Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [101]
‘Who else is here?’ said the Doctor suddenly.
Sabbath saw nothing. ‘There’s only rock.’
‘Yes? No. Who is it?’
‘There is no one.’
‘There is.’
‘You’re hallucinating.’
‘Or you’re blind. Drawing us upward.’
Towards the light and the air. The light a tiny opalescent blur far above, floating on the surface of the water. The air lost to the cold silence. But he would not die. The fools had done their best, but it would take greater than they to murder him. Towards the light and the air. His lungs crushed against themselves; they would scream if they could. The air and the light. The blood starved for oxygen beat in his head: breathe, breathe! Then the chains slipped from him, the Doctor released him –
Sabbath surfaced into consciousness, gasping for breath. The afternoon sun lay in a golden bar across the foot of his bed, and the Angel-Maker was gripping his hand as if she would break it.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-three
Bathed and dressed, the Doctor sat on his bed and happily pulled on fresh socks. He was still a bit intoxicated with his return to full life, and everything, even socks, struck him slightly breathless with its richness, its sheer actuality. This will pass, he thought sadly, this wonder and appreciation. Not entirely, but it will pass.
He got a good shove in this less-appreciative direction when the door opened and the Angel-Maker came in.
The Doctor stood up fast, then caught himself. ‘Sabbath ready to go yet?’ he asked casually.
‘It’s that he’s fixing the course. Sure, and you’re a rabbit,’ she added disdainfully. ‘Jumping up like you did.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the Doctor with what he thought was, under the circumstances, remarkable patience, ‘but you may remember that the last time we met you stabbed me.’
‘Only because you willed it.’
‘You contributed something to the encounter. I seem to recall, for example, that you brought the knife.’
She shrugged, as if the details were trivial, and sat on the bed.
‘Do you want something?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing you need fear.’
‘That’s extraordinarily reassuring. Thank you so much for telling me. Why are you here?’
‘Harming one of you is the same as to harm the other. Why would that be so?’
‘We share a heart.’
Her eyes widened and she almost started to cross herself. Instead she shook her head uneasily.
‘Why does that bother you? You’ve seen things as strange – one person in many bodies, many people in one body.’
She continued to shake her head, stubbornly. ‘The heart is never the same.’
‘It’s only an organ.’
‘It’s never the same.’
‘Well, in any case,’ said the Doctor, in no mood for a biology lecture, ‘that’s the reason we’re mutually mortal. I can’t die as long as he’s alive.’
‘And if he were to die?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor, uneasy himself now. ‘Probably it would also work the other way.’ He almost said that, being human, Sabbath might not have his resilience, but decided that would add an unnecessary complication to her attitude towards him.
She looked him up and down, then got up and came over to him. The Doctor held his ground. She examined his face, as if she might find something she hadn’t seen there before. ‘He says that you’ve forgotten everything. There’s a story that in heaven we drink from a river that lets us forget and so are reborn innocent into God’s love. I think it’s that for yourself you must be innocent, and that is why you’ve forgotten. And that your innocence is a cheat and a lie.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the Doctor expressionlessly.
‘Always I was knowing you’d bring harm to him.’
‘He yoked himself to me without my consent,’ said the Doctor, ‘and it’s up to him to deal with the consequences. It’s not my fault he doesn’t understand what this so-called power of mine that he envied is, or that his theft has results he didn’t bargain for.’
‘It’s that he saved