Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [23]
‘That’s because I’m paying them,’ said the Doctor.
‘Paying them?’ Bobby Prescott looked at the blood on his fingers. He wiped it off on his leather jacket.
‘To find you and pursue you. To bring you here. You see, I wanted to talk with you,’ said the Doctor.
The Doctor?
Bobby Prescott felt a cold feeling beginning low down on his spine and moving up.
‘They weren’t supposed to hurt you,’ the Doctor was saying.
Bobby Prescott recognized the symptoms of fear starting. He fought back immediately and brutally. He blocked the fear before it started. It was easy. It was nothing compared to the knife going into his throat on the steps. Feeling the fear wither away like that gave Bobby Prescott his confidence back. His mind was clear and strong. The little man was just a little man. He wasn’t called the Doctor. That was just a random thought that had passed through Bobby Prescott’s mind. But Bobby Prescott had firm control over his own mind. He banished the random thought.
‘I’m sorry they went that far with the knife,’ said the Doctor. Not the Doctor. The little man. He was shrugging. ‘That’s the problem with plans. They tend to take on a life of their own. People tend to get hurt.’
But Bobby Prescott wasn’t listening. They were in the main hall of the library now. This was where the shelves of fiction had once stood. The smell was strongest here. The rich, spicy mustiness. The smell of books, old books, library books. Books that had gone through a thousand hands. Their pages stained and dirty.
But the stains and the dirt didn’t obscure the words. All those words on all those pages. Pages you could turn on a rooftop, on a bench by a road, waiting at night under a streetlight. Words that carried you into a new world, away from the cold on a rooftop, waiting there by the satellite dishes while Uncle Max finished up downstairs in the bedrooms. And every different book was a different world. You could have a stack of them in your room, piled in the corner out of Uncle Max’s way. Books with red or green covers, some with pictures on them, ‘dust jackets’ the ladies in the library – the librarians – called them, protected by library plastic until some moron tore them off to decorate a wall, or just out of malice, the idiot need to destroy.
A stack of different books, all waiting to be read, each one with its own world you could escape into. Escape from Uncle Max and the floors you had to clean for him and the funny colour of the water you had to pour away afterwards, every time.
Each book an escape route. You’d sit on your mattress in your bedroom and take a book off the pile, and open it, and the magic would begin, the escape would begin. And it always began with that smell, coming up at you from the book, that comforting musty smell.
The smell that was all around Bobby Prescott now. But deeper and stronger and different.
Stronger because there were thousands of books all around him now, lying open where they fell, the dampness making the smell stronger. It was a friendly smell. But the dampness that swelled the pages was obliterating the words. Wiping them out the way the stains of a million hands never could.
Different because Bobby Prescott still believed he could smell the charred smell, the choking smell. The book burning smell.
‘You want to talk to me?’ said Bobby Prescott softly, looking at the small man. They stood in one of the avenues formed when the tall bookshelves were overturned, smashing into each other with the anvil noise of the colliding metal shelf‐frames. Bobby Prescott remembered the thunder as the books tumbled and spilled. Raining down bruisingly hard on his head and chest as he ran through the collapsing aisles. It was like being in a city of book buildings while it was toppling in an earthquake. Now they stood in the dark quiet aftermath, soaked with years of rain drainage from the torn roof. There were low hills of books all around