Shadow - Monsters, Machines and Mad Scientists!: Episode CLVI - These Empty Moments

There was a hole in the world, dark and awful. It consumed all light and heat and warmth. It permitted no escape, and let nothing good free from its grasp. It was blindingly black, deafeningly silent, tremulously still.

Gulliver had thought that he had experienced the depths of misery before, that he knew what it was to feel pain, to be missing some key component of life that everyone else enjoyed. He had thought that his life was one spiralling path to sorrow, but that he was nearing the bottom and there he would reside all his days. He had permitted himself a sense of relief at understanding his fate, a kind of joy in his torment. He had thought it could get no worse, but now, he realised, he was wrong.

There was a hole in the world, one which had been ripped open in a violent split second, one which could never be sealed and one which, he now realised, he was falling over into.

"Oh gods," he cried, "oh merciless gods!"

Harker's body lay in his arms: slashed, ribboned in blood, still warm and seemingly vital and yet missing that spark of indefinable something which gave him life. These hollow words echoed in his mind - My brother is dead. My brother is dead. My brother is dead - but could find no purchase there.

Miss Barkcastle had remained silent. Silent as the grave, silent as death, though he and she were still very much, painfully alive.

Blood ran through his fingers. His hands were slick with it. It spilled down his legs to soak through his trousers, dripped to the floor to pool around his knees. There seemed so much of it, like it could hardly have come from one man, and each drop was a sea, an ocean, vast and unnavigable, separating life from death. Though Harker was already gone, it seemed as if he were only getting further and further away.

My brother is dead.

And was this all Harker had been, after all? A bag of meat and fluids, stumbling around, only waiting for the cleaver. Had all he ever done been but a precursor to this grand guignol? Had there been any meaning to it at all.

My brother is dead.

"We have to go," Miss Barkcastle said softly. He could tell by her voice that she had been sobbing too - there was a harshness to it that did not come from the emotions projected, but the pain received, "we can't stay here much longer."

He knew she was right, of course. There was a job to do, a world to save, but even so, he could not help resenting her for having said it, for interrupting his grief.

My brother is dead.

And that was it. He didn't care about the world any more. He wasn't interested in freeing it from Lakhma's tyranny. The whole planet could be swallowed in fire, drowned in the seas, frozen in ice and he would not mourn it at all. There was only so much grief he could cope with and surely this was it. This was the bottom at last.

My-

“-brother is dead!” His voice, shaky and quiet with the first word, rose to a terrible shout by the last, to echo back at him – dead, dead, dead - over and over, shouting, speaking, whispering like ghosts.

“I know, Gulliver,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder, “gods, Gulliver, I know.” Her voice broke. Somehow hearing this elderly engineer, this tea-obsessed, mild mannered old lady who just happened to dabble in Philosophy, reduced to the same level he was… it was…

“too much…”

She knelt beside him them, wrapped her arms around him and wept with him, never minding the blood staining her petticoats.

“It is,” she said through her tears, “it is too much.”

They knelt there with Harker’s body in the long, forgotten corridor, before the doors of the obelisk chamber, just crying and holding each other until Miss Barkcastle said only one thing more.

“But it’s not over yet.”