Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [14]
'Well, you'll meet plenty of them there. And, of course, the more scholarly types drop by here a lot. Then there's the witchcraft shop over on Dumaine'
She ended up giving him a guide to all the local sorcery shops and voodoo museums and ghost tours and death-art galleries, and threw in the Anne Rice sites just for good measure. He took notes on the back of the flyer.
She thought he must have a lot of time to fill.
'Travelling alone?'
'My friends are staying at a hotel down the street, the house with the white columns and the iron fence shaped like stalks of corn.'
'Yeah, that's a beautiful place. Not enough room for all of you, huh?"
'There was room. I just decided it would be better if I were on my own.'
'Too much togetherness?'
'No.' He shook his head. 'They're nice people. I just have bad dreams.'
The magician hated being psychically blind. He moved through the world in his material body and colours that he didn't care about fell into his eyes.
But when he shifted off the physical plane, his senses went blank. He travelled fast, yet he groped his way, passing through a silence so profound that he felt as if he were penetrating a solid object - an infinite solid, with neither shape nor boundary.
It wasn't empty, this dark silence. He was simply insufficient to it. Just beyond his apprehension it hummed as sweetly as struck crystal. He knew this, though he could not say how - just as he knew he was not still but hurtling through this nowhere so rapidly that if he had had lungs the speed would have snatched his breath away.
The ancient texts all whispered of expansion, not this muffling mutilation.
They were laden with jewelled phrases - 'the third eye','the music of the spheres' - but he travelled with dust in his mouth. He could not remember tears, though pain, of course, never went away.
Then, thrumming on the edge of this edgeless realm, there had come something. Heat. Or perhaps it was light. Or water - a murmuring spring in his sensual desert. Was it knowledge or an object? An answer, or just a tool? Was it flesh? He began to think it was flesh. He felt that it decayed, though slowly, like eroding rock. It stood in a different relation to time than he did.
At first he was distraught and enraged because he knew that what he ultimately sought was not flesh and could not disguise itself as flesh, not on this plane. Without senses he had learned to sense, and what had he discovered? Not anything he wanted. He became petulant. To have dared so much and come so far, only to be fobbed off with What was it anyway? Its piercingly sweet energy had almost a sound, a silver tone chiming in his bones. Or almost a light, a soft gleam, also like silver, old silver in a fire-lit room.
He wanted to touch it. He wanted it to sing to him. Finally, he just wanted it. It would not shudder him. It would heal& No, no, he could tell that it couldn't heal him. But with it, he knew, he would find his way to healing at long last.
Such a slow journey. In folk tales, the heroes were set ridiculous tasks such as emptying a well with a sieve. His task was as absurdly tedious, as hopeless, as hard to measure. He had accomplished marvels, but were they the marvels that would help him? He had lost so much -could he gauge his progress by that loss? He turned the blind corners one after another, and always there was one more passage. But the dead end could be around the next corner. Or the millionth corner.
Or he could be on the path that led to his goal.
The sight of children playing hurt him. His tenderness frightened him. Was it a child he had found now? If so, he must stop. He must not he would not he did not want to use a child. But was it just a child? The purity was gangrenous with sorrow - an anguished sorrow, almost madness. Only a life lived could produce that particular suffering, corrupting despair. The magician knew.
It was not a child, and he would find it. If only he could see.
Chapter Four
The Magical Mystery Tour
The Doctor enjoyed the streetcar ride