City of Nightmares
Ten
Acnictexr. That was its name. Its pronunciation was as hard for him to get his head around as the place itself. Once they stole through the cellar of Crater Lake Sanatorium, past more sinister, alien languages written on the walls and a few skeletons he tried to ignore, they had come across an area which… well, for want of a better word, it vibrated. In front of his eyes, the walls seemed to shimmer and blur and warp and Donna, regaining some of the clarity of her mind, said that this meant the walls of reality were thin, those slivers of void separating the universe from the pre-universe. And so Donna had used her powers to open a doorway, a portal, through from their world to the world of the Elder Ones.
They had stepped through the blue phosphorescence of Donna's creation, a conglomeration now including Christina de Souza and James Elliott – though the boy was practically concussed – and into the world of Acnictexr, which was almost as indescribable as the colour of the knife Ten still carried with him. He wanted to dispose of that ghastly instrument while they were there on the other side of this breach in this unknown realm, get it out of human hands for good. It struck him that they didn't even have a plan of action now. They'd come into this monstrous world without knowing what they should be doing. Hopefully his go-to tactic of improvisation would prove itself as apt as usual…
It was a horrible place, unlike anything the Doctor had ever laid his eyes upon before, but it was simultaneously a fantastic and ultimate piece of evidence proving to him the existence of this 'before the universe' land allegedly home to the Beast of Krop-Tor, the one with such powers of physical manipulation it had kept a whole planetoid from collapsing into a black hole at the edge of time. The alleged Vh'ozuth. The sky and the ground were all tinged in varying shades of the perplexing and non-existent colour, which didn't hurt his eyes as much now he was rendered permanently ill-at-ease simply by the shape of the land and architecture in Acnictexr.
Walking through it was like walking through a surrealist painting, a dreamscape conjured corporeally by Dali's psyche, a horribly tangible recreation of Tanguy. These sorts of things were not supposed to exist; it was devastating and impossible and mind-bending to see heavy things balanced on objects the width of needles; things curved and bulging and floating beneath a rippling orb in the sky that could be a moon or a sun or something more sinister. The very air seemed to glow and all of the buildings looked like ancient ruins. In the sky, far overheard, were swarms of those same distant and mutant things like the one Christina had shot and killed in the sanatorium. Even the puddles of liquid around them looked too dark to be water, but reflected the world back both crisply and with horrid distortions.
"What's the plan, then?" Christina asked him. Her voice sounded like it was coming from miles away, and the gravity was pulling him sickeningly to one side and then back again, like they were rocking on a ship in a perpetual storm. His head swam. He was struggling to thing properly in that hell. "Destroy this place?" Ten didn't know.
"I'm not sure this city is all that safe," Esther said, "I doubt that any of these buildings are structurally sound."
"Aren't we just meant to be closing the doorway? Like, the one we came through?" Sally Sparrow asked.
"It's not that easy," Donna began, "There's a connection that needs to be broken. Something's powering the rifts, something here, and they link to the meteor. The power source needs to be destroyed so that they can't access our world anymore."
"Wouldn't something like that be guarded?" Christina asked.
"If you think of it in terms of the multiverse, maybe not," Donna said, "Who's to say that all the parallel worlds weren't equally created by this pre-verse we're in? Maybe this is the hub for every single universe in existence, right in the middle? They wouldn't care about losing connection to one, not one where they banished one of their own to." Ten was taken greatly by surprise by that. In fact, all of them were.
"Speaking of 'losing connections', you're not going to disassociate from your brain too much, are you?" he asked her carefully. He could see what was happening. She wasn't Donna anymore at that moment; the Doctor-Donna, that alter-ego that sometimes sprang up, had made another of its unusually-timed re-emergences.
"It's a proximity thing," Donna answered.
"Her brain?" Christina asked.
"It's a long story – some inter-dimensional creatures took my brain out and put it in a jar," she said, "It unlocked forgotten parts of my altered genetic structure. Elliott was there."
"Yes, yes," Ten said nervously, "Don't strain yourself. You know what happened last time."
"Your memory wipe and the repairs to fix it are still in effect, you know," she told him, "They're a physical thing. The further away from my brain I get…"
"I understand how it works," he told her, "You got all that knowledge from me."
"I don't think we should stay here for long," Elliott said guardedly, looking around. He seemed to keep trying to walk next to Sally Sparrow, and every time he did she slid away to be walking on the other side of Esther (caught in the middle of this) until he followed again. Whether he was doing this on purpose, Ten couldn't really tell, and didn't care particularly.
"Oh, really? Because I've been looking for real estate opportunities. Do you think any of these buildings are rent-controlled?" Sally remarked.
"What do you care? You don't pay your rent anyway," Esther said.
"He's right. Just being here could have devastating effects. This isn't like when we went through that rift in London," Ten mainly addressed Christina, "That was just to another planet. But this? This is a living nightmare."
"Then it's a good thing you have me," Donna said, "I'm not like Rose, I can't only manipulate the Alphaverse. You heard what Oc'thubha said, I'm extra-dimensional. We destroy however they make their rifts, leaving them stuck in this wasteland, and then I'll get us out. Easy-peasy."
"Don't jinx it," Sally said. The bipedal bat-things still swarmed high overhead, miles and miles above so that they looked like blots against the sky, which looked like it was raging a storm the likes of which he had seen before on Jupiter. Yet the air around them was stagnant, and dead, and dry.
"Can you tell where their power source is?" Ten asked Donna.
"I've been leading us towards it this whole time. Did you think I was just walking around aimlessly? Ooh – doesn't that creepy spire full of monsters look like a nice place to go?" she nodded ahead at what was, yes, a creepy spire full of monsters. "A prime tourist attraction, that is. Not a death-trap, or anything." She didn't say much more, just continued on their path through the archaic old city. Who had it been built for, he wondered? Not the creatures swarming the dominion of the Elder Ones, and not the Elder Ones themselves because they were, as Oc'thubha had explained and as he had seen for himself, massive. Bigger than comprehension, sometimes, if the Beast of Krop-Tor was anything to go by.
They walked over narrow, fragile bridges towards this spire, which was sunk on a much lower level. They had walked out just before the beginning of this ginormous bridge, and it curved upwards horribly steeply so that they were gasping by the time they reached the top. But they, the six of them, surmounted it, and saw laid out beneath them the rest of the building this spire belonged to. It looked like a cathedral, but an infernal one, something that shouldn't even be allowed to exist it was such an insult to every single faith that had ever been concocted in any parallel reality. It was huge, and so black in colour it might be rotten.
"That's where Ic'tharru is," Donna said, "Using the power source to communicate through the rifts."
"Um… right. Ic'tharru. What, exactly, do we do about that?" Christina said, "I don't think my gun will do much."
"Yeah, and, um, I don't think lightning will help, either," Esther said, "Humans can survive lightning strikes pretty easily. If this thing is as huge as everything else here… it'd be like getting static from the TV remote." That was a fair point, Ten thought. Even if Rose was there, this Ic'tharru would remain undefeatable.
"Esther should just run in, destroy it, and run back out again," Donna said.
"Are you kidding me? In these shoes? Just run in there? I was always terrible at gym class," she said.
"What? No, do the fast thing."
"The what-thing?"
"That whole running-at-the-speed-of-light thing you do."
"Who the heck told you I could run at the speed of light? I'm not the Flash."
"I saw you do it, in 2029."
"In 2029? I mean, I… theoretically, even if I could do that back on Earth, I couldn't do anything that would exert that much electricity here. Electricity isn't just a hobby, I need it to survive, I'll burn up without it. I couldn't maintain something like that in a place with no electricity at all enough to get into that cathedral and back."
"Then it's a good thing we've got me," Christina de Souza declared, "I'm the most celebrated master thief of my generation; infiltration is my specialty."
"I thought Jenny is like, the master thief?" Esther questioned. Christina was offended.
"A master thief at stealing peoples' wives, maybe," Christina remarked. That was cold, the Doctor thought, but he didn't want to get into an argument about his daughter's relationship. He tried not to think about all that. "I'm infamous. All you have to do is find another way in."
"If you suggest scaling it and abseiling down from above-" Elliott began.
"We can't do that. I don't have my ropes. You just have to remember the old adage start from the bottom and work your way up."
"And try not to look at any ancient god-creatures that might make your eyes bleed," Sally added, "That's my idea of a fun day out. Really family-friendly."
Christina called it an adventure in retrospect. The Doctor called it a calamity. The cathedral structure turned out to be colossal and full to bursting with some sort of substance. This substance was huge and looked leathery and fleshy, and it pressed against any cracks and blemishes in the exterior of the building. When he reached to touch it to see what it was, Donna grabbed his hand out of the air and asked him what the hell he was doing, that's Ic'tharru. Ic'tharru, whatever it or he was, nested in that wicked caricature of a church. The strange flesh of this Elder One was about as much Ten wanted to see of it, if Oc'thubha was telling the truth about the bleeding-eyes thing.
They walked the whole length of it until they found an opportunity to actually get into the place, though every cell of his body was telling him not to do that, and to get as far away from that hell as possible. He never wanted to step foot in another twisted plane like this.
It was a very small crack in the wall Christina found, and when the six of them slid inside they discovered it was a very narrow tunnel. They could follow it in either direction, but Donna told Esther (who was at the front, being as she was the Lightning Girl) to go to the right to get to the device that was providing the energy to create tears in all the universes. The narrow tunnel led to a narrower, steeper staircase, and again he wondered who the architects of this city had in mind when it was built. They crept up and up and up for what seemed like miles and hours in Ten's head, but time didn't work properly in Acnictexr, that much he could detect.
And there they were, high up, on another level of that ghastly cathedral. They could see the mass of Ic'tharru from up there, they could see the bat-things crawling across the rafters. The walls were lined with enormous books, which the idea of even perusing caused a sickening clenching in his stomach. They could not look at Ic'tharru, though. His eyes passed over the fiend for just a second until they started to itch and burn. It wasn't hard to look away after that, and with Oc'thubha's warning in mind.
But the power source was there, too. It was a very large and luminescent orb, filled to them brim with a spectral, cosmic energy, the same unperceivable colour as everything from that frightful realm was. That drew their attention away from the blind-spot that was Ic'tharru, who had yet to notice them. They were of little significance, probably. Flies on the wall. Nothing.
"How do we get down there?" Ten asked.
Donna began to speak, but Christina interrupted, "Easy. I have a grappling hook." Whatever Donna had been about to say, she stopped saying because she was so surprised at this grappling hook thing.
"What?" Ten exclaimed, and she pulled a gun out of the side of one of her high boots, a compact thing with a claw sticking out of it. Then she shrugged and shot it into the air, scattering a pocket of the bat-things. Great, he thought. Now she had got their attention. Still, it was a remarkable thing to watch, because she managed to get a solid grip with the claw of that thing, and then she just jumped over the stone barriers in front of them and swung down there like Spiderman.
But it wasn't as stable a grip as they thought; when she was close enough to the stone platform with the glowing ball sitting on it to easily survive the drop, the stone grotesque she had latched onto crumbled. Oh no. Christina was fine, she just rolled out of the way. But that grotesque and the wire from her gun fell down through the air and landed. Right on top of Ic'tharru. A growling noise deeper than anything he should normally be able to hear, which reverberated through his very bones, sounded within that hellish structure. Christina, far below, shrugged innocently, like this wasn't her fault.
"What were you going to say before she interrupted?" Elliott asked Donna.
"Hmm? Oh. I was going to say I could just make us a portal to get down there…"
"Do it now, quickly," Ten said, "We need Esther to destroy it."
"We need Esther to what?" Esther asked, but she went unanswered, because Donna spread her arms apart and very easily created her blueish, flickering puncture in the world, and another appeared simultaneously in the air by the side of Christina de Souza. She waved at them through the mirage. Ic'tharru was moving, was lumbering around, turning, he thought. Had it been asleep? Did those things sleep? He didn't think he wanted to find out. But they were so close now – another minute and they could have it, they could be out of there.
Ic'tharru's movement was even louder and more devastating when he stepped through that portal to join Christina, everyone following quickly with Donna last of all. Donna nearly collapsed now she was so close to such a powerful container of whatever the energy powering the rifts was. Ten turned his attention to her.
"Donna? Donna, stay with us, we need you to get us out of here."
"Break it, Esther!" Sally ordered Esther Drummond, who was panicking, understandably. Ic'tharru was approaching, was unravelling its many slithering appendages from the columns and the ruins, was bringing its many mouths and eyes and limbs towards them. He had to keep sparing searing, painfully glances at the monstrosity to try and gauge how much time they had left until it smote them.
Esther fumbled when taking off her insulated gloves; Ic'tharru roared, a terrible sound that the Doctor thought might make his eardrums explode. His head rang, and everything became white noise. Maybe his eardrums had exploded; it was impossible to tell. Esther grabbed for the source finally and exuded more electricity than he had ever seen, as much electricity as she could expel without simply dissolving herself, channelling millions of watts of burning lightning into that one object. When it blew up, it was devastating. A pulsation of the spectral stuff rippled out from the epicentre of the destruction, and Ic'tharru roared even louder than it had done before.
"Donna! Get us out of here!" Christina ordered. Donna was knocked off her feet for a few seconds after Esther had destroyed the thing linking the universe to the pre-universe, but now, with terrifying determination, an incredible rift sprang out of the space between her fingertips. And through it he could see, like watching a flickering, black-and-white film, the quaint and shadowy cobbled streets of Hollowmire, which was a sanctuary compared to its dark counterpart of Acnictexr.
Ic'tharru screeched and the Doctor shouted at everyone to run through the rift, with Sally Sparrow and James Elliott dragging Esther – who was nearly unconscious after exerting so much of her power in an electrical dead-zone – through, Christina next, and then him, having to leave before Donna as much as he hated to do so. He landed in the cold street on the other side, feeling the world's gravity right itself and the atmosphere return to that which he knew so well.
But the portal was still there, still indigo and crackling at its edges, Donna still on the other side. With the wall of the dimensions between them, the connection eliminated, the Doctor could see Ic'tharru for a split-second. That mass of black tentacles and appendages and a thousand-billion eyes and pearly-white razor-blade teeth rolling like heavy smoke towards Donna, roaring numbly in pursuit. He reached his hands in and dragged Donna through, and in the blink of an eye as she collapsed on top of him on Hollowmire's high street at six in the morning, the portal disappeared. The ghost of Ic'tharru's image was left suspended, hauntingly, in the dust of the air for a second until it floated away and dispersed. They were safe.