a rush of panic and relief. It felt like the other shoe dropping. But Trish was here, looking at him, part of it, drawn into his world. Despair had a bitter aftertaste, like rhubarb. He would have fallen back into his bed if he’d had the strength to sit up in the first place.
“How much do you know?” he asked.
“Not a lot. I remember leaving the hospital… then it all goes cloudy.” She frowned. “The next thing I remember clearly, we were on the street, everybody was standing around, confused, people were screaming, there was a helicopter on the median strip…”
John blinked. No, that bit couldn’t have been real.
“Then you fainted,” Trish continued, “and the doctor — I don’t know his name, he just said he was a doctor — he said he wanted to bring you here. He said that something’s been controlling the crowds in the city and that it didn’t seem to affect you. Oh, and he said I could go home, which I told him was just about as likely to happen as anything else he’d said.”
John tried to smile, but gave up. “It probably wasn’t such a bad idea.”
“Oh, please.” Trish leaned forward. “Something’s really wrong in this city, John. Give me credit for knowing that much.”
“I do. Believe me.”
“Well?” She looked at him, frowning. He could see the concern and confusion brewing in her eyes. Partly cloudy. Chance of precipitation 80 per cent. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly. I don’t know.”
“Or why the military’s so interested in you?”
He stared helplessly at her, knowing she wouldn’t give up until she got answers. “Trish, you’re not part of this…”
Trish glared at him, said a word which actually managed to surprise him, and added, “and I’m starting to think Isabel’s right about you. If I’m not a part of this it’s because you won’t let me in! Dammit, John, I’m trying to help you! Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
John looked away. “You don’t know,” he muttered. “You can’t. You’ve got no idea.”
He could feel her frustration, pressing up against her desire to help, smothering it — the cold, he thought miserably, it’s closing in. That was me. I did that.
She didn’t say anything else. But she didn’t leave either.
? ? ?
“Just how long are you planning to keep him here?” Sharp demanded.
The Doctor shrugged, tapping one circuit board against another as Mark winced protectively. “That depends on how long it takes him to recover. He’s suffering from the most serious case of empathic neurosis I’ve seen since, um…” He looked up at the ceiling, moved his lips for a moment, and concluded, “last Thursday, actually, but on the other side of the galaxy and three incarnations ago.”
“Look, even setting aside the question of your inviting a civilian into UNIT headquarters…”
“She was very insistent,” the Doctor protested.
“Oh, was she? Well, that’s all right then. I mean, it’s not as if the purpose of the military is to take a stand against insistent people who want to do things that aren’t allowed.”
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “What a remarkably narrow viewpoint,” he said. “If I didn’t know better I’d assume you weren’t letting this situation get to you, but I do and you are and so we’ll say no more of it. Besides, she’s experienced two of these… incidents first-hand. If nothing else we can ask her about those.”
“So has Ace,” Mark pointed out. “Why not ask her?”
A cloud crossed the Doctor’s face. “One and a half,” he said darkly. “And she’s seen things Trish hasn’t. Real things. I think it’s best to leave her out of this for now.”
From the doorway came the sound of Ace pointedly clearing her throat. “Leave who out of what?”
“Oh, typical,” the Doctor muttered and swung around to look at her. “Any news on John yet?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Trish was still looking after him when I left. Bad news from the outside world, though.” She looked at Sharp, brow furrowed with worry. “Just came in on the wireless. There’s been another attack, at a downtown call centre. People are dead. It’s different this time, though.”
“Different?” the Doctor asked sharply. “How different?”
Ace frowned as if looking for the right words. The Doctor watched her carefully as she sat down. “It’s like when they went into their trance, some of them just… didn’t come out. Or worse. They said about a dozen people in the call centre aren’t showing any signs of mental activity at all.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “Customer service reps with no higher brain functions? How did anyone notice the diff—”
The slap of flesh on the desktop sounded like a gunshot, hitting Mark’s words in mid-air and sending them tumbling to the ground. “Not funny,” the Doctor said, very quietly, raising his hand, piercing Mark with his gaze. “Not here, not now. Not after what we’ve seen.”
Ace narrowed her eyes at the Doctor. “We?”
“The ones at the centre of the attack will be dead,” the Doctor said, “or as good as. Their bodies may still be moving but their conscious minds are gone. Devoured. They’re the lucky ones. The ones on the fringes of the attack, the ones who snapped awake before the process was complete — they’ll never recover. Fragments of their minds torn away, like strips of meat worried from a carcass by jackals. Massive psychosomatic brain damage. Aphasic. Amnesiac. Unable to control their motor functions. And the damage is irreparable.”
Mark looked away from him. “Not funny,” he muttered. “Got that. Thanks.”
The Doctor tapped his fingers against the arm of his chair. “Thought for food,” he muttered. “There are predators out there, and now they’ve tasted blood in the water.”
“You know what we’re up again, then?” Ace asked.
The Doctor nodded. “I have an idea. But no proof yet, no first-hand evidence. All we can do right now is wait for John to wake up, and see if he’s ready to talk.”
There was a knock on the door.
Trish stood in the doorway, looking in, tentatively. “Excuse me? Doctor? John’s awake. He wants to talk to you.”
The Doctor suddenly smiled widely and stood. “You see? I don’t know what you’re all so worried about.”
? ? ?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said John.
He was hunched up in his bed, sheets pulled up around his body, his eyes looking anywhere but at the Doctor. Trish reached out a hand to his brow, but he flinched, and she hesitated and then lowered her hand again.
The Doctor ignored the byplay, staring unblinkingly at John. “I think you do,” he said. “And I think you know that I think you do. You’ve no time left to hide behind. What have you been telling people all your life? Fear of open spaces? Fear of crowds? But what is it that frightens you about them?”
“I don’t know!” John snapped. “I told you! It’s just a phobia, it’s nothing I can…”
“You’re the only one who wasn’t affected by the herding instinct,” the Doctor pressed on relentlessly. “Alone in the middle of a crowd. After avoiding crowds for so long. All those minds with but a single thought, and then there’s you.”
“I don’t—”
“You know I know. You know I’ve worked it out. You know. What number am I thinking of?”
John looked up at him, eyes sunken and terrified. “Thirty-five,” he said.
The Doctor scowled. “No. But you knew that already. Don’t waste time. Something’s out there killing people, and you’re the key to it. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”
Trish looked between them, lost. “Didn’t what?”
“Read my mind,” the Doctor answered.
For a moment, just a moment, it looked as though John was going to argue again. But the Doctor fixed him with that stare, and John wilted back into his pillows.
“I can’t help it,” he whispered. “I read everyone. I can’t stop it.”
Trish’s eyes widened.
“Oh.” The Doctor’s expression softened. “How terrible for you.”
? ? ?
“So this thing’s hunting him?” asked Ace.
They were in the laboratory now. The Doctor had stormed back into Sharp’s office, tapped Mark on the shoulder and asked him to help break the laws of physics. Circuit boards and other electronic things Ace didn’t know the name of but didn’t want to call whatsits in front of everybody were scattered about, and the Doctor was wiring them together in ways which would have made Mark scratch his head if his hands hadn’t been full.
“Hunting…” the Doctor mused, reaching for the soldering iron. “Not quite the word I would have chosen. Searching? Seeking? He says he felt it in his mind, trying to make contact. He wasn’t aware it was there until it fled. Didn’t know what he had until it was gone.”
“Him and everyone else,” said Ace. “But if it was trying to make contact with him, and it was in his mind, why didn’t it just speak to him?”
“Ah, that’s the point,” Mark answered. “If the Doctor’s right, this thing’s like a telepathic animal.”
The Doctor nodded. “John didn’t sense any intelligence in the crowd at all. Just desire. Need. Basic animal instincts. He said it was like the feelings he gets from his cat. Great Rassilon’s ghost, he’s been here all night. Remind me to tell the Major to send someone out to feed his cat. Screwdriver.”
Ace picked up a screwdriver from the bench and handed it to him. “So this isn’t an invasion?”
“That depends on how you define invasion. Release any alien creature into a different biosphere and you’re going to have trouble. Intelligence is irrelevant. Remember Australia? Can the cane toads or the rabbits be considered intelligent? Or the sheep, when it overgrazes and destroys its own pasture?”
The Doctor snapped another circuit board into place. “Intelligent aliens are actually far less likely to do damage than mindless beasts. It takes intelligence to avoid being disruptive. No, we’re dealing with something different. I’ve heard of creatures like this before. There are species out there which have thrown off the shackles of physical evolution and passed on into the realm of pure thought, and then there are other creatures like ideas which have gotten loose and evolved on their own. It’s like what happens when an ideology gets out of control, or when you try to tell a story and the characters begin to do things you never expected them to. Some ideas take on a life of their own. In a very real sense.”
“The metaphor given flesh?” asked Mark.
“Well, yes, only without the flesh. Think of this as the idea of an animal. Something lost, something afraid. Something which is normally part of a herd, and is terrified to find itself alone. Like a cow, or a sheep.”
Ace blinked. “An invisible telepathic alien sheep?”
The Doctor sighed. “Like that, yes, only not so silly. This one’s wandered away from its herd and gotten stuck in the city. It must have sensed John nearby. Now that I know, I’ve taught him Gallifreyan meditation techniques to help keep himself under control, but he’s probably the most potent telempath on the planet, and he’s shut himself away from everyone else because of it.” The Doctor frowned and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He’s terribly lonely. The… sheep feels an affinity with him. It feels that he’s similar to it, and it’s reaching out to him. Trying to get back to its herd.”
“And missing.”
“The crash on Highway 413? John drives there almost every night on his way to work. Little Italy? Trish and her friends go clubbing there every week. She was there just before the event we witnessed, thinking how much she’d like John to be with her.”
“Whoo,” Mark grinned.
“It must have followed the scent of him in her thoughts, in Little Italy, in the Underground City… but now it’s getting desperate. It almost reached him when he went to the hospital, but it failed, and now it’s lashing out at random, trying to make contact again. Because it knows it’s being hunted.” The Doctor looked up. “John sensed something else in the crowd before it broke up, something dangerous. Where there are lost sheep, there are wolves.”
Ace nodded slowly. “Predators. And when the sheep calls out for help it triggers this herd instinct in the human mind, right? Ideas, you said. It must be a similar sort of idea. Similar enough to attract the wolves’ attention.”
“And now they’ve tasted blood,” said the Doctor, “or at least the idea of it. And we don’t know if it was to their liking, but we have to find that sheep and make it…”
“Invisible telepathic alien mutton,” Mark concluded.
The Doctor glared at him. “Let’s be civilised about this, shall we? We have to make it go away. We have to send it home, rather than just killing it. We have to lay a trail away from Earth and get the wolves to follow it. Because if we kill the sheep here, the wolves will stay. And if they kill the sheep themselves they’ll stay. And it will never be safe for anyone to let their mind wander again.”
He turned back to his work. “Time’s pressing. We have to find it soon. And for that we’re going to need John’s help.”
Ace frowned. “Help for what?” she asked suspiciously.
The Doctor snapped another circuit board into place.
? ? ?
Exhale, inhale. What was that mantra the Doctor had taught him? Om mane padme hum. Concentrate on not existing, and shut out the existence of others by not being there to be affected by them.
In theory.
Not that it was doing any good at all as long as she was sitting there, eyes boring into the back of his neck even when she wasn’t looking at him. The weight of her presence, her fear and shame coiled around each other, an emotional cat’s cradle stronger than anything in the room, pulling his attention away.
He took a deep breath and tried not to shudder.
“Can I help?” Trish asked quietly.
John shook his head. “I have to relax,” he said. “I don’t… it’s hard. I wish you wouldn’t.”
Wouldn’t what? she nearly asked, except she knew that he already knew she was going to ask the question now and so she caught herself before speaking it out loud because if he wanted to answer he could anyway and she didn’t really have to think about all of this right now and —
“Wouldn’t that.”
Trish sighed. “This is silly,” she said. Calm down, think happy thoughts — don’t be patronising! — just tell him — “I won’t deny it comes as a shock.” — don’t frighten him — don’t insult him — don’t think too hard about what you’re saying or you’ll get it wrong — “I mean, it’s going to take some getting used to…” — if I stay.
John rubbed his forehead, wincing. “Please, Trish. I — your thoughts. They’re just all so there, all over the place. It’s very… it’s very distracting.”
“I just want to help — but you know that, don’t you? Of course you do, you know what I’m—” Oh, this is ridiculous!
“Trish, I can’t concentrate!” he snapped. Oh, this wasn’t good. Teeth flashing in the darkness. There was a chair in front of him, good, that was good; he gripped the back of it, trying to squeeze out his frustration. “I know you want to help—”
Of course you know.
“I need you to calm down. I can’t think while you’re here. I need you to calm down or…”
He closed his eyes. Wrong thing to say. Was there a right thing? He could feel her pain from here, feel the words hit like bullets, especially the ones he hadn’t said. Squeezing the life out of her. That was me. I did that.
“Calm down or go away?” Trish asked bitterly.
John sat down. “I know you want to help,” he said. He looked at her, agonised. “I know.”
“But you don’t think I can.”
There was no answer to that.
? ? ?
