by Doctor Who
Simultaneously, another man threw himself at an orderly, with a desperate plea, ‘Help me! I can see them again! I can see the pretty girls again!’
A young woman with long, straight hair slapped him across the face. ‘Sinner!’ she spat. ‘Parading your smutty dreams in here for all to see!’
‘Formica!’ shouted another woman, before collapsing into a giggling fit.
It was taking one orderly to subdue the distressed man, another to keep the straight-haired woman away from him. Rose made for the gap between them and broke through, the far door in sight. She barrelled through into another long, straight corridor. . .
. . . but there were more orderlies ahead of her, coming for her.
She threw herself at the nearest door, feeling a surge of hope as it opened, finding that hope dashed at the sight of a cleaning cupboard, empty but for an overturned bottle of bleach on the top shelf.
And then she was overrun, and the orderlies’ hands were grasping at her, pulling her down, and she was trying to fight, but for every hand she batted away there were two to replace it, and that alarm was shrieking like a drill in her head, and the itch in her brain had flared up into a ball of pain.
As she was forced onto her knees, Rose caught one last glimpse of her trusted companion standing above her, seemingly unconcerned.
‘Doctor, do something!’ she spluttered.
‘Can’t.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought you knew – I’m invisible.’
And then she was lying face down on a white floor on which the recent application of a mop had just made wet dirt patterns, and the 113
weight of three, four, five bodies was holding her down, and the alarm stopped at last and the world seemed to fall into a deathly hush as, out of the corner of her eye, Rose caught sight of the gleam of a sharp needlepoint. . .
. . . and felt it pricking into the side of her neck.
114
‘D ’you wanna come with me?’ Domnic couldn’t describe how he had felt when he heard those words. It was as if, in the few seconds he’d been in his life, the Doctor had changed it for ever. As if the future he’d been waiting for had arrived at last.
It had taken Domnic those few seconds to adjust to the fact that this man, this stranger this. . . this normal-looking bloke – was the one about whom Rose had said so much. Despite her protestations, he had still half thought of her Doctor as a fiction. Now, transfixed by a pair of intense blue eyes, he remembered spaceships and time travel and monsters and. . .
He knew he shouldn’t have believed, but. . . but. . .
‘D’you wanna come with me?’
He had timed it to perfection. He had read Rose’s note – the one that Domnic still didn’t understand; the one that said she had gone off with him – and he had scowled and muttered, ‘Not her.’ His shoulders stooped as if carrying a great weight, he had turned and left the hotel room. He might have forgotten that Domnic was there.
Just enough time had passed. Enough for Domnic to realise that, wherever this stranger was going, he had to be there. Enough to fear 115
that, if he let the Doctor walk out now, he would be throwing away everything he’d ever wanted. So what if it was a lie? He couldn’t sleep until he knew for sure.
Just enough time for him to realise that he didn’t have the words.
And then the Doctor had paused, one hand still on the half-open door, and he had looked at Domnic as if noticing him for the first time. His expression had cleared and he had issued his invitation – at exactly the right moment, before the doubts and the fears had begun to set in.
The only moment at which the invitation could have been accepted.
So now Domnic was outside the city for the first time, wading through a lush jungle that he had only glimpsed in natural history programmes and his dreams, and it was as if he had found a whole new world already.
There were colours he had never seen in the city and shapes that seemed at once gloriously random and yet meticulously plotted. But there were roots pulling at his feet too, thorns snagging on his jumpsuit and branches scratching his hands and face. And the always-present sense of danger, the fear that some predator could leap from the foliage at any moment.
Not that there were any predators. There were no indigenous life forms at all on Colony World 4378976.Delta-Four. That was why it had been so perfect for settlement. But Domnic’s comic strips had often used the jungle as a backdrop and filled it with beasts from his darkest dreams. The jungle represented the unknown, the unexplored
– and no matter how many scans had confirmed it empty, there was always the tiny, tiny possibility that the scans were wrong. That something was hiding.
He tried not to think about it. If he did, he would hear them.
He would hear the crunching of footsteps behind him, the rasping of breath as something waited in ambush. He would catch signs of movement in the corner of his eye – a creeper disturbed here, a leaf shaken from a branch there – and he would know that the monsters were waiting.
He focused on the Doctor instead. As they’d set out on their journey, 116
Rose’s friend had fired off a barrage of questions, about Domnic, about his life and his dealings with Rose and Captain Jack. That had helped him. Talking about things he remembered, real things, had anchored him, kept him from being overwhelmed by the possibilities of the new.
Once the Doctor had his answers, though, he had lapsed into a silence that had at first been contemplative but now just seemed sullen.
Domnic needed that anchor again, so he ventured, ‘It’s like something out of a storybook, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor shortly.
‘Oh, I. . . I mean, I’m not saying they’re real, the stories, I just. . .
What if they. . . Well, what if they were? Because how can we be sure? Really sure?’
‘They’re not real.’
‘I can show you, if you like. One of my comic strips.’
The Doctor froze and looked at Domnic for a moment. He seemed to consider his offer, but then a smile tugged at his lips and he said,
‘No ta. Not interested.’ And he ploughed on.
A minute later, the Doctor asked, ‘Why do you keep doing that?’
‘What?’
‘Pinching yourself. You just did it again.’
‘Oh. I hadn’t realised. A reflex, that’s all.’
‘Helps you concentrate?’
‘I guess, yeah. It’s just. . . all this, I’m finding it a bit hard to, you know. . . The jungle. You. If I pinch myself, I can feel the pain and I know I’m not dreaming. You must have heard. . . I mean, it’s what people do, right?’
‘It’s what they say,’ said the Doctor, ‘but no one actually does it. No need. If you’re dreaming, yeah, sometimes the mind can be fooled, the dream can seem real, but it doesn’t work the other way round.
When something’s real, you just know. Otherwise you’d be knocked flat by the first bus to appear round a blind corner while you’re still stood in the middle of the road telling yourself how improbable it all is.’
‘How?’ asked Domnic. ‘ How do you tell the difference? Because I’ve had dreams like this before, and they’ve looked like this and sounded 117
like this and smelt and felt like this and I’ve wanted them to be real, but I’ve still woken up and. . . Sometimes, I think that might be the dream, my bedroom, and I’m pinching myself and I’m trying to go back to the jungle or the spaceship or the zombie castle or. . . or. . . ’
‘What an exciting life you must lead.’
‘Not really,’ said Domnic with a sigh, ‘because it never changes.
Whatever I dream, whatever I write down, it’s always a lie.’
‘That’s what happens,’ said the Doctor, ‘when you just wait for change instead of making it happen. What you’re about to see, by the way – it’s real.’
There was something in front of them. A new shade among the jungle colours; hard, straight lines that belonged to
the city, the domain of humans.
A chunky, fat cabinet, nestled between the trees. A rich, dark blue.
Some sort of a store shed? But why all the way out here? And why did it display, in bright, backlit letters, the legend ‘POLICE PUBLIC CALL
BOX’?
Domnic’s mind raced, trying to find the logic in the blue box’s presence – because, without that logic, he was afraid he would wake up again.
‘Go to it,’ said the Doctor, beaming like a proud uncle. ‘Touch it.’
Domnic ran his hands over the cabinet’s surface, concentrating on the feel of the wood on his skin. It was rough, solid, real. And there was more.
Something behind the wood. Something that Domnic couldn’t quite feel with his fingers, couldn’t describe, but it was there. Something powerful, straining to get out. It was intangible, unknowable, and yet he was sure that it was real too.
‘And while you’re there,’ said the Doctor, ‘have a good walk round, get used to the size of it. It’ll save you some time later on.’
It was a dream after all.
There was no other explanation, no way that the doors of the blue cabinet could really have opened into the room that Domnic was now seeing.
118
His first impression was that the huge, round chamber was alive –as alive as the jungle outside. Coral clung to its walls, support beams twisted and branched like trees, cables hung like creepers and trailed like roots along the floor. But there were ceramic handrails and metal grille flooring beneath Domnic’s feet, and a mushroom-shaped control bank that looked as if it had been gutted and rebuilt out of spare parts.
Had it not been for his disappointment that none of this was real, he could have been proud of himself. It looked as if his mind had spewed up images from throughout his life, from everything he had ever seen on the TV, and crammed them together at random and yet somehow, impossibly, made the whole thing work.
When he woke up, he was going to write a great story about this.
For now, he let the Doctor – a mass of energy and authority who still seemed obdurately, impossibly real – lead him past the console, past an incongruous chair and through a doorway. Expecting to emerge from the back of the cabinet, Domnic laughed to himself and shook his head to find three corridors stretching away from him, more corridors criss-crossing them. The walls had the same organic, encrusted look as the ones behind him.
They took one turning after another, their route twisting and looping back on itself until Domnic had lost all sense of direction. The Doctor was thoughtful, as if he couldn’t quite remember where he had left something. Then he braked sharply outside a door, pushed it open and announced, ‘This’ll do!’
This room was round too, but mercifully small, cluttered with an assortment of junk as eclectic as the lash-ups in the main chamber. Much of it appeared to be medical in nature and most had been patched up in some way or another. An ECG monitor had been left to rot on a trolley, wires hanging out of its back, while a bench was festooned with bottles and syringes, and a stethoscope lay draped over a battered refrigeration unit.
The Doctor swept a box-shaped machine from a dentist’s chair, not seeming to care that it hit the floor with a crash and a tinkle of broken glass. He gestured to his guest to take a seat, but Domnic balked at the prospect.
119
‘Hang on – what are you planning to do to me?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Quick examination. Nothing to get your knickers in a knot about. I just want to see why your brain doesn’t work the same as other humans’.’
He grinned disarmingly and
bounced on his toes – but his hands were behind his back and Domnic didn’t know what he had just picked up.
‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you!’
‘ The Doctor. Not the same thing.’
‘And this. . . this. . . whatever it is. . . this police box. Police box!
I should have seen. . . I was right last night,when I first. . . You’re working with them, aren’t you!’
‘Er. . . no.’
‘You want to open up my head and. . . and zap out bits of my brain.’
‘There’s no need to exaggerate.’
‘You even sound like the police! I. . . I don’t care if this is a dream, I won’t let you. . . ’
Domnic backed away, but in his panic he found the wall instead of the door. And the Doctor was upon him, taking him by the shoulder, guiding him firmly into the chair – and before Domnic could recover his wits, could do anything more than just dig his fingernails into his palms and hope to wake up, the Doctor had kicked a lever at the base of the chair so that it collapsed into a horizontal position. And then he was holding a bulky brass contraption, like a diver’s helmet studded with control knobs, and Domnic was still flailing, trying to straighten himself as the helmet came down over his head and he felt its weight on his shoulders, the chill of its metal against the exposed parts of his neck.
‘Best think of something nice,’ cautioned the Doctor. ‘This might hurt a bit.’
The jungle looked different, though Domnic didn’t know why.
He felt different – light-headed, as if some great pressure had been taken off his mind.
The Doctor had busied himself about the helmet contraption, adjusting controls, clicking his tongue and occasionally asking Domnic 120
if he could feel anything. Most of the time, there had just been a low-level buzz in his head – though there had been one worrying moment when a circuit or something had blown out and the Doctor had attacked the helmet enthusiastically with a strange sort of soldering iron that gave off blue light.
Then, with no warning at all, something had sparked and sent an electrical pain through Domnic’s head, causing him to cry out. The current had seemed to shudder through his entire skeleton, making his body tighten.
‘Still think you’re dreaming?’ the Doctor asked now. He had been walking six steps ahead of Domnic, but he’d suddenly turned to face him.
‘No. . . Yeah. . . I don’t know.’
‘Imagine something for me.’
‘What? Like what?’
‘Something in the jungle. A monster.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Aw, come on, Derek.’
‘Domnic.’
‘You’re supposed to be a writer, aren’t you? Give me a story. Vast jungle like this, there’s bound to be something in here, don’t you think?’ The Doctor was right in Domnic’s face, smiling, but there was a malicious gleam in his eyes. ‘Cos I’m sure I heard something a few metres back, you know. Sort of footsteps, padding after us. Could be zombies.’
Domnic swallowed nervously. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Yeah, you did, you just don’t want to admit it in case I think you’re fantasy crazy. But that’s not very bright, is it, Daniel? Not bright at all, because what if the monsters are real? And they could be, you know.’
‘Stop it!’ cried Domnic.
‘Creeping up on us right now, and what good are you gonna be when they pounce? Standing there with your fingers in your ears and your eyes closed.’
‘No! I. . . I. . . You’re right, I can hear them! I can see them! I. . . ’
The zombies, crashing out of the bushes, their arms outstretched.
121
‘. . . can see. . . them. . . ’
And yet, at the same time, they weren’t there.
‘. . . in my mind. I can see them in my mind, but. . . ’ But, to Domnic’s astonishment, that was all.
‘Result!’ crowed the Doctor.
‘What. . . what. . . what do you. . . ’
‘You’re cured! For the time being, anyway.’
‘Cured? Cured of what?’
‘Micro-organisms,’ announced the Doctor, ‘smaller than a single pro-ton, thriving in the atmosphere of this world. They’re all around us.
They were in your brain – until the feedback from my scanner drove them out. Won’t work for ever, though.
Give it a few hours, they’ll be back.’
‘You. . .
you mean. . . ’ Domnic put a hand to his head, tried to concentrate. They were still in there, the zombies, but trapped somewhere deep down, where they couldn’t get out.
He felt a sudden rush of fear. ‘You’ve taken them from me. How can I. . . I can’t feel my dreams any more, how can I write again? What have you done to me?’
The Doctor looked put out by his ingratitude. ‘You’ll get used to it,’
he sniffed. ‘Your dreams might be less vivid now, but they’re safe. You can dream bigger dreams, without being afraid. Who knows? You might even dream something worthwhile, one day.’
And then he was off again, crashing through the jungle so that Domnic had to scramble to keep up with him even as his mind was racing to make sense of what he had said. Micro-organisms? What did that mean? It sounded like fiction to him – it sounded like science fiction –but there was no doubt that the Doctor had done something to him, changed something.
And he found himself wondering what it would be like to be able to dream like the Doctor. To be like him. Or like Rose Tyler – to travel with this strange and wonderful man in his blue cabinet. To have his mind blown like this every day. To be the Doctor’s friend, his assistant, his companion.
Somehow, he just couldn’t imagine it.
122
He had left it too late to struggle. By the time he realised what they were doing to him, he had been too badly outnumbered. His chances of getting away had been practically zero. So he’d kept up the pretence of cooperating with them, for a second too long.
Until Nurse Tyko had told him what would happen next.
And then Jack had struggled all right, pulling with all his strength at the straps that secured his wrists above his head to the cold metal trolley. It had taken the orderlies minutes to catch his kicking feet and to strap down his ankles, and he had given them a few good bruises in the process.
He hadn’t cried out, though, hadn’t shouted in anger or begged for mercy. He hadn’t wasted his strength.
