You were warned You were warned 'Shut up!' Lecha.s.seur spat. 'Mestizer is... gone. I don't know if she's dead or alive, but she's gone. The Doctor's gone too. It's over. You don't have to do anything else. You can go!'

Abraxas shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. His mask betrayed nothing, but maybe he was considering.

You don't understand she is the loose end I have to cut off You don't understand she is the loose end I have to cut off You too now, I have my orders from Mestizer You too now, I have my orders from Mestizer I am a soldier am a soldier 'Yeah, so what? You don't have to follow orders all your life. Even when they matter, you can still say no!'

Mestizer pays well and what's it to you? pays well and what's it to you? Lecha.s.seur breathed deep and said: 'I have orders too. From the Doctor.'

There was more than that, of course, but he knew now that from the moment he'd entered the cafe to meet the false Emily, the dead unsaved Emily, that he would end up here in front of Abraxas. Whatever else the Doctor might have wanted or done, at heart he needed someone who could be here when he was gone, taking care of the loose ends he couldn't.

I might be wrong, but it feels like the right thing.Abraxas laughed, a faint babyish sound from his crackling voicebox. The Doctor is a cheapskate! The Doctor is a cheapskate! he cried, and sprang forward to attack. he cried, and sprang forward to attack.

And Lecha.s.seur could see Abraxas, he could see all of Abraxas. He saw the worm of his history spreading back and contorting through the burning wreck, stretched thin back up the slope from when he'd been thrown, then twirling through the air back to the railway line and beyond. His attack seemed stifled, inching forward like a fast-cranked film through sticky unyielding time.

Lecha.s.seur had tracked the pink pyjama girl from the house this way, following the Emilyworm through s.p.a.ce and through time. It hurt his eyes. He felt the pressure build behind them, inside them, almost enough to detonate them in their sockets, but if he concentrated hard and urgently enough he could see the world unfold in four dimensions.

Abraxas came at him, a beautiful brown leather snake with infinite arms. The suit, he saw, was keeping him alive. It was riddled with pins, plugged through the layers of armour and the atrophying skin within. An orange fluid that was not blood ran in his veins and machines throbbed in his chest where the heart, the lungs, the stomach should have been. His leather skin was oily, flayed from the backs of creatures that no longer walked the Earth.

He was moving fast, though it looked languid. Lecha.s.seur pulled Emily aside before the Big Man could crash into them. Her skin whispered to him of amnesia, a layer that had built around her as insulation against a violent and incomprehensible world. It was a thin layer, it would peel off easily if they survived.

And for the first time, he thought that they might.

He pulled Abraxas out of his attack and tried to fling him onto the ground. Even with time on his side that was impossible. Abraxas' balance was too good, he was too strong, but Lecha.s.seur gouged a hole in the st.i.tches of his armour as he tried. Abraxas howled and battered him away, skidding sideways to rest on the bank.

You hurt me? You hurt me? It was almost a plea. It was almost a plea.Abraxas reached for him and missed. Lecha.s.seur saw where his fists would be, moments before they made contact. He wove a cat's cradle between them.

Abraxas wobbled but regained his footing. Lecha.s.seur was on him, pounding and tearing with all the strength he could muster. Abraxas' hands clamped round the back of his neck and for a second he couldn't breathe then the electric voice moaned and the fingers let him loose. He heard the crump of metal on metal, looked round with b.l.o.o.d.y red eyes and saw Emily beating the Big Man on the back with a metal bar she'd pulled from the car wreck. She managed another swing but Abraxas s.n.a.t.c.hed the bar out of the air and snapped it in his fist.

Her momentum lost, Emily skidded back onto the ground and lay still.

Had it been like this in the war? He couldn't remember. He'd never seen the enemy so close. Abraxas was right up against him, their limbs were tangling and he could feel air being pumped from his face by the machines inside. Death in Belgium had come invisibly by sniper fire or pianos laced with dynamite, not so brutal, not so physical. He ducked Abraxas' next two grabs, seeing them before they came.

There was a weak spot on the Big Man's midriff, where he'd torn his first hole. He made a claw of his hand and rammed it hard into the wound.

Abraxas screamed. He had three voices and they all screamed.The first was the electric voice. Lecha.s.seur's fingers found wires in the hole and as he popped them the humming galvanic pitch wobbled violently, turning into a hard high screech-tone, then grinding down into harsh static.

The second was his whole voice, flickering through the worm of his life. It wasn't so much a scream as a gasp of air with a near imperceptible squeak at its heart. The past-time segments of Abraxas were fixed but they all moaned to themselves now and forever under their breaths.

The third voice was human and came from Abraxas' gut and from a ragged hole in the flesh and bone under his tight leather mask. It was the worst thing Lecha.s.seur had ever heard and he had to step back. By the bank, Emily shook her head and coughed out phlegm and thin vomit as the sound went through her body.

Abraxas' gloves fastened on Lecha.s.seur's shoulders and pulled him close but the Big Man was dying. He sank to his knees, his ma.s.s dragging Lecha.s.seur down into a kneeling hug in the churned mud and the rain.

I was a soldier like you was a soldier like you he confessed he confessed'I know,' Lecha.s.seur told him, because he had seen it when his fingers met flesh in the hole he'd torn. He'd seen the little blond boy arrange his painted lead soldiers in ranks on the table in his bedroom, then the lead went through him at Pa.s.schendaele, shredding his body. The boy lay on a barbed-wire bed and sobbed blood, Christ-wounds. The angels, when they came, had chrome faces, they unstrung the dirty metal hooks and fitted clean replacements. The blond boy was in his dorm at school, a leader of men who saw nothing but suffering in the walls, writing poetry because he thought it could redeem him though he had nothing to say. He kissed a girl whose name he forgot, he looked at Emily through gla.s.s eyes and wondered if she was maybe the forgotten girl's daughter though all human women looked the same to him now. Mestizer looked at him with her grease-paint face then he had seized the Doctor by the head and pinned him to a mushroom-shaped pedestal in a room of light, and the Doctor looked like Mestizer, a man in an ill-fitting mask. He was Abraxas and he was the boy laughing at a dirty joke then he was in a butcher-stink uniform while all round him humans and horses were transformed into blooms of gristle and excrement and all he could think to say was

I need a doctor I need a doctor I need a doctor need a doctor I need a doctor I need a doctor 'Yeah,' Lecha.s.seur agreed. His tears were like blood on his face. Abraxas' voice broke down into gibberish and then went silent, so Lecha.s.seur eased himself out of the dead grip allowing the body to slip forward into the mud.

Emily was shaking and crying and so was he.

'I've been warned against turning bitter and cynical,' Lecha.s.seur reflected. He'd found a stone pressed into the earth, out-of-place in such soggy ground. It was smooth-flat and looked orange in the night lights. He imagined it being lodged in Abraxas' brain, shaken loose like a seed when the body died. He flipped it across the channel of water but it didn't skim.

Emily Blandish sprawled beside him on the bank with her bare pallid feet resting lightly on his knees. He'd checked them for splinters, an impossible task in the dark, and rubbed off some of the dirt. She had tiny weightless feet with toes pushed narrow together. She was probably bruised all over so was he, but he'd heal.

'Was it the Doctor?' she asked. 'Who warned you?' He made a nod.

'I think I do remember him. Not very clearly,' she admitted. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hold anything back from you, the first time we met. I couldn't have told you much.'

'It doesn't matter. I'm not looking for him any more.' He set her feet back down on the ground. 'He wanted me to find you. He wanted me to protect you, once he was gone. Though I'm not completely sure of that, he was kind of elusive.'

'I know what you mean.'

'You really do remember him?'

He couldn't tell if she was nodding or shaking her head. 'I remember someone. I someone. I don't know if it was the Doctor, the real Doctor. It could have been anyone really.' don't know if it was the Doctor, the real Doctor. It could have been anyone really.'

Lecha.s.seur couldn't think of a helpful reply but sat staring at his hands. There was blood on the open palms, blood and a sickly ooze that smelt like oil but wasn't. Abraxas' humour, it tingled his hands, dissolving in the rain. I'm melting, I'm melting. melting, I'm melting.

Emily piped: 'How does he manage it?'

'What?'

'How is it that the Doctor isn't bitter and cynical?'

'He is. I've met him.' Lecha.s.seur sighed. 'But he said it was something to do with... I don't know what you'd call it. Companionship?'

'Friendship?'

'Yeah.' He nodded.

The rain drizzled away and a heavy mist rose quickly from the damp earth and the Thames. The south bank lights were already skinned over by green fog. Emily was sweating despite the cold. Lecha.s.seur had pulled Abraxas' heavy cape from the body and draped it over her shoulders. She looked frail in its tent-size folds, as vulnerable and defiant as a day-old baby. She'd survive. She was tough.

'The Doctor's gone,' he repeated. 'I don't know where.'

'He'll be back.'

Lecha.s.seur nodded. He stepped down the bank to crouch by the body. Abraxas lay snout-down in the mud. Lecha.s.seur had considered calling the police but Emily shrank away from that. She didn't want to return to the Beardsley house and anonymous celebrity. Besides, Lecha.s.seur had lost track of the number of laws he'd broken that night, including thou shalt not kill. No, a water burial was the easiest option. The stream would carry the body down to the Thames and from there he might float all the way to the sea.

Lecha.s.seur turned to Emily and said: 'I can't do this on my own.'He could barely touch the thing he'd killed, it was still twitching with remembered mechanical life. His fingers went for the leathery mask then drew back. He couldn't bear to see the skull beneath the skin. Emily moved off the bank to help him roll Abraxas into the channel. He was surprisingly light. He dropped into the water with a dull splash, sank into the grime then bobbed up as the current delivered him to the Thames.

They stood together, watching him go. Lecha.s.seur could still see the wounds on Emily's face and his own wounds reflected back at him on her eyes. He blinked and watched her worm-segments ripple back through time to the moment when she'd stepped out into Spitalfields market. Before that she tapered into nothing, she was newborn and the Doctor had delivered her.

Their hands were held together, a joint fist of interlocking fingers.'Can you see them?' Emily asked. She was thinking of the Doctor, he could sense it through her skin. She'd cast her gaze back up the bank but when Lecha.s.seur turned to look there was no one there but the shambling old men of the sh.o.r.e. They looked down at the companions, curious spectators, their faces smudged and illegible, their costumes once gaudy but now frayed. Lecha.s.seur thought he heard faint voices caught on the wind from above, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. No, it was birdsong, the shrieks of seagulls wheeling in an alien sky. And Emily, no longer thinking about the Doctor, turned back to face the river.

Emily Blandish and Honore Lecha.s.seur didn't move from the bank but clung together until they were sure that Abraxas's body was gone. Lecha.s.seur was tired and he felt Emily's weariness in the weight resting on his arm. On the river monsters moaned in foghorn voices and their huge lumbering silhouettes slid by in the murk. Abraxas bobbed down to join them. They waited until the speck of his body was enveloped by the fog, then Lecha.s.seur and Emily walked off the bank and were swallowed up themselves, at least until the morning.

Out there in London, the future was waiting for them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Thanks are due to Simon Bucher-Jones, Emily Carter, Mags L. Halliday, Craig Hinton, Fiona Moore and Kate Orman, for agreeing to look at and comment on my draft ma.n.u.script, and to Jennifer-Lynn Siegrist, without whom this book might not have been written.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Daniel O'Mahony was born in Croydon in 1973 and grew up in Ireland and the South of England. He has an MA in Media Studies, specialising in the early history of film, and has worked in far too many bookshops. He has written two Doctor Who novels for Virgin Publishing's New and Missing Adventures ranges of the 1990s: F novels for Virgin Publishing's New and Missing Adventures ranges of the 1990s: Falls the Shadow (1994) and The Man in the Velvet Mask ( The Man in the Velvet Mask (1996). The Cabinet of Light is The Cabinet of Light is his first new his first new Doctor Who Doctor Who book since then. He lives in Hampshire. book since then. He lives in Hampshire.