Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [22]
'No —'
'Doctor?'
I felt as if I had been struck, hard, across the face. I slumped to my wounded knees and sprawled on the carpeted deck, drained of all energy and will.
'Are you ill?' A gentle hand was laid on my shoulder, and I snapped my head up to look at Miss Lamb. Alive and well.
Alive and well.
'Don't go in the water,' I shouted, far more loudly than was necessary.
'What?' asked Miss Lamb, startled and taking a step backwards.
I repeated myself. I tried to stand, stumbled and fell, rose again and grabbed Miss Lamb by the shoulders, shaking the woman to try to compel her to listen to me.
She looked terrified. I dread to think what I must have looked like to her.
'Don't go in the water,' I said again. I could feel my eyes bulging, such
was my insistence.
'Why?'
'It's dangerous. I've just had ... '
What, exactly, could I tell her? How could I best describe the experience without sounding like a lunatic? A precognitive vision in which she was drowning? A flash of extreme future-shock? A warning to the curious?
I tried to recover my composure, to back away rapidly from the wild-eyed mania that I felt. I wanted to scream at her. To tell her to turn and run to her cabin, to lock the door and not to come out until we arrived in New York. I resisted the temptation. Instead, I walked past her to the cerulean blue double doors to the pool and stood there barring her entrance.
'Please do not go into this place, I beg of you,' I said. 'I cannot explain why you mustn't enter, you simply have to take my word for it that ... ' I could say nothing further. I sighed, shook my head, and let my arms drop to my sides. I looked at her, pleadingly.
After a long pause, Miss Lamb shivered. 'This is a bad place, isn't it?' she asked, echoing exactly what Simpkins had told me earlier.
'You feel it too?' I asked.
'I'm sensitive,' she replied, a double meaning that certainly didn't seem out of place. 'I've been deluding myself for too long. Trying to ignore my feelings.' Then, she looked at me closely, curiously, and with an accusing stare. 'You've seen them all too, haven't you?' she demanded. 'The ghosts? They're all over the ship.'
My reply was slow in coming and deliberately worded so as to be as noncommittal and oblique as possible. 'I have seen things that I cannot readily explain.'
I felt like a charlatan as I said it. And like a coward when I said no more.
'Here?'
'Yes.'
She nodded. What she was thinking at that moment, I can only speculate. Betrayal. Fear. Uncertainty. A combination of all three, perhaps? 'You said you believed that it was all in my mind,' she noted at last. 'That such things do not exist.'
'I may have been precipitous in my assessment of the situation.'
'Meaning?' she asked in a harsh whisper at my deliberate gobbledegook.
I shrugged. I really didn't know. Or, at least, I pretended to myself that I didn't. 'Meaning that I've seen things that may have changed my mind,' I replied, with as much truth as I could manage at that moment. And that was not much.
We walked slowly back to Miss Lamb's cabin in a stony silence broken only by the occasional greetings that we received from passing fellow travellers. These were pointedly ignored by both of us. As we reached her cabin door, I thanked Miss Lamb for trusting me and told her that I would see her again in the morning.
Miss Lamb looked at me, silently. It was as if she had something that she desperately wanted to tell me but, equally, she was wholly unable to do so and was, thus, trapped between two worlds: the spoken and the unspoken.
Finally, with an almost painfully hoarse whisper, that seemed to have dragged itself from the pit of her stomach and fought its way to her throat, she bade me good night.
She reminded me at that