Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [6]
He was wearing a frilly Mr-Darcy-style shirt now. Over that, he pulled on a dark-blue blazer. It was a peculiar ensemble. He hurried over to the mirror and examined himself, pudging up his face with his fingers.
‘Um. . . This is all right, I suppose,’ he said to himself. ‘A little scrawny. A little young, but I’ll grow out of that.’
He shrugged off the blazer and found himself a velvet jacket.
‘And so what you did before. . . that was regeneration?’
‘That’s right. This’ – he pointed down at his own body – ‘is my thirteenth incarnation. The process renewed me, a surge of artron energy restored my damaged synapses. Gave me back all the memories I had lost.
‘You were suffering from post-traumatic retrograde amnesia,’ Rachel said.
‘It’s rate, but it happens. In people, I mean.’
Marnal looked impressed as he discarded the jacket in favour of a light blue knee-length coat.
‘I got my degree,’ she reminded him. ‘And because of that, I know that there’s no such thing as a lindal gland or any of the other things you mentioned.’
‘You saw me change,’ Marnal reminded her. He was turning, admiring himself in the mirror. Then he threw away the coat, scowling at himself, and put the blazer back on.
‘I’ve been thinking about that. It was a dark room, and I was on my own in there. It could easily have been a trick. You’re one of the old man’s nephews or something.’
Marnal turned to her, stared at her.
‘You were the one that believed me,’ he said, a hint of cruelty in his voice.
14
Rachel hesitated, thought about it for a moment. ‘I do believe you,’ she said. At the very worst, it was a harmless fantasy.
‘Every word?’
‘Every word.’
‘It’s all true, I promise you. The world you know is just one of an infinity of worlds.’
He took her hand in his, pressed it against first one side of his chest, then the other. A heart beat on each side.
‘How are you going to get back?’ she asked.
He pulled a small cube from his pocket.
‘It was there all along, only I didn’t know what it was.’
He pressed it to his forehead, screwed his eyes shut.
‘There we go.’
He put the cube back in his pocket.
‘A telepathic signal. The miracle of time travel is that whenever they receive my message, they can dispatch someone to this exact point. We won’t have to wait.’
They waited.
The Doctor frowned and put down his book.
There was something there. He could hear it over the sound of the time engines.
He slipped out of the control room, through one of the many doors that led to the depths of the ship. He walked past the workshop and one of the smaller libraries, carried on down a winding corridor.
This was the corridor that led nowhere. You walked through a couple of doors, then after the last turn there was another fifty paces to walk, then there was just a wall, covered in the same round indentations as most of the other walls. The Doctor knew that his time-space machine was very large, so large he hadn’t been able to explore it all. But he knew this corridor well. He thought of it as the back wall of the TARDIS.
Sometimes, when his companions were asleep, he would come down to the back wall. The Doctor knew Fitz had discovered this place too. Fitz had never tried to discuss it with him. The Doctor didn’t know if he’d ever heard the strange noises. If Fitz spent any time down here, he would have heard the scratching. Today was no different. He must have wondered if an animal was trapped on the other side. Or perhaps a person, their fingernails grown into claws over the centuries they’d been down here.
‘Oh. . . Hi.’
15
The Doctor turned to see Fitz. His companion was wearing a tatty dressing gown, and had one hand stuck in his pocket. The noises behind the wall had stopped.
‘Come down here for a smoke?’ the Doctor asked.
Fitz removed the hand, and the packet of cigarettes that had been in there with it, from his pocket.
‘Yeah. . . er. . . you weren’t waiting down here to catch me, were you?’
‘No. I often come down here.’
‘You mind?’ Fitz asked, taking out a cigarette. Then: ‘I mean if you want one, then