All that could be seen through the darkness were two glowing eyes and a fiercely fanged mouth. Dodo yelped – before bursting out laughing. She ran forward, the Doctor and Steven following more slowly.
‘It’s only a jack-o’-lantern!’ she called. ‘Now I can see why people used them to see off evil spirits. They’re dead creepy.’
More pinpricks of fire-lit eyes glowed in the distance, and Dodo ran on ahead. ‘I think they’re marking a path,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’m sure they are. Let’s follow them!’
It would be a lie to say the Doctor and Steven were enthusiastic about this course of action, but since returning to the TARDIS was their only other option, they carried on after Dodo as she called back a running commentary.
‘I think I can see a house in the distance … The path’s leading towards it, I think … Ooh, it’s a big house – a mansion! I wonder who lives there? Hang on, I can see someone at a window. It’s –’
She’d briefly gone far enough ahead to be out of sight of her companions. As her scream rang out, Steven leaped forward. Within seconds he’d caught up with her, and he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as she buried her face in his chest.
‘What happened?’ he asked urgently, scanning the dark for any imminent threat but finding nothing.
‘Oh, Steven, it was horrible! A monster!’
‘Where?’
Dodo lifted her head and looked back towards the mansion. ‘Oh, it was there, Steven. It was! A face at the window! A monstrous face! With only one eye! I thought it was … well, you’ll laugh at me, but I thought it was a Monoid.’
Steven did laugh, but it was a half laugh, intended to be reassuring rather than mocking. ‘A Monoid! Well, I don’t know where we are, but I don’t think it’s Refusis Two! Anyway, there’s nothing there now. There’s not even a light. I don’t think anyone’s at home.’
‘It was there, whatever it was. It pulled back the curtain and I saw it.’
The Doctor, breathing rather heavily, had joined them now. He too dismissed Dodo’s fears. ‘A Monoid? Oh, goodness me no. You’re imagining things, child. Imagining things!’
‘Maybe …’ said Dodo, knowing that she wasn’t. It might not have been a Monoid – one of the green, one-eyed adversaries of a recent adventure – but it had been something.
The three carried on together towards the mansion, Dodo too nervous now to run ahead alone. The jack-o’-lanterns led them to a huge door of black wood, a lion-head knocker looking uninviting in the flickering light from the pumpkins.
Dodo raised a hand towards the knocker, then pulled away, scared. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should go back.’
‘Nonsense, child!’ said the Doctor. ‘We need to prove there are no monsters here!’ He reached past her and gave a firm rat-a-tat-tat with the metal ring.
The door swung open with a horror-film creak. A figure stood in the doorway, and it was the Doctor’s turn to give a sharp intake of breath. Embroidered robes, a mandarin hat and a blank, pale face. But the face was so blank, so pale …
The Doctor snorted with laughter and turned to Dodo. ‘For a moment I thought … But it’s just a mask! Just a mask. They’re all masks!’
‘Why, it’s a fancy-dress party!’ Dodo beamed with delight. ‘How super.’
The masked mandarin spread out a hand in invitation, and the three friends entered the house. The Doctor pointed out a figure wearing a green ogre costume, the mask’s single eye seemingly staring at them. ‘There, you see! That is no more a Monoid than this fellow is the Celestial Toymaker, or that gentleman over there –’ he gestured at a man wearing a ten-gallon hat – ‘is one of the gunfighters we met recently!’
They were in a huge hall, lit by a thousand candles. Masked figures in costumes stood all round the edges of the room – not milling about, as might be expected at a party, but watching and waiting. In the centre of the room was a ring of children, each also in costume, as still as statues. The door creaking shut behind the new arrivals was the only sound to be heard.
And then music exploded into the hall. A masked figure dressed as a gypsy violinist was scraping his bow wildly against the strings, and the music coming from the fiddle echoed around the space, louder than seemed possible. The children were up, dancing – a tiny witch was waltzing with a small scarecrow, while a bandaged mummy hopped from one foot to the other and a black cat galloped around all of them. The adults moved too – although they weren’t dancing; they were still just observers – and a vampire came over to the newcomers to offer them goblets of deep red fluid. ‘Bat’s blood,’ he whispered, his fanged mask muffling his voice, and Dodo turned to the Doctor in alarm.
‘Just fruit punch, my dear,’ he told her, having sniffed it, and the three drank deeply.
Dodo watched the violinist appreciatively. ‘I tried playing the violin at school,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get much further than “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Wish I’d stuck with it. He’s fab.’ But, as she spoke, the music stopped. The violinist froze, and everyone else froze too.
‘I think the music’s controlling them,’ Dodo whispered to the Doctor, suddenly scared.
‘You’re right,’ said the Doctor, unconcerned. ‘Well, in a way. Have you never come across the game Musical Statues?’
She grinned. ‘Oh, of course! Hey, I wonder if they’d let me play?’
Although still whispering, her voice must have travelled in the silence, for a moment later an Egyptian pharaoh had taken her hand and was dragging her into the centre of the room, among the still-rigid children. When the music started again, Dodo danced with the rest of them, taking the hands of a girl dressed as a ballerina and a ghoulish boy draped with chains.
The music stopped again. All froze – except one small red devil who carried on jigging regardless. The pharaoh who’d brought Dodo into the game took the boy by an arm and removed him from the dancefloor. Dodo felt sorry for him – how embarrassing to be the first player out! – and as the dancing began again she looked for the boy (his costume made him easy to spot), and saw him being led out through a far door.
The game continued. More and more children failed to hold their poses and were led one by one from the room. Soon only Dodo and six others were left. When the music stopped once again, the little ballerina beside Dodo had been in the middle of a pirouette and now started to wobble. Wordlessly, an adult zombie grabbed her by the arm and began to drag her away. The ballerina gave a gasp of pain, and Dodo, indignant, leaped forward in her defence. ‘Hey, you’re hurting her!’
The zombie ignored Dodo – but one of his fellows didn’t. Another zombie now took Dodo’s arm, pulling her in the same direction. ‘Hey!’ she said again.
He looked at her, but the eyes she saw appeared to be as lifeless as the mask they gazed through. She shuddered and stumbled along beside him.
Suddenly his hand was ripped from her arm. ‘Let her go,’ Steven demanded.
The zombie turned to face the newcomer. ‘But she moved,’ he said, and Dodo almost laughed – it sounded whiney, petulant, and made her remember that all they were doing was playing a game, and she’d lost. These were just people and this was a Hallowe’en party, not a monster’s castle. Not every place they landed in the TARDIS contained a threat.
‘He’s right, Steven. I did move,’ she said with a shrug.
The zombie beckoned and she followed him out of the room, although Steven, still looking wary, now accompanied them.
They went into a smaller room – smaller than the huge hall, that is; it was still about eight times bigger than the largest room in Dodo’s house back on Earth, the room her great-aunt still insisted on calling the ‘best parlour’. Funnily enough, there was a slight great-aunt smell here: a faint mixture of lavender and candle wax, the scent of dull Sunday afternoons in Wimbledon. She turned to say something to Steven, but he was already being led through another door, and Dodo realised that all of the children in this room were girls. At the zombie’s insistence, she took a seat on the floor next to her ballerina friend. ‘What happens now?’ she whispered. The girl just shrugged her shoulders.
A green-wigged witch and a skeleton with fluorescent painted bones walked into the centre of the circle, each holding a basket. The witch put a hand in her basket and drew out an apple, shiny, red and green.
The apple from ‘Snow White’, Dodo thought. Safe on one side but poisoned on the other. She fought from shying away when the witch offered it to her. But it was just an apple. Just an ordinary apple. She took it.
Then the skeleton stood before her and dipped its fake finger bones into its own basket and drew out a knife. A huge, sharp knife. She gasped, but the skeleton began to laugh – a disquieting sight as its grinning jaws never moved – before turning the knife round and offering it to her handle first.
‘It’s a game,’ the ballerina told her, as she too took an apple and a knife. She sounded slightly exasperated at this teenager who was behaving more like a scared child than the actual children present. ‘You have to peel the apple all in one go, without breaking the peel. Then you throw the peel over your shoulder and it’ll show you the initial of the person you’re going to marry.’
‘Oh, that sounds like fun!’ said Dodo, even though she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to get married to anyone. You probably had to stop travelling through time and space if you got married, unless your husband or wife was incredibly understanding.
She began to peel her apple. The first time she tried, the knife slipped slightly halfway round and left her with a sadly short and limp piece of peel of no use to anyone. The witch, after tutting at the waste, was finally persuaded to let her have another piece of fruit.
The little ballerina, meanwhile, had finished hers in record time, the first of the girls to do so. She flung the long green strand over her shoulder, calling out, ‘Apple peel, please reveal, who will be my love!’
The other children shuffled over to look at the result. ‘It’s a T!’ they decided eventually.
The ballerina went off in ecstasies. ‘Maybe it’s Tommy! Or Timothy! Or Tony!’
Other girls completed their peeling and found out they would marry a D–, or an M–, or an S–. Dodo tried to block out their excited screams as she concentrated on her own task. Finally she had a single, unbroken spiral of apple peel. Copying the others, she called out, ‘Apple peel, please reveal, who will be my love!’ and threw it over her shoulder. She turned round. And gasped.
The peel hadn’t landed in the shape of a letter. There, clearly in front of her, was an outline of a skull.
‘What is it?’ asked one of the others. ‘A weird sort of A, maybe?’
Dodo just shook her head, staring.
‘Maybe a Q gone a bit wrong?’ said another, sparking off an argument as to whether there were any boys’ names that began with Q.
But there was no way it was an A or a Q. It was quite clearly a skull, an impossibility of curves and shadows making a death’s head out of the single line, and she couldn’t understand why the children weren’t seeing it as she was.
Married to … death?
No. That made no sense.
Perhaps her future held no wedding, but only death?
She shivered. ‘What a silly game,’ she said. ‘I hope the next one’s more fun.’
‘I think you’ll find it will be,’ said the skeleton.
When all of the girls had finished, the remnants of apple were cleared away, and a new figure entered the room. He wore no mask, but there was no sign of his face – instead a shirt, topped with a ruff, covered his head, giving the impression of a decapitated man. A model head was carried under one arm.
‘Ooh, the headless horseman!’ said Dodo.
‘He hasn’t got a horse,’ the ballerina pointed out, but Dodo ignored her.
The witch and skeleton carried a carved wooden chair into the centre of the circle and the horseless headless horseman sat on it, placing his head on his knees. The chair was carved from ebony, with back and seat padded in red satin, and gave the impression of not being a chair so much as a seated coffin.
I’m being ridiculous now, thought Dodo as that crossed her mind. Whoever heard of such a thing? She smiled at the man and sternly told herself not to let her mind run away with such silly notions.
‘A man has died,’ announced the horseman, and Dodo kept smiling, because obviously this was part of the game and not a pronouncement of actual death. ‘We do not know how. The only clue left behind was the body itself.’
The girls in the circle giggled and shuddered.
‘It is our job to make that dead body talk and so discover the truth. Let the autopsy commence!’
There were little shrieks of nervous excitement as the room was plunged into darkness. ‘First the eyes!’ said the man, and Dodo also shrieked as two slimy objects were suddenly dropped into her hands.
‘Here, take these,’ she said to the inky blackness on her left-hand side, where she knew the little ballerina to be, and the ballerina gasped as the spheres were passed on to her. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dodo. ‘I’ve played this one before. It’s just peeled grapes or something.’
‘They’re too big to be grapes,’ the girl pointed out.
‘All right, maybe they’re … I don’t know, apricots. Or plums. Ugh!’ This last was as something new was passed on to her: a mass of slimy strands. ‘Spaghetti, I bet,’ she said, as the horseman announced, ‘Now his guts!’
The game continued, with more and more slimy and strange items being passed round – ‘His liver! His fingers! His heart!’ – until they got to the grand finale: ‘His brain!’
Something cold and clammy, a lump of bumps and ridges, landed in Dodo’s outstretched hands. ‘Cauliflower?’ she said out loud.
There was a deep, rumbling, unpleasant laugh. Suddenly a number of candles flared to life around the room. The light was hazy, but Dodo could see clearly that in her hands she held something grey and wrinkled.
It was not a cauliflower.
She looked up at the headless horseman, who was still laughing away. The laughter was coming only too clearly from the severed head sitting on his knees.
At this point, Dodo realised that this really wasn’t a normal party after all. She screamed.
Steven had also ended up in a separate room, herded together with all the boys who had played and lost at Musical Statues. From the ceiling hung strings, evenly spaced out, each with a pink-iced ring-shaped doughnut tied to the end. Steven’s upbringing had been worlds apart from Dodo’s twentieth-century childhood and Hallowe’en parties were something he’d never come across before, so he just stared, bewildered, at this display, wondering if it was some eccentric form of interior design. But when a masked cowboy shouted ‘Go!’ and all the boys ran forward, their hands clasped firmly behind their backs, it didn’t take him long to work out that this was a game where they had to try to take bites of the swinging doughnuts using just their mouths. Not caring much for games or for cakes, he stayed where he was.
Some doughnuts had been nibbled, but it was a few moments before the first full bite was managed. ‘I did it!’ cried a small boy dressed as an astronaut. (Steven approved of the costume, even though for him the spacesuit seemed laughably primitive.)
‘I did –’ The next cry of triumph became a shout of disgust. All around the room boys were yelling as their teeth pierced the doughnuts and a red substance ran out.
‘What on earth is that?’ demanded Steven.
‘Jam,’ said the cowboy. ‘Just jam. Doughnuts have jam inside. Didn’t you know?’
‘I’ve never seen a child react like that to jam!’ said Steven. He took a step forward, but the cowboy blocked his way.
‘It’s just jam,’ the cowboy repeated.
‘Jam isn’t that runny,’ said Steven. He made to step round the cowboy, but was blocked again. Behind the cowboy, a man in a vampire mask was removing the remaining doughnuts, while the boys, some still looking upset, sat back down, cross-legged, on the floor.
‘The game is over. It was jam,’ said the cowboy. He indicated that Steven should also sit on the floor. Reluctantly, unsure what course of action he should be taking, Steven complied.
The vampire and cowboy now pulled a large tub of water into the centre of the room. Apples floated on the surface. Again, Steven had little idea what this represented. Bath time for fruit?
The cowboy asked the spacesuited boy to join him, but Steven leaped to his feet and barred the boy’s path. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I think I’d better try this one out first. Just in case there’s anything nasty on offer.’ He marched up to the tub and looked down at the apples. ‘So … what am I supposed to do exactly?’
‘It’s apple-bobbing,’ said the young astronaut. ‘You have to pick up an apple using only your teeth.’
‘What is it about all these games and only using your teeth?’ muttered Steven. He leaned over the tub – and two pairs of arms grabbed him. Steven, caught by surprise and off balance, was unable to prevent the vampire and cowboy from tying his wrists together.
‘Just to make sure you don’t cheat,’ said the cowboy. His mask was fixed in a permanent grin, and Steven was sure the same smug expression was spread across the real face beneath.
‘I’m not a cheater,’ Steven growled through gritted teeth. He knelt down, baring his teeth, and set his sights on an apple.
The apple also bared its teeth.
Steven yelled as a dozen pieces of fruit clamped their jaws on to his nose, his ears, his cheeks. Somehow, they were dragging him down, into the water. An apple wedged itself in his still-open mouth; he tried to breathe but his head was underwater now.
But space pilots need cool heads, and Steven was not one to give in to panic. He stopped thrashing about, relaxed, and as he was drawn deeper into the tub he raised a knee on to its rim and pressed down hard. It wasn’t an easy or elegant move, but it succeeded. Steven ended up on his back, very wet, with the upturned tub on top of him, but he could breathe again. A spreading pool carried the fanged apples across the room, and as Steven pushed himself up on to his knees he was delighted to see that some were already nipping at the toes and ankles of the vampire and the cowboy.
Then he heard a scream. Dodo!
Steven got to his feet and slipped and slid his way to the door. ‘Dodo! I’m coming!’ he shouted, before realising he had no way of opening the door with his hands still tied behind his back. ‘Hold on!’
The door was opened from the other side and Dodo stood in front of him. ‘Oh, Steven! I’m so glad to – what happened to your face?’
‘Untie me, would you?’ he said, turning round and holding up his wrists as best he could. ‘We need to find the Doctor! Something pretty odd is going on around here.’
‘You’re telling me! I just found myself holding someone’s br– Argh!’ she cried out as she was grabbed from behind by the headless horseman, his head now under his arm.
But she’d loosened the ropes enough that Steven was able to shake his hands free. He grabbed hold of one of the biting apples and flung it at Dodo’s captor. The body let go of Dodo – and let go of its head too. Shrieking, the head rolled away, as the boys from Steven’s room and the girls from Dodo’s started flinging things – mainly apples, but also the occasional body part – at the horseman, the vampire, the cowboy, the witch and the skeleton.
‘Come on, let’s get the Doctor,’ said Steven, holding Dodo’s hand to help her through the throng.
‘But the children …’ she began.
‘They seem to be coping fine. Anyway, we can help them best by finding the Doctor.’
Together, they ran out into the huge hall. To their astonishment, it was almost exactly as they’d left it. The Doctor was sipping from a goblet, chatting to a Frankenstein’s monster. Dodo and Steven hurried over to him. ‘Doctor!’
The Doctor put up a hand, as if they were children needing to be taught not to interrupt their elders. ‘In a moment, in a moment. Now, my dear sir –’
‘Doctor!’ Dodo grabbed hold of his coat sleeve. ‘It’s important!’
Tutting and shaking his head, the Doctor apologised to the monster – ‘Excuse me, my dear fellow’ – and turned to them. ‘Well? What’s so important, hmm?’
‘There’s something really scary going on, Doctor,’ said Dodo.
He looked at her with tolerant pity. ‘My child! This is a Hallowe’en party. Being scary is the whole point!’
‘Not like this,’ said Steven. ‘I was attacked by apples!’ He saw the Doctor’s face, half disbelieving, half almost-laughing. ‘It wasn’t funny! Listen.’
They told him what had happened, and were about to head off to investigate further when a voice boomed out, ‘Time for our final game!’
Everyone fell silent at the announcement and turned to the speaker, a figure covered completely by a sheet, a cartoon-like ghost.
‘Murder in the Dark!’ the ghost continued. ‘Join us, everyone!’
The far door opened and all the children ran back into the room, laughing and excited, not a hint of the confusion or chaos or fear Dodo and Steven had just been telling the Doctor about.
‘Everyone will select a role at random.’ The masked figures began circulating through the crowd of children, holding out upside-down top hats full of white discs.
‘I don’t want to play,’ said Dodo, when a hat was offered to her. The masked ghoul continued to thrust the hat at her. ‘No! I won’t!’
‘I think you’d better,’ said Steven from behind her. She turned to see two masked Roman soldiers menacing the Doctor with their all-too-real-looking short swords. He had taken a disc and so had Steven. Reluctantly, Dodo did too. She just had time to see it had no word on it, just a question mark, when all the candles went out.
There was a scream. Long, piercing, but whether a man’s, woman’s or child’s she couldn’t tell. Then she felt someone bump into her.
Almost immediately the candles spontaneously started burning again.
Now Dodo herself shrieked in horror. In those few moments, things had changed.
The three of them – herself, Steven and the Doctor – were completely surrounded by every masked figure. The gunfighter, the headless horseman, the ghost, the gypsy violinist, the skeleton, the mandarin, the one-eyed ogre – all of them. And beyond that circle …
Every single child was lying on the floor.
‘Are they …?’ Dodo whispered, unable to utter the word ‘dead’.
‘It’s just make-believe,’ said Steven. ‘It’s just part of the game. Play-victims.’ He sounded convincing, but she knew he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
‘Who is the detective?’ boomed the sheet-covered ghost.
Silently, the Doctor held up his disc. The word DETECTIVE was written clearly on it.
‘And now, Doctor, you have to find the murderer. Not too difficult. You only have two suspects.’
Dodo looked down at the disc she held, the one with the question mark on it. She turned it over. On the other side, it read MURDERER. Steven held out his. It was identical.
‘Examine your suspects, Doctor,’ said the ghost. ‘Then make your decision. But be sure of your answer. Only one of your friends can walk free.’
‘And what happens to the other, hmm?’ demanded the Doctor.
‘The guilty must be punished.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ shouted Steven. ‘Neither Dodo nor I have hurt anyone. The Doctor knows that. Everyone knows that!’
‘But it’s the rules of the game. You accepted our invitation, joined our party. That means you must play by the rules. Or else. So decide. Who killed the party guests? One of your friends must be punished; the other will walk free.’
Dodo felt sick with fear. She choked back a sob of panic, and reached in her pocket for a handkerchief.
There was something else in there. Horrified, she pulled out a small blue bottle. It had a skull and crossbones on it.
‘Was it Miss Chaplet with poison in the punch?’
‘Someone must’ve put this in my pocket when they bumped into me!’ cried Dodo. ‘It’s not mine!’
‘Or Mr Taylor with drugs in the drink?’
Steven wordlessly pulled an identical blue bottle out of his pocket.
The ghost yelled, ‘Decide, Doctor!’
The surrounding crowd took a step forward, hands outstretched, ready to grab the guilty party.
‘It was me!’ Steven suddenly said. ‘I did it. That’s your answer, Doctor. Please.’
Dodo felt an indescribable rush of gratitude, but of course she couldn’t let him do that. ‘No,’ she said urgently. ‘Doctor, it was me. I … I poisoned them.’
The Doctor looked at her, met her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ Then he turned to the ghost. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I have my answer. The murderer is … you!’ But it wasn’t Dodo he indicated, or Steven. He spun round to face the masked mandarin, and ripped the rubber from his face. Below was a face almost identical to the mask – a face Dodo recognised. A face they’d last seen only a short time ago, when they’d escaped his world of toys and tricks. The Celestial Toymaker.
‘Hiding in plain sight, hmm?’ the Doctor said. ‘But who else could it be? Who else would twist games like this?’
‘Well done, Doctor,’ said the Celestial Toymaker. ‘But your answer is invalid. My toys –’ he made a gesture and all those surrounding them pulled off their masks to reveal crude dolls’ faces with dots for eyes and nose, a semi-circle for a mouth – ‘know that games must follow the rules to the very end. They are waiting for your decision. Steven or Dodo?’
‘Games must follow the rules, hmm? Well, if they must, they must. But I have a request. A music request! “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!” ’
The Celestial Toymaker looked as though he thought the Doctor had lost his mind. So did Steven.
But Dodo suddenly got it! She grabbed fiddle and bow from the gypsy violinist, and began to frantically scrape out the only tune she knew. All the dolls took a step towards them.
‘We’re playing Musical Statues again!’ declared the Doctor. ‘And when the music stops –’ obediently (and relieved) Dodo stopped playing – ‘all the players must stop moving!’
All the dolls froze, and the Doctor cried, ‘Dodo, Steven, run!’
The three of them fled through the frozen figures, and through the children on the floor, which were now revealed to be nothing more than floppy ragdolls of cotton and thread.
‘This is not Musical Statues! This is still Murder in the Dark!’ they heard the Toymaker yelling at his creatures as they dashed through the huge wooden door. ‘Get after them!’
But the Doctor, Steven and Dodo were already on the path. The jack-o’-lanterns were still lit and they hurriedly retraced their steps away from the mansion towards the TARDIS.
‘How did we get away?’ said Dodo when they stood in safety at last. ‘Did we win the game? I thought the Toymaker destroyed his world and everything in it if he was beaten.’
‘We won Murder in the Dark,’ said the Doctor. ‘I rightly identified the killer – the Toymaker himself. But starting a new game confused things for long enough to let us get away.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Dodo, who wasn’t entirely sure she did. But being back in the TARDIS was all that mattered. ‘You know, when we beat him last time, I thought it’d keep him off our backs for a bit longer than this.’
‘For those such as him, time is nothing,’ said the Doctor. ‘He could have spent a thousand years planning this since we last met, although only days have passed for us.’
‘You’d think he’d have made a better job of it, if he’d been planning it that long,’ put in Steven. ‘A twisted kids’ party!’
‘But he nearly got us!’ Dodo pointed out.
‘Oh nonsense, nonsense,’ said the Doctor. ‘It wasn’t as near as all that. Anyway, we got away. That’s the important thing.’
Dodo shivered. ‘Let’s never come here again.’
‘Definitely not!’ agreed Steven.
But had either of them glanced at the scanner screen, they would have seen a flashing blue light, an outline of another police box appearing.
The battle between the Doctor and the Toymaker would never end …