In the Mouth of Madness

Jenny

"Do you remember this morning? When you said that you won't let me get killed, or injured, and that if anything happened to me you would answer to Clara and Martha?" Jenny could not get her father to meet her eyes as she talked, because his eyes were trained on the gigantic silhouette of the beast they could see straight out of the large doors of Lunis Terminal's loading bay, where they were parked. Finally, he looked at her, worried but thinking.

"Do you remember that this was your idea?" he pointed out.

"Then I suppose we're both in trouble if something happens."

"So we'd better make sure that nothing does."

She nodded, "Yeah. Right. Good plan."

With their help, it hadn't taken long for Li to reformat the scavenged warp drive from their broken ship into an incendiary device. And then Jenny had kept her promise and evacuated them back to the Alliance HQ station in orbit around the Earth; all apart from Ashildr, who wanted to remain at Lunis to see the mission through. Jenny did find her presence at the other end of the comms a comfort, admittedly. She didn't much fancy being stuck inside of a giant alien monster with just her father for company, considering they didn't know how long they were going to be in there. It was a good thing her little spaceship had a fully-stocked kitchen.

"Are you ready to go? The bomb is stable?" Ashildr asked through the hacked comms.

"Helix, is the bomb stable?" Jenny asked.

"Negative, Major. The device is highly volatile and I advise against keeping it in the fridge."

"…The bomb's fine," Jenny lied to Ashildr.

"You know I can hear the robot when it talks," she said.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that?" she continued to lie, "Just preparing for take-off. All systems go – the, uh, flux capacitor and the… hyper-drive, they're… superspeed enabled." She was flicking switches on the controls and pressing buttons that didn't do much.

"Whatever. It's your life on the line, not mine. Your suicide mission."

"It's not a – be quiet. We're leaving."

"Have fun with the flux capacitor, Major."

They shot out of the loading bay in the blink of an eye; Oswin's spaceship design far surpassed any technology Jenny had ever seen before in terms of speed and finesse. Inside the ship it was so pressurised there wasn't any pressing force at all, not like the kind she saw ancient astronauts endure in their space shuttles heading into orbit, vomiting into zero gravity with their heads buried against the seat covers. It wasn't even as physically strenuous as being a fighter pilot. More like being on a cruise, or idling along a country lane on a bicycle.

"Do we not have any drones we could send in to do this?"

"Drones?" Jenny asked him, "I don't think so. I don't think Oswin would sacrifice any of her creations to send them into some alien monster."

"The spaceship is one of her creations."

"I am a fantastic pilot, okay? And I've been in much worse places than the inside of that thing," she nodded out of the window at the looming shadow. It was growing larger and larger and larger, and she was getting increasingly frightened. She preferred her other regenerations, the ones who didn't care about what happened to themselves because they didn't have a father who was present, and they also didn't have Clara. "Just calm down, alright?" she told him, though she did not feel calm herself at all. "Here, see," she picked a paper bag up from the floor at her feet and held it out to him, "Have a jelly baby." He stared at her.

"What did you say?"

"I said have a jelly baby. I got some from the sweet shop in Hollowmire this morning because there was still a bit of time after we had breakfast before Clara had to go to work," Jenny explained. "Why are you being weird about it?" He then laughed to himself and took the bag from her.

"No, it's nothing. Just that in my fourth incarnation – this was a very long time ago now – I used to always carry a bag of jelly babies around and offer them out. You're a real chip off the old block."

"Mm, it's almost like I haven't got a personality of my own sometimes. I'm just your naïve shadow."

"I didn't mean it like that…" he mumbled, then he saw that she was smiling a little and realised she was only messing with him. It was too late to carry on talking though, because they were now closer to the beast than they had ever been before. It was a nasty-looking thing, but remained too huge to accurately come up with a description. Simply too enormous to fathom out there in space with such limited visibility.

"Helix, plot me a course to the mouth of this thing," Jenny said. She would like not to have to rely on Helix to tell her where to go and what to do, but the issue was that she herself didn't know which end of the thing was which, and there was the danger that even if she was looking right at one gaping hole she wouldn't be able to tell which orifice it actually was, specifically.

"Affirmative, Major." A course appeared as a hologram in front of the windows which indicated that the mouth was at the top of the creature relative to where they were.

"This looks like it's going to be bumpy…" she said, pulling back on the two joysticks so that they began to head upwards.

"It's like a roller coaster, isn't it? Going up and then down. It's exciting."

"You're like a child. Just hold on, it might be a bit jarring having to make a turn like that."

"Maybe you should turn on the autopilot."

"Excuse me? I'm the best pilot in probably this entire galaxy, okay?"

"Keep your eyes on the road, then," he said. She scowled and turned her head to look outside again. They were racing upwards along the edge of the glistening, rock-hard armour of the creature, close enough to see the blemishes and cracks from probably thousands of years of genocidal wear and tear.

"How close are you?" Ashildr asked.

"Nearly about to nose dive inside its mouth."

"Definitely the mouth, right? Because if you go in its arse, the sphincter will crush you."

"Yeah. Thanks for that. The mouth."

"Not to mention having to fight against waves of incoming alien faeces."

"Preparing to dive. Initiating radio silence."

"Understood, Commodore," Ashildr grunted resentfully. For all her smart-mouthing she appeared to have enough respect for Jenny to not disobey direct orders. Or respect for military hierarchy.

It wasn't like a roller coaster. It wasn't like a roller coaster because they were in zero gravity, and if you were on a roller coaster in zero gravity you may not be on one at all. So to them, no matter which direction the ship turned, it would always feel like they were going smooth and straight with an image of outer space twisting and turning in front of them. That didn't make rising over the brim of an alien's head to get a look at its huge, gaping mouth any less scary. At least it didn't have any teeth, it was just a big circular abyss. Maybe that made it worse…

"Does this thing have headlights?" the Doctor asked Jenny. She reached over and pressed a button which made a long strip of very bright lights along the front of the ship come on, illuminating the soggy, dark interior of the creature's mouth as it approached. She would very much like to turn the lights off again after that, but she doubted that the alien would have interior light fixtures, and it certainly didn't have any degree of bioluminescence. They headed towards that black hole which just grew and grew until they were finally drawn inside it and were encompassed by this beast.

"Hey, dad?" she whispered. She didn't know why she felt like she had to whisper, the ship was soundproofed. But she did it anyway. "How is it breathing? Does it breathe?"

"A creature this size will have a vastly different respiratory system to anything you and I are used to," he explained, also speaking quietly. Jenny flicked another switch and all the interior lights went out, which stopped them from having to look at their own vivid reflections in the glass and gave them better visibility. It looked like all of the surrounding walls of this thing were made of tongue, and they rippled unusually. Maybe it was a way to force the food inside quicker. "Of course we, and everyone we know, breathe through our mouths. This creature will have ways to generate its own oxygen inside its lungs; lungs which won't be connected to oesophagus. No doubt its armour also helps keep these innards pressurised. Did I ever tell you about the time Amy and I were eaten alive by a star whale?"

"What's a star whale?"

"Fantastic creatures, really. Enormous, fly through space, pink, have tentacles and double the number of flippers. Feed on solar energy, incredibly intelligent. A large human colony hijacked one of them and used it to fly them along, like a turtle shell, and they tortured it to make it do this. It was appalling, really, you would have hated what they did to it. I know I did. These majestic creatures completely maimed by the human race…" he sighed, then continued, "Not that I expect much better of humanity sometimes, they do have rather the problem knowing how to treat creatures equally intelligent or more intelligent than themselves. In fact, Peri and myself did once rescue one called Megaptera from a human ship hunting it."

"Who's Peri?"

"Just… an old friend. Hundreds of years ago now."

"Where does Amy come into things?"

"Well, the one they were torturing, to punish people they would feed them to it. Nasty business. But the worst part is that it came to help them on purpose, and they couldn't understand. Once they stopped torturing the poor thing it went much faster. But getting covered in alien whale goo-spit was not particularly pleasant. And it was Amelia's first trip, as well. These first trips often end up ridiculous, you know. I took Clara to an alien market and we had to defeat a god that was living inside a sun. Ridiculous. I can't possibly understand why that woman has married me considering everything she goes through when we're together." He was talking a lot, and she suspected it was to try and take his mind off their current mission. Jenny could hardly see anything.

"Helix, can you do an internal scan of the creature?" she asked. Helix could not do an internal scan before because the armour blocked out electronic signals. Which probably meant that their comm link to Ashildr was completely dead.

"Affirmative, Major."

"So why didn't the space whale eat you?"

"Just had a few words with it. He was a good laugh, in the end. More forgiving than I was. It's very rare that I get that angry about anything."

"Huh."

"Scan complete, Major."

"Okay, what's the best way to get into the bloodstream? I assume this thing has blood, right? And it does have a heart?"

"The thinnest barrier between the digestive system and the bloodstream is in the capillaries of the intestinal villi. Plotting course now."

"Thanks, Helix."

"You're letting Helix do a lot of the work, aren't you? I could have told you we need to go through the intestines," said the Doctor.

"Better safe than sorry," said Jenny, "I don't want to make a mistake because I'm too proud to ask the VI for help. Besides, it's better than having Oswin plugged into the comms doing all this remotely. I can't put up with her and Ashildr at the same time, they're just about as obnoxious as each other. No point taking unnecessary risks."

"Wow. You're really serious about making sure you're okay, aren't you?"

"Well… things were different, before. When I was just angry at you and I was fooling around with Jack… I mean, me and Jack, god – we're nearly the exact same person. It's a horrible match. I really stopped caring about what happened to me. I haven't cared much about what happened to me since… for about forty years. But things change. Now you care about me, you're trying, doing good. I'm trying. And I've got Ravenwood. I hate that she worries about me and that I put her through that, after she's been through so much…"

"It's disgusting in here, isn't it?"

She diverted her attention back to their environment as they made their way at a very careful snail's pace through the mouth and into the oesophagus of this monster. It was a very long and slimy cavity made of shivering, pulsating flesh which shone moistly in the beams of the ship. It got worse, too, when she squinted and steered them even closer to the walls, because they looked like they were writhing around as if a nest of millions of thick worms was breeding in its throat.

"What is all that?"

"Make sure we don't fly into it," the Doctor warned, "On Earth, gravity takes care of half the work of the digestive system, pulling everything downwards. But there's no gravity in space, so it must have adapted those feeler-things to help the food on its way. Probably passes everything along to get down into the stomach. You know, like crowd-surfing, but evil. This is actually fascinating, I've never seen a creature like this. Maybe we should try to catch it instead of blowing it up."

"So that it can hypnotise even more people into just walking into its mouth? It's dangerous. Don't get any thoughts about trying to rescue it."

"I wasn't…" he mumbled.

"Y'know, something like this once happened to Clara, when she was with Old Twelvey."

"Really?"

"Yeah, she told me about it. It was like, they got miniaturised, or something, and went inside of a Dalek."

"Why did they do that?"

"I can't remember… then I think he wanted to kill it and she wasn't too happy with him. I think she said she slapped him. He must be really annoying, Adam Mitchell once punched him in the face. And I don't think Adam Mitchell has ever hit anyone else in his whole life. And I nearly shot him in the head."

"You should have shot him, he might have died and regenerated into someone more amiable."

"There's still hope. We all have to regenerate sooner or later. And hopefully neither of us will regenerate today, because I can't think of anywhere worse for it to happen. Do you think we're close to the stomach yet? That's what's next, isn't it?"

"I think so, since there won't be any irritating vents separating the lungs from the digestive system. It should be relatively plain sailing. Anyway, if you did regenerate, at least your eye and your thumb would heal. Didn't Martha say the thumb would never heal properly?"

"Yeah, that's right," she said, still seeing not much of note inside the alien so far. "It really doesn't bother me. I like having scars like that. They remind me of how much I've lived. Instead of wrinkles, since I don't get those."

"I've never thought of it that way."

"What's that?" she pointed out of the window at something floating towards them. It looked like a big ball of liquid, but it was dark yellow in colour. "Is that saliva?"

"I don't think so. You'd better dodge it," he told her seriously, "It looks like stomach acid. No gravity, remember? It probably just floats around like that."

"Lucky for us that Oswin built shields into this thing," Jenny said, switching on the shields. A faint blue glow surrounded the ship and made everything they saw outside tinged slightly with the same colour. She still carefully steered them out of the way of the big globule. Slowly, as they proceeded, more chunks of the stuff began to appear around them, at which point the electromagnetic barrier became very useful.

But the Doctor was wrong, it wasn't stomach acid, not quite, because floating acid would most certainly not be a very effective trait to have evolved in a creature which lived in outer space. The story of the creature's stomach was much more horrid than that.