Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [2]
Reality writhed about her and she defiantly struggled to find one thought with which she could defy it all. Yet all she saw were Manisha’s eyes burning with hatred for the world. It didn’t matter which world: her friend had to be avenged and it was she who had to make the evil and hatred go away!
The hateful, humid air closed in to stifle her, but now she understood. The wood in the house was as dry as tinder: she knew what to do.
The Doctor pondered the TARDIS’s programme index. He had been sidetracked from his initial enquiry. The index was insisting that the English village of Greenford Parva was one half of a minor binary star in the Sherrin Cluster.
He attempted to use the related subject heading of hamlets, but this led him only into the drama section.
Aggravated by this, he reflected that annotated text was a poor substitute for actual experience. He had not made an entry in his diary for years, which was hardly surprising because he was just too busy. The universe was at his fingertips; it was often at his throat as well. Still, that was the price he paid for minding other people’s business. The universe needed a little nudge occasionally; otherwise it dawdled along and rarely fulfilled its potential.
Anyone who travelled in the TARDIS had a price to pay. However willingly any new companion walked through its doors, leaving their own world behind, and however determinedly they tried to assert control over the bizarre events in which the Doctor’s travels might embroil them, one fact was inescapable: throughout time and space their lives were in the Time Lord’s hands. Even the slickest of jugglers, however, could drop a skittle at one time or another.
The Doctor numbered many accomplishments in his catalogue and he rather enjoyed cultivating the image of cosmic factotum. That role, however, was only a part of it; he would hate to be pigeon-holed. Keep the public guessing was his motto, and sometimes he even surprised himself.
Call him showman, conjuror, great detective, mentor or tormentor, his speciality was to juggle the past, the present and the possible. No one was safe from that; anyone could be a potential skittle.
The Doctor rarely bothered with a safety net either; he never considered he needed one. But he didn’t always ask the skittles.
Ace had learned to trust the Doctor with her life.
Perhaps he was irritable with her sometimes, but that was because she didn’t always come up to his expectations. She was only human after all, however hard she tried. Besides which, few people had expected much of her at all during her seventeen years.
The Doctor was the first person for a long time who had even bothered to accept her for what she was: a delinquent.
She knew that and he seemed to like it that way too. There were things she understood now that she had never even dreamed of before; and yet there were still a few things she could teach the Doctor. Not everyone had their own personal professor and this was the weirdest tutorial in the history of the universe.
Ace hardly noticed the Doctor hurriedly put away a set of charts as she entered the TARDIS’s control room. There he was in the same dark brown jacket, busy jumper, loud check trousers and eccentric, paisley scarf that he had been wearing for the past month. It was beyond her how his clothes managed to stay in some semblance of cleanliness, the amount of wear and tear he put them through. She occasionally wondered whether he slept in them too.
‘Nearly there,’ he announced, smiling impishly as he cleared the data from the index’s screen. He had already given up on maps and charts; he was navigating through time and space by instinct. He paused and waited for the usual torrent of questions about destinations and dates and why. Except this time the explanations might not go down too well.
Nor, for that matter, would Ace’s immodest apparel