• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Doctor sighed once more. ‘There aren’t any Watchmakers, don’t you see? At least, not in any sense but the metaphorical one.’

He was sure that Catcher’s eyes flickered around the hall then, searching the corners, as if looking for proof that the Doctor was wrong.

‘There is only Reason. What else could there be?’

The Doctor shook his head. He could feel it, spreading across the town; the fifth law of thermodynamics in full effect.

Everything always gets slightly worse. ‘Do you really want to know?’

Catcher cocked his head again.

‘Close your eyes,’ the Doctor said.

The cloisters had ended abruptly, in a blank white wall that (a) jarred with the classical architecture and (b) wasn’t supposed to be there anyway. Chris had led Marielle Duquesne through a tall gothic archway, pretending that he knew exactly where he was going. Now they found themselves in the middle of the seemingly endless corridor that was generally known as the TARDIS library.

‘Library?’ queried Marielle.

Chris pulled a face. ‘Sort of. You say "library" and you expect it to have some kind of order. You know. Alphabetical filing.’ He shrugged, and indicated the untidy heaps of books that littered the floor for as far as the eye could see. ‘I don’t think it was supposed to be a library, originally. I think the Doctor just kept shovelling old books in here until it got that name. He told me once that he’d spent twenty-six years putting them in order, stacking them on the shelves and everything. He said it was the best meditation of his life. I guess they must have come un-ordered again.’

But even by its usual standards, the library was a mess.

Huge cracks ran across the floor, chunks of the corridor breaking off to form small islands of marble, furnished with cabinets and bookshelves. In the gaps between the sections, there was only darkness. The bad kind of darkness, Chris thought.

They started to move up the corridor, keeping to the more obviously stable sections of the floor. Encyclopaedias and compact discs fluttered past like moths. A cat with silver fur crouched in a dissolving alcove, its skin like mercury, and Chris knew at a glance that it was a TARDIS-spawned thing.

He saw Wolsey creeping up behind the quicksilver animal, attempting to sniff its arse. Just as he was about to succeed, the silver cat exploded into a shower of red, blue, and green pixels. Wolsey looked grumpy and floated off on a loose tile.

‘This is the way to Roslyn’s quarters?’ Marielle asked.

There it was again. That niggling feeling that the woman was remembering everything, making notes. Chris still wasn’t sure he trusted her. To make matters worse, he didn’t even fancy her much. She wasn’t bad looking, but she just seemed kind of distant, like she wanted to be somewhere else all the time.

Well, all right. So maybe that was understandable.

‘It’s, er, one way,’ he told her.

‘How many paths are there through this machine?’

‘Oh, hundreds. Thousands.’ A thought suddenly struck him

‘Hang on. You said the ship was communicating with you, right?’

She nodded. ‘It may be.’

‘Cool.’ That was a word he’d picked up from twenty-first century America, and he was very happy with it. ‘So you’ve got a kind of instinct for the ship? Like a kind of empathy?’

‘I wouldn’t say empathy, Christopher. But...’

‘But there’s a kind of contact?’

She nodded.

‘Great. Can you, sort of, listen to it? See if it’s saying anything? I only mention it because we’re in the library, and I’m sure the Doctor said something about the library being telepathic. Something about it being able to find books for you, if you asked it properly. He calls it the Library Angel.’

Marielle looked bewildered. Chris felt he was having difficulty communicating with her properly. He couldn’t remember how you were supposed to speak to people from this timezone; in America, he’d seen a TV mini-series set in the early nineteenth century, and that was about as far as his experience stretched. The programme had been inspired by novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, but the