Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [79]
The young man’s tone was magnanimous and his smile was a smug pantomime of reassuring warmth, and for the first time the Doctor understood completely Leela’s aggressive reaction to feeling patronised. The brightness he had been standing in now dimmed slightly, confirming that his caution was probably justified. If he had tried to move immediately, there was a good chance he would have been given some sort of unpleasant shock to the nervous system.
It could still happen, he realised, so he moved carefully out of the central pit and walked slowly up the slight slope to where Monly was standing.
‘I told you you needn’t be afraid,’ Monly said impatiently.
‘I’m a man of my word.’
The Doctor said, ‘I find all this unnerving. It’s hard to trust what you can’t understand.’
‘I understand it,’ Monly said. ‘You can trust me.’
The Doctor smiled and nodded. ‘Where is Leela, did you say?’
Monly stepped aside to let the Doctor get a clear view of the alcove. The darkness was more than an absence of light: it looked like a physical presence, and the whole alcove was filled with it up to the open front, where it ended in a precisely defined and slightly flattened curve of black. The Doctor, making a show of nervous helplessness, said, ‘I don’t see anything.’
Monly smirked. ‘That’s where she is.’
The Doctor had a rough idea what you had to do to get these alcoves to work but until he knew what had happened to Leela it was important that this madman should not feel threatened in any way, so he shrugged uncertainly and took a tentative step closer to the dark. He hesitated and then, as if too frightened to go the whole way in, stopped and leaned forward, putting only his face through into the effect.
He found he was at once inside and outside so that what he saw was both real and an illusion. By stepping further in he reasoned he could become fully immersed but he was unsure whether this would mean losing direct contact with the way out of the darkness, and this did not seem like a sensible time to experiment. Directly in front of him, Leela was walking in the dark, unaware that she could see nothing and was going nowhere. In a bizarre reversal of physical reality, what he could see of himself was less substantial than she was.
He reached out a transparent arm, took hold of her wrist and pulled her gently in the direction of the alcove edge where he was standing. It was clear that since he did not share her reality she could neither see him nor hear him. ‘Listen to me,’
he whispered, ‘and remember this is your idea. When you find yourself in the light sit down. Do not move. Do not panic.’
He pulled her across the threshold, and stepped back with empty hands held out in front of him, as though he was surprised to find them empty.
He had expected it, but he was still relieved that when he turned round Leela was standing in the bright centre of the chamber where he had first stood. She said, ‘I do not panic,’
and then she sat down cross-legged on the floor.
Monly was annoyed and suspicious. ‘How did you do that?’ he demanded.
The Doctor shook his head in mild amazement. ‘I don’t know, he said. ‘I saw her there and I tried to pull her out. Did I pull her out? Is that what I did?’
‘What you did was ruin a perfectly good experiment.
‘An experiment?’ the Doctor asked, interested and forgetting for the moment his timid disguise, which was beginning to bore him, anyway. ‘What hypothesis were you testing?’
‘That the blank zone I can create is infinite.’
‘And you would test that how, exactly?’
‘There are a number of ways. But I thought the most fun would be to see if she would walk herself to death in there.’
He sniggered and walked closer to where Leela was sitting in the brightness and stared at her.
It was a timely reminder, the Doctor thought, of how easy it was to forget that this was not simply an irritating young man but a dangerously unpleasant psychopath. ‘In that case,’ he said, hoping it was not too late to get back into character,