Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [77]
She met Ace’s eyes in the rear‐view mirror. Ace was thinking about the time he’d dislocated his arm (which had been her fault), the sudden startling realization that he was made out of flesh and blood, that he could be damaged. Usually finding the Doctor was a good sign that things were going to be all right. Not this time, then.
Ace pulled out onto the road, steering with one hand while she ate crisps with the other. ‘Cunning,’ she said. ‘Fool your enemy into thinking they’ve got the upper hand by letting them kick the shit out of you.’
‘Oh yes?’ said the Doctor from the back seat. ‘Is that what you think?’
Ace swore. The car skidded as she straightened it.
‘Conference,’ said the Doctor.
* * *
They conferenced in the kitchen in Allen Road. The house seemed quiet, muffled by snow; the jungle of the garden was silent and dead‐looking. Inside the kitchen even the air seemed to be hovering, waiting for something.
The Doctor drank tea, pouring milk out of the bottle Ace had bought. His face had a strange look; he was ill, but it made him powerful, like some sort of tribal healer high on funny leaves. His eyes burned, the pupils tiny in rings of bright blue.
‘The enemy’s name is Huitzilin,’ he said.
‘Huitzilopochtli?’ asked Bernice.
‘Just Huitzilin. Once upon a time, he was an Aztec chief. Long before they were Mexica, when they were still nomads, wandering in the wilderness. They were sheltering in a cave when they found something the Exxilons had left behind.’
‘Aliens interfering in human development,’ said Ace.
‘In this case, just an accident. They left behind a bit of radioactive rubbish. The result would have been mostly poisoning, cancer. But in one set of chromosomes…’
‘Huitzilin was a mutant?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘He was – he is one of the most powerful psychics ever to exist on Earth. When the time came to die, Huitzilin used his power to… not to stop his physical death, which he had already postponed. To survive.’
He stirred his third cup of tea thoughtfully. Ace had bandaged his wrist, where the UNIT handcuffs had chafed the lacerations. ‘Think of it this way. A living person is real. A dead person stops being real, and becomes imaginary, existing only in the memory and the imagination of other people. Huitzilin survived as an imaginary person.’
‘Like a ghost?’ said Ace.
‘Like a Jungian archetype?’ asked Bernice. ‘Present in the collective unconscious?’
‘Either of those analogies will do. But he survived. His was the ghost voice that led the Aztecs. And being noncorporeal, he needed a new kind of food.’
‘The sacrifices,’ said Bernice.
‘When a person dies,’ said the Doctor, ‘they give up their reality. Or they produce a certain amount of psychic energy… it’s not that different to the mundane food chain. The eagle eats sunlight energy stored in the form of a rabbit.’
‘Macbeth said the police are still looking for John and Lizzie,’ said Ace.
‘They won’t find them,’ said the Doctor. He pushed his tea away.
Bernice was rubbing her thumb across her forehead, agitated. ‘Where’d all this information come from?’
‘The door swings both ways,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh my God,’ said Bernice. ‘You’re his ixiptla.’ She stood up suddenly, hands gripping the back of the chair. The penny had finally dropped. ‘His ixiptla.’
‘We’re one and the same person,’ said the Doctor. He smiled whitely. ‘Twice now he’s tried to open the gate between us. The second time, he succeeded. For six minutes and twenty seconds, I didn’t exist.’
‘At the Happening,’ said Bernice. The panic she’d felt in the basement came crawling back up her spine. ‘And he ate Lizzie and John. He ate them.’
‘The whole thing was premature of him,’ said the Doctor. ‘Even with that energy, he couldn’t make the switch permanent. We haven’t grown close