Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [50]
His eyes should be closed, his mind opened.
There was no ‘him’ nor ‘eyes’ nor ‘closed’, simply ‘mind’.
DON’T
The Doctor’s eyes were open, as though he’d been woken suddenly. He was back in the dark cellar.
Back, back to his beginning.
There was an old myth that humans used only 10 per cent of their brains.
This was a simple misunderstanding. Give or take, there was activity in every part of the human brain. But the physical structures in there were capable of ten times the activity they actually performed. It wasn’t that a human being had a brain like a house with ninth-tenths of the rooms sealed off, it was more as though a road network wasn’t carrying as much traffic as it was designed to carry.
He was back in the dark cellar.
It was very hard not to think about something.
Itself a thought.
He was back in the dark cellar.
The Doctor tutted to himself. He knew how to do this. He’d studied the discipline a number of times and in a number of locations. He’d been the one who’d helped show the Beatles how to do it, in Bangor of all places.
Which reminded him. That had been the time he’d got into a conversation with a Buddhist vet about the karmic implications of putting an animal down.
Apparently, if you are so willing to put the animal out of its hopeless suffering that you’re willing to risk the resulting bad karma, and even rebirth in one of the hells, then it’s a good act. He had destroyed Gallifrey, put it out of its misery. Had he been reborn in hell, left adrift? The crucial thing to remember, the vet had told him, was compassion.
He was back in the dark cellar.
He let his thoughts slip away. He let his mind go, introduced his mantra, replacing thought.
Simply mind. Something like, but more than, the vast ocean. It was like being dipped in golden light. A pure world, quite unlike the dark cellar.
105
He was back in the dark cellar.
He was out of practice. Trying too hard. He didn’t need to go into a trance.
He simply needed to return to –
Vibration not thought. Golden light, light of life. Pure mind, not where we come from but where we all go when we transcend, the community of mind.
He had destroyed far more than he had created. But he was on the side of life.
He was back in the dark cellar. It was darker, more of a cellar. He screwed up his eyes to clear his head.
Why had that happened? That time it wasn’t him, it was like someone else had warned him. It hadn’t been a noise out here, in the real world.
Slipping back in was easier now.
Nothing had ever called to him in the gold. No voices tempting or scorning.
No conversations. But there were other voices here. Ghosts yet not ghosts, they. . . He had never existed. He was the passing thought of a small, cunning man sitting alone reading a book, drinking his tea, listening to a gramophone record. In a dream.
No.
False.
He was back in the dark cellar.
‘Damn it!’ the Doctor shouted out. Then he felt a bit guilty – he’d almost certainly startled Marnal and Rachel. Guilty for disturbing his kidnappers, not guilty about destroying his home planet and killing its entire population and history.
Interesting.
Trying to explore his mind was like throwing a rubber ball at a wall.
The Doctor closed his eyes.
Strip away all the deception, uncover the truth.
And the truth is: the Doctor was the finest dream of hundreds of human beings, refined as they tapped away at their typewriters. For generations, they’d made him a hero to countless millions in over a hundred countries.
Then, just once, he hadn’t come back. His enemies had kept him away. But despite their best efforts he hadn’t been forgotten. There were those who remembered him when they walked past a dummy in a shop window or sat on the beach looking out to sea, and every time they ground pepper. Some of those who remembered him had typewriters of their own. And, after far too long, a new generation of children were about to hear that music for the first time, and they would learn their sofa wasn’t just for sitting on. Before his sweetest