Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [8]
The Doctor was ignoring her. ‘We’re heading to Earth, 40 BC. We’ve had to change course to avoid resolving a quantum storm front. We should have landed any minute, but it’ll be more like three hours now.’
‘Oh. OK. Three hours?’ she asked.
‘You don’t mind?’
Trix had a bottle of champagne tucked under her arm. ‘Not at all. I’m sure Fitz and I will be able to fill the time somehow.’
‘Jolly good,’ the Doctor replied, returning to his study of the readouts as she hurried away.
Marnal was pacing around the library now. He kept playing with the lapels of his blazer, and clearly loved it. Rachel wondered if it was a little too tight for him.
Most libraries consisted of books written by other people, but this one was different. There were a dozen bookcases, packed with volumes of all sizes from big leather-bound books to yellowing paperbacks. There were also papers, pamphlets and notebooks stuffed into every available space, and countless magazines, comics and journals. Every single thing here had been written by Marnal. How many words, Rachel wondered. Tens of millions, easily, she thought, although she had no real idea how many words there were in a novel.
She had looked him up a few months ago, when the agency told her that her new patient was an author. She had a vague feeling that she recognised the name, but she couldn’t place it. She hadn’t found ‘Marnal’ in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, between Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field and Marney, Lord. Or in Cultural Icons, between Marley, Bob, and Marsalis, Wynton. She’d gone online. There weren’t any books in print on Amazon, although The Emergents and The Kraglon Inheritance were listed. Bookfinder was little better – she put in an order for The Witch Lords, the one book her search revealed, but was emailed back by the seller and told the copy had just been sold. On Google she got a list of autoparts and vitamin retailers. When she added ‘science+fiction’ she got one hit: a page in Spanish that she decided was best left untranslated. It had taken her a couple of days at a library, and a brief correspondence with a science-fiction society, to find out anything more tangible. This had sparked off some memories. She’d read a couple of his novels, but couldn’t remember very much about them.
18
There was something sad and strange about finding all these forgotten books here, together in one place, gathering dust. It was the literary equivalent of the lost gardens of Heligan. That’s what everyone thought of Marnal, if they thought of him at all: a rich, colourful mind that had become overgrown, tangled as it grew old. An author of popular adventure fiction who had succumbed to senility without realising it, whose books had become an impenetrable jungle, alienating even his most loyal fans.
‘Where do we start?’ she asked.
She reached up, moved aside a Hugo Award and pulled down a copy of The Strand Magazine that had almost fallen apart.
Carefully, she opened it, and flicked past pictures of Moriarty and Holmes and the falls at Reichenbach until she found the story she was looking for.
‘ The Giants, by Marnal,’ she read. ‘Once, long ago, on an island in a sea of clouds, there was a land where giants walked. The giants lived amongst the other peoples of that land, and they used their great strength to help them.
But the power of the giants was too great, their hands were too strong, their tread too heavy and the more they tried to help the people, the greater was the destruction that they caused. Until the people that they had tried to help were no more.’
Marnal took the magazine from her. ‘The first myth of the Time Lords, and my first foray into the Terran literary world.’
Rachel sifted through a pile of Pearson’s Magazine, The Idler, The Graphic and more copies of The Strand.
‘These are all over a hundred years old,’ she told him.
‘George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1884,’ Marnal replied. ‘He was still writing when he died in 1950, and the obituaries said his was the longest literary career this world had ever seen. Since 1960,