Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [96]
‘You sure?’
‘I’m fine, really.’ She moved to help him tuck the blanket around the Doctor. From down the hall, the Angel-Maker’s sobbing could still be heard. ‘I wish she’d shut up.’
‘It’s that old Irish grief you hear about, isn’t it?’ Fitz said soberly. ‘Like the banshee.’
‘I suppose.’ She wiped the Doctor’s damp brow with the towel from the washstand. ‘Useless, though, isn’t it? She’d be better off getting him a hot water bottle.’ Anji hung the towel on the headboard. ‘I suppose I could do it,’ she said grudgingly.
‘Yeah.’
She left for the kitchen. Fitz watched the Doctor. His breathing was rapid and shallow, but at least he could breathe. Not like last time when, Fitz would swear to the end of his days, his lungs hadn’t even been working. He became aware that the Angel-Maker had stopped crying and was relieved until he looked up and saw her in the doorway. With her wild hair and red-rimmed eyes, she looked like a banshee herself. Fitz wondered nervously where her knife was. She was staring at the Doctor. He saw fear creep into her face. ‘It’s that he helped me,’ she said. ‘Almost he took the knife from my hand.’
‘Yeah,’ said Fitz without surprise. He’d half-guessed it already. The Doctor’s strange mood on the tor... The way he had talked... He must have known the Angel-Maker had followed them, known too what she would do.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Only to kill him?’
‘Sabbath?’ said Fitz. ‘This isn’t about Sabbath. Sabbath’s just his... his anchor to life. His way back. This happened before when he was nearly killed in Liverpool. Did something happen to Sabbath then?’
She nodded and approached the bed. Fitz watched her cautiously. He didn’t think she’d attack the Doctor after the disastrous consequences of her previous attempt, but she was one weird, scary bird. ‘When one falls the other falls,’ she said, looking down at the Doctor’s white face. ‘And which one was it I stabbed, then?’
‘Both of them.’
She pointed. ‘Look,’ she whispered.
At the edge of the blankets, which the Doctor, shifting, had pushed down, was a red stain. Fitz jerked back the covers and tore open the Doctor’s shirt. The stab wound had stopped bleeding, but now blood from the old ridged scar was seeping through the bandage. ‘Oh hell.’
She ran from the room. Fitz pulled off the bandage and pressed a damp towel to the scar.
‘Oh God, what now?’ said Anji, rushing in. ‘Sabbath’s bleeding. She says the Doctor’s bleeding –’
‘Yeah, but it’s not bad.’
She came over. ‘No,’ she breathed thankfully.
‘What about Sabbath?’
‘The same.’
Fitz glanced towards the door. ‘She’s awfully quiet.’
‘She’s gone all calm. I don’t know why.’ Anji brought over a fresh bandage. ‘This really isn’t bad,’ she said, covering the wound. ‘Almost like...’
‘An afterthought,’ said Fitz. ‘Well, no, more like some sort of representation of what’s happening to him... wherever he is.’
‘Happening to both of them.’
In Sabbath’s room, the Angel-Maker cut her palm and pressed it to his bloody chest. She kissed him and took his hand. ‘You’ll not be going from me,’ she whispered. ‘Not all the horses of hell can drag you from me.’
* * *
Chapter Twenty-two
Sabbath liked the clocks. They were intricate and various and there were apparently an endless number. An infinity of these first time machines dividing time into finite bits. He toyed with the conceit as he walked among them.
The first part of the dream hadn’t been this pleasant. He had been drowning again. It was getting to be a bore. What was the phrase he’d heard that excitable Anji woman use: Been there, done that. Exactly. Why his unconscious kept bringing it up he couldn’t imagine. Surely the stock of terrors in his mental closet wasn’t so limited that he had to keep experiencing this one. There was, for example, that incident in Cairo...
But why think of that now when he could examine these magnificent instruments, these miraculous devices that translated time into sound and so made it directly apprehensible to the human senses? Exquisitely calibrated longitudinal clocks, silly overcarved