Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [1]
Then there is the silence of the Void. A mirror to the soul. As deep and dark and mysterious as any of Earth's many oceans. The silence that, at this moment, was broken only by my awareness of the sounds of my own body. My twin hearts beating out an unnatural, jagged and erratic rhythm.
A torch song to my solitude.
Here, for the first time in what seemed to be forever, I was completely alone.
When you are telling a story, it is often said, you should strive for lucidity, for elegance and a distinctive voice. This applies to any sort of tale from an epic saga to the shortest of short verses. From Gothic romance to a mood piece to an engine of destruction, told around a village fire to an audience of enraptured children. The rules are made to be broken, but it is said to be unwise to use a metaphor or a simile that is also a cliché, and that you should never use long words where short ones will do just as well, or ten when three are perfectly adequate. I am aware that I, myself, am guilty of both the latter crimes.
The writer and humorist Hugh Leonard is once said to have described his profession as less a vocation than an incurable illness. 'Those who persevere,' he wrote, 'do so not from pluck or determination but because they cannot help it.'
And so the story begins.
Sometimes I wish that I could take it all back and start again. To be a fisherman in a Cornish village like Mousehole or Mylor or Mullion Cove with nothing to worry about except my nets and my lobster pots and the raging, terrible sea.
To be a trooper in John Lilburne's Levellers or in the New Model Army perhaps, to fight for causes that are just. Or to explore Orwellian political futures. To have the language of poetry and iambic pentameter impinge upon the voyages of my TARDIS. To go anywhere, to any location, but here.
What a vile thing it is, to remember, and to regret.
With hindsight, which is always a wonderfully dangerous toy in the hands of the uninformed, I know now how this catastrophe began. How these events all fit together and how the whole picture is supposed to look on the lid of the jigsaw box. But such an awareness does not dissipate the clinging sense of guilt. On the contrary, it only multiplies it and reflects it back upon me, engulfing me like a shroud. Condemning me.
Mistakes are a luxury I have never allowed myself in the past.
They are the cause of untold suffering for everyone.
Drifting in the faceless infinity of the space/time vortex, the cracks between the seconds that help to define the limits of the universe, such as it is, the TARDIS's internal telepathic circuits seemed to have detected my lingering mood of melancholia and introspection after my recent, and troubled, return to my home. To Gallifrey.
It had never occurred to me, before this moment, just how empty the TARDIS could seem without the babble of young voices and the clatter of feet upon smooth corridor floors. For so long, companionship had been an important and unchanging part of my many lives. Now there was only the hum of instrumentation as my constant companion.
And the many memories.
Perhaps the old girl herself was looking to be occupied again. To be complete.
I had been brooding for a long time, I am now compelled to admit, upon
the true nature of fate. Of what it is, what it means and whether it even exists. And of whether any foreknowledge of the Master's diabolical schemes would have enabled me to save the lives of the President or of Chancellor Goth, that wretched pawn in the Master's wicked games. It was not, and is not, and will never be a simple equation, I was forced to conclude. Such questions as these are never solved easily or without the price of some personal regret. That, like the Void, is a universal constant.
A necessary constant.
So I sat and stared at the blank canvas of eternity. Lost, mute and blind, in a never ending pocket universe of my own imaginings.
Until, that is, the TARDIS became intolerant of my self-indulgence and decided