Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [3]
The Doctor looked faintly embarrassed, while Ben gave a derisive snort. 'Yeah, that's right, a real sweetie.' He handed the picture back to me. 'Sorry, love. I hope you find your boyfriend.'
I shrugged; situation normal. As the three strangers moved off into the flow, I held out Denny's photo for the next passer-by, a boy in a Big Brother and the Holding Company T-shirt. He was clutching something bundled in a torn, oil-stained denim jacket. There wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary about him – early twenties, long hair, trimmed beard, glassy eyes like he was tripping – but I had the strangest feeling. He walked right past me and stopped.
The Doctor and his two companions were about twenty feet away. I don't know if there was some psychic connection, but the Doctor stopped too. When he turned, he had this dark, concerned expression.
'Can I help you?' he asked.
The boy's glassy eyes were fixed hard on the Doctor. He spasmed, and then his left arm shook like he was sick. There was something in the air that gave me gooseflesh. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, before slowly unwrapping the bundle. For some reason I couldn't explain, I really didn't want to see what he was carrying. I should have walked away; it probably would have been better for me on every front if I had. But I couldn't; I just stood there and watched as he peeled that jacket off in a creepy, slow-stoned way.
It felt so dreamy and hypnotic it was like I was high myself. I couldn't hear any sound from the crowd, the street vendors hawking their comix and the Oracle, the kid playing guitar in the gutter; everything was dead, like we were in a bubble. The jacket arm came away. Silver flashed in the sun. The other arm fell away. What was I seeing? More silver, a metallic headpiece, black holes, like eyes, piercing a grey cloth-like face.
The Doctor's face was grim. His companions looked horrified. All three of them like statues, uneasy.
The jacket hit the sidewalk. Slowly the boy held up his burden: a head, hideous, silver, cold. It was like some robot from the Twilight Zone, but this one made me scared.
'A Cyberman.' The Doctor's voice burst the bubble of silence and the world rushed in.
The Doctor and his friends moved forward slowly, but I couldn't take my eyes off that mechanical thing. The boy raised it until it was shoulder-height and then it just burst apart. It wasn't like it exploded – no shards of metal, no sound – but like it broke up, became light, or oil, or something, and disappeared on the breeze.
The Doctor was transfixed, but his companions rushed forward, and I ran up to the boy too, not believing what I saw yet knowing I had seen it. 'What did you do?' I shouted at him.
He stared at me with heavy eyes, looked right through me, and then he blinked once lazily and it was as if he was waking from a dream. I saw awareness, then incomprehension, and then fear.
He looked slowly around our faces and then said, 'I've seen the Devil. He's come for us all.'
An instant later he was rushing wildly away along Haight, leaving the rest of us staring at each other like we'd all gone crazy.
The Doctor scurried into the Panhandle so fast that the other two had trouble keeping up with him. I don't know why I followed – maybe I was bored after spending all that day getting nowhere – but I like to think that I sensed something special, poetic; one of those moments when life spins off its axis, taking you to another future.
They were heading towards something I hadn't seen before, even though I'd been through that part of the park five or more times getting soup and rice from the Diggers. In the middle of a thick cluster of trees just off one of the paths was a blue box, about the size and shape of a phone booth, with tiny windows and a sign at the top saying Police Box. The Doctor was about to open a door in the side when the young guy noticed me watching.