Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [70]
‘No. I . . . ’ Powerless Friendless couldn’t force the words out.
‘You want your memory back,’ Dantalion said softly.
Powerless Friendless nodded.
‘When did I excise the unwelcome remembrances?’ Dantalion asked.
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Powerless Friendless shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps a few years ago.’
‘I was good then.’ The Birastrop smiled mirthlessly. ‘Better than I am now, at any rate. Have you been getting any breakthroughs? Any memories from your previous life?’
Powerless Friendless nodded. ‘Some,’ he admitted. ‘Flashes. Faces and names. How did you know?’
Dantalion looked away, across the restaurant. Powerless Friendless waited, wondering whether the being had heard the question. Eventually Dantalion picked up his glass and sloshed the contents around for a moment.
‘Long and painful experience,’ he said finally. ‘People come to me, and ask me to remove selected memories as if I were pulling a rotting tooth. Painful love affairs. Secrets. Tortures. Sometimes a few moments, sometimes a few years. They pay me, and I do my best. And then, years later, they find me again. “Give them back,” they cry. “I’m incomplete! I can’t live without them!” And I tell them what I’ll tell you.’ He took a swig from the glass, and Powerless Friendless could hear him gulp as he swallowed whatever had been swimming in the drink. ‘I don’t remove memories,’ he said. ‘I just hide them.
I put them in places your mind won’t think to look for them. Sometimes it rediscovers them by accident. Sometimes it searches so hard it finds them despite my best efforts.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes they come crawling back into the light and announce their presence anyway.’ He banged the glass down and signalled to the barman. ‘What I am trying, in my long and roundabout way, to impart to you is that some memories I can get back for you, but others will have been recycled for dreams or overwritten by other experiences. It’s a hit-and-miss affair. Are you still interested in taking advantage of my meagre skills?’
Powerless Friendless nodded.
Something sloshed against the side of Dantalion’s glass, rocking it slightly on the table.
‘Why do you drink that stuff?’ Powerless Friendless asked, wincing.
‘There are some things that even I don’t want to remember,’ Dantalion answered as the barman placed another inhabited drink before him ‘And, as I wouldn’t let anybody like me anywhere near my mind, this is the next best solution.’
‘Mom!’
‘Christopher?’
The small woman in the doorway stared up at Cwej in astonishment. The smells of breakfast – irradiated animeat flesh – drifted out behind her.
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Forrester turned to Bernice. ‘Why did I let myself get talked into this?’ she muttered, and gazed past Bernice, along the hallway. Nobody was around, but she still felt she was being watched.
‘What’s the matter?’ Bernice asked.
‘This just feels like a bad move.’ Forrester let her gaze linger at each of the doorways along the hall. Unlike her level, where the entrances to the individual apartments were grey and anonymous, the ones down here on Level Fifty-three were brightly coloured, ever-changing rectangular kaleidoscopes with the names of the families, and in some cases, their smiling simcord images, appearing out of the coloured patterns.
‘Christopher! It can’t be you!’ the woman exclaimed, clapping her hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh, let me look at you! We were so worried! We thought you might have been caught up in the riots!’
Riots? Forrester thought as Cwej grinned down at his mother. We’ve only been gone a few days. What’s been happening?
‘Mom, I brought some friends.’
‘Any friends of yours are welcome,’ she said, peering round him and gazing at Bernice and Forrester with warm curiosity. ‘Come in, come in. You should have told me you were coming The irradiator’s playing up. I think the techbrain’s gone again, but the cost of replacements these days . . . ’
She ushered them all into a large room filled with furniture and decorated with simcord images of family and friends. A tall, elderly man who had been sitting