Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [1]
Interview with a famous rock guitarist, 1989
Prologue
‘No doctors!’
That made a few of the relatives on the edge of the group jump, then look back at each other self-consciously. One of the aunts turned away, opened the window a little. The old man on the bed glared at her as the cold air drifted in, but said nothing.
Rachel was sitting by the bedside. The relatives were little more than silhouettes. Black outlines of people. Men in suits, women in tailored jackets, small, restless children in their Sunday best. She couldn’t see how many there were. Almost all of them, though. Crowding round.
Circling.
‘This is such a lovely house,’ another aunt said. She was standing at the window looking down over the lush, green garden.
‘Surprisingly large,’ an uncle agreed.
‘Too dark,’ a woman’s voice said.
‘Cluttered,’ another chipped in, to a general murmur of agreement.
There was a touch like a butterfly’s at Rachel’s wrist.
She looked down at the old man. Rheumy eyes stared back, unblinking. It had worn him out just lifting his hand. He’d heard every word.
‘Don’t let them destroy the books,’ he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘They’re my life.’
There wasn’t much of that life left now. He twisted a little on the bed, the pain in his back surging for a moment, coursing through him. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
Rachel hadn’t known him that long, but in the last month he had clearly begun to fade. He was very old – how old the agency had never told her, but she’d always thought he was in his eighties – with thin white hair and thinner white skin. He had an aquiline nose and high forehead. He had beautiful blue eyes, even if they were a little watery today. He hadn’t stood for a long time, he barely even sat up now. When she’d first given him a bed bath, she’d been struck that he was smaller and lighter than she had thought.
She’d seen his picture on the inside of one of the dust jackets once. Before, there had been so much dignity.
‘A good innings,’ one of the grandsons said softly.
3
‘He was a friend of H.G. Wells,’ another whispered to his wife. ‘Wrote science fiction before it was even called that.’
‘Do you have any of his books?’
‘I have some of them, it doesn’t mean I’ve read them,’ the man replied, eliciting a guilty chuckle from a couple of the other relatives.
‘Not all of the new ones were published,’ the old man tried to explain.
‘No,’ the grandson said, sympathetically. ‘But that didn’t stop you writing, did it?’
‘Pen,’ the old man demanded.
Rachel passed him the blue biro and the notepad. A couple of the relatives glanced nervously at each other. There was still time, after all, for him to change his will.
Once again, he tried to draw it. He started with a circle. Then a sort of broken figure-of-eight inside the circle, one with little swirls at the side. It looked vaguely Celtic. He gave up trying to get it right, again. This was the furthest he’d got with the shape for about twenty pages. He was nearly through the notepad. He could fit two, three or four circles on each page.
He dropped the pen. Rachel caught it before it slipped off the bed, and tried to hand it back. The old man refused to take it, or couldn’t summon the strength.
‘No,’ he said.
Rachel smiled. ‘You said it was always quite difficult to draw,’ she said gently.
‘Two hundred feet in diameter,’ he said, angry with himself. ‘Machonite inlaid in bone-white marble. A circle like that. . . should be. It filled the whole centre of the. . . the hall. The big hall. The one with hexagonal walls and statues the size of tower blocks. The. . . damn it! I want to get it right.
When I close my eyes, I can see it all. But I can’t even remember the name of the. . . I can’t remember it. I was born there. Spent lifetimes there. It’s important.’
The relatives were shifting their feet. Embarrassed by the outburst or worried that he had more life left in him than they’d thought.
The old man looked around,