Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [139]
So, what happened next? Yes. I remember. The Doctor turned on his heel, and started pacing the floor in front of his box. The Celestis stayed hushed all the while. Now, to be honest, I don’t think all of them liked the idea of this deal. I think some of them didn’t want to get involved with the Doctor, even on their own terms. But no one wanted to say it out loud.
‘Very well,’ the Doctor said, after a minute or two. ‘It’s a bargain. But with one or two minor stipulations.’
The word “stipulations” always made the Celestis edgy, but they kept quiet. The Doctor lifted up his hand, and swept it around the Grand Hall, pointing at all the blank-eyed servants standing about the place. Me included.
‘These unfortunates,’ the Doctor said. ‘I want you to free them.’
I wish I knew how I felt at that moment, but I don’t. All I know is, the Speaker started rustling his robes. ‘We could release our servants from their contracts, if we chose to. But it would be an empty gesture. We would simply recruit more of them from the land of the living. You gain nothing from this stipulation.’
‘Every soul saved makes a difference,’ the Doctor told him. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
The Speaker thought it over. Then he said; ‘Acceptable.’
Everyone started grumbling in the galleries. The Doctor nodded. ‘Good. Stipulation number two...’
He kept talking, of course. But I don’t remember any more of what he said.
I just remember seeing the faces of the other servants, the ones who’d been lucky enough to be in the Doctor’s sight when he’d swept his hand around the Hall. I’d hated all those other slaves, because they’d been so empty, so blank, so... all right, I’ll say it. So dead. But things were different, now the Doctor had made his bargain. For that one moment in Mictlan, they looked real again. They looked human. Even the ones who’d never been human in the first place.
Then there was light. Do I need to describe the light? It’s everywhere, now. I can’t see anything, I can’t feel anything, I can only remember.
Maybe I shouldn’t try to remember. I get the feeling I should let go, let the light take me. But I don’t know. I’ve been struggling to keep my identity for so long, I don’t want to lose it now.
My name is Kristopher Patrick Englund. I’m dead. I’m dead, but no longer walking, no longer talking. I’m telling myself my own story, over and over, until I forget all the little details, and the last of me finally goes to meet the light. I’m struggling, because that’s the only thing I know how to do.
Let me see. Should I start again? I think I should.
I remember being on an operating table...
14
FINAL OFFER
Kathleen Bregman, a.k.a. Lieutenant Kathleen Bregman, a.k.a. Miss Chicken-Legs, could still walk, talk, slouch, and scratch. As far as she was concerned, these were good signs that she was still alive. Unfortunately, nobody else around here seemed to agree with her.
The streets were full of people, although the people weren’t much more than shadows. They lurked in the doorways of buildings, and skulked behind streetlamps in the alleyways, but they looked scared to step out into the wet-Thursday-afternoon daylight. Their features were half-formed, indistinct, all traces of identity scrubbed away by the sheer tedium of the place. Bregman had tried talking to them, once or twice. They’d been quite adamant they were dead.
‘Dead?’ Bregman had queried.
Yes, they’d told her, definitely dead. This was Mictlan, the land of the dead, the place where souls were sent once they were used up and hollowed out. Bregman had read enough South American Demonika comics to recognise the name. This, in her own poxy orthodox Euro-Christian terms, was purgatory.
When Bregman had been a child, she’d lived near a corporation-owned housing estate in the Lausanne sub-suburbs, one of those concrete-lined holes the Swiss government liked to shovel Dutch immigrants and welfare addicts into. The sky had always been grey there; even the clouds had been uglier than the ones