Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [1]
He nodded, smiling that smile again. ‘They are.’
She looked around the small room: the bare brick walls, the simple furniture and threadbare rug, the barred windows. ‘And what did you give them, then, to buy me?’
‘I explained that I was a doctor, a specialist in the treatment of the criminally insane. That I wanted to take you on as a private patient.’
‘Oh, and it was only that? There was no money?’
‘There was money. This institution needs money.’
‘So it’s that you have bought me.’
‘If you don’t like the work, you can leave any time.’
She snorted. ‘Oh, and it’s likely they’ll allow that.’
‘They no longer matter.’
She stared at him for a long moment.
‘So is it,’ she said, ‘that you want to do the dirty thing with a dirty murderess? Is that your gentleman’s pleasure?’
He was neither shocked nor insulted. ‘No.’
‘Or is it just that you want a famous killer scrubbing your floors and emptying your slops?’
‘I live in an odd place,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to do any of that.’
‘And what is it, then, you’ll be having me do?’
‘Why did you kill that man?’ he said. ‘Really.’
‘He –’
‘No, please. Even that rather obtuse coroner could tell he was killed from behind. I’m certain that men have forced themselves on you. But not this one.’
Her eyes dropped before his dark regard. ‘No,’ she whispered. She put her hand to her mouth in fear. Why was she telling him this?
‘So why did you kill him?’
She looked up at him. His gaze was steady. He knew, she thought suddenly. He would understand.
‘He was wrong,’ she said.
‘Wrong how?’
‘A wrong thing. He was... It’s that he was here, and not here.’
‘How did you know this?’
‘I could tell,’ she mumbled, lowering her eyes again.
There was silence for a moment.
‘Tell me about time,’ he said.
She raised her eyes. ‘Time?’
‘The past and the present. The future.’
He knew! Her lips parted in wonder. But she still hesitated. His eyes reassured her, held her up, held her. ‘Sure and they’re the same thing,’ she whispered. ‘All the same they are.’
He smiled, a real smile, not an ironic one. She thought his face was beautiful then. He held out his hand. She placed hers in it. So big. But he would not hurt her. ‘I don’t believe you’re that doctor,’ she said. ‘I believe it’s just that you’re pretending to be him.’
He laughed.
* * *
Chapter One
The Doctor sat alone in a first-class compartment and listened to his heart.
He didn’t like to do this, and at first he had been able to distract himself with the rhythm of the train wheels: thackata-thack, thackata-thack, thackata-thack, thackata-thack. Like the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, he thought, gazing out of the window and remembering a future a century from now in which the landscape would be dotted not with factory chimneys but with dark Satanic nuclear power plants. Thackata-thack, thackata-thack... But slowly, under that relentless mechanical clanking, the sound of his own body reasserted itself. The thump of his single heart.
He never had got used to it. He never would. That solitary beat, surrounded by emptiness. The single sound where a double should be. Echoless. Isolated. Alone.
When it had first happened, the experience was so strange, so other, that he had been subject to sudden awful plunges of fear. What was this? Whose body was he in? If he held his chest, he felt silence. This thin, dull thud – the monotonous rhythm – like the tick of a clock, a dead machine. It was not him. It was not him. All the other symptoms – the weariness, the slower healing, the loss of his respiratory-bypass system – were nothing compared to this horrible, hollow absence.
The thread of his pulse seemed to him a trickle, a leak, no more. A signal of something diminished, something running down. He was colder now, cold all the time, especially his hands and feet and, comically, the edges of his ears, and sometimes his lips or the tip of his nose. The little flutter of warmth wasn’t enough. At times it seemed barely there, and he thought of sparks flaring and dying, of subatomic particles