Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [42]
‘And what’s the second manifestation?’ said Anji.
‘Octave’s an example of that, and as I said, he’s just the opposite. He’s been fractured so that he exists physically in simultaneous multiple presents.’
‘How?’
‘I suspect a time-travel experiment went wrong.’
‘You mean he broke up when he tried to use a time machine?’ said Fitz. ‘What was he trying to do – travel to a lot of different times all at once?’
‘And where’d it come from?’ said Anji.
‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘I don’t know what Octave was attempting, and I don’t know where the machine came from. There didn’t used...’ He shut his eyes and passed his hand over them, as if he had a sudden headache. ‘It wasn’t always like this,’ he muttered. ‘Time travel used to be restricted.’
‘By whom?’ said Anji.
The Doctor didn’t open his eyes. His face looked blank and lost. ‘I don’t remember.’ And he was silent the rest of the way to the Crystal Palace.
In fact, Anji discovered when they got there and she tugged his sleeve, he’d fallen asleep. He woke up bright-eyed – ‘Are we there? I love funfairs!’ – and hopped enthusiastically out of the cab. Talk about your mood swings, she thought, following. Chiltern should study him. Maybe it wasn’t just that being unstable made you more sensitive to time, maybe it worked the other way round too, and being sensitive to time, let alone travelling in it, made you unstable. Oh, that was silly. She wasn’t unstable. Was she? And what about Fitz? She glanced at Fitz, shambling along uncomfortably in his Victorian suit, and decided maybe it would be better just to abandon this line of thought.
The Black Chamber of Secrets was shut up, with a sign on the door announcing it wouldn’t open for an hour. ‘Oh, too bad,’ the Doctor said unconvincingly. He clapped his hands together and gazed around. ‘Where’s the roundabout?’
They located and rode the roundabout. Also the merry-go‐round, the swan boat ride, the balloon ascent, a rickety rail contraption called The Whip Of Doom, the sailing ships, and a gondola-car switchback. They looked for a while for a helter-skelter till the Doctor remembered it wouldn’t be invented till 1905.
‘No dodgems yet either,’ he said mournfully. ‘Not till the ’twenties.’
‘And none of those turn-you‐upside-down thingies,’ said Fitz in the same tone.
Anji, who had had quite enough whirling, steered them back towards Scale’s exhibit. Approaching from a new direction, they passed a showfront right beside the Black Chamber of Secrets that she hadn’t noticed earlier, and for a second she was brought up short by the paintings in exceptionally vivid colours of grotesque human figures – a man with only half a torso, a bearded figure in a gown, an armless, legless creature puffing on a hookah, like a parody of the Caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. The signs proclaimed NATURE’S TRAGIC AND MYSTERIOUS ACCIDENTS and SIGHTS TERRIBLE AND WONDERFUL. Anji looked away angrily. ‘How can anyone stare at those poor people? It’s patronising and rude and cruel.’
‘They have to earn their living,’ said the Doctor mildly. ‘If the Victorian public were more delicate about these things, the poor freaks would be doomed to the workhouse.’
‘I don’t like being stared at because I’m different.’
‘But you never control the situation. These folk do. They make the public pay to, literally, patronise them.’
‘Looks like Scale’s back,’ said Fitz, a bit apprehensively. Sure enough, the dissipated proprietor was once again slouched in his chair by the open door. The Doctor examined him for a moment before approaching. As they came over, Scale straightened up and attempted a welcoming smile. ‘Wonders inside. Impossible visions of the unexpected. The laws of time themselves –’ He squinted at Fitz and Anji. ‘Seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘We told our mate how great it was,’ said Fitz hurriedly. ‘He couldn’t wait.’
Scale looked the Doctor up and down. ‘Quite