Sweetness and Light

Chapter Thirteen

"I still think it's sick," said Lip. "It's disgusting!"

"Now, Lip," said the Doctor. "All of our legs are held up by some bones. Is that disgusting?" She frowned. "Don't answer that. Anyway, the Kandyman's judged himself enough for doing what he needed to survive. He doesn't need you coming along to do it as well. And I don't need your judgement either, for making sure he can walk again."

Slowly, the Kandyman was making his way from the pile he had been trapped on. He wasn't just made of sweets, of course. His inner circuitry had metallic components; his motherboard was made of something quite like fur. And his legs were now fixed together by a pair of human bones.

"It's just not right," muttered Lip, as the robot thudded to the ground. But the Doctor was no longer listening to anything other than the far wall of the cavern, her ear pressed up against it as the awful sound pulsed through. Tentatively, she gave the rocks of the wall a firm tap with her spoon, watching as ugly light rippled and squirmed away from the place that she had hit.

"This is the light you came through, isn't it?" she said over her shoulder to the Kandyman. "And the sound seems like the voice that coaxed you through, although you might quite know why."

"I'm not going back!" said the Kandyman. "We all fell through there, in fire and in agony. But there's nothing you could do to get me to go back where I'm from."

"Well, I don't want to do that, and if I did it'd still be impossible," said the Doctor. "The tear's only anchored here, to Ipsico 9; where it leads'll be in constant flux. It could go anywhere, now. Not that it matters, if you burn away to your bones just by going through it."

She turned to Lip.

"I've solved your mystery, by the way. A rip like this winds space up like a knot; it won't just seep into this cave. There'll be lots of portals shot through the cavern network, all leading to the same mysterious place."

"So everyone's fine!" said Lip. "They've gone through that hideous thing into whatever's at the other end. There was no monster, and nobody died. We were all just seeing death when nothing bad was there."

The Doctor sighed. "Nice thought, isn't it? But no. There is a monster here— but it isn't the Kandyman, and it isn't made of sweets. In fact, in a way it isn't made of anything at all. 'Cos this rip, it's very intricate, very complicated. And sometimes if things get complicated in the right kind of way, they tend to become–"

She gulped.

"–alive," she said.