• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Now there were more faces, dozens of them. And they all said the same thing.

'Go.'

Reluctantly, I went.

Actually, no, that is a lie to which I am now fully prepared to admit. I went with total willingness, glad to be away from these hideous, twisted spirits with their hidden agendas and unspoken identities. Angry, jealous tormentors with no thought for the hurt they caused with their hatred and mockery.

I backed away from the door, slowly at first, and then with purpose. I turned and raced away from Cabin 672 as fast as my legs would carry me, heading for the TARDIS.

My sanctuary.

As I tore blindly through the twisting corridors, I passed people, chatting amongst themselves. Or were they, too, ghosts whispering about my ultimate doom and destruction?

Nothing was real, anymore. The whole ship seemed to have taken on the perspective of a malevolent circus show, with grinning clowns and tinkling sinister music. Of sour-faced and bitter people whose anger had not had a proper outlet until now. I felt engulfed by inertia, trapped by a combination of my own reckless curiosity and the most damning thing of all, the sin of arrogance. And of, unforgivably, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The ship had become a huge and frightening environment of dark corners, secret places, of half-heard laughter from behind three-quarter closed doors. Shuttered rooms, empty and dank. It was easy to get lost within the maze of its corridors and function rooms. There were times when, sick with paranoia, I thought that I heard someone in the distance calling my name, but I didn't turn around or break my stride. I just kept on going at pace, my lungs aching from the exertion. My breath came in many painful spasms as I neared an area that I recognised and rounded a corner to find the TARDIS before me, welcoming and serene amid the carnage and the horror on board this ship.

This ghost ship.

I fumbled with the key, my hands shaking, my fingers numb with the chill in the air. Finally the key sank, satisfyingly, into the lock and turned. I stumbled, falling gratefully, if painfully, to my knees down the short flight of steps and onto the hard wooden floor of the secondary console room. As the doors closed behind me with a pleasing whoosh of compressed air, I gave an agonised upwards glance at the scanner above my head. It showed a patch of ship's corridor and, in the fraction of a second before they disappeared appeared, I observed a gaggle of ghostly images hovering around the doorway shouting incoherent things at me. They may have been mocking my retreat or they may have been pleading with me to stay and not to abandon them to their fate. For possibly the first time in my many lives, that was a mystery to which I had no wish to find an answer.

I tried to stand. My knees were bruised from the fall, my hands red from friction against the wooden floor. I picked myself up, an inch at a time, and rested against the console, my chest and limbs aching from the chase.

At last, my deliverance was at hand.

'Relocate,' I murmured aloud, and prepared for take-off.

One switch. Two. Three. I pressed the dematerialisation nodule and grasped the sides of the wooden console, preparing for the wheezing and groaning of departure.

I looked at my face in the shaving mirror attached to the centre of the console. I hadn't realised just exactly how afraid I had become until that moment.

I looked like someone who had seen a ghost.

Nothing happened.

I initiated the dematerialisation sequence again, as I had done a thousand times in the past, only this time more slowly and deliberately to make absolutely sure that the TARDIS would do the simple task that I was asking of her.

Still, nothing happened.

I hit the Fast Return switch, in irritation, for the first time in what seemed to be a lifetime or three.

Not a flick or a tick. The TARDIS, simply, would not work for me.

I began pressing and jiggling switches almost at random, trying