The Albino's Dancer - Dale Smith by Doctor Who

Author:Doctor Who [Who, Doctor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: time, adventure, action, hunter, bomb, war, Sci-fi, Doctor Who, SCIENCE FICTION, telos
ISBN: 9781845838089
Publisher: Telos
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

6A. 4 November 1951, 18:12

Lechasseur nodded solemnly.

‘There’s no chance...?’ His voice trailed off, his meaning clear.

Catherine found herself reaching out to him, their flesh touching briefly. She thought of Leiter. Cold electricity: she pulled her hand back sharply.

‘We watched them pull the body out together,’ she answered softly. Lechasseur’s face bore the same expression of sadness that it had on that morning. ‘I’m sorry.’

Lechasseur was silent.

For a moment, the café faded around them, the sound of old men smoking and discussing the dogs between slurps of tea muted and died. There were just the two of them, sitting in the middle of a smear of grey time. A second could have passed, a year, and neither of them would have noticed. Two people to whom time was so important, and it slipped by with barely a comment. Catherine felt a chill.

He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he knew.

She was caught in his eyes. They were snowdrop-white, standing out hypnotically from his coffee skin, Blandish burning like a fire deep inside them. They stripped the clothes from her, the skin, flesh and bone until they revealed her essential truth: the best way to save his friend was to ignore Catherine’s lies and just go on, living his life.

For a crazy moment, Catherine let him look.

Your friend might die, so my love might live.

I see nothing wrong with that.

Nothing.

There was a noise, and the moment was broken: two men at the far end of the café had started to fight, and a third was trying to break them apart with a broom. Catherine heard a woman at a nearby table comment that one of the men had said the King would be dead by the end of the year, but whether he was the one being beaten or the one doing the beating, Catherine didn’t know. Nor did she care: she looked back to Lechasseur, but he was already pulling his trenchcoat back over his broad shoulders.

‘You’d better come with me,’ he said grimly. ‘This kind of thing has a habit of getting out of hand.’

Catherine shook her head.

‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. In time, she thought.

Lechasseur looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and wove his way through the gathering crowd.

Catherine sat in her seat for a few moments longer, and sipped her tea. She was cold, but nobody noticed. A few moments passed, and she pulled herself together: a sharp word, and her own long nails dug hard into the pale flesh of her arm. Tiny red crescents appeared as she removed her hand, like a new moon creeping into the sky.

She stood up, and the greasy-haired café boy put himself between her and the fight as she strode out of the café, into the darkness outside.

Lechasseur was standing in the shadows out there, watching himself walking away. He must have been thinking about what was to come, but his face was unreadable. Even his eyes, so large and expressive, hid in the shadows.

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