Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [50]
'I know, I know. He's doing his best. He'll get it right someday. I just hope it's before I turn forty' She gazed forlornly at the little blue dogs. 'He's not just moving us out of the way because he expects things to get really nasty, is he?'
'Not to worry. If he was packing us off because he's going up against some supermonster, we'd be heading for Acapulco, not bloody freezing Vermont.'
* * *
The Doctor walked through St Louis #1 in the moonlight. The rain had not come, though the threat of it lingered in the damp air, and an occasional murmur of thunder faded in from the far distance. His footsteps crunched on the crushed shells. Rap music blared from an apartment building on the other side of the wall, but the cemetery still seemed swathed in quiet.
Like a new blue style of sepulchre, the TARDIS was sitting between two well-maintained white stucco tombs. No one had taken any notice of it. No one ever did. The Doctor had gradually got used to the way that, unless someone was actively looking for it, any eye except his tended to slide right past the TARDIS. How it maintained this edge-of-vision presence he had no idea. Possibly the effect had been his invention at some point. Possibly it was the TARDIS's own idea. He had learned you could never be sure.
Inside, he went over and laid his hands on the console, like a returning traveller touching his native soil. The low hum of the engines sounded like a contented purr. He thought, not for the first time, about getting a cat. He liked cats. He had had an odd, unexplained little adventure with a cat a few months ago, when the TARDIS had landed for no discernible reason in Kent in the early nineties. It was night, Fitz and Anji were sleeping.When the Doctor stepped outside, he realised he was on somebody's property.
He had walked a few yards, enough to get a look at the house and see that it was nineteenth century and lived in, when a small yellow cat suddenly appeared between his ankles, rubbing and purring. Leaning down to pet it, the Doctor had touched the soft fur and been hit, like an electric shock, with such a sensation of fear and grief that tears started in his eyes. Before he quite realised what he was doing, he had picked up the cat and carried it into the TARDIS, which then transported him to a farm in South Wales whose owners, though perplexed by this sudden visitor bearing the gift of a cat, welcomed the little animal. He last saw it sitting in a sunny window, contentedly licking clean a paw.
He never had figured that one out. He had stolen some unsuspecting person's cat and taken it to Wales - very peculiar, indeed outright criminal, behaviour. Yet he had a feeling of lightness and contentment, of a deed well done - at the same time that he sensed he had somehow cheated, acted in a way that wasn't exactly cricket. He had the same feeling now as he set the controls to take him back to the night in 1980 when the drowned plantation earned its name.
Of course, this time he was not going to act. Whatever had happened, he had no intention of interfering. He only wanted to witness. All right, perhaps it was cheating, bending some unwritten rules he couldn't even quite define. But he was under pursuit. And he wasn't safe. Not even in the TARDIS. With no place to run, he was justified in using every possible tool for defence or escape. Wasn't he?
Perhaps the TARDIS won't even take me there, he thought. He wasn't at all certain he'd get Fitz and Anji to New England the next morning; he might have to put them on a plane. Whenever he set the TARDIS controls, he had a sense of surrendering himself to fate. So who knew whether he had just landed twenty-two miles southwest of New Orleans at 11.30 p.m. on 30
April 1980, approximately half an hour, according to the news reports, before the mega-decibel crash of the house's collapse drew rescue workers to the scene? He checked the navigational readings. They indicated that he was in the right place at the right time - or at least where he wanted to be.