Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [13]
Denying reality was, I reasoned, something that had worked successfully for me in the past.
But I was convincing no-one. Least of all, myself.
And a part of me desperately wanted to know more. The adventurer. The dreamer.
Perhaps I am over-exaggerating my wish to know more at this point – it is difficult for me to be certain that I was merely curious, because I expected that I should be curious. I am the Doctor, after all. This is what I do.
My trembling hand stretched out towards the spectre and, in the fraction of a second between me touching it and it being touched, it vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. I stood motionless, rooted to the spot and staring at the place just two feet from me where it, whatever it was, had once been. Finally I roused myself from my stupor and crossed the corridor to touch the wall where my ephemeral visitor had first appeared and then disappeared.
It was just a wall.
Solid.
Tangible.
Utterly real. My knuckles scraped over smooth hard wood, polished daily. I could see my face reflected in it. My puzzled, bemused face.
The wood was, I noticed, cold to the touch. Like the ship itself.
Just as the immediacy of the experience was beginning to fade in me and I was attempting, with some initial success, to rationalise the entire experience as a by-product of an overactive imagination, I turned. And, in the half-distance, I saw the unmistakable form of my visitor floating down the middle of the corridor away from me.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight to attention as if affected by static electricity. This time, I could not only see the spectre but also feel its presence. My skin reacted badly to the invasion of my personal space, and I shivered.
'What are you?' I asked in a voice that was unsteady and emotional.
There was no reply.
I repeated the question, feeling strange and inarticulate. What was I expecting in reply, I now wonder?
It is what it is, and was, and shall be.
Once again, the vision was gone in a blinking.
To a bare patch of corridor I repeated my demand for the third time. 'What are you?'
A terrible, lonely silence was my only reply.
The visitations then continued all over the ship wherever I wandered, and
my apprehension increased with each successive sighting. Sometimes they were very ill-defined, almost wisps of cotton-wool cloud passing briefly through the periphery of my vision either to left or right, to become lost in the labyrinth of corridors and rooms. On other occasions there were forms that I could almost recognise as human. With arms and legs, torsos and faces. Still little more than afterthoughts, like the negative image from a photograph, two-dimensional and translucent, but with substance.
With meaning.
And, also, with a curious, disarming smell. A caustic, pungent, sickly sweet aroma that reminded me of burning rope and rotting skin, but also rosemary and oranges and wet autumn leaves. Not unpleasant, exactly, or disgusting, but unsettling in the way that a strange smell in an unusual context can often be.
Whatever that meaning was, I had to know more.
The dam had now been breached and I was a party to this reality.
As I wandered down corridors, occasionally passing real flesh-and-blood passengers, barely acknowledging their presence as I withdrew into my own head, there were questions that I could not help but ask myself.
Was this, perhaps, an after-effect of my experiences within the Matrix on my recent visit to Gallifrey? Those images, too, had seemed frighteningly real at the time, but had subsequently proved to be illusory. Was it a delayed reaction to the stress and strain that my mind had been forced to endure? Was it, perhaps, even more serious than that? Had I even left the Matrix