Falls the Shadow by Daniel O'Mahony Read Free Book Online Page A

bulb.
    The room was unfurnished. Almost.
    It was large, grey and ugly. It squatted in the corner of the room daring anyone to come near it. It was, simply, a wardrobe. It brushed the ceiling. It was almost as wide as it was high, its bulk magnified by the metal out of which it had been built. The doors were wooden, but these were only panels slotted into heavy metal frames. The box sat against the wall and brooded.
Wardrobe
was too weak a term for the sombre artifact. It was a sarcophagus.
    It had captured the Doctor’s interest.
    ‘Ace,’ he called eagerly, ‘what do you make of this?’
    It was impressive, but Ace was unmoved by the Doctor’s enthusiasm.
    ‘Look at it,’ he said, the excitement in his voice suddenly replaced with a deep and resonant note of authority. Ace looked.
    ‘What for?’ she asked.
    ‘Watch,’ the Doctor commanded, seizing the handle on one of the doors. It came ajar gently after a slow tug, and as it opened it gained a halo.
    The light grew suddenly. It blazed from the newly formed crack between the doors, suffusing the gap, streaming into the room. It was sterile and powerful – Ace raised an arm to protect her face from the glare – but not artificial. It was a natural light, like a snatched glimpse of a sun at its zenith.
    The Doctor slammed the door, hiding the light. Ace blinked frantically; her eyes felt as if they were on fire, and a staple‐
shaped image lingered on her retina for more than a minute. She kept blinking, grateful for the coolness of the air.
    The Doctor was talking.
    ‘It’s light,’ he was saying. ‘Intense light. First in the TARDIS. Now… Well, that couldn’t have been artificial, there’s no connection.’
    ‘And what does that tell us?’ Ace challenged him.
    ‘Nothing. I have suspicions.’ The Doctor mused momentarily before adding, ‘No proof.’ He shrugged wearily and shook his head.
    Ace moved to the sarcophagus, slowly reaching out to touch the door. The Doctor intercepted her quickly, seizing her by the wrist and shooting her a sharp glance.
    ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Leave it.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I want to know what it is before I go charging in,’ he told her. ‘And I want to find Benny first. We need to stick together.’
----
    ‘Dear diary, I’m not writing this down – if I could I’d be Mr Tickle – so I’m going to have to memorize this, or paint it on the walls.’
    Soon after she had left the Doctor and Ace, Bernice found her surroundings changing. The brickwork and plaster of earlier sections gave way to walls lined with wooden panels. The barely concealed wiring of the lights system disappeared into the ceiling. The dry dust taste at the start of the passage was replaced by the fragrance of old varnish blending with wood, echoes of a natural, forest freshness. Only the atmosphere was unchanged, as trapped and oppressive as before.
    ‘I’ve been going for almost ten minutes now,’ Bernice told herself with a soft whisper, ‘and, tell the truth, Bernice Summerfield is lost. Not
lost
lost,’ she corrected herself, ‘just disorientated. This house is like a maze without any options. No turn‐
offs, no junctions, no forked passages, no doors. A very easy maze in fact. All I have to do is turn round and keep walking. But you wouldn’t believe the number of twists and turns there’ll be on the way back. The architecture’s too complex for its own good. This is
not
the work of a sane man, trust me.
    ‘I’m turning back now, the Doctor and Ace are bound to have found something more substantial than corridors. Something more substantial will have found them.
He’ll
be surrounded by a death‐
squad led by a fascist whose pet hate is confident, charismatic fast‐
talkers.
She’ll
be locked in a dungeon about to be married off to and‐
stroke‐
or ritually sacrificed by a drug‐
crazed alien mastermind who doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for…’
    She closed her mental diary and turned, shining her