Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [41]
‘Scotch, please,’ she said faintly. The Doctor reached for the teapot. ‘What happened to you in Liverpool?’ she asked, unable to stay with the present subject. ‘I’ll never believe you had that clumsy accident.’
‘No,’ the Doctor admitted, pouring himself the last of the tea. ‘Someone tried to kill me. Several someones, actually.’
Fitz groaned. ‘Might have known. Someone’s always trying to kill you.’
‘Yes. I arouse hostility. Funny, isn’t it? I have such nice manners.’
‘Why?’ said Anji.
‘I must have been well brought up.’
‘Why,’ she said with overelaborate patience, ‘did someone try to kill you?’
‘And who was it?’ added Fitz, returning and handing Anji her drink. She noticed his was already half gone.
‘The magician, Octave. I wanted to help him, but I think he found my knowing his secret too frightening to deal with.’
‘You said “several someones”,’ said Anji.
‘Well, that was his secret. He was several people.’
Fitz frowned. ‘You mean like those split personalities you were talking about?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘That’s several personalities in one body. This is one personality in several bodies.’
‘One personality...’ Anji felt something creep along her spine. ‘That’s not... How did he get that way?’
‘That’s what I need to find out.’
‘Hang on,’ said Fitz. ‘You’re not going to go see him again?’
‘I have to know what happened.’
‘You don’t even know he’s connected with this time problem.’
‘Oh he is.’
‘Well, you’re not going alone!’
The Doctor smiled. ‘All right then,’ he said, so agreeably that Anji could only think that, of course, if he wanted to slip away from them he could and would do it in a minute. He wriggled down into the pillows. ‘Now, tell me what’s been happening. Have you heard from Chiltern?’
‘No,’ said Anji.
He frowned slightly. ‘That’s odd.’
‘We haven’t been to see him or Miss Jane,’ she said. ‘We didn’t want to leave while you were, uh...’
‘Yes, I understand. Anything else? Anything unusual at all?’
They looked at each other doubtfully.
‘Well,’ said Fitz, ‘there was that telescope thingy at the funfair.’
‘That was odd,’ she agreed.
‘In what way?’
‘It was this little room,’ said Fitz, ‘with six –’
‘No, eight.’
‘– eight sides and this mirror table in the centre, and there was this sort of, more of a periscope thingy, actually, and it –’
‘It caught moving images from outside the room and projected them on to the table surface.’ The Doctor had momentarily seemed interested, but now he shrugged. ‘A camera obscura.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A Victorian amusement based on the physical principle that if you let light through a pinhole into a dark room it will project an inverted image from outside on to the wall. The pinhole and lens that turns the image right side up again are in what you called the periscope, and the table top serves as a screen. They were quite an attraction before the age of motion pictures.’
‘What does the name mean?’ said Anji. ‘ “Hidden Chamber”?’
‘Well, “Lightless Chamber” maybe. It’s usually just translated “Dark Room”. As an experiment in optics it predates the camera, and you can see how the name was transferred –’
‘Hang on,’ said Fitz, not keen for a lecture on the history of the camera that he probably wouldn’t follow half of anyway. ‘It wasn’t exactly like that. We were seeing marshy fields, and some cottages. So it wasn’t showing us what was outside –’
‘– because outside was the fair,’ finished the Doctor. ‘Right.’ He sat up. ‘Let’s go.’
* * *
‘There seem to be at least two manifestations of the time problem showing up in human beings,’ the Doctor said in the cab. ‘The first is that people with certain forms of psychosis have developed abnormally sensitive temporal perception.’
‘Like Miss Jane seeing the future,’ said Fitz. ‘So she’s bonkers?’
‘Well,’ the Doctor’s tone became slightly acerbic, ‘that somewhat oversimplifies it. Certainly, her mind doesn’t work in the ordinary way.’
‘Well, how does it work, then? Isn’t there a bunch of her?’
‘Not really. More as if the core personality shattered, and then new persons grew around each fragment.