Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [35]
‘The TARDIS will fix him,’ he said.
Anji stared at the unconscious figure, biting the edge of her thumb. ‘Why hasn’t he died?’
* * *
The Doctor was dying and not doing a very good job of it. This had begun to annoy him. It seemed a simple enough task. Get most of your inner organs crushed. Expire. Basic cause-and‐effect. What was the problem?
He seemed to be walking in the TARDIS. Corridor after corridor of white-roundeled walls. Turn a corner, more of the same. It was very boring. Maybe this was death. But he didn’t really think so – at the edges of his unconsciousness, he could feel his nerves screaming. He was still attached to the body.
The body. What an odd way to put it. He supposed this was the detachment of near-death. Certainly, he felt strangely separate from his physical form. As if it were a coat he’d taken off and any minute now he’d round a corner and find another one. Peculiar notion. He suddenly glanced back. For a moment, he had thought he wasn’t alone. Who is that on the other side of me? But there was only him. Not even a shadow for companion. He stood for a while staring at the blank floor, thinking that ought to remind him of something. But all he could think of was Peter Pan. He walked on.
After a time, he began to feel that he was getting somewhere after all. Or, more specifically, that there was somewhere to get. He had a sense that any minute now he’d round a corner and actually see something. And sure enough, he took a turn and there, at the end of the corridor, he glimpsed an open door, a splash of green and sunlight. Then, as if the walls had moved, it shifted out of sight.
The Doctor began to jog. He came around another corner and, yes, there was the door again, and then, in a blink, it was gone. He sped up. Another corner. Another glimpse. Another disappearance. He was becoming angry. This was ridiculously difficult. He was of half a mind not to die after all.
Suddenly as he came around yet another corner, he realised that it wasn’t the walls that were shifting at all. As the tantalising green doorway vanished, he felt just a tiny tug, like a pluck at his coat, jerking him back. He stopped and stood very still, one hand against the wall, head down. He shut his eyes. If he had been breathing, he would have held his breath. He concentrated... There. Yes, there was something. It was like... He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head to look over his shoulder. Behind him, as if it had come out of his back, a silvery filament, thin as spiderweb, stretched tautly away and out of sight. He watched it. Very faintly, it was throbbing. Not too fast. Steadily. Rhythmically.
The Doctor’s eyes snapped open. Fitz and Anji jumped. The Doctor said, ‘You son of a bitch!’
* * *
Chapter Eight
Sabbath had taken a mansion in Regents Park built by Nash in the previous century, a finely proportioned house filled with tall windows and light. Its elegant rationalism amused him. He made his office in the library, whose polished shelves reached to within a foot or two of the high ceiling and which looked out through French doors on to a parterre of low boxwood centred with an eighteenth-century armillary sundial. Near the doors, he placed a graceful mahogany table to use as a desk. If this occasionally held instruments an observer would have found perplexing, Sabbath wasn’t concerned: he had no visitors, and he didn’t worry about intruders.
Which meant that he was, if not alarmed exactly, certainly brought to attention when one sunny morning in the week following the Doctor’s adventures in Liverpool he sank into the leather armchair by the fireplace, tome in hand, and heard a rude spurting noise.
Sabbath started and turned red. Recovering himself, he rose and examined the chair cushion. Lifting this exposed