Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [114]
Now Litefoot stepped forward to shake his hand. 'Goodbye, Doctor. I must say it's been both the best and the worst of times. However, I rather think that I've had my fill of adventuring now. I'm getting a little too old for it all.'
The Doctor flashed him a grin. 'Goodbye, Professor. Give my regards to Henry.'
'Oh, I shall. It's a great pity that you were unable to meet him.'
'Yes,' said the Doctor evasively and half turned away. He hated long goodbyes almost as much as he hated bus stations and burnt toast.
'It is quite safe, isn't it?' said Emmeline, gesturing at the energy wave suffusing the doorway.
'Quite safe,' said the Doctor. 'Just step through it. You'll feel a moment's disorientation, but you won't come to any harm.'
Perhaps wishing to make up for being the last to climb on to the Skarasen, Nathaniel went first, squaring his shoulders and stepping determinedly into the wave. It sucked him in and he disappeared.A moment later Sam shouted,'He's outside. I can see him on the screen. He looks a bit groggy, but he's OK.'
Emmeline went next, blowing the Doctor and Litefoot a kiss before stepping through.
'I say,' commented Litefoot, but there was a twinkle in his eye. 'Well, goodbye again, Doctor. It's been most enlightening.' He stepped forward and in to the wave, and just before it sucked him in he raised a hand in farewell.
Instinctively the Doctor raised his own hand in return, but the professor was already gone.
Epilogue
Later that evening, Litefoot settled back in his favourite armchair, the old leather warmed and softened by the fire roaring in the grate. He cradled a glass of brandy and thought about the past few days.
For the second time in five years his life had been turned upside down, his perception of the world irrevocably altered.Yet despite all that he had witnessed and experienced, he felt surprisingly calm and controlled, as though his mind had expanded to accommodate the wealth of new and incredible information that had come flooding into it.
Did this make him dull wilted or perhaps even mad, he wondered, the fact that he was so willing to believe and accept the impossible? No, on the contrary, madness surely occurred only when a mind persistently refused to accept the barrage of evidence being fed to it by way of its own senses.
Such a mind, he mused, would be so unyielding, so rigid, it would certainly rupture, its boundaries straining until they burst, like the banks of a river after too much rain.
He glanced at the curtained window. There must be a multitude of poor, deranged souls wandering out there tonight, desperately trying to deny the evidence of their own eyes.
He had arrived home earlier that day utterly exhausted, his lungs aching from the walk. The only thing that had kept him going had been the thought of his warm bed and visions of Mrs Hudson's delicious beef broth, a pot of which she seemed to keep constantly on the boil. However, upon returning home, he had been informed by his housekeeper that there had been
'some form of commotion' in several of the poorer areas of London, and that his presence was required at the mortuary at his earliest convenience.
Driven by duty, Litefoot had hailed a cab, which had carried him as far as it could until the streets became impassable, and then for the second time that day he had picked his weary way through once-familiar streets that now resembled a war zone, strewn with corpses, rubble and debris.
He had spent the remainder of that long day performing postmortems on bodies that had been eviscerated, crushed, partly devoured, and sometimes all three. By the time a cab arrived that evening to take him home, the police having cleared a way through the streets, he was almost insensible with fatigue.Additionally, he had become so inured to the grisly nature of his work that he had had to be gently reminded by a police officer to wash off the gore that was coating his arms up to the elbows before donning his jacket and coat and staggering out