Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [113]
You're not fated, man, not doomed. Abandon this course.'
'And then what?' Rust's voice was metallic, deadly. 'All my victims will rise whole and well from their graves? All my lost years will return? I can spend the little time left to me thinking of the crimes I committed and the sacrifices I made for nothing'. You said it yourself: we are the shape the past has made us. What I've done and been can't be erased. It's in me now
-
it's what I am!'
'It's what you're choosing to be!'
Rust jerked him up. The Doctor choked back a cry. 'You pathetic inhuman thing!' Rust hissed in his face. 'What makes you think you can forgive me?'
He threw the Doctor down and strode back to where Thales lay hunched and trembling. Thunder banged around the house like a string of firecrackers. The Doctor stared at the black window. There was nothing there.
It was true, then. The void had run him to ground. It had found itself in him as he might find himself in a mirror - though not, he noticed, in the glass panes he now faced, which swallowed all reflection. Mon semblable, he thought, gazing into the emptiness, mon frere. Part of him wailed in resistance – it couldn't be, it mustn't be. Only there, undeniably, the dark thing was, pressed against the window like a black tongue. Evidence that was, in every sense of the word, damning.
Well, he thought, that being the case he might as well put his corruption to good use.
Oh, Rust,' he called, 'you might want to take a look at this.'
Rust's head jerked up. He had bound Thales's wrists with his tie and was using his pocket knife to scratch a hasty circle around him. 'No more from you,' he said dangerously.
"This isn't my doing, it's yours. Look at the window.'
A monstrous crack of thunder shuddered the room. The Doctor pointed at the dark panes. "The storm's right on top of us. Why can't we see the lightning?'
Rust seemed hypnotised by the nonsight. 'What is it?' he whispered.
'Oh,' said the Doctor sardonically, 'don't you know? You're like a boy who's tossed a match into a forest and then stares at the inferno and says,
"What's that?" It's the fuel that's propelled your machinations, Rust. That's a gas fire out there.'
'That's no fire '
'It is, though,' said the Doctor, 'for all it burns black.' He shifted, gritting his teeth, trying to ease the pain in his leg. 'It consumes everything. It follows one law: "All things created deserve destruction."
Don't you remember? Don't you understand? What did you think you were doing?'
Thales moaned but didn't move. Rust stared at the window. Rain streamed down it as if the glass were melting. Thunder crashed. There was no light.
'What does it want?'
'What do you think? This was all your idea. It wants me.'
Rust stood up. The knife blade gleamed in his hand. 'It recognises you. It's come for its own.'
'Unflattering,' said the Doctor, 'but not without advantages' -and, shouting as his damaged leg wrenched beneath him, he threw himself at the window and slammed it open.
The rain slapped his face. The wind flung itself around him. I'm here,' he whispered. 'Come for me. Come in'.
Rust screamed as if something had ripped out of him. There may have been words in his cry, but the Doctor couldn't tell, since the sound warped and whined incomprehensibly as he twisted through the air, through the room, through some unbearable new kind of space. Billions of miles away, the candles flickered like stars and thrust blisteringly against his skin. He seemed to be tumbling, like a man drowning in a stormy ocean, but there was no up or down, no water or air - only something filled his lungs that was cold and black as a night-sea. It slurped and roiled out of his mouth, and he realised it was a sound, like the wind shrieking. He knew it couldn't be him, because