Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [112]
I re-entered the house through the kitchen. Like a ghost, I moved through its many rooms, but my footsteps were drawn back to the scene of the final confrontation between us all. Baker lay flat on his back where I had turned him, staring at the ceiling with his ruined face. Catherine Harries lay curled on her side. She looked so calm that she might have been asleep. Only the pool of blood soaking into the carpet gave her away. And there, over by the windows, lay the last intact piece of Richard Harries: his burned and pitted skull. I stared at it for a long moment –
And felt myself go numb with horror as something moved inside. My skin began to crawl as if it had taken on a life of its own. I could not tear my eyes away. There, within the shadowed oval of the eye socket, something moved.
A brown furry snout peered blindly from the hole. Two tiny red eyes appeared, gazing inquisitively around the room. Finally a pair of pink forepaws clutched at the lower rim.
Behind the skull something flicked into sight. It was a fat, pink tail moving restlessly from side to side. Its owner appeared from around the other side of the skull. It was a rat, the mate of the one inside the cranial cavity.
Richard Harries’s rats had found a new home at last – within the cage of his skull.
* * *
Closure
* * *
Finale: 1968
‘In my dreams, sometimes, I am still her.’ Susan Seymour had slumped back and was staring at the dimly distant ceiling. There was a cobweb in the corner. The spider was long dead.
The tap-tap scratching was a background now, a counterpoint to her memories as she talked. The figure beside the bed was absolute stillness as he read and listened. When he had finished reading, he still listened.
‘It was strange when she left me. A wrench. In every sense. I felt her torn from me, as if a part of myself had gone. Not just some tenant within my head, my body. A joint owner. Sister, perhaps.’ Her voice was weak and dry from the talking. From the memories. ‘They’ll bring the tea soon, won’t they? I could feel them within me. I could see them. The Doctor standing at my centre, working his hands over the controls. Familiar, but strange.’
The figure’s head snapped up. ‘You see him?’ the throaty rasp demanded.
‘In my mind’s eye.’
‘What is he doing? Do you know? Can you see?’
She squinted at the distant ceiling, tried to untangle the blurred, hazy web. ‘He is setting the…’ Her head rolled slightly on the pillow. ‘Randomiser? Is that it?’
The figure was leaning over her now. Rancid breath hot against her dry face. ‘What is the setting? Can you see the setting?’
‘I… I’m not sure. Let me concentrate…’ She looked him in the face. In the empty spaces where his eyes should be. ‘Is it important?’
‘Without the seed,’ he croaked, ‘their destination, their route through the vortex, is indeed random. Unknown and unknowable. We can use temporal quantum theory to predict their possible destinations. We can narrow the options to the most likely with a probability-projection matrix. But that still leaves thousands. Too many to intercept them.’
His clawlike hand gripped her shoulder. ‘Think!’ he hissed. ‘Think! An interception must be precise. Not like scattering agents across the most probable quantum locations. Not like waiting for one of a thousand to signal his success.’ His grip relaxed slightly. ‘If you can tell me the random seed setting the Doctor used when he left you, then I will not yet have failed.’ He stepped away from the bed. ‘The years, the waiting, the pain. They will not have been for nothing. If…’
A sigh from the bed. Slowly, almost painfully, she exhaled long and slow.
‘You know it.’
‘Yes,