Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [15]
Why was my mind playing tricks on me like this? Or was it that someone else was rooting around in the hidden cupboards and dark places of my
subconscious?
'Please,' I continued, as much to myself as to the ghosts. 'I really would like to help if I can. You seem much troubled.'
'No help,' replied a woman's voice, less harsh and dreadful than the previous one. Were two entities occupying the same space? 'No light. No sound. No end.'
Now I was really confused.
'Would you care to elucidate?'
The skull seemed to regard me for an eternity. 'No escape,' the female voice finally continued. 'No light. No sound. No end,' it repeated.
'You are trapped?'
It was a wild and pleading stab in the dark. The skull seemed to be telling me that it was imprisoned. But where? 'On the ship?' I asked, remembering Simpkins and his friend and their gory chamber of horror tales of ghosts being absorbed into the very fabric of the ship itself.
Perhaps that was the explanation for Simpkins's well-disguised sadness?
'No sound,' repeated the skull in what seemed to be a third different voice. This one was male, older, with a distinct West Country accent. And then it was joined by others. A trickle at first. And then a rush, a deluge, as if a tap had been opened. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands of screaming voices filling my head to the point of bursting. All telling me different things, and yet the same thing. All of them shouting above the incredible cacophony in a vain effort to make their single voice heard. The penetration was deep and wounding and, as it reached my larynx, I found myself mouthing the words that were bombarding me.
'No light. No sound. No end.'
'Where?' I managed to gasp in the cracks between the voices. There was no answer. 'Tell me, please. I can't help you otherwise,' I shouted. 'You're killing me.'
A picture formed in the depths of my subconscious, and I was seeing the world through the dead eyes of the skull. Or rather, of the skull and a multitude of its companions, too numerous to count. All showing me variations on the same view, but from thousands upon thousands of marginally different perspectives. They came to me simultaneously and I had to cry out, the pain was so great. Reality shattered. I was caged, imprisoned behind an impenetrable barrier. I felt crushed and broken as a melange of multiple identities, all trapped under glass, merged together in me. The fractured, mutated shades of light, seen through the glass, were unmistakable.
The world was warped. Bent out of shape.
For a second I thought that I was in the forward lounge again, looking across the bow of the ship and out to sea.
But this glass enclosure was thicker. And smaller. Shatter-proof. I felt the airlessness, the claustrophobia, the terror that saturated the air around me. I was on the inside of a glass prison.
'Where?' I gasped again, as the visions retreated and my grateful brain cried out in relief at being released from this bubble-world. The skull remained, hovering, but now the corridor was filling with blood. Rivers of blood, oceans of blood. Drowning me. I closed my eyes, tight, against the assault.
'Help us.' It was a different voice and, when I opened my eyes again, the skull had gone, replaced by the figure of a child, a girl of no more than five or six years, wearing a tattered dress