Doctor Who: Ten Days of Christmas Festive Tales With the Tenth Doctor by Steve Cole

Author:Steve Cole [Cole, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405956901
Amazon: 1405956909
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

6

* * *

THE ETERNAL PRESENT

I have been screaming for one hundred years without drawing a breath.

I’m not aware for most of it. I am frozen in a moment, only able to grasp a scintilla of the full horror of my fate. And a single thought clung to for any length of time eventually slips away somehow. It loses meaning.

But sometimes, as I am lost in the sound of my scream, there is the sickening lurch of movement. The sudden silence shouts louder than I can. Breath stirs in my lungs, and I see a face. A face full of sharp angles, yet kind and curious, with the most penetrating dark eyes.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says. ‘Something terrible has happened to you, but I’m here. I’ll help.’

I want to respond, but it’s like I’m fixed in amber. I can’t breathe out.

‘Take it easy,’ he goes on. ‘This something that happened to you – it’s a kind of temporal anomaly. You’ll have to take my word for it. I’m only able to reach you because, well – time traveller, artron energy, blah blah blah. What? What’s that?’ The man looks behind him at something I can’t see, then turns back to me. ‘It’s like when your laptop can’t connect to the internet cos there’s no Wi-Fi, so you have to piggyback off the 4G on your phone. Does that make sense? Well, I’m the 4G and you’re the laptop! Afraid it’s not a very stable connection, but it’s all we have. And, as it’s the 1970s for me and Rose just now, you probably don’t know a thing about Wi-Fi and laptops in any case …’

It’s true; I know nothing of what he says. But I feel I know the name ‘Rose’. I know him.

‘Please,’ I gasp. ‘They have to be stopped!’

He frowns. ‘They?’

‘Doctor!’ The name bursts from me. ‘Doctor …?’

‘You know me?’ The man looks worried.

‘You – were – there –’

But then the Doctor disappears. The connection – whatever it was – has gone and I am back screaming again and always.

I try so hard to hold on to my sanity. To focus on what I know to be true:

My name is James Pryce.

It is December 1937.

I died somewhere in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

And the monsters are real.

Although the man – the Doctor? – has vanished, his coming seems to have made some small space in my eternal present. Between the scratchy snatches of the scream, details of my life before it ended come back to me, unbidden. Like facts half-remembered from those dusty, sunlit classrooms of my youth.

Like most other travellers to Brazil, I arrived at Manaus. From there I travelled by rail to Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. This vast territory of Brazil, between the headwaters of the Amazon’s great, north-flowing tributaries, contains huge tracts of jungle that few Europeans have attempted to enter. Of course, the unknown always gives rise to fanciful notions – one may imagine that Mato Grosso teems with hidden cities of gold and beasts

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