Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [109]
He paused to consider the situation: a guard at each of the several doors, but none, so far as he could tell, inside. Each door guard periodically strolled up and down a length of the building, checking for anything suspicious. None of them struck the Doctor as particularly alert or concerned, which didn’t surprise him. There wasn’t much reason to break into the Crystal Palace when a funfair was there except to vandalise the exhibits, a noisy enterprise at which the perpetrator was bound to be caught. Guarding the place was pro forma.
Which made it simple for him to get inside.
For a second, he stopped in the middle of the silent fair – the frozen rides and mute calliopes – and gazed up to where the light tapered out and the ceiling blended blackly with the night. There was something eerie about the shadowed stillness of this place that was in daylight such a whirl of movement and colour. All that energy, now suppressed and sullen, as if the unmoving rides were waiting tensely to swoop, or pounce. The carved figures on the showfronts, their painted eyes shaded, had this same guarded, anticipatory stealth.
In the dim light, the Black Chamber of Secrets had a forlorn air, small and shabby compared to the elaborate showfronts on either side. As the Doctor approached, he thought of hapless, pathetic Scale, of Sebastian Chiltern torn to pieces by his own brother and Nathaniel Chiltern’s stoically accepted half-life. So much pain from that infernal machine just on this small scale, and unimaginably, cataclysmically worse to come if he and Sabbath didn’t find the renegade Chiltern. Wherever he was.
He picked the chamber’s simple lock and eased open the door. The light from the midway, though faint, allowed him to see all of the small room. But just to be certain, he stepped in and lit the lamp.
No mirror. Not on a table in the centre, not propped against one of the walls, not – he checked briefly – behind the door. The Doctor nodded, sad but unsurprised. Well, at least this narrowed the field. How many places in London could a monster, his time machine and an extra mirror go? Back to Chiltern’s clinic? Or would it have made just as much sense to stay –
His eye was caught by a gleam across the room. The only furniture remaining in the chamber was a draped table shoved against the far wall, a low, boxy thing swaddled in black cloth. The Doctor had taken it for a covered pile of sacking or folded canvas. Now he realised there was something sitting on it, an object so incongruous that several bewildered seconds passed before he took in what he was looking at.
A toaster.
It occurred to the Doctor that he might be dreaming. Certainly, everything suddenly had a warped, disorienting quality, rather like his reflection in the object’s curved chrome surface, distorting and spreading as he walked slowly to the table and bent for a closer look. It was a toaster, all right – one of those nicely solid round-edged ones from the 1950s, with chunky black plastic handles. The Doctor stood with his hands on his knees, staring foolishly, as if the thing might abruptly metamorphosise into something more period-appropriate, like a toasting fork. He reached to pick it up.
The table moved.
The Doctor sprang back. The table tilted, widened. This wasn’t a dream. He was chillingly awake. He backed against the wall, helplessly, as the table curved, straightened –
– and stood up.
For an instant, the black cloth parted, showing the Doctor what he had finally, much too late, guessed – that, like a shiny metal tumour, the toaster was growing from a human back. The figure turned, slowly and clumsily, dragging its rustling robe, and things that the robe concealed.
‘Doctor,’ whispered Chiltern. ‘So good to see you again.’
The Doctor’s gaze had been fixed on the trailing robe, on an ill-shaped, restless bulge where Chiltern’s left leg should be. Now he raised his eyes. Sebastian’s face,