Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [42]
As if the last words had struck him, the Doctor staggered, flailed, fell -
- and waked on the floor of his room at Owl with hot tears on his face.
Chapter Nine
Who's Who
When the magician regained his earthly senses, he lay for a long while curled in a tight foetal position, one arm clasped around his knees, the other pulled protectively across the back of his neck. So close. So close!
He gasped in great ragged breaths. As always, his bones felt as if they had loosened within his flesh, which itself felt flaccid, gelatinous. He lay still, gradually returning to himself. It was always such a shock to be back in the body, back in time, ticking away towards death like a uranium clock, one decaying molecule after another.
Slowly his body untensed and he fell sideways, limp, arms and legs lolling.
Sometimes he vomited after these journeys, but the nausea wasn't too bad.
Not nearly as bad as the disappointment writhing through him. So close!
Twice! The first time was a surprise, he'd had help from outside, though initially he'd been unclear exactly what was happening. Then he saw that it was only that idiot Dupre, playing around with magic, accidentally abetting him without even knowing what he was doing.
But he'd been on track, he knew it. So he'd gone out again. And the second Time ah, that had almost been a success. If he had been able to trap his quarry's essence long enough, he could have conjured the body to follow.
He shivered slightly at the thought of what his prey might actually look like.
It was far from human, he could sense that. And its angle to time was so odd; possibly he wouldn't even be able quite to see it. Not with the eyes of his body. But when he finally had it, he would see it on the other plane, look at it full, and not flinch. No, not flinch. He had not come this far to be afraid or, if he was afraid, to let fear stop him.
The sun was just rising as the Doctor approached St Louis #1, glanced cautiously up and down the street, and climbed nimbly over the wall. He had heard of mourners and visitors being attacked and robbed in the cemeteries, but mostly in St Louis and Lafayette #2, and he suspected that sunrise fell between criminal shifts, so to speak, the night workers having gone home tobed and the morning men not having yet arrived.
In fact he was the criminal here, a trespasser. He supposed he might just as well have waited till the gates opened at nine, but he was impatient to see whether he could discover the sepulchre his dreaming self had been imprisoned in the night before. That it was an actual tomb and not a dream image he had no doubt. The whole feel of the dream had been disconcertingly real.
Of course, so had the second part, with the locked gate and the garden and the sleeper in the flowers, and that was clearly fantastical. What did dream theorists say - that every figure in a dream was actually an aspect of the dreamer? Great. What part of himself could possibly be represented by an imp with terrible eyes? The garden imagery, gate and all, was generic, a fixture in every culture that had botanical life. As for the hot grief of his waking well, who knew? Some neuronal misfire or other.
Whereas the first part had been as much vision as dream, as much experience as imagining, he was sure of it.
The morning air was a little damp, and sweet with the odour of some flowering shrub. On the rose-coloured horizon, the sun glowed gold. The little tombs appeared almost domestic, as if each should have a bottle of milk and a newspaper on its stoop.
By the Doctor's recollection, 'his' tomb, while not being one of the pristine refurbished ones, was in fairly good shape, with an intact iron fence of some beauty. He roamed up and down the narrow pathways, and where the paths gave way to a crowded clutter of tombs, squeezed between and behind them. The sun was higher now, and paler, the sky a hard autumn blue. In the clear light, the ruined