Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [46]
‘I found this on my fridge. Not actually this. I found this diagram taped to my fridge. This is just a copy.’
‘When was this?’
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ admitted Bob.
The Doctor ran a finger over the diagram, tracing its geometry, its symbols. ‘Quite a professional job,’ he murmured. Bob was shivering. It was weird to watch the Doctor shift frames like this – science fiction one moment, fantasy the next.
‘Someone meant to give you a good scare.’
Bob relaxed a little. ‘So you don’t think it’s for real,’ he said. ‘It’s just meant to spook us out.’
‘When it comes to the occult,’ said the Doctor, ‘there’s real, and then there’s real. Your intruder, and I think we can safely assume it was Miss Swan, may have had one of three intentions. One, she noticed your interest in things arcane and thought she would use superstition against you. Two, she is a believer herself and hoped to harm you in some paranormal way. In either case, you have nothing to worry about.’
‘What’s three?’ said Bob.
‘She actually has a command of paranormal powers, and this symbol has some genuine and measurable purpose,’
pronounced the Doctor. ‘You know, it’s amusing – in the theatre, the term machinery is sometimes used to mean the supernatural elements in the play. Gods and goblins produced from the stage machinery’
‘I don’t get it,’ Bob said. ‘Do you believe in this stuff, or don’t you?’
The Doctor leaned against the desk, holding Bob’s scribbled impression of the seal in his hands. ‘The world is full of real and strange powers. It is also full of cheap and shallow imitations of those powers. Half-remembered keys to the energy of the universe. Half-invented rituals. Mental practices that have become detached from the cultures that made sense of them.’ He looked up at Bob. ‘ Your Key of Solomon and Goetia are the equivalent of watching a television with the plug pulled out. The form is there, but not the content.’
Bob had a death-grip on his personal talisman. ‘What about the device? What if it gave her some kind of power?’
‘I think we’d know about it already,’ said the Doctor simply.
Cold rain started to fall, carrying the fresh promise of snow to follow. The Doctor went back to his rental and turned on the radio, catching a little distant opera between the crackling of static. I don’t think he slept – he was just waiting for the rest of us to wake up. I crawled back into the passenger seat of the RV.
Bob stayed looking up at the sky for a while, polling on a beanie against the fat, chilly drops of rain. We were miles from the nearest electrical power, the nearest phone. But Bob was surrounded by energies he couldn’t see or touch. Like the rain, falling everywhere, those energies connected everyone.
He wasn’t safe in the dark, but vibrating in a network of power like a bug fished out of the air by a spider’s web. He would never be invisible.
The Doctor had brought about a million chocolate bars for breakfast. He kept finding more and more of them in the pockets of his suit, along with a bottle of chocolate milk for Bob. We sat in the campervan, shivering our socks off. ‘I’ll never be mean about a hotel room again,’ said Peri.
‘What’s on the agenda for today?’ said Bob.
‘Our goal now is to follow Swan’s movements without her being able to follow ours. That means we keep moving and we stay anonymous.’
Peri said, ‘So how do we know what she’s doing if we can’t use the phone or computers?’
The Doctor raised a finger. ‘Actually, we can do both. We just have to be very careful about it.’
There was a line of telephone poles sticking up from the forest floor, their wire-laden heads looming over the road. Bob and the Doctor picked their way down the steep slope, grabbing onto trunks and shrubs to avoid a long bum’s rush into the wet undergrowth below. Peri and I spread a map on the bonnet of the campervan so we’d have an excuse if anyone pulled over. The occasional car cruised by, but no-one disturbed us.
The Doctor