Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [14]
But an idea even more horrible than these possibilities was percolating in the back of my mind. There was an old Time Lord myth, a chilling bedtime tale for children, about a surfeit of time travel causing a diseased mental state akin to the human condition of delusional or hallucinatory schizophrenia. Could it be that this was something other than a story? That it was actually true, and that I was becoming a victim of it?
Could it even be, I wondered painfully, that my many travels thus far in my lives and times could have, literally, brought me to the brink of madness?
To indulge in such forced introspection is most unlike me. I am, I believed then and still believe now, afraid of very little, in real terms. But
it is a foolish man indeed who is afraid of nothing. We all need something to be scared of when the lights go out.
So, the apparitions continued wherever I ventured on board the Queen Mary. While some appeared as mere fleeting spectral flashes, others were powerful and terrifyingly strong images. Screaming skulls that loomed suddenly at me from out of the walls and from the shadows of the dark corridors. The first such appearance made me cry out in terror. I pressed my sweating hands against the smooth-panelled corridor walls, which felt even colder to the touch now. Suddenly the whole ship was like an ice box. A damp and tangible chill wrapped itself around me, refusing to relinquish its tight grip upon me.
I breathed out slowly, trying to recover my composure, and my breath was visible to me, like a thick cloud of fog.
And there the terrors finally found my breaking point. I was reminded, briefly, of an incident in a darkened, shadowy French church in the 14th century. Of fleeing from frighteningly strong visions of devils and demons summoned to plague me by a particularly powerful narcotic present in the dye in the drapery. Deliberately so, it had turned out. But there were no Knights Templar on this ship, playing evil mind-games with my psyche.
I ran. Blindly, wildly, away from things that I cared not to speculate on the origins of. I could ponder on the whys and the wherefores later, I told myself, but for now, I had to be rid of these terrors that dogged my every step.
Until, in a corridor on the third deck, alone and afraid, I was overtaken by the visions. They trapped me, cornered me in a cul-de-sac from which there was no escape.
A skull swam before me, inches from my face. It seemed to me that its dead eye-sockets, black and vacant, were staring back at me with curiosity and some pity. Again, I wanted to touch it, to feel its substance sliding beneath my certain fingers.
I resisted the urge.
Communication seemed to be the obvious next step. The only step.
I tried to converse with it verbally.
'Hello! I'm the Doctor,' I said. It felt inadequate and rather pathetic.
There was no reply.
'Please try to talk to me,' I said, a degree of panic evident in my voice. 'I mean you no harm. I only want to help.'
'DOC-TOR?' The voice was in my head rather than external and from the apparition. It was low and guttural, and seemed stripped of any corporeal existence. A voice from beyond the grave. From the very depths of Hell itself.
The fact that the apparition could communicate with me at all made me jump. I gave a strangled yelp of surprise. But there was satisfaction in my cries too. This was a step forward.
'Hello,' I said again, as brightly as I could under such circumstances. 'Can you tell me who you are?'
'DOC-TOR?' repeated the skull, seeking confirmation or assurance of my identity.
'That's right.'
I was calm by now. Calm, lucid and balanced. Surprisingly so, given the shock that I had initially felt. But this was what I was supposed to be good at. First contact. Being friendly. Doing the right thing.
My mind was suddenly in another place. Several different other places in fact. Having a lengthy bedside conversation with Emile Zola concerning remorse, redemption and regret. Standing on a jagged and windswept rocky shore with William Golding,