Forever Autumn by Mark Morris

Author:Mark Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409073314
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

IT WASN’T LONG before the tunnel widened out, enabling the Doctor to stand up. He brushed off the knees of his suit, stretched, and spat out the torch, which he caught neatly in his right hand. He was intrigued to see that, beyond the spot where the rotting timber cladding petered out, the walls, floor and ceiling appeared to be moving. He shone his torch on them and strolled over. Thick, black vines, knobbly and glistening, were writhing over and around and in between one another, thousands and thousands of them.

He poked one and it did two things: it flashed briefly with green light and it gave him a mild electric shock.

‘Ow,’ he said, and waggled his fingers in the air to get the tingly numbness out of them. He put on his black-rimmed spectacles and examined the vines more closely.

‘Kinetic binary fusion,’ he murmured with a soppy grin. ‘That’s beautiful. In an icky, slimy, creepy sort of way.’

He was about to move on when something happened. First the vines clenched; then they shuddered; then they began to move more quickly. At the same time a renewed surge of green light rippled through them, bathing the tunnel in a virescent shimmer.

At first the Doctor thought an alarm had been triggered by his prodding the vine. Then he realised what it really was.

‘Someone’s happy,’ he said. ‘Had a little feed, have you? A little power boost?’

The Doctor’s face was grim. Although he had never personally encountered the Hervoken before, he knew exactly what sort of power they used.

He pressed on, and eventually the tunnel branched out into two tunnels, then three, and then into chambers which sometimes contained as many as six burrow-like exits. He marvelled at the whole tentacular, subterranean system, imagined it stretching the length and breadth of Blackwood Falls, with all the townspeople living on top of it, like tiny parasites on the back of a giant crab. The deeper he went, the less featureless the tunnels became. Nodular growths bulged in greater profusion from the walls and floors, some of which looked like boulders, whilst others resembled twisted columns or lightning-blasted trees.

Green light was bubbling and burping and flickering all around him now, though even with the boost it had just received the Doctor could tell that the system was barely ticking over. Although he didn’t know his way about, he was following his nose, or rather his tingling skin and itchy teeth, to what he guessed would be the control centre. Etta’s house might be drenched in residual energy because it was bang on top of the bit of Hervoken technology closest to the surface, but the real power, the real heart of the place, lay much deeper.

It didn’t surprise him that he didn’t encounter any Hervoken on his journey. Theirs was a species based more on the cerebral than the physical. Unlike humans, they didn’t need to scurry about from one place to another; they didn’t need to see and smell and touch and taste and feel everything they came into contact with.

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