Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [34]
Osbourne ignored my barbed comment. 'There is no such thing as a soul,' he repeated. 'There is only a life-force, which is mine or anyone else's for that matter, to use as I or we or they see fit.'
'You are a brilliant man,' I told the scientist, truthfully. 'And that brilliance has corrupted you. You're beyond help. Given time, I could have ... '
He would not allow me to finish. 'Time?' he interrupted. 'An incestuous whore. A plaything, just like the atom, to be split, dissected, cut up into fragments and studied. I shall master time and that achievement will be my immortality.'
I could stand the shocking, venal lack of moral conscience in this man no longer. In a rage, I strode across the room, kicking aside the metronome and approaching the bell jar with only one intention.
Osbourne was on his feet now as, in that split second, he saw what I was planning to do. 'Stay away from that jar,' he warned. 'You have no right.'
Strangely, he did not try to stop me. I gave him a dismissive glance. 'I have every right,' I shouted amid the rising cacophony of voices in the room. Now, I did not take my eyes from the jar as I picked up the wooden frame of the metronome and brought its full weight down upon the top of the glass, smashing it to smithereens with one mighty blow.
A flood of psychic energy filled the room, and me with it. Completely overwhelmed, I again found myself collapsing to the floor; but, unlike last time, there was a smile on my face as I did so. This simple act of destruction was my release from the choking constraints of the last few days. From the pain and the misery and the self-doubt and all those other things that I thought I had left behind on Gallifrey and on Skaro. A feeling of being helpless to change the course of events, of not having the right answers when the cogs that turn the wheels of the universe asked of me that I should be the one to do their dirty work for them.
The time is out of joint, oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
This felt like the right thing to do.
It felt like a taste of freedom at last.
It felt, in fact, like victory.
EPILOGUE
OH, HOW THE GHOST
OF YOU CLINGS
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
is driven, I know not whither.
JOHN WEBSTER, THE WHITE DEVIL
I AWOKE SEVERAL HOURS LATER, DISORIENTATED AND EMERGING from a lucid dream in which I was sitting on a tartan blanket on the newly mown grass lawn of Christ's College, Oxford. The smell of the freshly cut grass lingered with me for several seconds as I remembered that I was having a jolly picnic of ham and cheese sandwiches, fairy cakes and lemon tea, and that my most charming and affable companions were Le Rol Soleil Loius XIV, Joseph Goebbels, Bertrand Russell and Sir Kenneth Clark. The Marquise de Pompadour had just turned up after getting delayed in heavy traffic on the M3, and things were starting to get really interesting with a juggling jester playing a banjo whilst sitting on top of a small wall, when – boom – I threw myself bolt-upright from the floor.
'Bizarre,' I told anyone who might have been listening. But there was no reply.
I was quite alone in the room. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the jar, tiny shards of glass surrounded me in every direction like a castle moat. Quite how I had not been cut to ribbons was a question best left for another day. Carefully, I stood, shook my jacket free of the offending materials and looked around the room again.
Osbourne was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps that was for the best.
The room was silent and still, even the dust having settled down quietly to wait for the next blast of wind to disturb its rest.
'Not quite what I expected to happen,' I told the same no-one inparticular as I crossed the floor to the door, the glass splinters crunching loud beneath my feet. I picked up my hat from where it had fallen in the confusion, jammed it back on my head, and left Cabin 672. As I closed the door, I smiled broadly, happily, feeling as