Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [002] - Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Author:Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563405665
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1997-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

CROSSING OVER

‘It’s getting darker,’ said Shackle.

He lay slumped face first on Harris’s desk at Angel Labs, the corner of her in-tray poking into his temple. He didn’t move. People talked a lot about feeling hollow, but this was literal: it felt like everything in his chest was shrivelling down to a single flickering point, leaving nothing but a numb space where it had been.

She sat across the desk from him, leaning back in her chair, observing him. ‘So I take it this isn’t the usual, then.’

He shook his head, just a fraction. ‘No one-liners. Too much effort to think them up.’

‘Well?’

‘It’s been one day too many,’ he said. ‘People passing through the clinic, getting hurt or killed for the least of reasons – oh hell, you know the story. Maybe that is the usual. But this time I can’t just brush it off. I can’t.’

He could have gone to the Doctor, but the Doctor wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t: he was so gratingly optimistic there was no way he could ever have seen the world the way Shackle did. But Harris knew – she said things he could believe.

He rambled on. ‘The jokes, the extravagance, they’re an easy way to cope. Easy to be amusingly cynical about it all. But after a while you get to the point where you really do believe what you’re saying.’ That’s where he was now, he thought – on the threshold, just short of crossing into believing it was hopeless. ‘I don’t feel like I can win any more.’

‘You can’t,’ she said plainly.

He felt the little flicker within him contract even further.

She looked down at him from her seat. ‘People die. People die stupidly. Hasn’t changed in nine hundred years, and it’s not going to change in another nine hundred. They can say all they want about every little bit helping, but that doesn’t mean a thing to the ones who are dead.’

‘But?’ he asked, almost pleadingly. There had to be a ‘but’.

‘But what?’ she said, and waited for him to come up with the answer. He couldn’t find it, he couldn’t.

This was wrong. He’d come here to feel better and it was only feeling worse. He was drowning, and she was throwing him a brick.

But everything she was saying felt so true.

The Doctor paused on the threshold, his key in the lock. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘You said you needed me here,’ said Carolyn. ‘Whatever you need me to do.’ She leaned nonchalantly on the police box door and waited for him.

A little distance away, disconnected from the pair of them, Sam stood holding a black metal case. Carolyn tried to puzzle out her expression for a moment, then gave up. She wasn’t giving any clues how she felt about the Doctor letting Carolyn into her home.

Of course, it wasn’t clear whether she was being an unreadable distant teenager because she didn’t want Carolyn to know how she felt about it, or whether she was being an unreadable distant teenager because she herself didn’t know how she felt about it.

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