Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [32]
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘No.’ Fitz deflated. ‘Neither do I, really.’
* * *
To the Angel-Maker, it seemed as if there were a crack in the world. A very thin one, to be sure. Hardly wider than a thread. But dangerous, nonetheless, like a hairline crack in a jug that slowly, imperceptibly weakened the vessel, until suddenly one day, all unwarning, it fell to pieces. So might the world fall to pieces if nothing were done.
The big, dark man – who indeed, as she had suspected, was not a doctor after all, and who had told her his name was Sabbath – agreed with her about the crack. He couldn’t see it with his eyes, as she did, but he detected it on his instruments. These were fabulous things, like the old scrying mirrors or stones, but somehow, he explained, connected to the light in the new, brilliant, electrical bulbs that he had in the study of his grand house. They sat in this new, strange light, he in a leather armchair and she on a slender, petit-point covered one, in front of the fireplace – a large thing, with a graceful marble mantel, not like the narrow little coal fires of the houses she’d worked in – and he’d explained to her that there was a crack in time – he called it a fissure – and that she had the gift to see this fissure and the monsters it produced.
This made sense to her. She had known people with the sight all her life. They too saw things that others said didn’t exist. And these monsters – these freaks of time, as Sabbath called them – stood oddly in the world, too flat somehow, yet also too thick, and not angled right. They were wrong things, things that pulled the normal inside out, like a walking corpse or a stone that spoke. She feared and hated them on sight, with the deep, life-preserving terror she might feel towards a cliff edge or a whirlpool.
According to Sabbath – he did not let her address him as ‘Mister’ – these time freaks were actually part of the fissure, not just a manifestation of it. So destroying one closed up the fissure just a bit. This made sense to her too. It was like Satan coming through evil people. When the evil person was dead, there was one less doorway for the Devil.
About whether Sabbath were an agent of the Devil she had suspended judgement. On her first nights in the house, lying between sheets soft as the petal of a flower, she had not slept, waiting for his approach. The Angel-Maker wasn’t vain. She knew she was nothing much to look at. That hadn’t stopped men before. They were a sex that would have congress with farm animals, so why not with her? She felt safe with Sabbath; she wouldn’t have minded with him. Nor did she mind when he didn’t come. She began to sleep, deeply and sweetly, without dreams, and waked warm and relaxed to find, always, a fine porcelain coffeepot and cup on a silver tray beside the bed. Whoever brought this, she never heard them. She could not imagine Sabbath doing it. Perhaps he had invisible servants.
Why shouldn’t he? She thought him capable of anything. He showed her marvels. In the zoo were animals with necks longer than she was tall. Overlooking the stony beach at Brighton stood a palace. In what had once been an even grander mansion than his, she saw the ancient dead of Egypt, swathed in linen and laid in magnificently carved boxes. Using an orrery and a lunary, he had explained how the orbits of the planets worked and why there were eclipses. He taught her chess, which she liked, because when she looked at the pieces she saw immediately dozens of their possible permutations. It was like looking into the future.
And naturally, any little errand she could perform for him, she was glad to do.
* * *
For three