Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [67]
The Doctor woke to find himself on a bed, head propped up with a pillow, in a silent room, illuminated by a spotlight above him. Looking down across his chest, covered with a soft, padded quilt, he saw an animal curled contentedly on his belly.
A cat. A ginger and white cat with impossibly green eyes. Or yellow.
He’d seen the cat before. No. That wasn’t quite it. Someone else had seen the cat before. Someone. . .
121
He sighed inwardly, everything on the tip of his memory. He tried to relax, to let it all come back to him, but all he could hear was an odd, rhythmic clattering of metal. A clacking like the rattling of pebbles in a can? Or was it kitchen implements, tap-tap-tapping together?
He swallowed painfully and looked around to see if whoever had put him to bed had been kind enough to leave him a glass of water. Perrier, perhaps.
He frowned – the phrase somehow had a resonance, an in-joke that he didn’t understand. But beyond the quilted bed there was nothing. Not that the room was dark – just that there wasn’t any room. As if. . . he didn’t know ‘as if’
what and started to get irritated with himself for not having worked it all out.
Obviously, he thought, none of this was real. The last thing he remembered was trying to get up the ladder behind Calamee before the wave had struck.
All he remembered of that was a numbing, tingling sensation over his skin, and a grey fire burning into his eyes. He clearly wasn’t in the barn any more.
Maybe he’d been moved elsewhere, although he didn’t think he’d actually been unconscious. So he was probably either in some sort of projection, inside his own head, or inside someone else’s. He looked down at the multicoloured quilt – rather garish and tasteless, he thought, but comfortable, and vaguely reminiscent of something. Perhaps he was inside his own head. He eyed the cat – and the cat eyed him back.
‘I don’t suppose you’re the one who’s brought me here, are you?’ he asked, not feeling too hopeful.
The cat gave him an indifferent look.
‘Didn’t think so.’
He looked up, but there was nothing there, either. Despite the pool of light that fell across the bed, above him was total darkness.
‘Well,’ he said loudly, ‘I suppose I’d better get out of this bed and have a wander around. Is that what I’m supposed to do?’
No one answered him. This was becoming a little irritating. He tugged the quilt back from his chest and stared at what passed for his body.
A swirling, writhing mass of. . . something fleshy. Something organic. A strange melange of skin and his coat; shards of other colours – cream, beige, tweed even – darted through it, like minnows in a pond. Slivers of red and purple velvets, watery green silk and something that looked like black leather vied with each other, each new arrival pushing the old pieces back into his body. A living lava-lamp of flesh and fabric. An endless renewal.
The Doctor pulled the quilt back over himself, unwilling, in some way even he didn’t understand, to look at his transmogrification. There was a pain behind his eyes like toothache – a familiar pain, a warning. Was he being told to stay away? It reminded him of the pain he’d felt, a lifetime ago, when he’d tried to break through his amnesia using Dr Chester’s ‘Amazing’ Cerebrotron 122
(Dr Chester’s own quote marks).
Cautiously, he drew back the quilt again and looked down at his body, now almost stable – a watery shimmering, like a heat haze, hung over him, as though the changes that he’d seen in his body were temporarily being held back, in abeyance. It was as though someone – or something – was tinkering with him. It felt like his body, his cells – his molecules, even – had been pulled apart, reconfigured.