Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [11]
'No. Stay here.' The Doctor watched until the thing had gone, taking that unnerving feeling with it. The distant sounds of the city crept back in.
'You know what that was?' I said.
'I do indeed.' The Doctor's expression was graven. 'A Menoptra. One of a race that exists on a planet far, far away from here.'
He appeared deathly serious. 'What did it want? Is it dangerous?'
The Doctor folded his hands together in deep thought, and for a second I thought that he wasn't going to answer. 'It is a bit of a mystery, isn't it?' he said eventually, his tone surprisingly light. 'The Menoptra shouldn't be here, any more than the Cybermen should . And you saw the way it moved its arm?' I nodded. 'It's almost as if there's something ... ritualistic about this business.'
'We should get out of here, Doctor,' Ben said morosely. 'This whole place is crazy. It's turning my head around.'
The Doctor, suddenly intensely serious, disagreed. 'No, Ben. We cannot leave. There's something out there. An intelligence. And it has noticed us.'
You can never escape the past. It remains trapped in that time machine of our heads, endlessly replaying, hinting at other dimensions of what might have been and what never was. Jackie scrambling over the back of the car, reaching out in one moment of insane clarity. Denny hauling me away from the rednecks, both of us terrified but laughing, fear and hope in equal measure. Most potent of all, that year of 1967, when everything changed, forever. A time of beauty and decadence, haunting and so very sad.
The past has its own terrible gravity. You go through your life blithely looking ahead until one day you wake up and realise what has gone before has attained some critical mass. Suddenly there is no escape; it keeps dragging you back to a particular time, warping your life with a secret pull, twisting your psyche until nothing inside you or ahead of you is unaffected by what has gone before. We become ruined, dead satellites of a monstrous force.
When I look back on the Haight with these eyes of a different person, the Doctor looms large. He presented a face we could all understand, but behind it I could sense a universe of meaning and information that stretched off to infinity. Like space, he was alien, timeless. There were no human parameters by which I could judge him. Could he be trusted? Did he feel love or hate or anger? At times I felt he had an agenda so far removed from our own that it was impossible to comprehend.
The Doctor wanted to get back to his police box to think over what he'd seen. For me, all the craziness that I'd been drawn into that day was a distraction. Denny was the only thing that mattered. I went back to the house where I'd crashed for the past few days, my head spinning, wondering if there was any circumstance in which Denny would touch Blue Moonbeams, continually searching for any other answer that made sense.
Everyone was there: Jen with her glassy eyes and slow smile, Hal with his rants and Country Joe and the Fish bootlegs, Mickey and Jill and Joe humping away continually in various permutations. They already felt like a kind of family. I'd only known them days, but I don't think I've ever since found friends that mattered to me as much as those people.
My bedroll was on bare floorboards with my few possessions scattered around and a stubby candle for a night-light, but it still comforted me. Exhausted, I went to sleep believing I'd wake to find Denny lying next to me, that he'd finally find his way to me, two hearts drawing each other together across space.
Instead, I dreamed of men becoming butterflies and human beings having their souls drained away until they became robots.
Stimson called at the house around eleven the next day. He looked like some split-personality cat, the top half an English gent in dinner jacket and bow tie, the bottom half the hippest of the hip in purple loons and sandals. The cigarette holder was clenched jauntily between his teeth as he