Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [25]
Connections began to form in my mind, but I refused to face up to them. 'Why didn't he disappear like the others?' I asked feebly.
'Maybe, like any other drug,' the Doctor replied, 'it has different effects on different people.'
'Acid can't kill you.' My voice sounded strained, tiny; I wasn't really aware what I was saying. All I could think of was why the blood patterns were the same as those on Denny's shirt.
'This can,' the Doctor said. He glanced at me, and I had the strangest feeling he was reading my mind. I looked away. 'If we get out of this place,' he said in an almost detached tone, 'perhaps it would be better if you left this city immediately. You're not up to what lies ahead.'
That made me angry. 'I'm seeing it through,' I snapped. I walked away from the body and looked around the room. 'We can't go out the way we came in. And I'm betting they'll be in here any minute.' I noticed a square every now and then taking shape out of the shadows shifting across the ceiling: the entrance to the roof-space. 'Up there,' I pointed.
Ben was drifting again, and dragged himself back with irritation. 'Come on, then. No point hanging around.' He held his hands in a cradle to lever me up.
We scrambled up into the dust, damp and dark, the music now a dull ache beyond the rafters. The Doctor carefully closed the trap after us; Mathilda would think we'd gone the same way as the others. Dead? Disappeared? I really didn't know any more. All I could think about was Denny, how his death must have been so terrible; I couldn't help tormenting myself. I was a mass of raw emotions, but the irony wasn't lost on me: I'd come to San Francisco in search of a new life, but what I'd found was death.
Yet, even so, I still believed. I had to do the right thing for Denny. What we felt in our hearts was true, and though we'd suffered so terribly, it was still the light in the dark. I wiped away my tears, trying to think what Denny would have wanted me to do, and kept going.
When I look back to those times, it feels like I'm observing another person: a child, cosseted, who still hadn't worked out how the world works. How stupid I was, how pathetic and naive. Yet that short time in Haight-Ashbury is still so clear in my memory, every image in sharp definition, the smells, damp misty mornings and sunlight on brick and the ever present smell of grass, the constant background chatter of lively people and the music that soundtracked a generation. Why does such a brief experience have so much potency, especially when it ended so badly?
The years that followed – the hitch-hiking, buses and trains, a succession of grim, industrial cities and YWCAs, loveless sex, sex for food, money or lodgings, sex for comfort – it all merges into one dreary mass. An abstract, characterised by despair and fear, that sooner or later he'd catch up with me; that it all would.
The evil that was loose in that town that day hasn't faded away like all those poor people who took the Blue Moonbeams; it's got stronger.
For a long time, I thought this house would be my sanctuary. It was
bought with the proceeds of a hundred dead end jobs, every cent stored away before I moved on to the next town. All those dreams of being a poet evaporated early on; there was no poetry in my life; no poetry in America.
I guess I was stupid thinking I could hide away here forever, on the edge of the country. From the outside, the house looks like it's falling down – hanging gutters, fallen tiles, swinging shutters. Nobody ever visits. For five years it was a place to rest and be alone with my thoughts.
And then the phone that never rang, rang; and I knew that he was coming.
Back there in the Haight we used to wish every day; we really believed if we wished hard enough it would all come true. If I had one wish now it would be to get back what remains of my future. But it's too late for that.
We got out of Mathilda's place through a service hatch on