Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [109]
Then finally, peering out at him from its cage, the small black cat had made what was almost the same sound. But this time it was higher and shriller. The cat had stared through the bars, looking directly at Jack. And it had cried, ‘Here.’
* * *
Jack had discovered that he quite enjoyed being a dog.
It was a seductive sensation. He felt a vast excitement at being so small and so mobile after being trapped in the barn. He enjoyed dashing across the great sweeping green expanse of the hills, suppressing the urge to bark at the top of his voice. The excitement gave him the energy to run and the running, in turn, fed his excitement.
Sometimes the sheer joy of existence had been too much for him and he simply had to stop and collapse and roll around on the damp slopes of sweet‐smelling grass.
It hadn’t been this way at first, though.
His first reaction had been panic. When he’d realized he was trapped inside a dog’s body he’d felt such a surge of fear that he thought his mind might snap.
In a way, it had. Jack’s intelligence was floating symbiotically in the dog’s brain and when he gave in to panic his consciousness had vanished momentarily, sinking below the surface and allowing the dog’s personality to rise in its place. His fear had turned to dog‐fear, a deep, primitive sensation that threatened to shake his heart to pieces in his narrow chest. It was the atavistic fear of night hunting and moon‐howling. The fear of the pack animal who suddenly finds himself alone. The fear of the dog who smells death stalking him upwind, approaching with the burning, angry scent of the bear or wolf.
But it was also a fear fired by abstract concepts. Concepts which the dog portions of Jack’s mind couldn’t possibly understand. Without a tangible object the fear had swiftly faded and this had caused Jack’s consciousness to surface and reassert itself. He was perversely angry at his mind’s inability to be scared at his predicament. Stupid dog. And this anger had burned away the last of his fear.
But anger was an emotion the dog could share wholeheartedly and once again Jack found his thoughts eclipsed as this mind was overwhelmed with hot brute rage, the need to sink teeth into the neck of a foe and drag it down and kill it. It was probably only a minute or two before Jack managed to regain awareness, but it felt like hours. The hot red pathways of rage were well worn and easy to follow.
Thinking with this new shared mind was like learning to ride a bicycle. Jack could only persist for a certain amount of time before he wobbled and fell off, surrendering to powerful primal dog concepts, his personality lost in a simpler, more vivid realm.
Two things helped him regain control and keep it. The first was Ace. He was straining to recall what had happened in the barn and that led him to Ace and how she had shown him the way to escape. Even now the whole episode seemed unreal. Jack couldn’t quite believe it. Had warlock really freed his consciousness and allowed it to pass out of his body? Perhaps the drug had simply driven him mad and everything he was experiencing now was just an elaborate hallucination. If so, there was no way he could tell. Reality or delusion? In fact, that was the fundamental question of all conscious existence.
That’s a pretty deep thought for a dog, thought Jack, tongue lolling from his toothy, grinning mouth.
But thinking of Ace had relaxed him. It triggered behaviour patterns deep in the dog brain. The pattern of dog and master. When Jack thought of Ace he was flooded with trust and well‐being. Ace neatly fitted the model of a wiser, superior entity and that was a model the dog mind could comprehend. Thinking about her gave Jack a sense of security and deep comfort, the way an intensely religious person might respond to thoughts of god.
This calmer mind state soon gave him a firmer foothold and he found he could