Doctor Who NSA06 - The Stealers of Dreams by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-25T06:00:48+00:00

He had found his tongue tied whenever she had spoken to him. She just seemed to know what he was still trying to learn. She seemed to get it.

But gradually her stories had lost any grounding in reality. They’d become longer and more rambling, lacking in structure – aimless flights of fantasy that made sense to no one but herself. And now, when the others had called her ‘mad’, it had been with concern in their voices rather than admiration.

Mad Mand had smashed up a restaurant one day. She had threatened the customers with a table leg. The staff had tried to restrain her, but they’d said on the news channels later that she’d had the strength of ten. In the end, in desperation, the chef had reached for a knife.

Manda had still been laughing, in her baritone boom, as she was carried into the ambulance. She had died in a traffic jam, halfway to the hospital.

Domnic had shunned the reading group for a month. It had taken him that long to come to terms with what had happened. The media had seized on the incident, citing it as an example of the danger of fiction, but that wasn’t right. It had been the danger that had seduced Manda to start with. She hadn’t been interested in the stories for their own sake, just in the thrill of dicing with insanity. If fiction hadn’t killed her, she would have found something else to do the job.

At least, that was how Domnic rationalised it to himself.

Later, thanks to the news channels, they had found out a lot about Mad Mand – about her parents and a succession of bad boyfriends.

They had come to see why it was that she had been so scared of reality.

Domnic, in the meantime, had returned to the group to find Nat.

Poor, sweet Nat. Seventeen years old and so nervous, approaching each new story with trepidation, always feeling that she was doing something terribly wrong. Domnic had had to talk her out of leaving a few times. She’d stayed because she said a love story made her feel sort of liquid inside. She had written one once and had wept as she read it out loud. She hadn’t read Domnic’s stories, because she said they were too violent. She had been scared of ending up like Manda.

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