The
Eyeless
LANCE PARKIN
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Published in 2008 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
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© Lance Parkin, 2008
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ISBN 978 1 846 07562 9
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To John, Lesley, Jo, Katie and Brie – the Parkins Recent titles in the Doctor Who series: MARTHA IN THE MIRROR
Justin Richards
SNOWGLOBE 7
Mike Tucker
THE MANY HANDS
Dale Smith
GHOSTS OF INDIA
Mark Morris
THE DOCTOR TRAP
Simon Messingham
SHINING DARKNESS
Mark Michalowski
THE STORY OF MARTHA
Dan Abnett
BEAUTIFUL CHAOS
Gary Russell
PART ONE
THE EYES OF A CHILD
The first walkway the Doctor tried almost gave way beneath his feet. The second creaked disconcertingly, and he half-ran, half-tiptoed across it. He didn’t even dare put his foot on the third. He’d got two city blocks closer to his goal and decided to enter the nearest tower and descend to ground level – an easier task than he’d dared hope, as the building had a fantastically carpeted staircase. This place had been a hotel. The robot porters and janitors were all gathered by a large recharging station just off the lobby, puzzled expressions permanently stuck on their mechanical faces. Like their human masters, who they’d clearly survived, they’d have taken the power supply for granted.
There was a garage, full of speeders and flyers and one-or two-man flying saucers. The Doctor had toyed with the idea of just fixing an aircar up and driving the rest of the way but, with each one he found, a lot of the mechanics had rusted or rotted away, and the power cells were dead.
He’d quickly decided he could walk to the Fortress in half the time it would take to fix one up. The exercise would do him good.
The Doctor wished he could have just flown the TARDIS there, but that would have been a very, very bad idea. He’d landed as close as he dared.
The ground here was metal, a broken-down moving pavement. It was littered with rubble, shards of glass and scrap metal – chunks of material that had fallen from the surrounding buildings after winter storms or as whatever held them up there corroded away. There was a raised monorail line that ran straight and in roughly the direction of the Fortress. The Doctor clambered up. The line itself was in a bad way. Metal expanded when it was hot, contracted when it was cold, and engineers had to allow for that by leaving gaps at intervals in the rails, or they’d crack or buckle. When trains ran over those gaps, they made that ‘clickety-clack’ noise, the whole universe over.
The trick was to keep the gaps clean, or they’d fill up with leaves and rust.
The city had been carefully designed so that sunlight streamed over every building and down to every level.
Even at ground level it was still bright. The sun was low in that green sky now, though. All that light meant weeds and grass had thrived, poked through holes in the concrete, making the monorail line a thin strip of green life that warmed the Doctor’s hearts. There were even a few scattered saplings that would be great trees, given a few decades. Something on this planet had survived the cataclysm, and in the long term that was all that needed to.
Three hundred million years from now, this city would be a thin, silvery geological layer in the rock, and some distant descendant of these weeds would have evolved to puzzle over it. Earth had seen similar turmoil and mass extinction before humans had come along.
Perhaps tomorrow the Doctor would take the TARDIS
into the far future, have a wander round that civilisation.
Pop in for a chat with a weedy geologist.
The Doctor stopped, turned. Something had caught his eye as he walked past it. Behind him, in the mud, was a footprint.
He bent down and put on his glasses. He soon found a short line of footprints in a thin patch of dirt. Human, near enough. Whoever had made them had six toes on each foot, certainly, but they were bipedal, they didn’t have hooves or paws or caterpillar tracks. The foot was a Size 9, the Doctor estimated. Not that this person had been wearing shoes. Barefoot. No evidence he – or she – had cut their feet on the metal or glass, though, as the Doctor surely would have done if he hadn’t had his trainers on.
Pacing it out, like the page of Good King Wenceslas, marking the footsteps, the Doctor decided they’d been made by a person a little shorter than him, who had been walking, not running. The prints were in thin mud, so it wasn’t possible to estimate the weight of the person who’d made them. They were fresh – an hour old, at the most. He hadn’t anticipated anyone else being here. The implications of having company were all worrying.
The Doctor took his glasses off and looked around.
There was a figure at ground level, ducking round a corner, out of sight. Even the Doctor hadn’t had much time to take it in.
The Doctor clambered down to where the movement had been, but it wasn’t there now.
A pile of burned-out aircars blocked the other end of this passage. The Doctor looked straight up at the perfectly smooth, vertical sides of hundred-storey buildings. It was hard to see how anyone could have got away. At ground level, there were small niches and crevices in the walls, but nothing even he could squeeze into, and he was notoriously skinny. It must have been a trick of the light. It wouldn’t even qualify as a particularly good trick. And he was on edge. The Doctor concluded that there hadn’t been anyth—A dark shape leapt out at the Doctor; he turned to face it and was almost blinded. Belatedly, he realised the attacker had the sun behind it. By then, the creature was on him, shoving him over with a plank of wood.
‘Ghost!’ a high-pitched voice yelled out. ‘Don’t let a ghost touch you!’
The Doctor hadn’t quite been knocked off his feet, and his vision was quickly returning to normal. Now the walls were coming alive, with over half a dozen other shapes rushing out from the cracks and gaps.
They were children, the Doctor realised. None of them looked more than about 12. Boys, mostly, all dressed the same sort of way, in very smart dark outfits which were all
a bit too baggy, but brightly decorated with bits of colourful foil and plastic ribbon. The children each carried two or three small bags which clanked and rattled as they moved. They looked human, or close enough. They were all rather pale.
‘He’s a ghost,’ one of the boys called.
‘Looks like we got ourselves a ghost,’ another agreed.
‘I’m not a ghost,’ he laughed. ‘I’m the Doctor and this is—’ He turned and then looked back, sheepish. ‘No one.’
‘Who were you talking about?’
‘Just force of habit.’
‘You know what I think? I think we are… we is talking to a ghost.’
‘You were right the first time,’ the Doctor said helpfully. ‘“You are talking to a ghost”.’
‘He says he’s a ghost!’
‘Ghost. Ghost. Ghost,’ all but one of them started chanting.
The boldest of the boys was advancing, swinging a piece of metal pipe. The Doctor blocked it, elbowed the pipe out of the boy’s hand. The boy was wiry, but he was also only 10 years old. Strong for his age, but not much of a threat. Another child – it wasn’t the Doctor’s top priority to work out if it was a boy or a girl – was already lunging with a very fancy-looking knife. The Doctor stepped out of the way, tripped the child up and found himself shoving over a boy with a piece of brick in his hand.
After that, the children stopped the attack and started circling. They’d moved around so they’d blocked the only escape route from the passageway. The boy who’d attacked first retrieved his metal pipe. They were still shouting out ‘ghost, ghost, ghost’ over and over. The Doctor didn’t feel any safer, and the children were clearly preparing to pounce. Every so often one of them would step forward, quickly withdrawing. They were testing him, like a pack of animals would.
A stocky girl was the exception, the only one not chanting. She’d spent the time standing there looking thoughtful. The Doctor decided to concentrate on her.
‘A ghost?’ he said, addressing her directly. ‘Ridiculous.
You can see right through that explanation, right? See through it? Ghost.’
She was glaring at him. The Doctor’s face fell.
‘Loses a bit in translation, probably. Jokes tend to.
Point is: I’m sure you can convince your friends here that I’m not a ghost.’
‘Ghosts don’t bleed,’ she said. ‘We could see if you bleed.’
The Doctor nodded slowly, pursed his lips. ‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s an example of the scientific method.’
‘We should cut you open,’ the boy with the fancy knife leered.
‘Do you see a lot of ghosts?’ the Doctor asked, suddenly. A thought had struck him. ‘You don’t happen to have six toes, do you? Any of you? You’re not barefoot.
All wearing very nice shoes. They look brand new.’ A brainwave struck him, and he pointed down at his own feet. ‘Trainers. Look. Teenagers love trainers, right? These are a bit big for you, of course. But if you’d like them, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. If this is a mugging, that is.’
‘A what?’ the lead one asked.
‘If you’re mugging me for my shoes.’
‘Why would we do that?’
‘Don’t you like my shoes?’ The Doctor felt insulted.
‘Who are you?’ the stocky girl asked. She was tallest, and she looked stronger than most of the boys. Girls tended to at that age. The lad with the metal pipe looked like the leader, though.
The Doctor decided to assert some authority. He gritted his teeth and pulled out his psychic paper, opening up the wallet and swinging it round so that he was sure all the kids could see it.
‘What’s that?’ the leader asked.
‘It’s got writing on it,’ the stocky girl replied.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the Doctor said patiently.
‘Writing?’ echoed another one of them, a particularly grubby boy who looked about 12.
The Doctor held it steady, up in front of that child’s eyes.
‘We don’t read,’ the boy said dismissively. ‘No one reads.’
‘Ah. Well, it says –’ the Doctor checked it, ‘– that I’m from the planet Ofsted and… Ofsted. That’s, oh… Well, take my word for it, that’s funny. You clearly don’t think so. Fair enough. It’s that joke/translation thing again.’
The kids were all glaring at him.
The Doctor grimaced as he put the wallet back in his pocket. ‘Anyway, if you could just… How many of you are there, by the way? Not here in this alley. There are eight of you here. How many people live here?’
Again, it was only the girl who was listening to him.
The grubby boy was at her side, though, hands in his pockets, and it really looked like he was waiting for her lead. This still meant there were half a dozen others to worry about.
‘Maybe he knows about ghosts,’ the grubby boy suggested.
‘Oh, I’ve met ghosts in my time,’ the Doctor said cheerfully.
The wrong thing to say. The others were nervous, now.
‘Ghosts aren’t the spirits of the dead or lost souls,’ he said firmly, like he was teaching an unruly class. ‘Ghosts are usually a sign that there’s a discontinuity in the space time continuum. Nothing to worry about. Just the sort of thing that happens. Five times out of five. Guaranteed.
Well… unless they’re Gelth. Or time travellers with a dodgy temporal feedback circuit. Or from the future of an alternative timeline. Or an osmic projection. Or it might be because this city was built over a time rift.’
He hesitated, because he’d run out of fingers. ‘Or they could be holograms. Or waterhive. Or an army of millions of Cybermen from a parallel universe. OK… that’s eight.
Eight out of, er, five. Let’s call it ten. So… two times out of ten, a ghost is—’
A brick sailed past him, clattered and clanged against the metal wall. The Doctor sensed he was losing his audience.
‘Thing is, there’s always a rational explanation,’ he said calmly, but quickly. ‘A reason. If you’ve got a ghost problem… well, I’m your man. Ghosts, I can help with.’
‘He helps ghosts!’ another of the boys shouted.
‘Um… that’s not quite what I—’
‘He said he was the reason for the ghosts.’
‘He called himself the Ghost Doctor.’
‘That he knows eight different types of ghost.’
‘He said five.’
‘He said ten.’
‘He said nine,’ the stocky girl corrected them.
‘You’re right – I said nine,’ said the Doctor. ‘But you’re missing the nuances—’
‘What’s the ghost talking about now?’ The boy with the metal pipe was slapping it in the palm of his hand.
‘What’s a new onz, then? Is that the type of ghost you are?’
‘He’s not a ghost. He helps them and he talks to them,’
the stocky girl reminded the crowd.
The children’s reaction made it clear they didn’t see this as an improvement.
‘Doesn’t matter what,’ dismissed one of them.
‘I think I saw a ghost here a minute ago,’ the Doctor told her, almost pleading for calm. ‘Now… I’m new here.
Only just arrived and—’
Another rock flew past.
‘I wish I could see a ghost,’ the Doctor said.
That seemed to shut them up.
‘No!’ the one with the fancy knife shouted.
‘He wished it!’
One of the boys screamed.
‘You heard him! He summoned it. You saw it.’
‘It?’
‘The ghost.’ The grubby boy was jabbing a finger at the
Doctor. No: jabbing it to indicate something behind him.
The Doctor took a deep breath before bowing to the inevitable and turning to take a look.
The ghost shimmered. Its features were blurred and difficult to make out. It was a man, or the shape and size of
one. It wore white robes, a toga, and was terrifying because it looked so terrified. It was an expression that the Doctor recognised, but could never get used to. His instinct was to run, and he fought it, beat it down, kept himself rooted to the spot. He was looking at a man who knew that he’d lost everything, absolutely everything he knew and loved, including all the things he thought would be there for ever, all the things that should have survived him. And the Doctor could tell that, once, this had been a man, a confident, proud man, who thought he had achieved and built and protected those things he valued. A good man reduced to a lost soul. He stared at the Doctor with accusing eyes.
‘I know,’ the Doctor said.
The ghost reached out with both hands, trying to grab at the Doctor, just looking for one last moment of contact, some way of bridging the gap.
‘I know,’ the Doctor repeated, raising his hand.
‘Don’t let it touch you!’ the boy with the metal pipe shouted. The ghost swept his arm around, almost casually, touched the boy, who vanished, his screams abruptly cut off. The metal pipe clattered to the ground.
‘Frad! No!’ the grubby boy said, grabbing the pipe.
There wasn’t much room between them. The ghost turned to face him, pleading. The ghost was fading away. It was
already hard to make out where it ended and the air started.
‘No…’ the boy shouted, but it was too late, and the ghost swept towards him, looked almost apologetic. The boy was wild-eyed.
‘Let go of him!’ the Doctor shouted.
This had the intended reaction – the ghost was distracted, turned away from the boy. The stocky girl pulled him away.
The kids were all running off, now, out of the alley into the open. A couple of them were still screaming.
‘Class dismissed,’ the Doctor whispered.
The Doctor looked back at the ghost, unsure whether to feel anger. The ghost was hardly there, now. It looked confused. It howled, but didn’t even have the power to break the silence. And then it dissipated, losing even itself.
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