Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [0]
Camera Obscura
by Lloyd Rose
The Doctor sat alone and listened to the beat of his remaining heart. He had never got used to it. He never would. The single sound where double should be. What was this new code hammering through his body? What did it mean‘ Mortal. No, he’d always known he could die. Not mortal. Damaged. Crippled. Through his shirt, his fingers sought out the thick ridge of his scar.
Human...
The Doctor’s second heart was taken from his body ‐ for his own good, he was told. Removed by his sometime ally, sometime rival, the mysterious time-traveller, Sabbath. Now, as a new danger menaces reality, the Doctor unwillingly finds himself working with Sabbath again. From a séance in Victorian London to a wild pursuit on Dartmoor, the Doctor and his companions work frantically to unravel the mystery of this latest threat to Time...
Before Time itself unravels...
This is another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth Doctor.
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Epilogue
Thanks to:
About the Author
Credits
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To Paul Cornell
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Prologue
‘I’ve teeth in my hip. My sister’s teeth that should have been. I killed her in the womb.’
The young woman waited, but her visitor had no reaction.
‘So and that would be why,’ she continued, ‘I was a murderer before I was born. And that would be why, then, I murdered all those other small ones.’
‘You said at your trial you didn’t kill them.’
She shrugged.
‘It was only me talking, wasn’t it? Everyone knows it was me that killed them. They tell me the newspapers call me the Angel-Maker.’
He didn’t seem interested in what the papers said. ‘At your trial, you claimed that you killed an adult male – a man whose body was, in fact, found downstairs from the room in which the slaughtered children lay. You said that you had come to be interviewed for a position and that he attempted to assault you.’
She raised a leg, setting her foot up on the seat of her chair. Her skirt slid down her thigh. The man’s dark eyes remained on her face. Funny, that usually got their interest. He was funny. When he’d come in, not stooping but seeming to because he was so big and the room was so small, he’d looked around and said, ‘Ah, the ambience of a Victorian insane asylum.’ As if it were a joke. But not a joke on her. On the place.
‘And it must be that I was lying, then,’ she said. ‘Or it must be that I don’t remember. That God in His mercy didn’t let me remember.’
‘Do you believe in God?’
She stared at him for a moment. That was a new question. And he was asking it seriously. ‘Sure and you’re trying to trap me,’ she said. ‘To get me to blaspheme.’ He looked like he could be an agent of the Devil. Big and dark. Powerful. Uncaring.
‘If you believe your soul is damned already,’ he said, ‘what’s a little blasphemy?’
‘It’s evil you are,’ she said.
He smiled, gently but with an edge of irony. ‘Do you think you’re evil?’
‘Sure and I must be, after what I did.’
‘If you don’t remember what you did, are you still responsible?’
‘Someone is,’ she said. ‘They were all eight dead. And all the blood.’
‘The wounds on the children were almost identical to the wounds on the man.’
‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘it must have been me.’ Bored, she lowered her leg. All the questions were the same.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You look about eighteen or nineteen.’ She shrugged again. ‘How long have you been in service?’
‘It’s five years ago that I left Ireland. I was in Liverpool as a skivvy first. Then I did the same here for the Porters, till he lost all his money in that speculation.’
‘How would you like to work for me?’
She laughed.