Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [69]
Fire, she thought. Fire and corridors and screaming people.
She shivered.
The lightning cracked right overhead, and the thunder had already caught up with it.
There was a man in the garden with her, standing perfectly still in the rain.
She jumped, but felt strangely abstracted from it all. As if this was a dream.
He was young, but older than she was. Seventeen? Eighteen? But the details were vague, as if they hadn’t quite been finalised. She couldn’t see his face.
The lightning cracked again, and he had vanished.
Miranda shook herself.
She’d seen him.
She took a step forward, not in the least bit scared. The grass squelched underfoot, and something suddenly occurred to her. She went over to where the man had been standing, only about six feet away from the police box. She knelt to check, but she could already see that he’d left no footprints.
She looked around, trying to work out what had come together to make the optical illusion of a young man. Her mind worked through absurdities: that it was tree branches and a bin bag, or that it was her own shadow, cast by the police-box light.
She was getting soaked. The raincoat must have trebled in weight, and she’d just got cold mud on one of her knees.
Miranda hurried back inside, and was very careful to lock the door behind her.
* * *
Ferran pulled the circlet off his head, panting, exhausted.
‘You’ve beaten him,’ the Deputy said, proud of the boy.
‘I know where she is,’ he said. ‘For a moment I was there. I saw her.’
He was at the table, leaning over the Doctor, who was on the brink of unconsciousness.
‘I was stronger than him,’ Ferran said, gasping for air. ‘I saw everything. He’s adopted her, he’s pledged to protect her. He loves her, more than he’s ever loved anyone.’
He held the knife close to the Doctor’s face. For a moment, the Deputy thought Ferran would whip the blindfold off and carve a scar in the Doctor’s skin.
‘Was that all you saw?’ the Doctor asked.
Ferran looked at him, then away, ashamed.
‘I know you, now, Ferran. It’s not your fault you were born when you were, into that family. Since your cradle, since before you can remember, all you’ve been taught is revenge. Vengeance and blood and blood feuds and a sacred duty of vendetta.’
‘There is nothing else,’ the Deputy said.
‘There is,’ the Doctor insisted. ‘It’s like an addiction, Ferran. You can help yourself. I know that deep down, below all those layers of hatred that others have filled you with, that you’re a decent man. You know me now, you’ve seen almost a century of humanity.’
Ferran smirked. ‘Oh, yes. The human race shows great potential.’ He seemed almost drunk, the Deputy thought, a little out of his depth as he assimilated the Doctor’s memories. ‘I see a column of tanks rolling past a ruined cathedral; I see napalm and rape and crippled workers and flooding mines and mushroom clouds and border guards shooting those who would escape.’
‘Is that all you saw?’ the Doctor asked again.
‘Rockets,’ Ferran said. ‘AIDS, stock-market crashes, Red Indians and Jews and Kulaks and Gypsies and embryos being led to their deaths like cattle. Anthrax and agent orange.’
‘There was so much else,’ the Doctor said softly. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. It happened, but that wasn’t all that happened. Is that really all you remember?’
Ferran leered at him. ‘I’m going to kill your daughter, Doctor. You’ve told me where she is, and now I’m going to kill her.’
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
Target Acquisition
The Doctor woke to find Debbie Castle leaning over him with a sponge full of cold water.
‘He was too strong,’ the Doctor said. ‘The Interrogator weakened me. But Ferran was fresh to the fight. He was stronger than me.’
‘You have to rest,’ Debbie told him.
‘No. I have to stop Ferran before he leaves. He knows where Miranda is. He’ll kill her.’
Debbie sighed, too exhausted to cry or shake any