Thoth Agog's Dream. A TTR/TDF story by Clive May (clive@cj4386.demon.co.uk) Dr Who is copyright BBC. Thanks to D B Killings for his illuminating commentary on the original posting which picked so many holes in the plot I decided to revise fairly drastically. Thanks Doug! Prologue Nyssa's groping hand found the scalpel. Absently, she lifted it and dipped the razor sharp blade into the noxious bubbling brew in the beaker. Holding the scalpel before her eyes, she examine the stains on the blade. A restrained, lady-like smile, toyed with her lips. "It's perfect!" she breathed. "Now! Adric..." Clutching the scalpel carefully in one hand, she went in search of the boy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The minute hand on the old grandfather clock moved onto the hour. In a blur of speed, Adric was out from behind the bar and zig zagging for the door. Quick as he was, Nyssa was quicker. She came up in a smooth motion; her arm lashed out; and the javelin flashed through the air. Under the various tables, the patrons winced. Hands were thrown hastily over eyes. Adric swayed left. The javelin buried its razor sharp blade in the door jamb. He was going to make it! His heart gave a little skip of pure delight - he was home free for the evening. He paused in the doorway to look back, and to stick his tongue out at the enraged Traken. This act of petty contempt proved the boy's undoing. Catching his foot on the top step, he went sprawling down the steps, and into the dust of the TARDIS parking lot. For long seconds, Adric lay still, gritting his teeth, waiting for the agony in his back. It never came. The tension grew unbearable; it was killing him! Well? Nyssa surely wasn't! Slowly, he rolled over onto his back... Only to meet Nyssa's over-bright gaze. Her lips were set in a feral half smile. Unhurried, she plucked the javelin from the door jamb. Her eyes went all gooey. Lovingly, she stroked a hand down the shaft. "Die! Swamp Rat!" she crooned fondly. With great tenderness, the girl thrust the spear into the boy's heart. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Adric screamed. Adric sat bolt upright in bed. For long seconds, he sat staring, wide-eyed, around the dimly illuminated bedroom. He was sweating. His legs were entangled in the bed-sheets. The things he could see, the roundelled walls, the abacus on the desk, his favourite yellow and green suit strewn across the floor, intermingled inextricably with the frightful impressions jerking through his brain. Slowly the "real" things he could see began to edge out the internal imagery in the scramble for "most real". The story playing in his head, still hung on gamely to a shred of credibility; but the word "dream" was diluting its power to terrify. A dream! Yes - it was all a dream! Adric grinned at his foolishness. Of course it had been a dream - he could even see how it had come about. All true dreams, of course, are just the jumbled up memories and impressions of the things one sees and feels during the day. Ghastly and strange as the images had been, Adric, felt certain that with a little thought, he would be able to track them all down to an ordinary source. Tegan! It was all her fault! Adric scowled. She'd been on a nostalgia jag. She'd spent the day bending the ear of anyone who'd listen, whining on about the pubs and bars she'd known; and in particular, the joys of having a quiet drink in a little out-of-the-way pub. Obviously, that accounted for the This Time Round. Adric grinned at his own cleverness. That this fictitious pub seemed to be located in a place outside reality, was not difficult either. Cocking an ear, he listened to the hum of the engines - they were in flight - which meant that at this moment he was outside of reality. The two things had obviously got mixed together - the way they do sometimes in dreams. Smugness, an old friend, beckoned to the Alzarian in the certain knowledge of a warm welcome. Encouraged by his own cleverness, and the solid feeling that the indisputable fact of one's own sanity brings, he felt confident in tackling one of the more difficult concepts. - that his real life was a story drawn from a tv series put out on earth! Well. Tegan was to blame there too. She'd been going on about watching television - a system for broadcasting pictures and sound through the medium of the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea did not appeal to him, but to hear the way Tegan had been whining on about it...You'd think it must be something really special? Either that or Tegan was a little simple, or easily amused - which he thought was most likely the proper explanation. The most puzzling aspect of his dream, that his life was being written as a series of "out of cannon stories" by the people who watched the programs, The blame for that, too, he found no difficulty in laying squarely on Tegan. Apparently, some Earth people actually did this? Tegan was most disparaging of their efforts at literature. What was the term she had use din such a contemptuous tone? "Trekkies?" Yes. That was it. "Trekkies and, what was it? Duffel Coats? Eh? No. Anoraks? Well, some sort of coat anyway." Why they should want to do this, he could not fathom. For once, though, Adric found himself in total agreement with Tegan's opinion. There was some hope for the woman yet. His personal devil of smug self-satisfaction patted him affectionately on the back. To find out such sad people existed gave him a feeling of superiority Now, he felt ready to tackle the most puzzling thing of all: what appeared to be the central theme of these stories: that he was continually being killed by a homicidal Nyssa. Smugness looked the other way, not wishing to be associated with Adric's sudden doubts. His grin lost some of it complacent assurance. Now, where HAD that idea come from? The thought of the kind, serene young woman as a psychotic killer? it was so utterly preposterous he couldn't fit that in anywhere. Smugness shook its head sadly and left in a hurry. A tiny frisson of fear ran down Adric's spine. For a second he doubted his own reality. But it was only a tiny doubt, soon pushed aside as he brushed a finger over his badge for mathematical excellence. Of course he was real! And yet? He hopped off the bed. A nasty thought had just struck him. Perhaps all this madness was some kind of elegant and insidious psychological attack on him, intended to destroy the Doctor in some way. He quickly pulled on his clothes and set out in search of the Doctor. If it was an attack, the sooner he told the Doctor the better. As he hurried down the corridor, he did not see the shadow move from a dark corner, nor the glint of light from the upraised blade. Nor did he hear the swish of silken robes. His first, and last intimation of danger was a shout from close behind. "ADRIC?" Then an icy cold kissed the back of his neck. Adric screamed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- At a corner table in the TTR, Nyssa mouthed dire oaths into a gag, while she worried unsuccessfully at the ropesbinding her wrists. It was a waste of effort. Francoise had tied her with a special knot, used by his people to subdue the deadly thousand tentacled Strangler Beast of his home planet. He had taken this drastic step because he was determined that Adric would survive this evening. He had not done this out of any inate sens of altruism; but because, due to a lapse of concentration whilst serving two difficult customers, he had accidentally lent Adric some money, forgetting that on the death of a debtor, all his debts are considered void. He was hoping to keep the Alzarian alive long enough to collect. That she had to lean further and further sideways, to peer around the sixth and sevent Doctors to keep Adric in sight, was doing nothing to improve Nyssa's mood . The pair were in a red hot, nose to nose, confrontation right across the table before her. "Poppycock?" snarled the sixth, glaring at his seventh self. The air between them sizzled. "Yes! POPPYCOCK!" the seventh assured him. "That one was a chestnut with long whiskers when he was a young man!" he affirmed, pointing to where the first Doctor sat in a quiet corner sipping chocolate and flirting outrageously with Cameca. "And," he added, "You still haven't answered the riddle...What did he die of?" The sixth Doctor sat back, his expression ugly. "It's not a proper philosophical postulation. I mean to say, if this putative fellow goes to a play about the French revolution, falls asleep and dreams that he is being guillotined, and just at that moment a woman touches his neck with a fan?...AAAAGGGGHHHRRRRRGGGG!!!" Nyssa lifted her booted foot from the Doctor's crushd toes. She ignored his baleful look, Now, she had an uninterrupted view. Adric sat at a table with the fourth Doctor. The Time Lord was regailing a few of his companions, among them Romana, with an outrageously embellished tale of one of his adventures. Adric, who had heard it a dozen times before, was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The tale was the one where the Doctor had stumbled upon the cult of Thoth Agog, a rather unpleasant amphibian who had acquired some unwholesome delusions of Godhood from a copy of Conan the Barbarian he had chanced upon. The cult's practices had involved something extremely imaginative with naked, nubile young virgins. "His name was Afrog Agog," Romana corrected helpfully. The Doctor stopped in mid-flow to glare at her. "Yes, yes", he snapped. "Thoth Agog - now do stop interrupting! Who's telling this story anyway? Now as I was saying..." "But you never remember it properly," Romana persisted. The Doctor fixed her with his best fifty mega watt glare. "If you don't stop interrupting, I might just forget not to include the idea you had for distracting old Thoth..." Romana looked a trifel uncertain. "Eh? I don't remember that?" she said, anote of warning inher voice. "oh. You *must* remember? When you joined in the dance of the nine virgins an dhad to take all?......" "Doctor!" Romana cried, her cheeks turning a delicate pink. "Or the ah - imaginative business with the cucumber that had old Thoth really agog!" "DOCTOR! Please!" Romana pleaded, her cheeks afire with embarrassment, her voice rising to a mortified squeak. The Doctor regarded her with his most innocent look. He waited patiently. "Alright, alright, Doctor. Tell it your way if you must," Romana conceded. The Doctor leaned back in his chair and went on with his tale. But he had lost the male half of his audience. They were all casting speculative glances at Romana, smirking, and imagining like crazy. Unaware that he was losing his audience, the Doctor swept grandly on. "Well. As I was saying, I simply could not let that sort of nonsense go on. Once I had rigged the power supply, and switched on, old Thoth Agog was out of the maiden sacrificing business for good. When my brilliantly improvised ambiguous reality perception referencing loop kicked in, poor old Thoth was no longer certain whether he was a frog, or a man who had fallen asleep and was dreaming that he was a God dreaming that he was a frog, dreaming that he was a man who had fallen asleep, and was dream...." "AAAIIIeeeee!!!" The terrible scream stopped the Doctor dead in his tracks. At the corner table, Nyssa stopped mouthing oaths into the gag. She ceased struggling against the ropes. A warm glow began deep in the centre of her being; and her insides went all wobbly. Her eyes misted with fondness, touched with just the tiniest hint of jealousy. But the Traken suppressed that ruthlessly; she was not one of those clinging, obsessive, homicidal psychotics who demanded that their victims only be killed by them and by no one else. No, she would not become one of those jealous types. If Adric felt the need to be killed by another, well, of course it made her a little sad, that he could consider spurning her attentions for another, but she would forgive him his little infidelities. Adric was slumped in his chair, his mouth a rictus of horror, dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Behind him stood Turlough, his mouth agape, clutched in his hand a half melted Adric's demise. He had just touched it to the Alzarian's neck. "TURLOUGH!" bellowed the fifth Doctor. Turlough started guiltily. The ice cube fell from nerveless fingers to shatter on the floor. Haunted eyes went around the group at the table. He half shook his head. "I didn't mean it!" he whined. "Honest! I didn't mean it. I just wanted to make him jump. I didn't mean to kill him. Please you've got to believe..." Turlough trailed off into a guilty silence. A cloaked figure at the bar set down an empty mug. It gathered up a sythe. Turning from the bar, it strode over to the table. Turlough took a hasty step back. Although the figure was *not there*, it was *not there* in a most unsettling manner. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Epilogue "Nyssa!" Tegan cried as she pounded down the TARDIS corridor. The Traken girl looked up from her inspection of the prone form of Adric. In her right hand, she clutched a scalpel with a stained blade. Her face was pale, emphasising the fear in her eyes. Tegan skidded to a halt. "What happened? What's going on?" she asked, breathless. Nyssa half shook her head. "I don't know? Oh, Tegan! I just wanted to show him the results of our experiment - he did the calculations for me. I...I called out to him; but he didn't seem to hear; so I touched him on the shoulder and...And he screamed and collapsed!" Nyssa shot Tegan a look of desperate appeal. "Tegan? What *IS* going on here?" The end