Walking the Labyrinth
A/N: References in the quotes are to the spiritual aspects of walking a labyrinth, in both the pattern and mythological senses.
'Your life is a sacred journey. And it is about change, growth, discovery, movement, transformation, continuously expanding your vision of what is possible, stretching your soul, learning to see clearly and deeply, listening to your intuition, taking courageous challenges at every step along the way. You are on the path... exactly where you are meant to be right now...'
– Caroline Adams, from
1: Releasing (Purgation)
A releasing, a letting go of the details of your life. This is the act of shedding thoughts and distractions. /b I
– Caroline Adams, ibid
England had her back: dim skies, busy motorway, and the scent of exhaust. Aunt Vanessa waited patiently by the car. But Tegan Jovanka had forgotten all about the flat she was supposed to be rolling down to the nearest garage. Before her lay the unknown, contained by an old British police box. The first step was the hardest. It took all her life to carry her over the threshold.
If the blue box was magical for being bigger on the inside than on the outside, it was mundane in its hospital style white sterility. The plain wooden hat stand and step ladder were welcome additions. They lent coziness to this alien interior.
Coziness didn't compensate her for the sudden closing of the doors. She ran to them but they offered no purchase for her fingers.
Tegan didn't really want to leave (she should). There was a door that led God knew where that no sensible person should want to go past (she did). The instrument panel wasn't labeled with anything she could understand. Her examination of it showed one control that looked vaguely like a communications device, so she tried it. Her voice mocked her ears, but there was no one there to laugh at her but herself.
(there was).
Did she hear laughter? She didn't (she did). Did she? Or was it only her imagination? The air was full of the hum of machinery, faint but ever present. In that quiet, Tegan's breaths were like storm gusts, her words like hail. The slow hard thumps of her heart tolled beneath her ribs… no (it did.) She did hear a bell. She followed the sound through the door (Had there been laughter? The bell tolled for her.) She opened it and looked out into white roundel pocked corridors, featureless and forbidding in their uniformity.
She wasn't afraid! (She was.) She wouldn't let herself be. But if she left the first room, that would separate her from any trace of normality. The known world would be left behind. It was a commitment, like the commitment of a plane's tires leaving the ground. Once you were in the air, you went forward: fly or fall.
Tegan Jovanka took flight.
Interlude: Meanwhile back on the Barnett Bypass
The flat tire lay abandoned in the ditch where it had rolled out from under Tegan's hand. Vanessa stared down at it. Where had Tegan gone that she hadn't taken the tire? What would Tegan be doing INSIDE the police box? They were only empty sheds. Vanessa didn't know what an old police box was doing here, but they were familiar from younger days and she was not afraid. Where else could Tegan be? She went to the door and found it open. And inside—
Inside the box was Death. Vanessa stumbled backwards, snatched up the tire and held it up. She didn't know what the Black Man wanted (she did). She knew he was Death.
A moment later, Vanessa's doll-like body and the tire lay discarded on the ground, the remnants of a life forever transformed. The architect of this transformation was laughing, as he often did. Life was a joke on other people, and murder was his punch line.
The Master's new body was full of vigor. Laughing fired bursts of pain-killing hormones into his blood. He could barely remember, before this body, what it meant to be free of pain. He was glutted with energy, he was I high /I on life. How better to enjoy himself than by tormenting the Doctor? It was so easily done, the means easily acquired. There were toys I everywhere. /I
He laughed. He laughed. He laughed.
(o what fools these mortals be!)
end chapter one