Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [55]
Rachel cut him off before she had to endure the whole lecture. ‘Why make your spaceships so big, then?’
Marnal shrugged. ‘There are legends that the first Time Lords were true immortals. But I think the reason is that a TARDIS and its operator are linked.
All our minds have hidden depths, areas we will never consciously explore.
That seems to go double for the Doctor.’
He strode down the corridor. After thirty or forty yards he stopped and looked around.
‘You don’t know where we’re going?’ Rachel asked, as gently as she could.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I’m looking for the power room. It usually isn’t very far from the entrance.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘A power room can look like anything. Its distinguishing feature is that there will be what looks like an iron ball the size of a house in it.’
‘That’s pretty distinguishing.’
Rachel opened the nearest door and stepped through it.
It was a lad’s bedroom. Small, with an unmade bed with a radio and broken clock built into the headboard. The sheets were almost as crumpled as the piles of jeans and underwear. An old record player sat on a chair, surrounded by a variety of LPs, CDs and what looked like square blocks of transparent plastic. There was a bedside table piled with a few books and knickknacks topped by an empty champagne bottle.
Rachel trod on a discarded bra. She guessed this wasn’t the Doctor’s room.
‘This isn’t it,’ Marnal told her, rather redundantly in the circumstances.
‘How many rooms are there?’ she asked once they were heading back along the corridor.
‘Countless numbers.’
They’d walked some distance down the corridor and reached a wall that blocked their way.
‘The power room is clearly down another corridor.’
‘This is weird,’ Rachel said. She wasn’t talking about the cigarette butts all over the floor.
Marnal was staying a few feet back from the wall. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.
Now she could, and she took a step back. ‘A scratching noise. There’s something trapped behind there. I think we should get the Doctor.’
∗ ∗ ∗
117
The Doctor lifted himself up and smashed his chair down against the cellar floor. It was metal, but it was quite old. The legs buckled, so much so that he couldn’t rest the chair back on the ground. Instead, he smashed it down again.
One leg broke off and another went without much more effort. With his legs free, it was the work of moments to smash the back of the chair against the wall.
He quickly found a hook on the wall, and prised the manacles apart enough to wriggle his hands out.
Free.
He stood for a moment, catching his breath and letting the blood reach his hands and feet. He’d not stood up for almost a day, and it was almost dizzying.
No time to hang around, though.
As he hurried to the door his eyes fell on the pile of books. He picked up the top one. Day of Wrath, by Marnal, a paperback published a quarter of a century ago. He flicked through the first couple of pages, then put it to one side and rummaged through the other books. All by the same author, all on the same theme. A record of Gallifrey, in almost obsessive detail. One of the books, it appeared, had no story as such; it was more like a novel-length summary of a ceremony that was conducted only once every century.
It had been published in 1938 and was illustrated by Mervyn Peake. Another was an obsessive list of the annual variations of his home planet’s climate.
Gallifrey, it seemed, had more than two dozen seasons. Not that any of the Time Lords ever ventured outside the sealed domes that covered their cities to experience the weather directly – they preferred the safety of books on the subject. The problem, the Doctor concluded, for the writer of adventure fiction set on Gallifrey was that nothing much ever happened there.
His coat was in one corner. He put it back on, and checked to see if anything was missing. Only the TARDIS key. He slipped three of the thinner books into his pockets.
The Doctor went upstairs, keeping as quiet as he could. He found himself in the kitchen. Rachel