Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [27]
The wind stopped, abruptly. For a second there was a total silence.
And then I heard the tiny chinking sound of a tea cup and saucer.
Opening my eyes, I looked into the cabin. Instead of, as I expected, a room crammed from ceiling to floor with piles of rotting corpses and embittered angry souls shaking their fists at me and demanding to know just what I thought I was playing at, there was a rather unprepossessing man in his mid thirties sitting at a writing table, surrounded by sheets of paper, some written upon, others screwed up into little balls and discarded.
He was drinking from a china tea cup with white-gloved hands. Seeing me, he smiled. It was not a cruel or sadistic smile, but rather an enigmatic and inscrutable one, rather like the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa. This man, I sensed, knew many things that were hidden to me. And that seemed to please him greatly.
'Tea?' he asked, as if he had been expecting me all along.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BEHIND THAT LOCKED DOOR
Death, old captain, it is time,
let us raise the anchor.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, LE VOYAGE
THE MAN WAS SO UTTERLY UNREMARKABLE IN EACH AND every conceivable way that, for the briefest of moments, I wondered if I had come to the wrong room entirely. I did a double-take and checked the number on the back of the door to confirm that this was, indeed, Cabin 672.
Usually I use moments of buffoonery like this to try to buy myself a little time or to put my adversaries off their guard. I cannot, in all honesty, say for certain that this was my intention on this particular occasion.
I turned to face the object of my quest.
The man was slight of build, and prematurely balding. He wore thick, black, horn-rimmed spectacles, and his face, with its sad, hooded eyes and a prominent nose, seemed intelligent and placid. He had a deeply furrowed brow that spoke of many hours pondering upon the whim and caprices of outrageous fortune. Certainly he appeared to spend a lot of his time thinking about something or other. His clothes however – all polyester and tweed, with black leather sew-on elbow pads on his ginger jacket – spoke of a lack of any real interest in conventions or mores or of what anybody other than he thought about himself. Or of anything else,
come to that.
He looked like a stereotypical representation of a mad scientist.
He looked, if truth be told, a little like me.
All right, then. A lot like me.
'Hello,' said the man flatly, without standing or even looking at me directly. He sucked a pencil end and began to scribble something in an indistinct, spidery hand on one of the yellowing bits of paper in front of him. 'You've come at last to see me. I knew that you would, do you see? I don't know how I knew, I just knew, you know?' He paused in his writing and took a brief sip from his tea cup which, judging by the expression on his face, was either clay cold or scalding hot. And then, finally, he looked up at me with what might have been an intense curiosity in his eyes. Or perhaps it was something else entirely. Something wicked and dangerous. I thought, again, about the concept of small evil. 'I'm afraid you'll have to excuse the mess,' he continued. 'Never seem to get room service in this blooming cabin, for some reason or other that I haven't fathomed out yet. But I will, given the time.'
'Time?' I asked. 'It's always a question of time, is it not?'
'An abstract concept,' the man noted. 'Any old fool knows that. Somebody said that once. It might have been me, actually.' His words were a rapid-fire stream of consciousness. Wooden wheels chattering over a cobbled stone road. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat. Nervous, agitated and only vaguely interconnected with each other, like atoms whirling around in magnificent isolation. A perfect metaphor.
He seemed bored by our conversation now, and changed the subject. 'Have you ever said something really witty and fantastic