Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [21]
‘Who are you?’
She started. For an awful moment she thought it was herself who had spoken, in some other voice, some other person. But no, she hadn’t, there really was someone. She pressed her face to the grille. She didn’t see anyone outside. ‘Is someone there?’
‘Next to you.’ The voice was a man’s. ‘In the next cell. Who was there with you earlier?’
‘Doctors.’
‘Chiltern?’
‘And another man. Who are you?’
‘Listen,’ said the voice intently, ‘I don’t belong here. I know how that sounds. I know it sounds mad –’
‘Yes it does,’ she said. ‘I’m ill but I’m not stupid.’
‘Wait – don’t go! Don’t go!’
She curled her fingers through the grid. The voice seemed to be coming from the left. ‘I’m still here,’ she said.
‘You oughtn’t to be here, should you? This is the violent ward.’
‘There were no other rooms.’
‘Doing good business, is he?’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I’m here by mistake.’ In spite of herself, she laughed. ‘No, listen listen! He’s locked me up, but he’s the mad one. He doesn’t realise it –’
‘I’m sorry, but I have to go now,’ she said, and left the window. She left the room too, and the ward, and went out into the garden. She found a bench by a sunny wall overgrown with still-open morning glories, and sat there and thought. She was afraid of what she thought about, but not as afraid as she had been of many other things.
* * *
‘His brother, eh?’ said the Doctor. ‘And he says impossible things – though, obviously, they’re not impossible to say.’
‘Impossible things,’ said Fitz, ‘are what we run into six of before breakfast.’
They were in the TARDIS, in one of the many rooms containing inexplicable, at least to Fitz and Anji, machinery, looking at an equally inexplicable readout that appeared to be a graph of some sort, with ominous-looking spikes and even an occasional smudge – though perhaps, Anji thought, that was from the printer. The Doctor sometimes got confused about which was the correct ink to put in.
‘Significant,’ she said of the graph, ‘but opaque.’
‘Well it is, rather,’ said the Doctor in dissatisfaction, smoothing the paper on the table, as if that would help. ‘The time sensors aren’t set up for exactly this type of phenomenon, whatever it is, and the location and intensity and even the exact number of disruptions can’t be detected with any precision.’
‘How can you be sure the disruptions are even human beings?’ said Anji.
‘Oh that was simple. I cross-referenced with some biological scans.’
‘And you’ve just been guessing about the form the disturbances would take?’
‘I never guess,’ said the Doctor, piqued. He turned the graph around, apparently to see whether reading it upside down would help. Or perhaps, she thought, he’d had it upside down all along. ‘In order to survive in time, all sentient beings have to be protected from full perception of it, rather the way the human eye filters out most light waves. Any time disruption linked to humans is either going to cause or be the result of mental aberration.’
‘Why didn’t you just start interviewing nuts?’ said Fitz. ‘Like the inmates at Chiltern’s place?’
‘The difficulty with schizophrenics is that they’re often not very articulate.’ The Doctor gave the paper a half-turn and looked pleased. ‘And as my experience with Constance Jane showed, even if they’re articulate, they’re unlikely to know what’s happening to them.’
‘What’s causing this?’ said Anji. ‘And shouldn’t it show up on that graph somewhere, some big spike or something?’
‘Yes it should, but it’s not. Whatever caused the disruption may be gone or...’
‘What?’ she said after the Doctor had stared silently at the graph for a while.
‘Or switched off.’
‘Switched