Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [85]
‘Yeah. Of course.’ There was another, instinctive ‘ Ow’, then – ‘Actually, to tell you the truth, I leave all that sort of thing to the Doctor.’
Laska considered asking Fitz what on earth he had been doing over the last few months, if it wasn’t researching local history, but she let it pass.
‘Not so surprising though, is it?’ continued Fitz. ‘I suppose buildings are always changing their function. There’s a hotel I know in Puerto Rico. Used to be a brothel.’ He laughed. ‘Actually, on a Friday night, it wasn’t so easy to work out what it was.’ And he chuckled again.
‘Tell me about Dr Smith,’ said Laska suddenly. ‘Trix said you’d answer all my questions.’
‘Well, he’s not human, for starters.’
‘Yeah, right.’
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‘No, honestly. I mean, look at that dog that attacked us. Was that normal?’
‘Well, no, but. . . ’
‘That’s what happens. The Doctor is attracted to weird things. Alien stuff, holes in time, that sort of thing.’
‘So he is a superhero.’
‘He tries to put things right,’ said Fitz, finally emerging from the bathroom.
He grimaced slightly when he put weight on his right leg but other than that, and the bloodstain on his trousers, he seemed fine. ‘He has great power, but chooses always to turn away from evil. I suppose that makes him heroic.’ He smiled. ‘Now, where are these documents?’
Laska led him to her father’s study, a room she had barely touched in the years since his death, as if he might one day stroll back in and resume his research as though nothing had happened. She clicked on the desk lamp and started pulling open drawers and folders.
‘The Doctor said he wanted anything to do with the history of that building –
and your genealogy.’
Laska nodded, glancing down at an annotated family tree.
It was a
huge sheet of paper, covered with almost unreadable notes and dates, with branches and roots extending in all directions, encompassing those who died in childbirth and those who died in ripe old age, and every kind of imaginable life in-between. She found her name down towards the bottom. It seemed so bare and lonely, an only child of an only child, with the weight of years and decades of family heritage and expectation threatening to squash her utterly.
She wondered if she had always carried the weight of all these dead men and women on her shoulders.
She was just about to roll up the paper when another name caught her eye.
She stared at it in mute disbelief.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fitz quietly.
Laska pointed.
‘Carolina Thorne, 1862 to 1903,’ read Fitz aloud. He shrugged. ‘Er, so?’
Laska looked up. ‘In the diaries. . . The doctor in 1903 talks of a patient called Miss Thorne. She came from a family that supported the asylum financially.’ She glanced further back up the tree – unfamiliar names, early deaths.
How many incarcerations? ‘She had an illegitimate child and was admitted to the hospital, as many members of her family had been before.’ Laska suddenly remembered a squat building full of death, a sleepwalking dream that felt more real than life itself, an attempt to throw away the burning necklace. . . ‘The mausoleum,’ she whispered.
‘What?’
‘The folly on the hill,’ said Laska. ‘It’s a mausoleum.’ She ran her finger 154
down from Carolina Thorne to her own name. ‘And Miss Thorne is my great-great-grandmother.’
155
Seventeen
Matters of Life and Death
(Chiaroscuro)
Joe Bartholomew turned his car off the lane and on to the Retreat’s driveway.
With his mobile wedged between his face and shoulder he did not see the tyre marks on the driveway, the flecks of metal and paint that rested at the base of the gatehouse. His mind was entirely on other matters.
He’d been trying to get hold of Liz all day but the Retreat’s phones seemed to be out of action. He’d tried Liz’s mobile – and Susannah’s, for good measure – but he hadn’t been surprised when that hadn’t worked either. Mobile reception there was pretty ropey; there had been talk of putting a mast smack-bang on the roof of the house, but