Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [38]
Why was this particular situation bothering him so much? For the past half-century, he'd been more or less inured to the randomness and chaos of his odd existence. Angered sometimes, hurt, occasionally shocked, a few times even awed - but not thrown like this, not confused. Whenever he thought about the problem, it was as if his head were stuffed with a hugely tangled ball of string that, simultaneously, he was also stuck in the middle of. He didn't seem to be able to think.
Which was a good indication, of course, that there was something he didn't want to think about. The Doctor sighed. Those sessions with Freud had been like this. He'd entered analysis out of curiosity more than any belief it would unearth memories - though at the time, more than a century ago, he'd been more interested in that, and had more hope about it, than now. In the event, no memories had been recovered. But a number of insights that could be accurately characterised as unpleasant had come up, and he'd noticed that every time one nudged at the edge of his consciousness, his focus had shot away from it like a startled bird. And he had learned that this was always a sign that the insight deserved his most serious attention.
So - he shifted, putting his hands behind his head - what did he not want to think about? What did he not want to know? Well, it was obvious, wasn't it?
How had the darkness got into the TARDIS?
The TARDIS's newly-refitted defences were well-nigh unbreachable.
Something as inchoate as the darkness couldn't possibly pierce them, even with a directing mind behind it. The darkness& perhaps Nothing was a better word for it the Nothing was an impersonal force, a wind of emptiness, he could tell that. Even aimed deliberately at the TARDIS, it should have been rebuffed.
Unless
Unless the laws of attraction came into play. Unless the Nothing wasn't trying to invade but merely to merge, to seek a natural completeness.
Unless something identical in him was reaching out to, longing for, welcoming the void.
'No!' he said out loud. 'No,' he whispered, remembering that that was what Fitz had said he had been yelling as he dreamed. 'No,' he muttered helplessly. What was he? What was he? He was alive, he was life, he was on the side of life -hadn't he proved that over and over again? Whoever had died, whatever had been wrecked, it was life he served. For over a hundred years he had -
but what about before?
He clenched his teeth in irritation. What about before? He couldn't remember. Whatever it was, there was nothing he could do about it now.
He might travel through time, but his own personal present was as limited as any human being's. He was what he did, not what he had done& Even as he argued this to himself, a cold whisper at the back of his mind breathed that it wasn't so. Remember Greene's novel. The man had killed his wife. The husband could insist as much as he liked that he was only his new, memoryless self - but the woman was still dead. Her surviving spouse's self-image didn't do her much good.
A moral being is defined by its actions. Is it also trapped by them? That didn't make sense. After a misstep, was there no starting over again? The moment you committed a well, a crime at that moment, should you kill yourself because all possibility of a good life was now gone? A ludicrous notion. Childish, even. You did what you could, and then you lived with it -
'Shut up,' he told himself quietly. It didn't matter. All the logic and the reasons and the common sense didn't matter. He was afraid. He was afraid that he wasn't an agent of life at all, that in the long run he had destroyed, and would destroy, more than he created.
He was afraid he was a monster.
Well, he thought, only one way to find out. Time to sleep.
In a minute. In a few minutes. He needed a little more peace before his descent.
Dupre thought his night couldn't get any worse until someone poked him with the tip of a shoe and