Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [43]
‘Lucky guess,’ said Laska blandly, wondering where this was going.
‘Oh hardly,’ said Smith. He looked at her so intensely that Laska had to glance away. ‘We shouldn’t just dismiss our dreams, you know. Especially in a place like this. When our defences are down, our subconscious can finally get through to us.’
‘You’re a Freudian?’ queried Laska.
Smith carried on as if he had not heard her, like a visiting academic ignoring an unruly pupil in the front row. ‘The ancients, of course, concluded that our dreams are the gods – or other supernatural powers – trying to communicate with us.’
‘A Jungian then,’ said Laska.
‘Jung, Freud, Lacan how I hate labels!’ exclaimed Smith with sudden passion. ‘Pigeonholes, categories, genres, marks out of ten – how they limit potential, ring-fence freedom, stamp on individuality. . . ’ He sat next to Laska –
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straight on to a sheaf of papers and documents – and beamed a fatherly smile.
‘One morning I might believe one thing, one evening another – isn’t that what being alive is all about? The freedom to make mistakes in this wonderful, expansive, inexplicable cosmos!’
‘That’s one definition of being human, I suppose,’ said Laska.
‘Human. Yes, I suppose.’ There was a hint of disappointment in Smith’s voice, as if even ‘humanity’ might be a limiting factor in the worldview he was proposing.
‘So you don’t believe in objective truth?’ queried Laska more confidently –
she knew where she was now, what was expected of her. A philosophical discussion.
‘Of course I believe in truth!’ exclaimed Smith hotly. ‘Good and evil, justice and prejudice, freedom and slavery – you cannot help but yearn for objectivity in such areas.’ He indicated the room in which they sat, the impassive forms of Fitz and Trix who exchanged long-suffering glances, the trees beyond the window, bent by the wind. ‘But here, in this world we know, we have only subjectivity. We each of us muddle through, as best we can.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Laska. If she had to put the look on Trix’s face into words, it would doubtless be the same question.
‘Over the next few days. . . I don’t want you to dismiss anything out of hand.
Don’t pigeonhole what you see, don’t trivialise what you dream. And, please, if you want to talk about anything. . . You know where I am.’
Laska didn’t have a clue what Smith was on about. She might have quizzed him further, but in this conversation Smith was the one with the authority, the power, the potential, along with the other doctors, to influence Laska’s very future. Best keep schtum. ‘I’ll. . . I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said, getting to her feet.
‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, before you leave?’ asked Smith.
Laska thought of her pendant, seemingly vanished off the face of the earth, the dog that had hunted her through her dreams, the scratches on her arms that she couldn’t remember making. Then she turned for the door.
‘No, nothing,’ she said.
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Eight
Cellar Door
(The Place You Fear the Most)
Laska retreated back to the sanctuary of her room, turning Smith’s words over and over in her mind. She didn’t know what to make of the man, much less his sudden concern for her. When he spoke to her he seemed to be talking on so many levels that she simply couldn’t establish what he knew and what he wanted to know. His queries sounded like statements and his assertions like riddles. It was as if he was intimately familiar with Laska – her family, her way of looking at the world, her future even – yet still was powerless unless she gave him permission to proceed.
Proceed to do what? She interrogated herself further: what did he know?
What could he know, or have surmised? Did he realise that she was having a relationship with James, or was it all just conjecture on his part or paranoia on hers? Did he – somehow – know about the missing pendant, about Laska’s horrifying dreams of savage, degenerate hounds?