Falls the Shadow (12 page)

The Doctor and Cranleigh had moved Truman onto the bed where he now lay, cold and unconscious. Benny strolled over to them, watching them carefully. It was like a Victorian medical scene. Cranleigh was a grieving relative, hovering concernedly on the edge of the bed, staring with ill‐
matched eyes at the ‘patient’. The Doctor was a grim physician, dressed in white rather than black, lurking on the fringes of the painting like something unholy, something fatal, something soul‐
crushingly good.

That, Bernice reflected as she moved into the frame, makes me the whore who gave the stupid sod syphilis in the first place.

Truman’s dinner‐
jacket and shirt had been loosened, revealing large expanses of his chest. Benny wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

‘Is it true what they say about men with hairy chests?’ she asked.

‘Probably not,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Give me your knife.’

‘What?’

‘I noticed it as I was carrying you up here. Give give.’

Benny prised the knife from her boot, remembering that it was really Cranleigh’s – unsuitable though he was to be in possession of such an item – and she wondered briefly whether he was going to claim his property. No, he wasn’t interested.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, handing it to the Doctor.

‘Nothing permanent,’ he replied, pressing it against Truman’s chest.

There should have been a scratch. There wasn’t.

‘Isn’t this a bit dangerous?’ Benny asked, uneasily. It would be novel if the physician took to stabbing the patient.

‘Only for him,’ the Doctor murmured, sinking the knife deep between Truman’s ribs. Benny started.

‘Jesus!’ she shrieked. ‘You bloody stupid…!’

‘Look,’ he suggested, regret absent from his face.

There should have been a mess. There wasn’t. No blood. No gore. No mess. It wasn’t the wound made by a knife. It was smooth, large enough for a cricket ball to squeeze through comfortably. Truman’s skin rippled and whirled around the hole, as if alive.

Benny felt her own skin crawling. Truman’s body had parted without injury to grant the knife passage. The Doctor withdrew and instantly the hole sealed itself. Flesh flowed into the wound until there was no sign that there had ever been a break. Truman was healed. Good as new.

‘He’ll wake up in about quarter of an hour,’ the Doctor told Cranleigh, ‘right as rain. I want you to be here when he does.’ He turned back to Bernice.

‘Something obscene is happening in this house. Something that destroys lives and minds. Something that revels in deception. I’m not sure what, but I’m ninety per cent certain of who’s behind it.’

There was a gentle cough from the door. Benny didn’t recognize the man standing there. A man in his late fifties, tall, tanned, perhaps attractive.

‘Hello Doctor. Professor Winterdawn would like to see you.’ His voice was gentle and mellow. ‘Now.’

Why, everyone wanted to know, were there blood‐
stains on that photograph of John Pilger?

The room was a silent place, grown dusty through five undisturbed years, its cold air thick with memories. It was a place of heavy darkness and melancholy. Winterdawn could remember a time when it had not been dark. The light was long dimmed, but Winterdawn could still see patches of it. Intense flecks, starfire‐
bright, radiating warmth. Everything had been kept as he remembered.

The photographs, the furniture, the ornaments. The bed she slept in, the books she read, the odds and ends on her bedside table. All served as reminders. So much a part of her.

Daring to touch something, Winterdawn reached for the book on the bedside table. Pilger’s
Distant Voices
– its cover discoloured by brown stains – blood snowflakes flattened across the author’s features. Winterdawn skimmed through it without concentrating. Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs – all blurs of black on white, their meaning wrested from them. Winterdawn wasn’t reading; his mind was wandering through pastures of bitter memories, through the earliest months of his loss.

The rain drummed a constant beat against the window, the book remained wedged in his cold, numbing fingers. Nothing broke his train of thought.

Winterdawn remembered.

The chair was unfamiliar then – an awkward shape trapping him wherever he went. He writhed in constant frustration, straining to break free of this bulky prison. He was strapped into a chair like a condemned man.

The air round him was alive with the buzz of expectant voices. Young voices, student voices, offset by the more mature droning of underworked lecturers. Sitting in a draughty church hall waiting for a meeting to begin, waiting to watch a debate more heated in their imagination than it would be in life.

The discussion was a formality. It couldn’t reverse the UN’s decision.

There was a crowd of protesters in the hall. A far cry from Grosvenor, Winterdawn felt. He wasn’t sure what they were protesting about. Some seemed opposed to UN adventurism in the Persian Gulf. Others were protesting – and Winterdawn found this particularly embarrassing – about discrimination against the ‘limbically disenfranchised’. Winterdawn listened, wearing an expression of grim neutrality. Inside he was cackling.

There were about forty or fifty observers in the hall. Hardly a capacity crowd, but forty‐
nine more than Winterdawn expected. Winterdawn was there as representative of the Miracle Workers. Keightley was there too, sporting a Mona Lisa smile and a pair of distorting spectacles. The UN had sent a representative too – a pale man on the edge of his fifties who cracked his knuckles and chewed nicotine‐
replacement gum, an ex‐
soldier who wanted to be somewhere else.

There was a murmur of discontent from the anti‐
imperialists as the chairman announced the UN’s terms for the return of Thascales’ research.

There was a blanket of silence when Keightley replied that
everything
would be returned – all the original material, all the subsequent research – and all projects suspended. Keightley spoke in a dangerous voice that sounded as though she was enjoying the situation.

Winterdawn wheeled himself forward and watched the expectant faces – the more alert demonstrating the facial symptoms of perceived betrayal.

I despise you. I despise this sick world humanity has built. I am going to smash it. Everything you have ever believed in, everything you hold dear, he declaimed,
but only in his imagination.

His genuine speech was more mundane:

I am resigning. To spend more time with… with my daughter.

He’d thought he’d got away with it. Five years of covert research. He was so close to the breakthrough. He’d thought he’d won. Then this Doctor had come to the house. A coincidence perhaps? Winterdawn doubted it, but he was nonetheless pleased by the stranger’s arrival. He could contain his excitement no longer. At last, there was someone who would understand, someone in whom he could confide, even though it meant the end of his work.

Winterdawn snapped the book shut and restored it to its place on the bedside table. When he looked up the Doctor was standing in the doorway.

Winterdawn studied the newcomer with an analytic eye, absorbing every detail into an educated first impression.

The Doctor was not a tall man. He was slightly built, though Winterdawn felt that this belied a powerful, physical strength. He was dressed in a cream‐
white suit that struck Winterdawn as incongruous but not exceptional. His appearance was unremarkable, saving his face.

The Doctor’s features were vague, almost fluid. One second he seemed to be an old man, his face worn by centuries of careful studying. The next he had the smooth face of a child, radiating angelic innocence. His hair was a thicket of dark curls, receding to reveal a high, intellectual forehead. Then there were his eyes: whirls of black light like holes in space, doors into the infinite. Eyes that watched patiently.

‘Doctor.’ Winterdawn smiled generously, hoping to start off on the right foot. The Doctor said nothing. The silence was painful but Winterdawn continued: ‘I’m Professor Jeremy Winterdawn. I welcome you as a fellow scientist.’

The Doctor strolled through the gloom, speaking in a low, powerful voice as he moved, his head held at a slight angle.

‘There is something sick happening in this house. There’s an evil atmosphere here. Thick and dense. It’s like a web that’s ensnared me, drawing me to this house. Since then, one of my friends has almost been eaten alive by those obscenities in the conservatory, having first been threatened at knife‐
point by your pet lunatic!’ The Doctor’s voice rose in pitch, volume, anger. ‘I’ve been held at gunpoint. I’ve no idea where my other friend is, nor why I’m here at all. But I know the sort of power that’s responsible. As I said, there’s something sick happening here, and
you
are at its heart!’

Winterdawn drummed his fingers on the side of the wheelchair, hesitating before breaking the silence.

‘This was my wife’s room,’ he said, firmly, reasonably. ‘You will not shout in here.’

The Doctor looked up slowly, then nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quieter than before. ‘But I demand an explanation.’

‘You’re hardly in a position to demand anything.’ Winterdawn managed to muster a threatening tone. ‘You’ve broken into my house. The best you can expect from me is a good word to the police. That’s assuming you haven’t taken or damaged anything.’

‘You won’t call the police. You’d have to explain what you’re doing. Something illegal isn’t it?’

Winterdawn remained calm and decided to bluff.

‘Is it?’

‘Benny was almost killed.’

‘By her own negligence, if Moore’s to be believed.’

‘By his prize‐
winning plants!’

‘Who were doing no harm until she blundered into the middle! Is it illegal to keep carnivorous plants? Is it immoral, even?’

The Doctor considered then shook his head. He wasn’t giving up though.

‘What about Cranleigh? What did you do to him?’

‘I took him in! He’s my daughter’s fiancé, he hasn’t got a family prepared to look after him. What do you expect me to do? Let him live on the streets? Besides, he’d been here for years before he became unstable.’

‘You let him play with a knife!’ The Doctor’s tone was accusatory.

‘Not with my knowledge.’

‘Irresponsible.’

‘But hardly a crime! Unlike what you’ve done,’ Winterdawn growled, tiring of this exchange – it was apparent that the Doctor had no idea what he was doing. ‘Is there anything else you would like to accuse me of?’

The Doctor blinked slowly, then glanced around the room. He was still angry, but stripped of his accusations there was very little he could do. It was genuine anger though. He had actually believed – probably still believed – that Winterdawn was up to no good.

And he was a scientist…

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing,’ Winterdawn offered.

‘Please,’ the Doctor replied guardedly, ‘as a fellow scientist.’

Winterdawn smiled slightly, and was pleased to receive a smile in response. The Doctor’s anger was harnessed by his curiosity.

‘Have you ever heard of Professor Carl Thascales?’

‘The name rings a bell.’

‘He’s dead. He drove his car into a wall in the mid‐
seventies. His body was burned beyond recognition. Nasty.’ Winterdawn squeezed the arms of his wheelchair, his knuckles whitening. It was a habit. ‘Until then he’d been working at Cambridge on his own theories into “interstitial time”, by which he meant…’

‘An envelope of non‐
space, non‐
time,’ the Doctor interrupted, ‘underlying the “real” universe. It surrounds and separates every space‐
time event. A theoretical zone of nullity; “the gap between now and now”. Literally, outside reality.’ He smiled smugly.

‘Oh.’ Winterdawn was more irritated than anything else. ‘You know.’

‘I am a fellow scientist,’ the Doctor replied, wearing his innocent child’s face.

‘Until about five years ago I worked with a team at Cambridge who sought ways of
applying
theoretical quantum physics. We wanted to manipulate space‐
time. We were miracle‐
workers, we wanted to walk on water.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. We ended up impersonating Saint Peter. Our theoretical knowledge was probably the most advanced in the West, but still limited. It’ll be centuries before the technology exists for any practical use. Our task looked impossible.’

‘But on the quantum level,’ the Doctor wore a wry smile, ‘nothing is impossible.’ Winterdawn nodded happily.

‘We made a couple of discoveries. Thascales’ main body of research had been bought up entirely by the UN but it was made available to our college. There were probably funny handshakes involved… It turned out to be – we thought – gibberish. Then we read closer and discovered that there was something to it after all. Complex themes running through it which were just enough to make it look credible. Thascales had come up with some amazing stuff that had been totally overlooked.

‘The UN withdrew all the rights to the research. They were entitled to, of course, but it was disappointing for us. We’d come so far and we were being stifled by official cowardice. So we decided to continue in our work secretly. I’d… had my accident,’ Winterdawn tapped the arms of his chair, ‘so I resigned my seat at the college and disappeared into the sunset with illicit copies of our work. I’m still paid out of the college funds. All my results are sent to Cambridge through mailing companies set up when I resigned. Clandestine and, I confess, utterly illegal.’ He held up wrists to the Doctor. ‘It’s a fair cop. I’ll come quietly.’

The Doctor turned away frowning, then glanced back sharply.

‘There’s more to it than that. What have you done?’

Winterdawn paused, eagerly anticipating the collapse of the Doctor’s composure.

‘It took me five years. I have found a way to physically enter the interstitial gap.’

The Doctor batted an eyelid.

Winterdawn savoured the silence.

‘That’s impossible,’ the Doctor said, with superficial confidence.

‘“But on the quantum level, nothing is impossible”,’ Winterdawn replied smugly. ‘Cranleigh’s been there,’ (don’t tell him what it did to his mind), ‘Truman made recordings.’ (Don’t tell him what happened to
those
either.)

‘You said yourself,’ the Doctor was rationalizing, ‘it will be centuries before the technology exists for any practical application. Thascales can only have given your work more theoretical depth, you couldn’t have developed the technology, unless… You said something about a couple of discoveries.…

‘Technology bequeathed to you from somewhere?’ He spoke under his breath, no longer addressing Winterdawn. ‘Human technology – not in this period. Something extraterrestrial then…’ Nonsensical though it was, Winterdawn was intrigued by this speculation, but decided to chime in with a suitable prompt.

‘Something Wedderburn found on his expeditions.’

‘Expeditions? Yes, the Amazon,’ the Doctor mused, without dropping his obsessive line of enquiry. ‘And what else did Wedderburn find in the Amazon? Local wildlife exposed to a powerful mutagenic over a long period of time!’

He turned back to Winterdawn, a look of triumph in his eyes.

‘Wedderburn found something in the Amazon. An alien artefact emitting high levels of radioactivity. He brought it home, and you were able to apply it in your work. Am I warm?’

‘Warm‐
ish,’ Winterdawn conceded, surprised at the accuracy of the Doctor’s deduction. ‘I’m not sure about an “alien artefact” – I’m not that credulous. I have no idea where the thing comes from nor why it does what it does. But I don’t care. It’s an instrument for the manipulation of reality, Doctor! It can warp space‐
time round my little finger.’ Or it would, he added silently, if I understood all its functions. ‘Do I sound obsessive?’

‘It’s the mark of a committed scientist,’ the Doctor replied. ‘You’ve been using it to mess about with your architecture?’

‘You’ve noticed that? That’s accidental, I’m not sure why it happens. Do you believe a word of what I’ve said?’

‘Every syllable. Unless you’re a better liar than I credit you for.’

Well,
Winterdawn thought,
there’s no answering that.

For a moment he wanted to climb out of the chair. He wanted to stare the Doctor in the eye without getting a sore neck. He wanted to move properly. Just once.

‘It’s true, I’ve seen it.’

Sandra was standing in the doorway, the woman who called herself Ace beside her. Both wore smiles that were not so much smug as triumphant. Winterdawn started, suspicious of the sudden rapport between his daughter and her attacker. He had no idea of how to deal with this sudden alliance. Fortunately the Doctor took the lead.

‘Ace? Have you been all right?’

‘Shoved about a bit. Nothing damaged. Did you find Benny?’

‘She’s fine, a few pints short of a cardio‐
vascular system perhaps…’