Causal Affect

by Nic Ford

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. In fact, it was all of the times – the Tardis was on the fritz again.

The battered, wooden time machine slammed itself across the vortex from the red to the blue and back, careering from one end of forever to the other and stopping at all stations in between. Or rather, refusing to stop at any, no matter how hard its inhabitants (one in particular) tried to regain control, or (the other in particular) swore at the first for his inability to do so. To be honest, it was as much as either could do just hold on as best they could.

“Where are we?!” Melissa shouted over the anguished groaning of the time engines, giant, temporal finger nails dragged down a blackboard stretched across eternity. The console room suddenly tilted violently the other way, and the couch that she was desperately trying to remain on top of, rather than under, slid back across the floor, crashing into the roundelled wall on the other side. “Ouch! WHEN are we, for that matter?!”

“I have no idea,” the Doctor shouted back, “and I have no idea. In that order.” He stood at the console, legs spread to brace himself against the vicious shuddering of the vessel, one hand gripping a lever in an effort to hold himself in position. What the lever did, he was unsure: he’d been meaning to find out for decades, but had never quite got around to it. Oh well, an absent part of his mind commented: there’s a good chance we’ll find out soon as you lose your grip.

With his other hand he frantically stabbed at buttons and dials, urgently but determinedly attempting to get the Type 40 to do something he wanted. Anything. Anything at all, in fact, other than what it actually was doing.

“I think I’ve got it,” he shouted to Melissa. “If I just…”

“You haven’t got it,” she shouted back, as the couch suddenly reversed itself and slammed into the first set of roundels again.

“Of course I have! I just need to…”

Suddenly, there was a brief lull in the chaos. The Doctor, audibly, exhaled… and gingerly pressed another button.

The chaos started again.

“You didn’t have it, did you?” Melissa shrieked.

“Um, opinion is divided.”

“Whose… ow! …opinion?” Melissa and her upholstered mount were again thrown against a wall.

“Mine, and the Tardis’s, it would seem,” the Time Lord replied. “I am definitely of the opinion that I am in charge. She, however… seems to disagree.”

“‘She’? It’s a bloody machine!”

“Yes, well, I’ll let you tell her that. Do we not have more important things to focus on, Ms Malone?”

Inasmuch as a centaur part woman, part sofa could glower, this one glowered.

And then, all of an instant, it was calm.

 

A blue door attached to a blue box that had no right to be slightly listing to one side on a tepid, bright beach, gently creaked open. Two heads that had no right to be inside, timidly peaked out.

“Where are we, Doctor?” Melissa asked.

“I refer you to my previous answer,” the Doctor replied.

“Seriously?! Skaro. Mars. An alternate universe in which Brexit is not divisive and Marmite is a downright force for unity. You must have some idea!”

“Oh. Well, all right then, if you insist.” The Doctor sniffed the air, and experimentally fluttered his tongue in and out for a bit, his inner gecko momentarily asserting itself. “We’re close to Bamburgh, Northumberland. August. Probably the 27^th. Three in the afternoon, or thereabouts; but no later than quarter past. And it’s 2019.”

He opened the door fully and exited the time machine, fingers assuredly gripping the lapels of his frock coat. “Or possibly 1954,” he continued. “The ratio of misogyny to racism is confusingly similar. Oh, and I’m not sure which end of the beach we’re on.”

He looked up, expecting, and secretly looking forward to, a barrage of annoyed questioning from his companion regarding his ability to know anything like all that from a simple bit of tongue extrusion, and why didn’t he use the machine that went ‘bing’ that he undoubtedly had stowed in a pocket somewhere and ported around just on the off chance exactly this situation should crop up, to tell them what was going on? But the barrage was not forthcoming.

To the Doctor’s mild disappointment, Melissa had emerged from the Tardis and chosen to stare not at him, but rather the infernal ocean. Obviously smitten with the sight of the sea, she had wandered a bit away down the beach, and was looking out over the waves. She seemed… happy!

“It doesn’t matter,” she called back, grinning for what felt to her like the first time in an eternity. “Not one bit. Cos wherever we are, we’re here. No more rocketing around the vortex, no more being thrown against walls till I have the shape of a roundel embedded in my forehead, no more that bloody couch using me as an air bag.” She drew a deep breath of sea air, and exhaled with satisfaction. “We’re back on Earth. England. Possibly my own time. And you know what, Time Lord? I’m ’avin a ninety-nine!”

She swept around 180 degrees, still grinning, to look inland at the perfect English seaside village in front of her – and realised two things almost simultaneously. Firstly, that there was something timeless about a seaside town: a chip shop, an ice cream van, a harbour filled with little fishing boats, a shop or two selling neon shrimping nets and necklaces made from shells.

And secondly, that probably none of those should be burning.

“Yes. I see you’ve spotted my reticence to commit to ice cream at this early stage,” said the Doctor.

“Okay, forget the ninety-nine,” Melissa sighed resignedly.

 

The streets of the village, leading up a mild incline from the beach and harbour past smouldering shops and houses, were strangely deserted as Melissa and the Doctor worked their way inland. On a normal day, Melissa would have expected villagers and holidaymakers, purveyors of sunglasses and kids excitedly running from knick-knack shoppes to ice cream vans, and then back again with cones and lollies akimbo.

Even on a day like this, with buildings ablaze for some reason, she would have expected some activity. A couple of fire engines, for example, with fire fighters urgently showering water on the flames in a desperate attempt to dowse them, and occasionally accepting the gift of a cooling Mr Whippy cone from a grateful ice cream lady. (I must really miss ice cream, Melissa thought to herself absently.)

But here, there was no such activity. No one at all. It was all very weird.

“Strange, isn’t it?” the Doctor said.

“Yes, absolutely,” Melissa replied. “So few people.”

“No, not that,” the Doctor retorted. “The village is on fire. They’d have run away ages ago.” He stopped, and glared at his companion. “Come on, Melissa. Be a bit more observant please. Look, flames!”

“I know! But why aren’t there…?” She stopped herself. There was really no point starting to argue when he was in this kind of mood. “Okay, Doctor. What do you mean, strange?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Okay. One, nothing’s really on fire.”

“What?! But…” Melissa turned to look at the building they were heading towards – a small Post Office and Fudge-U-Like – and examined it. To her astonishment, the Doctor was right: although there were flames licking across its bricks and paint work, the building underneath was surprisingly undamaged. And now that she thought about it, there was surprisingly little heat emanating from what looked like a conflagration. And it was, well…

“Green. The flames are green!”

“Exactly,” the Doctor replied. “Like I said, strange. I think – and this is only a theory, at this stage – that this is some kind of temporal projection.”

Melissa thought about this. “Like, a ghost of a fire? Can a fire be a ghost?”

“Sort of,” the Doctor replied. “But the green tinge suggests a premonition rather than a replay. The ghost of a fire not yet set.”

With no small trepidation, but the kind of overwhelming curiosity that, let’s face it, had got her into this whole situation in the first place all those weeks ago, Melissa gingerly waved her hand through one of the flames. Greenish tendrils licked around her fingers, leaving them tingling – but not burning. She let out a small, delighted laugh.

“And of course,” the Doctor said, “they’re entirely invisible. To the locals I mean. Can’t see them at all. You and me, time travellers, we’re sort of used to seeing this sort of thing; but anyone who actually lives here, totally inured to it.”

“Yeah, makes sense,” the woman replied, as if it actually did. “Weird! But… there are no locals. No one at all. If there’s no fire, or at least, not one they can see… why did they run away?”

“That’s the second strange thing,” the Doctor said. “It pains me to admit it, but you were right all along. There really should be more people. Ms Mallone, we have something of a mystery on our hands.”

 

It was a cave. Down on the beach, and hidden from sight by overhanging foliage on sheer cliff faces. Inaccessible unless the tide were far out, guarded by crabs and anemones and tiny fishes in rock pools formed from a black, metamorphic rock that would blast the sun’s heat back at any unsuspecting foot scrambling across. A moon-locked, sun-scorched entrance to a cool, dark, dank, secret underworld: the making of any childhood seaside holiday, and the den of pirates and kraken and serpents of the sea.

And possibly something far, far worse.

The clues that suggested this were the source of the village’s problems were few, and took all of the Doctor’s intuition and inference – or, as Melissa was wont to think of it, guesswork and randomised madeuppery – to bring together in any coherent form. Signs of a hurried evacuation here; a local paper, blowing past a not-really-on-fire chip shop door there, bearing a headline describing the “Third Disappearance from St Michael’s Beach in a Week”. And a machine that went ‘bing’, which the Doctor had apparently been porting around in one of his copious pockets just in case a situation such as this should crop up, going ‘bing’ in the direction of the shadowy opening in the craggy cliff.

“You think they’re in there?” Melissa asked dubiously. “That cave?”

“Possibly,” the Doctor replied. “Some of them, at any rate. Shall we?”

Without waiting for an answer, the Time Lord nimbly hopped forward across the pool-riddled rocks towards the cave. Melissa followed, with what she considered a good degree less agility, eventually standing beside her friend at the entrance with a scraped shin and a wetter than desirable shoe which (she feared) may have got a crab in it, for her efforts.

Despite the bright sunlight hitting the beach, the cave itself was bathed in shadows, and seemed to swallow any photons in its vicinity rather than allow them to bounce back to illuminate it. Its darkness was utterly impenetrable, no matter how hard Melissa peered in, trying to make something out in the gloom.

“Dark, isn’t it?” the Doctor said. “And… listen! Do you hear that?”

Initially Melissa was sure she could hear nothing. But, straining to focus on whatever minuscule sound might emerge, she at last discerned – just! – what the Doctor was referring to. A small non-sound, only just inside the bounds of perception. A tinkling, like a tiny water fountain.

“What is it?” she asked. “A stream, or something?”

“I don’t think so,” the Doctor replied. “I’ve heard that sound before… somewhere. Ah! It’s on the tip of my brain! If only…” He slapped the side of his head a few times, as if to dislodge the memory. “No, no good, I can’t get it. But there’s something… death. It means death, I think. Sounds like fairies dancing, but it’s the monsters again, I’m sure of it.” He fished a pair of Ray-Bans from his coat pocket, and put them on. “That’s better. Ready?”

“Doctor! It’s pitch black in there! Why on Earth are you wearing sunglasses?!”

“Something doesn’t want us to be able to see, Ms Mallone,” the Time Lord replied. “Okay, fair enough, so be it. But if I’m not going to see, well, I’m going to do it on my own terms.” He balled his hand into a fist, and thrust it high into the air. “Hear that, monsters? I’m taking back control!”

The Doctor strode forward into the gaping, lightless maw of the cave, only hitting a cliff face once.

Melissa sighed, and followed him in.

“Monsters. Always bloody monsters with you, isn’t it?” she muttered under her breath. “Once… just once… couldn’t it be the fairies?”

 

The darkness, it transpired, did not progress far past the cave’s entrance, and within moments of entering the subterranean realm, the Doctor sheepishly removed his Ray-Bans, conscious that taking back control had rendered him more helpless than he really ought to be, under the circumstances. He started to scrape at the walls of the cave, ostensibly examining the lichen growing there, but in fact simply trying to hide his annoyance at the sunglasses debacle.

The cave was, in fact, illuminated by a dull, greyish glow that faintly pulsed in time with the almost inaudible tinkling. It’s source was not immediately obvious, and it took Melissa a few moments to work out that, in fact, it seemed to be stronger towards the back of the cave, where the tear in the Earth turned downward and to the left, out of her line of vision. Bullishly, she pushed past the Doctor and his scraping, and rounded the corner to try to discern the source of the light.

She very quickly wished that she hadn’t.

 

There is nothing likely to drag a Time Lord staring at damp moss back down to Earth more than the scream of his companion. With a start, the Doctor dropped the pen knife he had been using to attack the lichen, and ran full pelt into the interior of the cavern.

Round the corner, the small, damp cave opened into a larger area – an amphitheatre of rock, twenty metres across and twice as tall – and it was here that he found Melissa. Her scream had stuttered to a sudden halt, and been replaced with something that resembled an actual growl, accompanied by a look of pure fury. She rounded on the Doctor.

“Who?!” she demanded. “Who’s done this to them? Who has done… this?!”

She gestured urgently, angrily, into the cavern, and the Doctor looked beyond her to see what she was indicating. Around the walls of the space were a number of cocoon-like structures, each of which was pulsing with a dull, leaden grey light – the source of the cave’s illumination, he assumed. The cocoons were woven from a rough, alien silk: a sticky, grey rope that cemented itself to both the other ropes around it and the stone walls of the cave behind. And each cocoon contained a weakly struggling form.

A human form.

“No!” the Doctor shouted in obvious denial of what was there in front of him. “No, no, no, no, NO!” He pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and pointed it at one of the cocoons: immediately the device’s shrill tone turned up a notch in both pitch and volume, and the Doctor’s gaze interrogated it urgently.

“I should have known!” he shouted. “Why didn’t I recognise the signs?” He turned quickly, and grabbed Melissa by the shoulder. “Mallone, I need you to run! Run back to the Tardis, go inside and lock the doors. Don’t open them, ever, not for anyone. And don’t come back!”

“Absolutely not,” the woman replied. She indicated the cocoons, and the people locked inside. “I’m not leaving them like this – and I’m not leaving you, you pillock.”

“You have to,” the Time Lord demanded. “I’m going to stay and do what I can – but that means precious little, and I don’t want you here when they come for me!”

“Who?” Melissa demanded. “When who come for you? What is this place?”

The Doctor sighed, and sack down to the dank sand of the cave’s floor. “It’s a nest. A Chronobytes’ nest. And the hatchlings are about to emerge.”

“Chronobytes? As in Necrobytes?” Melissa’s eyes widened.

“Hmm, as in Necrobytes,” the Doctor said grimly,  “but without the morals. And no, that’s not irony, they really are that much worse. I’ve been seeing echoes of them for weeks now, but they bend and eat Time, so I wasn’t sure what was going on. But they are far, far worse than Necrobyes…”

Melissa laughed slightly, more to hide her fear and repulsion than anything else. “Worse than the Necroytes? Come on!”

“I mean it,” the Doctor said ominously. “If the Necrobytes are pit-bulls, then the Chonobytes are the thugs that train them to bite. Whatever little spitefulness comes naturally to a Necrobyte, the Chronobyte will tease and nurture and corrupt it into a full blown psychosis, till everything around it is death and hate and disease. Oh, and they do it across the timelines!”

Melissa gulped. “Come on then,” she said, her voice shaky. “Let’s get to it. Let’s save these poor people, and get out of here before the Chronobytes…”

“Go back to the Tardis!” the Doctor thundered. “Go back now. Aren’t you listening, Mallone? I don’t want you here for this!”

Despite herself, Melissa started to back away. “Okay, okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want. Just… just, save them, and then come back to the Tardis too, and let’s get out of here.”

“You’re really not listening,” the Time Lord growled, staring angrily at the ground. “I said don’t open the doors, not for anyone.”

“Not… not even you?”

He snapped his head up, catching and locking her eyes with a steel glare. “Especially not me. Not anyone, and definitely not me!”

“Wh… why?”

“Because when I do what I have to do here, I won’t be the same.” His eyes softened a little; a tear formed. “I can’t… I can’t save them, you see. I can’t. The hatchlings: I said they were going to emerge. Well… what do you think they’re going to emerge from?”

Melissa gasped, horrified.

“I told you,” the Doctor continued, “the Chonobytes corrupt everything they touch. Even me. I have to do this – and I won’t ever be the same.”

The Time Lord stood. He turned his back to Melissa, facing the nearest cocoon, and slowly adjusted the sonic, it’s tone growing louder and more intense. He pointed it at the cocoon: immediately its pulsing turned a sickening red, and the body inside started to convulse, in obvious torment.

Melissa drew a deep breath, and was about to protest at the pain of the person trapped in the cocoon – but before she could utter a word, the Doctor snapped his head back to her, his eyes aflame with a greater fury than she had ever seen in the man.

“I SAID… GO!”

 

Before she was twenty metres from the cave’s mouth, panting and running from the Chronobytes lair in terror, back to the Tardis just as the Doctor had demanded, Melissa realised she had made a mistake. How could she leave him there, to face that on his own? To go through the horror of ridding the planet of Chronobytes, at the terrible cost of all those people? How could she let him bear that burden alone? She faltered, and turned… and despite her fear, and the Doctor’s insistence that she leave, she retraced her steps back into the cave.

Back in the subterranean amphitheatre, Melissa found the Doctor on his knees. He was weeping.

Around the walls of the cavern, a number of the cocoons were now smouldering heaps of ash, the silk ropes and their sick cargo, thankfully, both unrecognisable. But precious few were like that: the majority were still intact, and despite the Doctor’s efforts to focus the sonic on each, it was obvious that he was not going to manage to destroy many more.

And with a sudden, awful realisation, Melissa saw that the situation was worse. One of the remaining cocoons – and then another, and another – was beginning to split. And emerging from it, pushing the remains of the silk rope and – oh god! – its erstwhile host, this time far too recognisable, aside…

She had seen nothing like it before. A hissing, eight-foot monstrosity, multi jointed, sharded limbs bending in all the wrong directions – that nonetheless she almost couldn’t see. It wasn’t black so much as just an absence of light. But it shimmered. A sickening, obsidian skin that vibrated light rather than reflect it.

It turned its grinning, almost seeable death-mask head towards her, soon as it was out – and hissed. An exhalation of hate and spite, disease and death. And right at her.

Melissa sank to her knees, and let out a terrified gasp.

The Doctor spun round immediately. “Melissa! What are you doing here? I told you to go!”

“I… I couldn’t! I couldn’t leave you!”

His fury was palpable. “I TOLD YOU TO GO!”

He spun back to the cocoons, pointed the sonic once more. But the device was obviously failing, and he threw it to the ground in disgust, before turning back to his friend.

“I’m sorry Melissa. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want this for you.”

Four of the Chronobytes were now fully emerged, and were starting to stalk the pair in the middle of their realm. Not with any degree of stealth though: the hissing alone would wake the dead.

The Doctor didn’t look at them, not once. He only had eyes for Melissa. Not breaking eye contact once, he reached into an inner pocket of his code, and rummaged.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again. His fury was gone now, and he smiled sadly. “There’s only one thing left I can do, you see.”

From his coat he produced the machine that went ‘bing’.

“This does a number of things, Melissa,” he said. “It doesn’t just find caves, you know.”

The Doctor’s hands crept across the face of the device, pressing the buttons on its surface in a defined, sure sequence.

“It can also,” he continued, “be quite disruptive. To Chronobytes, to Time Lords…”

He sighed, and a tear fell from his eye.

The Chonobytes hissed their way closer. One threw its shard-hand out, its blade brushing only a finger’s width away from the Doctor’s ear. Melissa gasped.

“…and to Londoners, of course,” the Doctor continued, unperturbed. “I’m so sorry.”

He pressed a button, and the machine went ‘bing’.

“See you in the next life,” he said.

And the world exploded.