Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [35]
I searched the ship for over thirty minutes. It was free, seemingly, of the haunting that had plagued me since my arrival and infested the ship for who-knew-how-long before that. It was as though a huge weight had been lifted from my mind. But there was one more tragedy for me to face, and it was made all the worse for me by the fact that I knew that it was coming.
As I reached the second deck, and hurried along the corridor towards the central stairwell that led up to the TARDIS, and to my freedom, I saw a group of ship's personnel shouting through a locked hatch. My heart sank as I recognised one of them as Simpkins's friend, Jarvis.
'Come on now, matey,' I heard him cry through the bulkhead. 'Open it up and let's have a nice cup of tea and a chat about this. It's bloody madness.'
'No,' came a muffled cry from the other side. 'This ship's damned, you know that. You all know that. We're never gonna get off it alive. I'm taking the only way out that I can.'
'Don't be a coward and a fool, Simpkins,' an officer barked in reply, nudging Jarvis out of the way and speaking directly to the solid grey door. I hid behind a nearby corner and watched the tragedy unfold before me with a terrible feeling of dèja vu. 'Come on, son,' the officer continued, in a much more conciliatory manner. 'Let's have a bit less of all that "Goodbye cruel world" nonsense, there's no need for you to be doing any of this. Your mate here's right, come on out and we'll talk about it.'
A red emergency light above the door, and the screeching of a warning
siren told their own, sad story. Simpkins had opened the exterior bulkhead. I could not hear exactly what his final reply to his crew mates' pleadings was, but the meaning of it was clear enough from the tone. Seconds later, there was the crash of the bulkhead slamming shut and the scream of Simpkins as it sliced him cleanly in two. Killed by a fate that had fascinated him but which perhaps he could never have foreseen, but which I could. And did.
I headed back to the TARDIS with heavy hearts and a brooding sense of failure that lingered around me like a blackened thunder cloud. It was the feeling of helplessness that hurt more than of not having done the right thing. Had I been manipulated, cruelly, by fates in which I had ceased to believe seven hundred years earlier? Perhaps. I had been used as some greater power's puppet before this, but usually, I had reconciled such situations with the inevitability that we, the fates and I, shared similar aims. On this occasion, however, I could not help but feel that nothing had been accomplished or gained for anyone, except some amusement for the wretch Osbourne. Wherever he was now.
And that was another good point. What, exactly, had happened to Osbourne? My initial feeling had been that he had been destroyed when his creation exploded but, the more I thought about it, the less likely that scenario seemed to be. I finally understood why that was, when I rounded the corner and stood facing the TARDIS to find a mass of glowing white energy surrounding it.
The spectres were still on board the ship, after all. As I suspected they always would be. They were everywhere, having formed themselves into one vast collective gestalt of psychic energy that was woven into the very fabric of the ship. No longer trapped by the jar, maybe, but now they were truly stuck here forever.
I could see individual faces within the mass – the angry woman, the child, Simpkins – all bursting to the surface occasionally and then dipping back into the rippling collective beneath. But they all spoke with one voice. One booming, thundering, outrageously loud voice.
They told me to leave, and in the blink of an eye they faded and vanished.
But Osbourne was there, standing by the TARDIS with that same infuriatingly smug expression on his face. I was baffled.
Why, I found myself asking, had all the essences not simply departed the ship now that