• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The chair was empty. When he crossed to it, he saw water pooling around the rockers.

'I'd like to talk to you,' he said to the vacant chair.

No response. He was alone. The Doctor looked around the room. The pomegranate had joined the other fruit on the table, gleaming among the dark grapes and pale pears.

'Thank you,' he said, 'but I'm not biting.'

He went out to the pool at the foot of the waterfall, stripped, dived in and swam as close as possible to the falls themselves, where he hooked an arm around a convenient rock and drifted and bobbed in the turbulence, squinting up through the spray at the roaring water. It was darker than emeralds or jade, the colour of green marble, white foam streaking it like veins. He'd like to be that water, the Doctor thought, supple and tumbling.

Arms slipped around him from behind. 'No,' he said.

The embrace was gone so swiftly he wondered if he'd imagined it.

The next day he didn't climb to the top of the waterfall but walked in the opposite direction, following the stream from the pool down through the forest. In an impossibly short time, he came to the sea. It was purple, as if he had wandered down from

Germanic mountains to the shores of the Adriatic, and the sky above it was more green than blue. The Doctor walked barefoot at the edge of the waves. When night came, he slept on the beach. The next morning, a depression in the sand told him that someone had slept beside him.

He spent most of the day walking along the beach in the other direction.

The white sand went on without feature, except for a number of interesting shells that washed up at his feet. He took these back with him to the cottage and lined them up on the mantel. The offerings on the table were unchanged, except that the pomegranate was gone.

The Doctor sat on the bed and refilled his coat pockets. Then he addressed the empty room: 'I'm not going to the mountains, and if I don't, this existence is rather a dull one. I wish to leave.'

He didn't expect a reply and he didn't get one.

In the middle of the night he woke up, blinking, in bright moonlight. Mrs Flood was perched on the window ledge, her feet resting lightly on his thigh.

'I need to go,' he said.

'Why?' Incongruously, she retained her Southern accent. He supposed it was the only way she knew to pronounce human language. Probably she would speak Japanese with the same twang.

'Because this isn't enough.'

'You don't know if it's enough,' she pointed out. 'You haven't seen it all yet.'

'Nor will I.'

'Why not?'

'Because ' he said inadequately. How could you explain to an immortal the pressure of passing time, the sense that it was to be lived in, not drifted through. She rubbed her foot against his leg. 'Stop that.'

'Why?'

'It's Just stop it, please. 'With an exasperated sigh, she stopped moving her foot. She did not, however, withdraw it.

'You know,' she said. 'I never lived in a body before, and I don't say much for it. But there's a couple things about it I don't mind at all.'

'Have you taken physical form just to communicate with me?'

'I guess you could put it like that.' She slid down on top of him. The Doctor felt as if a light shock had shimmered over his skin. 'You don't make much use of your body, do you? You just sorta let it carry you around.'

'I still don't understand,' he said, maintaining a conversational tone, 'how I released you.'

'You tried to help. You thought about me instead of you. Three times.' She brought her face near to his. 'I owe you.'

'You don't -' he began, but she put a finger across his lips.

"There's other things to feel besides pain.'

Then she bent to him, and all the input of his senses entered into his blood.

She tasted of the ocean. She never slept. Her eyes were always open and on him. Her whispers were like sounds he had heard when holding a shell to his ear.

Still, to her annoyance, he refused to take any food. If she tried to feed him slices of bread