Doctor Who and Deepdark part two
Author’s note: I claim no ownership of Doctor Who or its associated elements. Lock, stock and barrel owned by the BBC. This story is presented for fun and for free. No payment is needed but your time.
Previously in Deepdark, we learned that T’K, a reptilian alien who overtook a Middle East country and was overthrown by the Doctor in his third incarnation, is being held in Deepdark a secret maximum security prison for alien superfiends. The aliens are put to the task of fighting off alien invasions. One such alien has just handed himself in, a Professor McCoy. Barrington Jacques, the governor of the prison, has him vetted and then takes him to meet T’K, who takes McCoy for a tour of the prison. But before the tour is properly underway something manifests, something with a grudge against the Doctor…
Part Two:
It was at that moment that Bendigo Apollyon manifested in the corridor in front of them. Of medium height, but of abnormal girth, he had small piggy eyes and a sensuous mouth. T’K had found him a disagreeable man, portentous and self-important.
Apollyon had been a human (real name Benjamin Appleyard) who had been chosen by an other-dimensional entity called the Arrhythmic Absence as its servitor in this reality. It had rebuilt his human form so that it could house unholy fires and work counter to the flow of time. But it had not fully understood human beings, and the thing it created was neither human or sane.
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Doctor Who and Deepdark, Part One
Author’s note: Doctor Who is not mine to do with as I wish, the whole shebang is owned by the BBC, I only present the following story for the fun of it. As mentioned last week, this was written for a competition to write a story about how the Doctor changed my life. I got wrapped up in doing the antithesis of the obvious story, the Doctor making someone’s life better. In retrospect, this may be why I don’t win many competitions. I don’t think you’re meant to deconstruct the idea, I think you’re meant to do the thing they ask.
I had at the same time fallen in love with the idea of a retirement home for super-villains. And everybody was writing stuff about Guantanamo. This idea morphed into the situation below. In the original version that I submitted to Big Finish, T’K was a lot softer. He had come to accept his situation, although there was a hint that maybe this was hiding something darker.
The original version had no continuity references either. I extracted them, but I think that fitting them back in makes the story better.
Part One:
The desert. At night T’K remembered its heat, as he lay in his cot with the artificial breeze of the air conditioning passing over his scales. He had been happy there, in the ruins of some Earthling kingdom.
Amongst the warring factions of brothers and the subjugated sisters, he had offered them protection, sold them it, in return for their worship. The Earthlings had made him a god. They didn’t realise that he was a god in hiding. (That there was a sentence of death awaiting him in his home systems. For a small theft. It was such an unjust sentence that kept him from his home. Never to hatch a brood.)
So he had built a nest amongst the Earthlings, had taken the riches they willingly gave him. Had eaten the odd child to keep up appearances. Had mercilessly slaughtered those who opposed him.
Brains, Lewis, Brains
Author’s Note: You lucky lucky people. Inspector Morse and Robbie Lewis are the creations of Colin Dexter, and not mine by any stretch of the imagination. I borrow them out of fondness and a desire to parody.
It hadn’t been the same since Morse had died. Lewis felt that a little class had fallen from the world, that it was somehow less elegant and less intellectual and less irritating and less snobbish.
He didn’t miss Morse’s high-faluting allusions and worship of the Cambridge illuminati (and he hadn’t learned that word at school in Newcastle). He didn’t miss the operatic shifts in mood, from depression to anger. He didn’t miss the obsessions with music and women. But he did miss the pints down the pub. He missed the cantankerous old bugger’s sense of humour. He missed the crosswords and the talks about things no one else ever talked about.
But to drag Morse’s corpse back, and stick a thousand volts through it, and stick it back on the beat like nothing had happened: that was a bit much. Even for a simple secular copper like Lewis, it twisted something in his guts and brain and heart all at the same time.
Doctor Hobson had finally turned up to have a look at the poor sod whose head had been smashed in with the sharp end of a hammer. Cause of death wasn’t so important as time of death.
It showed up one of the differences in Morse pre- and post-death. This Morse had no issues inspecting the corpse and still hadn’t come out of the little tent hiding the body from the schoolkids across the road.
‘Morning Robbie, is His Grumpiness here?’
‘Aye, he is, Doctor. You can go straight in.’
The little woman smiled at him in that way that made him wonder if she fancied him (he dismissed the idea immediately, she wouldn’t want a dull Geordie) and went into the tent. Half a minute later she was out again.
‘Have you moved the body?’
‘No! No, it’s right in there.’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Not any… Oh no, not again.’
Morse walked out of the tent, dabbing the side of his mouth. ‘Lewis! I think I need a beer, something stout and robust to wash my meal down.’
Mo[n/b]ster, or the Henchman’s Tale
Author’s Note: I’ve always been intrigued by what happened next. Stories tend to be more interesting to me when it’s already in progress and there’s the suggestion of an accumulated history behind the characters and the events. Say you’re the person who saved the world from an alien invasion, or who went on an adventure to the future. How do you go back to an everyday life? Can you? Or does saving the world end up casting a shadow across the rest of your life? Could anything ever match up?
This story is in that vein. It’s what happens in the aftermath. (There’s more author’s note after. You’ll see why.)
Oh yeah. I apologise for the slightly salacious content, but it seemed to fit the character. And sometimes that means writing things you don’t agree with.
He crabbed on the floor of the cottage, clawing at his throat. His lungs had stopped functioning and the gill slits in his neck were not working properly.
The girl from the village, with tears in her eyes and love in her heart, her blouse two buttons undone and a stocking pulled down, kneeled beside him, clutching his mottled grey hand and sobbing requests that he not die, that he please not die.
The monsters had done this to him, and the mobsters.
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Superman is dead, and we have killed him
Author’s note: This was written when the neo-conservatives were in power. I have a thing about the fact that about 75% of science fiction/genre work written since 2001 has had some kind of metaphor for the War on Terror in it. Whilst I agree with the majority of the ones I’ve read (which have tended to be written from a liberal perspective), it did quickly reach a point of sameyness. But somehow I ended up writing something about it myself.
I’ll never get to write a legitimate Superman story (although I think he’s due to become public domain in 2013, though just Superman, not the other elements like Krypton, Lex, etc.). I spent evenings as a youngster planning out story arcs for when I would write and draw the Superman comics. (I’d loved John Byrne’s time on the character, but didn’t think Dan Jurgens got the character.) Recently I was thinking about the possibility again after reading All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and came up with a story that starts with Superman dying and then follows him on an adventure through time and space. Big, mythic stuff. It was a story built to be visualised, but I wanted to do something with it, so here it is.
I guess it’s where all this stuff about honour and loyalty and big ideas has been coming from this week.
The lamp was powered by kryptonite batteries. That was why he felt so weak when they shone it in his face.
They had come into his home. He had been sitting on the sofa, reading Dostoevsky in the original Russian, and listening to the Metropolis Philharmonic Orchestra downtown. Dana Barrett was playing the cello. He had had the glasses on, so he had allowed them to strike him, thinking that they were after Clark Kent and that he was in no danger.
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