Doctor Who: Festival of Death: 50th Anniversary Edition Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Beautiful Death is the ultimate theme-park ride: a sightseeing tour of the afterlife. But something has gone wrong, and when the Fourth Doctor arrives in the aftermath of the disaster, he is congratulated for saving the population from destruction – something he hasn’t actually done yet. He has no choice but to travel back in time and discover how he became a hero.

  And then he finds out. He did it by sacrificing his life.

  An adventure featuring the Fourth Doctor as played by Tom Baker and his companions Romana and K-9

  About the Author

  Jonathan Morris is the writer of the official Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, has written a number of Doctor Who novels for BBC Books, including Touched by an Angel, and numerous audio adventures for Big Finish Productions and BBC Radio 7. He has also written for the TV sketch shows Dead Ringers and Swinging.

  The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection

  Ten Little Aliens

  Stephen Cole

  Dreams of Empire

  Justin Richards

  Last of the Gaderene

  Mark Gatiss

  Fear of the Dark

  Trevor Baxendale

  Players

  Terrance Dicks

  Remembrance of the Daleks

  Ben Aaronovitch

  EarthWorld

  Jacqueline Rayner

  Only Human

  Gareth Roberts

  Beautiful Chaos

  Gary Russell

  The Silent Stars Go By

  Dan Abnett

  To Doctor Who fans everywhere

  INTRODUCTION

  It was one of those envelopes you dread to open. It had the BBC logo on the label and I knew that the letter inside would be a response to my first Doctor Who novel submission, ‘The Beautiful Death’. I opened the envelope to find a surprisingly long letter with the Doctor Who logo at the top, followed by three pages of detailed notes that ended with the commissioning editor, Justin Richards, explaining that the reason he’d included so many detailed notes was because he wanted to commission the book.

  The memory of that moment, and the jolt of joy, has never left me. I wanted to run around the room punching the air. I probably did. I would be writing a Doctor Who story! A professional, BBC-published Doctor Who story! It was almost too good to be true!

  And then I had to actually write it, in the first four months of 2000. Boy, did I work! I must’ve worked harder on this book than I’ve done on anything since (any Doctor Who thing, at least) because I was terrified that this would be my one chance, my single shot at success.

  Which is why I packed so much into the story. Enough ideas for at least two books, if not more, and a plot that was involved to the point of being over-complicated. Bear in mind that my original synopsis had been even more complex, with Vinnie being an android hired by ERIC to assassinate himself!

  At the time I wrote it, I was working full-time for the pop group Erasure, running their Information Service (their fan club). Fortunately the band weren’t doing much at the time so I had plenty of spare time to dedicate to writing the novel. My main memory of writing it is walking home from Mute Records, my head spinning with all the time-travel-puzzles I’d have to work out that evening.

  I’d been particularly ambitious with this book, you see. Nowadays it’s not unusual for a Doctor Who story to involve lots of ‘timey-wimey’ elements, with the Doctor and his companions crossing their own time streams, meeting people in the wrong order, and even getting forewarnings of their own deaths. But at the time, back in 1999, these things hadn’t really been done before. That was this novel’s unique selling point. So when reading it, please go on your own voyage of time travel and cast your mind back to the days before The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, The Big Bang and A Christmas Carol. Because – if you will forgive a little pride – Festival of Death did it all first.

  Well, almost. I was heavily indebted to a previously published Doctor Who novel called The Sands of Time which laid much of the groundwork, which was written, coincidentally enough, by Justin Richards. I remember he advised me to make a flowchart of all the time-travel business, and I did. I had to staple together half a dozen sheets of A4 and the final product looked like a map of the London Underground.

  The hardest thing about writing it was that I was learning how to write a novel as I was going along. It turned out to be far more arduous than I’d expected. I ended up rewriting the first four chapters over and over again, just to establish a style. It’s only around Chapter Five that I developed sufficient confidence to relax and enjoy the process; that’s when it properly begins to take flight.

  Reading it now, over twelve years later, the main thing that strikes me is how awfully hard the author is working to endear himself to the reader. A little too hard, perhaps. The book is positively saturated with in-jokes, references and quotations, and full of little nods to things I liked at the time (Harken Batt being clearly inspired by Brass Eye, and the character of Executive Metcalf being inspired by David Bamber’s character in the widely lamented sitcom Chalk). It even explains why K-9’s voice changes in the next TV story! It wears its influences like a badge of pride; it’s full of unintentional echoes of the Doctor Who novels of Gareth Roberts, as well as owing a clear and obvious debt to the works of Douglas Adams.

  (The other thing I should mention, almost as a health warning, is that when you write your first book, practically everyone you know comes up to you and asks you to name a character after them. And so you do. It’s not terribly professional and I’m not terribly proud of it, but in my defence I would like to point out that every other Doctor Who writer did the same thing.)

  As I read it, I find myself looking out through the eyes of my 27-year-old self. I’m reminded how cripplingly insecure I was back then, how easily intimidated. I remember how, at the time, Doctor Who was a dead TV show, and Doctor Who fans were so thin on the ground they could only be found in the dark recesses of the internet and a squalid Fitzrovian pub. And I remember how, as a result of writing this novel, I gained some self-confidence and forged friendships with other fans, friendships that endure to this day.

  The novel turned out to be something of a smash hit. It won that year’s Doctor Who Magazine poll, albeit by the narrowest of margins. The reason why it turned out so well was because I really put my heart and soul into it. The first draft was something like 30,000 words too long, which gave me the freedom to cut anything dodgy (along with most of the adverbs and anything pretentious). And it worked. Now I’m surprised by how assured it is, and how good some of the jokes are. I’m tempted to re-use them in my next book or audio… but now that it’s been reprinted, I suspect some people might notice…

>   Jonathan Morris

  August 2012

  PROLOGUE

  For the rest of his life he would remember it as the day he died.

  Koel’s mum took a stern breath and tightened her grip on her son’s wrist. Koel twisted against her, tugging at her arm, trying to pull her attention down to him.

  The voice of the intercom soothed over the hubbub. ‘It is my pleasure to inform you that the Alpha Twelve intersystem shuttle is now boarding. All passengers for Third Birmingham should make their way to embarkation lounge seven. Felicitations.’

  ‘That’s us,’ his mum sighed. ‘Time we were gone.’

  Koel looked at his dad, willing him to notice his discomfort. His dad smiled and walked away, swinging their baggage over his shoulder. He hopped on to the escalator and rose into the air, the glass-walled tube climbing through the vaulted ceiling of the spaceport.

  Koel’s mum dragged him forward and he tripped on the metal steps, surprised by the upward rush and the ever-lengthening stairwell beneath them. Below, the crowds swirled through the terraced shops, and then the sight vanished abruptly as he and his mum emerged into the blackness of space. The exterior of the dome was grey and lifeless, crawling with skeletal antennae.

  Through the glass walls Koel watched the amber lights swimming past. Closer, he could see a young boy rising on an identical escalator beside him. The boy wore a sky-green duffle coat and stared silently back at him, tears dribbling down his cheeks.

  Koel tasted salt on his lips. He could hear the shouting through his bedroom wall. He couldn’t make out the words, but the conversation kept on growing louder until each time his mum would shush his dad, reminding him that Koel was upstairs. Koel curled himself into his duvet, trying to force himself to sleep.

  His mum entered his room and switched on the bedside lamp, and Koel pretended to blink awake. She began to speak but her voice cracked, her tears bubbling up from inside. She told him to pack his clothes, not forgetting underpants and socks. They would be going on a sort of holiday, she said. When he asked where to, she told him it was rude to ask questions, and added that they wouldn’t be able to take Benji. Koel cried into the dog’s fur for a final time and then made it chase outside after an imaginary biscuit. For a moment Benji drooled in confusion, but then noticed an interesting smell and disappeared into the night.

  An hour later, they were shutting all the doors and creeping out of the residential block. Koel had never been outside this late before and marvelled at the unearthly lightness of the sky and the silhouetted city towers. The air was chilly and wet, and Koel buried himself into his coat collar as they drove away.

  ‘It is my pleasure to inform you that this is the final boarding announcement for the Alpha Twelve intersystem shuttle to Third Birmingham. Passengers should present their passes at embarkation lounge seven. Felicitations.’

  Koel was plucked off the shifting walkway and deposited on to the grid-patterned carpet of the departure lounge. They hurried past the rows of moulded seating to join his dad in the fenced maze snaking towards the entrance of the airlock. A row of passengers shuffled ahead of them, offering their pass cards to the stewardess. In the airlock two masked security guards glowered at the procession of travellers. Their masks were bulbous, like the heads of giant insects.

  A window filled one wall of the lounge, overlooking the bulk of the intersystem shuttle. The shuttle wallowed in the blackness, constrained only by its umbilical access tube. Koel could see the passengers picking their way along the pipeline.

  Fear washed over his body. There was something malevolent about the shuttle.

  Koel’s dad reached the checkout desk and fished three pass cards from his jacket. The stewardess swished the cards through a reader and three times the reader buzzed its rejection. The stewardess frowned and punched the codes in manually.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ his dad protested. ‘Maybe the cards got damaged. They worked fine on the skybus.’

  ‘Mum…’ Koel felt the sweat on his mum’s palm.

  ‘Do you have any other identification?’ asked the stewardess.

  Koel’s dad fumbled in his pockets and presented the stewardess with some crumpled certificates. She skimmed through them. ‘That all seems to be in order, thank you. Enjoy your flight.’

  Koel’s dad hauled their bags on to his back. Koel’s mum followed him into the airlock, dragging Koel behind her, his shoes skidding across the floor.

  The fear swept over Koel again, like a black chill. He froze. Koel’s mum squatted down. ‘Now what is it?’

  ‘I don’t wanna go.’

  ‘Well, we can’t always do what we want, can we?’

  ‘Won’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Won’t”?’ growled his dad. They were attracting disapproving looks from their fellow passengers. His dad moved to one side to allow the remaining travellers to troop past.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Koel’s mum. The two security guards had noticed the disturbance and turned their insect faces towards them.

  ‘There’s something bad. I can feel it,’ said Koel. ‘Please –’

  ‘Move along,’ rasped an electronic voice. ‘We’re sealing the tube.’

  ‘I’ll meet you in the ship.’ Koel’s dad turned and followed the last of the passengers down the access tube.

  ‘Koel, you’re coming with us and that’s the end of it.’ Koel’s mum tugged at his arm so hard he thought it would snap.

  The two guards clicked their rifles back into their belts and retreated into the lounge. One of them punched a sequence of triangles on the wall. There was a hydraulic hissing and the airlock door began to shut. A red warning beacon flashed on.

  ‘No!’ Koel slid out of his mum’s handhold and ducked through the closing door. He pelted into the departure lounge, past the insect guards, past the stewardess. He heard his mum call out to him, but she seemed removed, unreal. Then her voice was silenced as the airlock clanged shut.

  Koel raced as far as his breath would carry him and collapsed into a chair, sobbing.

  ‘It is my pleasure to inform you that the Alpha Twelve intersystem shuttle to Third Birmingham is now closed. Felicitations.’

  His mum and dad would be angry, Koel knew. But he had no choice; the thought of the shuttle made him numb with terror.

  Wiping his nose on his sleeve, Koel got to his feet and walked back to the observation window. Looking up, he could see the ghostly reflection wearing the sky-green duffle coat floating in the vacuum outside.

  One of the guards approached him, removing his mask. The man had bushy eyebrows, and a round, weathered face. ‘And what do you think –’

  Koel screwed his eyes shut.

  There was a wrenching sound. The screech of metal buckling, the rattle of bolts tearing. Koel felt the reverberation rising through the floor. Somehow he knew what was going to happen next.

  The access tube snapped.

  It telescoped away, looping through the blackness. The orange lamps flickered and died, the framework shattering into a thousand whirling metal fragments.

  The stewardess screamed. An alarm sounded and a warning light soaked the room with its bloody glow.

  Then came the passengers. They spilled out of the access tube and floated towards the observation window. Their bodies were twisted like broken dolls, their faces frozen in shock. They bounced noiselessly against the glass.

  Koel’s mum’s face was a livid mass of exploded blood vessels, a spray of red bubbles escaping her open mouth. His dad still had a luggage bag in one hand.

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN IMPOSSIBLE MACHINE whisked randomly through the time-space vortex. It resembled a police box, a squat blue booth that might normally contain a twentieth-century English policeman nursing a mug of tea, but was in fact the TARDIS, a craft of unimaginable sophistication belonging to an equally impossible Time Lord known only as the Doctor.

  Vastly bigger on the inside than the outside, the TARDIS containe
d a white, roundelled control room, where the central column of the six-sided console was rising and dipping contentedly. Beside it, the Doctor lay sprawled across a chair. A small battered book on his lap was also rising and dipping contentedly, in time to his deep, mellow snores.

  Romana, the Doctor’s Time Lady companion, strode into the console room, followed by K-9, their small, dog-shaped computer. She observed the Doctor, unimpressed, and crouched down to speak into his ear.

  ‘Revision going well, Doctor?’

  ‘What?’ The Doctor woke with a start. Realising where he was, he adjusted his multicoloured scarf. ‘Yes. Very well. Absolutely well indeed.’

  Romana retrieved the book, brushed back her long blonde hair and thumbed through the pages. ‘All right then. Describe the procedure for realigning the synchronic multiloop stabiliser.’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted the Doctor, slumping back into his chair. ‘Easy.’

  He fell silent. Romana tapped her heels.

  ‘Realigning the synchronic multiloop stabiliser?’ considered the Doctor. ‘First you adjust the proximity feedback converter, recalibrate the triple vector zigzag oscillator, take away the number you first thought of, and there you are. Stabiliser realigned.’

  Romana sighed. ‘Wrong.’

  ‘What?’ The Doctor bounded over to her. ‘Wrong? How could I be wrong?’

  ‘To realign the synchronic multiloop stabiliser, simply activate the analogue osmosis dampener.’ Romana held the book open for him. He clutched the book and boggled at it.

  ‘Activate the analogue osmosis dampener. I didn’t even know there was an analogue osmosis dampener. All these years and no one’s ever told me about the analogue osmosis dampener.’ The Doctor flicked through The Continuum Code and then returned it, unread, to Romana. ‘I knew there was a good reason it wasn’t working properly.’

  ‘Doctor, you’re never going to pass if you don’t make an effort,’ chided Romana. She knelt down beside K-9 and rubbed his ear sensors. ‘Isn’t that right, K-9?’