Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [107]
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Ace moved to hug the Doctor one more time but he shook his head. ‘Just go. I’ll slip away quietly. No fuss.’
Ace nodded silently, feeling the tears well up in her eyes.
Then she ran through the double doors without looking back.
Epilogue
Expecting the familiar moorland, she was somewhat surprised to find herself on a broad stretch of beach.
The sand glistened like pomegranate seeds and the sky above her was a lovely, dusky purple. A breeze was blowing through a dense forest to her right. Three moons hung low over the horizon.
‘Doctor,’ she said in a low whisper. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’
Robin waited for a very long time. In fact, for over five She ducked back into the TARDIS. The tertiary console months, never a day passed without him making the trip to room was empty and silent, save for the familiar hum of the telescope. Just in case. But she never came back.
machinery. Ace noticed several switches clicking into life.
Perhaps it was for the best. If, as she’d said, she was from Ace stepped over the threshold. The doors swung shut of the future, then living through her time again might have their own accord and the TARDIS dematerialised proven very difficult. But Robin missed her so much.
automatically.
He became very close to Dr Cooper and Vijay Degun and She grasped the brass door knob and threw open the it was good to have friends who understood what he was interior door, racing into the corridor beyond.
going through now that Lawrence was gone too. It had been
‘Doctor! Take me back! I have to go back! I have to!’
a terrible time for them all.
There was no reply. Ace ran down the corridor, fresh tears Robin read the official account in the paper some time springing to her eyes. ‘Doctor! You promised! Take me back!
later. Poison gas, they said, from under the ground.
The light in the grey corridor was dim and cheerless. Ace Couldn’t have been anticipated. Nobody’s fault. He was wheeled around, already hopelessly lost. She slid down the surprised to see how many of those who’d had the worst roundelled wall and buried her head in her hands. ‘Take me scares were the first to deny anything out of the ordinary.
back.’
Probably just their way of dealing with it.
Robin didn’t stay long in Crook Marsham, however. He moved to York and then to London. Occasionally, he got a postcard from Jill Mason. She seemed never to settle down.
Always at some political flashpoint or another.
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Vijay and Dr Cooper he saw more frequently now they were back in Cambridge. They had all put the village behind them. Too many memories. Far too many...
The tracking station was closed down almost at once, dark noises being made about risking government property and Author’s Notes
lives (in that order) in such an unstable geological area.
The great telescope dish stood through another three winters until it was dismantled. Eventually, even the concrete shell of the station buildings, stained and broken by the elements, disappeared.
And there was only the rain. And the moor. Always, the moor.
Prologue
THE END
I knew from the beginning that I wanted a prologue set on Gallifrey with the first Doctor running away. Susan featured in the original draft, as I recall but I was asked to take her out so as to leave her origins more mysterious. She could be waiting for the old man inside the un-disguised TARDIS or he could find her somewhere else later. I still think it’s a rather nice prologue, though it’s a bit purple and, as Joseph II might put it there are “too many notes”.
The very last line where the Time Lord realises the TARDIS has been stolen and says ‘Oh no, this really won’t do at all’ continues the long tradition of the Time Lords’
occasional, lovely forays into the vernacular (see the Master’s terse “D’you wanna rot in ‘ere for the rest of yer natural?” in Frontier in Space). The best example, of course, being the wonderful line at the end of the novelization of The War Games when,