Dream Spores - 6. Demons and Stars / Flesh Terror

I don't know why exactly, but this man who looked a little like Martin Freeman in a police uniform and was my pretend-husband (and I a person in a yellow raincoat fluctuating between male and female) wanted us to get off the tube at the very last station and hide in a niche at the underground depot. I was pressing myself into a small wallgap to stay unnoticed, whereas he just stood there in plain view of the subway people and no one seemed to care. The subway people finally left and we'd been successful, apparently, but fuck if I know what was supposed to happen next.

Because it didn't, because this was happening next:

In a big old city I wandered through the inner city at night, past a grand old church and lovely baroque facades, and came across a modern glass-and-metal structure in rectangular shape. It had only a ground floor and was "architecturally" reminiscent of those ugly kiosks and tourist info boxes you may find at some bigger bus station outside of the main building. Meaning it had glass panes for walls, tinted orange-red or covered with orange-red foil, was framed in metal, and was perfectly straight and angular. And also perfectly ugly and temporary-looking.

A soldier of high rank greeted me. As we passed along the outside first, one of its long sides, I noticed a baneful foreboding, an angry humming and vibration behind the glass wall. It even rattled. The noise and movement were erratic as if originating from a living organism (as opposed to a machine) and did not quite take place in the actual world. It wasn't that the walls were actually growling and rattling, but rather that I got the distinct, unmistakable sense that there was something behind them that shouldn't be contained by them. And wouldn't. I was fairly certain, as we were entering through the main door at the headside, that something really bad was going to break out here during my visit.

The officer (Captain, Colonel ... who knows, who cares - he never said), mistaking me for an inspector of some kind, babbled something about the building's new purpose. He said that since the Doctor had left they had locked down and secured away part of the left side of the building containing the old research - skeptical, I eyed the white glass walls separating said research tract from the hallway. This is secure? - and had turned the rest of the facility into living space for his Romans.

Sure enough, right about then a sliding door (squeaky clean white glass again) opened in front of me in this narrow hallway and I half expected it to spit out a couple of bloodthirsty demon monkeys, attacking me, because it shared a wall (white gla- well you guessed it) with the "locked down" left part of the building. You know. The evilly vibrating part.

But it seemed to be only an elevator. A few women looking ... "Roman" somehow, (it was a mixture of futuristic and ancient in the way they were dressed and wore their hair) stepped into it, ignoring us completely and boredly waiting to go down. Right, there's more underground ... I thought.

It was about then, or shortly after, that shit went down.

It didn't happen in detail, sorry to disappoint there.

However, a high official's lovely trophy wife (looked like Oona Chaplin with jewelry) was sent out during all the ensuing terror to get help. Specific help. So she ran through the city as it turned from nightly to nightmarish, large grating and slithering noises, hollow whoomping and disturbing crackling filling the air, growing, swelling, buildings rapidly dilapidating without actually falling down, a maelstrom of sheer horror and mouths demolishing the small glass building and the people inside, and she looked up at the sky and cried for the Doctor.

He didn't come and she began to call even more desperately, for "Doctor Who!" repeatedly, I looked up at the starry sky as well, and when the terror consumed and blackened up the air around us, obscuring the view and all other senses, I drifted up to a roof to see better. It was actually starry. Not what you usually see from inside a big city, but rather a picture that the Hubble telescope would show you. It was so still. Colourful and glittery.

The Doctor never came.

No one came.

The wife was gone when I returned to the ground.

Out of nowhere a ... living thing as large as an elephant, with a revolting evil baby face and wrinkled, naked skin hopped in front of me and assumed the sitting pose of a dog.

It stared at me.

I was about to say something to it when it suddenly grew tentacles. Thick and leathery, turning it into no more than a writhing, thick sausage, the tentacles grew thicker and sprouted new tentacles. They didn't exactly reach for me but they lunged for and stoppered all doorways and regular walking paths in sight and so efficiently cut off all my exits. I was loathe to touch them but I didn't need to. Managing to avoid the massive flesh writhing on the ground (most of them were as thick as old trees now), I jumped up on a low stone bridge to escape.

When I landed on the railing, another fleshdemondog hopped in front of me and sat. It stared reproachfully.

This time I didn't wait around and just jumped down the other side of the bridge and ran. There was another fleshdog sitting and staring at me, I ran past it, and in the distance by the cathedral I could see another squatting.

It ends here.