Sweetness and Light

Chapter Eleven

The Doctor was frowning at her spoon, and the spoon was frowning at the Doctor.

"This doesn't make a lot of sense," she said. She scowled and whacked the spoon off the cavern wall, then scowled again when that failed to make any difference.

"What's wrong?" said Lip, half listening, his senses turned towards hearing more chocolate insects.

"Something's distorting the reading, like there's lots of places here all at once," she said. "I can see that time's all twisted, that nothing's now quite as it should be. But there's something else; a mess on top of a mess. Like an ugly wig on a hideous man."

She thrust her spoon out ahead of her. "It's getting stronger the further down we go. In fact, I think the source of it might actually be just here."

They stumbled out into a large cavern, and whipped their torches round the space. At the centre of the space was a pile of bones, and at the top of the bones was a candied man.

"Ah," said the Doctor.

The Kandyman turned towards them both, his spiral eyes picked out in the torchlight. He dropped the bone he was holding, and chuckled in his curious way. As he did so, there was a burst of hideous sound and light, which both throbbed their way around his curious face.

"Visitors!" he said in his strange, high voice. "You've come to my lair, I see. I hope you haven't come expecting laughter. I'm afraid I'm not so jolly anymore."

"You're a killer," said the Doctor softly. "Innocent people have died because of you, and I'm not sure I'm able to let you live."

The Kandyman just laughed in response. "I am!" he said. "I don't deny it. There's no twist in the tale, no punchline. I'm just a monster, and I'm so alone–"

"Oh God," muttered the Doctor, "he's gone depressed."

"I'd be depressed as well," said Lip. "Made out of candy, stuck in a cave all day. And with a voice like that. I thought he'd have a scarier voice."

"It's a terrible voice," moaned the Kandyman. "An awful sound for an awful man."

"Caught up with you, has it?" said the Doctor. "The executions with sweets, and your delight in them? I didn't think your maker would have put guilt into you, but I was wrong. It's all through your being, like a stick of rock."

"Executions?" said the Kandyman. "But I've never executed anyone."

"Yes you have! That's what you do! You can't go round as a toaster and claim you've never seen any bread before!"

"You must be thinking of someone else," said the Kandyman in his sing-song voice.

"Oh, yeah, one of the other candy robots blasting about the universe," said the Doctor. "I'll just get out the list. Or I won't, because there's only one Kandyman. Built by an insane genius, and made to kill."

"Um," said Lip.

"Not now, Lip," said the Doctor.

"It's just–" Lip trailed off. "If there's only one Kandyman," he said at last, "then what's that over there?"

The Doctor followed Lip's gaze to the side of the cavern, where the shattered candy shell of a robot lay. Its entire lower half was gone, and its body was blistered brown where the heat had ripped it in two. But it was clearly the remains of something that looked exactly like the thing before them now, sitting confused on the top of a pile of bones. Silently, the Doctor looked round more of the cavern. There were bones everywhere, in great piles that covered the ground. But there were also bits and pieces of things that had clearly once been Kandymen, colourfully standing out from the human remains.