Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [17]
'You know too much,' said Dorothée, getting into her stride. 'Don't know how you did it, but you've been inside my head. You've got al the lurid facts, but you don't have a clue what I feel. And this isn't about me anyway, is it?'
Ace stared coldly. 'You reckon?'
28
'Call yourself an interrogator? You couldn't interrogate the time out of a policeman. You're not Ace. I'm Ace and Dorothy and Dorothée.' She managed a smile. 'The Doctor's secrets are his, not mine. So who sent you? What's the game?'
The room went black. Dorothée was alone with her thoughts.
***
'I dreamed I was standing in front of a huge wall. Huge stones, really ancient. No, older than ancient. As if it had been there forever. The stones were rust-coloured. The wall went right up into the clouds and there were birds high on it, wheeling birds. Vultures maybe? I couldn't tell. There was a pair of big doors in the wall. They must have been bronze, but they were all tarnished.'
'This is very vivid,' said the Doctor.
Chris shook his head. 'Yeah. I never remember dreams like this. I wake up and the details go really fast.'
'Tell me about the wall. Was there anybody with you?'
'Not at first. There was a stone pavement in front of the doors. I was standing on it, but when I looked at the ground beyond it, that was moving. It was sliding under the pavement. Under the wall. The whole wal was moving slowly forward over the landscape.'
He waited for a reaction, but the Doctor sat silently, waiting for him to continue.
'So ahead of me, ahead of the wall, I could see the sun rising out of the mist. There were shapes in the mist too, but I couldn't make them out against the sun. I had this urge to go back through the doors. I suppose that means I'd already come through them, but when I tried them they were shut tight.
'And then there was a woman there, all in brown - in a sort of mass of brown gauze veils. Her face was brown too, sunburnt and stretched tight. She was matronly - is that the right word? I don't know where she came from. She was just there.
'She said the doors were the Door to the Past. So I looked through a spyhole and on the other side, the landscape was al lit red in the sunset. If it real y was the Past, then it was all dripping with blood like some sort of schlock-vid battlefield and the clouds were made of bone. And the brown woman told me, "On the other side, the doors are the Gate of the Future." It was weird, but she smelt of roses. I never smelt things in a dream before, but she smelt of honey and roses. Like summer's supposed to smel in books.'
'Very poetic,' observed the Doctor. 'Is that al ?'
'No. That's just the start of it. I could hear voices singing. They were children's voices. They were singing something about Eighth Man Bound.'
The Doctor cleared something uncomfortable from his throat:
'Eighth man bound
Make no sound
The shroud covers all
The Long and the Short...'
His voice trailed off.
'That's it,' said Chris. 'How did you... how did I know something you knew, but I'd never heard?'
'You must have heard it somewhere,' said the Doctor smoothly. 'A nursery rhyme at your mother's knee?'
'She always sat us in front of the holovid.'
The Doctor frowned. 'Schlock-vids?'
29
'Maybe. It's what most families do.'
A pained expression slid across the Doctor's face. 'Well, a race memory then,' he foundered. 'I take it there's more.'
'The woman in brown said the voices belonged to the unborn children. The ones waiting to be born. Waiting to live.
And then she lifted her veils.' He faltered in sudden realization. 'That was what it was like. It was like a shroud. Like in the song. And under it, there was an old hag crouching on the ground. She was in filthy black rags, more like a vulture than a woman. Her face was al skinny wrinkles and her nose was al beaky and she had an eyepatch.'
'And what did she say?' asked the Doctor.
'Something about, "He's gone away, the gatekeeper." Her voice was like a croak. And then she said' (he paced it out carefully), '"The Door to the Past is locked. Nothing gets through.