Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [34]
Maybe, he thought, removing his makeup after the show, he wouldn’t look tonight either. There was something morbid in this new obsession that he should resist. He put his dirty makeup towel in the hamper and checked to see that his nails were clean. It was hard to keep the greasepaint from lodging beneath them. He didn’t glance in the mirror. He never did. He saw himself often enough as it was.
Octave always went home in shifts, carefully, one at a time, by different routes and in and out of different doors. Now he sat in his flat waiting for himself and feeling almost cheerful. He wasn’t going to look, after all. Why should he? What difference would it make? He was being foolish and unmanly, allowing a mere whim to have so much power over him. It was only a floor, some old boards. The sight would be as meaningless as those historical sites where you knew some luckless prince or pretender had been slain and you looked at the stones or the tiles in the nineteenth-century sunlight and they were just stones or tiles, dusty and ordinary, nothing notable about them at all.
He was strong. He was in control. He heard the steps of his second returning self on the stairs, glanced up those stairs to the slit of light beneath the door, waited in the empty, echoing theatre, and smiled. No need to look. No need at all. It was over. It had never happened.
And then, at the last possible moment, he betrayed himself.
As his final self emerged from his cabinet at the left-hand side of the stage, the ghost light threw his shadow into the wings and somehow, before he realised it, his gaze followed the shadow. Then he was trapped, staring at the patch of floor only a few feet away. It wasn’t too late, of course. He could still turn and leave. There was no need to walk over to the spot. There was no need...
He walked over to the spot.
He was shocked. He stood paralysed, staring down. True, there was no stain. Just as he expected, the floor had been revarnished, so that it gleamed slightly. That was just as he had imagined. What he had not imagined, had never even thought of, were the gouges, not terribly deep, but deep enough that the sanding hadn’t eradicated them, and still visibly pale under the new varnish. Scars in the wood. Made by... what? Octave’s hand sought out and gripped the edge of the curtain. Surely not... surely the man’s broken bones hadn’t actually... come... through...
Octave gasped and turned aside. He felt sick. In his miserable flat, his various selves gripped themselves and swayed. He caught the curtain with both hands, held himself up, pivoted slowly so that he faced on to the stage. The ghost light glowed feebly, Above it, the high flyspace seemed as dark as if there were nothing there. Behind it, the opposite wings, through which he would have to walk to reach the exit, looked blackly impassable. He took a deep breath. This was nonsense. Nonsense. Why this cowardice now? He was not going to be one of those pathetic murderers undone by their weakling consciences...
And even as he thought this, a figure emerged from the shadowed wings, and he understood that indeed he was not going to be one of those guilt-stricken, self-accused, self-betraying killers. That soon, in fact, he was no longer going to be anything at all.
* * *
Anji and Fitz knew there was nothing they could do to help the Doctor, but they went regularly to the medical lab anyway. They always found him the same: ashen and motionless. He was still wearing the coarse, white hospital-issue nightshirt, stained near the collar with the blood from his mouth. Anji had cleaned his face when they’d brought him back, but she hadn’t liked to – it felt like an imposition. And his cold immobility frightened her.
Fitz assumed this was his usual healing trance, except that he didn’t heal now as he once had and also he really didn’t seem to be breathing. Watching him now, Fitz could have sworn his chest