DOCTOR WHO.

Camera Obscura.

by Lloyd Rose.

Prologue.

'I've teeth in my hip. My sister's teeth that should have been. I killed her in the womb.'

The young woman waited, but her visitor had no reaction.

'So and that would be why,' she continued, 'I was a murderer before I was born. And that would be why, then, I murdered all those other small ones.'

'You said at your trial you didn't kill them.'

She shrugged.

'It was only me talking, wasn't it? Everyone knows it was me that killed them. They tell me the newspapers call me the Angel-Maker.'

He didn't seem interested in what the papers said. 'At your trial, you claimed that you killed an adult male a man whose body was, in fact, found downstairs from the room in which the slaughtered children lay. You said that you had come to be interviewed for a position and that he attempted to assault you.'

She raised a leg, setting her foot up on the seat of her chair. Her skirt slid down her thigh. The man's dark eyes remained on her face. Funny, that usually got their interest. He was funny. When he'd come in, not stooping but seeming to because he was so big and the room was so small, he'd looked around and said, 'Ah, the ambience of a Victorian insane asylum.' As if it were a joke. But not a joke on her. On the place.

'And it must be that I was lying, then,' she said. 'Or it must be that I don't remember. That God in His mercy didn't let me remember.'

'Do you believe in God?'

She stared at him for a moment. That was a new question. And he was asking it seriously. 'Sure and you're trying to trap me,' she said. 'To get me to blaspheme.' He looked like he could be an agent of the Devil. Big and dark. Powerful. Uncaring.

'If you believe your soul is damned already,' he said, 'what's a little blasphemy?'

'It's evil you are,' she said.

He smiled, gently but with an edge of irony. 'Do you think you're evil?'

'Sure and I must be, after what I did.'

'If you don't remember what you did, are you still responsible?'

'Someone is,' she said. 'They were all eight dead. And all the blood.'

'The wounds on the children were almost identical to the wounds on the man.'

'Well, then,' she said, 'it must have been me.' Bored, she lowered her leg. All the questions were the same.

'How old are you?' he asked.

'I don't know.'

'You look about eighteen or nineteen.' She shrugged again. 'How long have you been in service?'

'It's five years ago that I left Ireland. I was in Liverpool as a skivvy first. Then I did the same here for the Porters, till he lost all his money in that speculation.'

'How would you like to work for me?'

She laughed. 'And they're going to let me go from here!'

He nodded, smiling that smile again. 'They are.'

She looked around the small room: the bare brick walls, the simple furniture and threadbare rug, the barred windows. 'And what did you give them, then, to buy me?'

'I explained that I was a doctor, a specialist in the treatment of the criminally insane. That I wanted to take you on as a private patient.'

'Oh, and it was only that? There was no money?'

'There was money. This institution needs money.'

'So it's that you have have bought me.' bought me.'

'If you don't like the work, you can leave any time.'

She snorted. 'Oh, and it's likely they'll allow that.'

'They no longer matter.'

She stared at him for a long moment.

'So is it,' she said, 'that you want to do the dirty thing with a dirty murderess? Is that your gentleman's pleasure?'

He was neither shocked nor insulted. 'No.'

'Or is it just that you want a famous killer scrubbing your floors and emptying your slops?'

'I live in an odd place,' he said. 'You won't have to do any of that.'

'And what is it, then, you'll be having me do?'

'Why did you kill that man?' he said. 'Really.'

'He '

'No, please. Even that rather obtuse coroner could tell he was killed from behind. I'm certain that men have forced themselves on you. But not this one.'

Her eyes dropped before his dark regard. 'No,' she whispered. She put her hand to her mouth in fear. Why was she telling him this?

'So why did you kill him?'

She looked up at him. His gaze was steady. He knew, she thought suddenly. He would understand.

'He was wrong,' she said.

'Wrong how?'

'A wrong thing. He was... It's that he was here, and not here.'

'How did you know this?'

'I could tell,' she mumbled, lowering her eyes again.

There was silence for a moment.

'Tell me about time,' he said.

She raised her eyes. 'Time?'

'The past and the present. The future.'

He knew! Her lips parted in wonder. But she still hesitated. His eyes reassured her, held her up, held her. 'Sure and they're the same thing,' she whispered. 'All the same they are.'

He smiled, a real smile, not an ironic one. She thought his face was beautiful then. He held out his hand. She placed hers in it. So big. But he would not hurt her. 'I don't believe you're that doctor,' she said. 'I believe it's just that you're pretending to be him.'

He laughed.

Chapter One.

The Doctor sat alone in a first-class compartment and listened to his heart.

He didn't like to do this, and at first he had been able to distract himself with the rhythm of the train wheels: thackata-thack, thackata-thack, thackata-thack, thackata-thack. Like the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth, he thought, gazing out of the window and remembering a future a century from now in which the landscape would be dotted not with factory chimneys but with dark Satanic nuclear power plants. Thackata-thack, thackata-thack... But slowly, under that relentless mechanical clanking, the sound of his own body reasserted itself. The thump of his single heart.

He never had got used to it. He never would. That solitary beat, surrounded by emptiness. The single sound where a double should be. Echoless. Isolated. Alone.

When it had first happened, the experience was so strange, so other other, that he had been subject to sudden awful plunges of fear. What was this? Whose body was he in? Whose body was he in? If he held his chest, he felt silence. This thin, dull thud the monotonous rhythm like the tick of a clock, a dead machine. It was not him. If he held his chest, he felt silence. This thin, dull thud the monotonous rhythm like the tick of a clock, a dead machine. It was not him. It was not him. It was not him. All the other symptoms the weariness, the slower healing, the loss of his respiratory-bypass system were nothing compared to this horrible, hollow absence. All the other symptoms the weariness, the slower healing, the loss of his respiratory-bypass system were nothing compared to this horrible, hollow absence.

The thread of his pulse seemed to him a trickle, a leak, no more. A signal of something diminished, something running down. He was colder now, cold all the time, especially his hands and feet and, comically, the edges of his ears, and sometimes his lips or the tip of his nose. The little flutter of warmth wasn't enough. At times it seemed barely there, and he thought of sparks flaring and dying, of subatomic particles flickering in and out of existence.

For a long time, the unfamiliar, inadequate rhythm prevented him from sleeping. Not that he slept much ordinarily. But in his new weakness he often stretched out, exhausted, only to find himself kept awake, teased from peace, by the wrongness wrongness of his pulse, the way it beat strangely in his ear against the pillow. What was this new code hammering through his body? What did it mean? of his pulse, the way it beat strangely in his ear against the pillow. What was this new code hammering through his body? What did it mean?

Mortal.

No, he'd always known he could die. Not mortal.

Damaged. Crippled.

Through his shirt, his cold fingers sought out the thick ridge of his scar.

Human.

Stop this!

He rested his forehead against the cool glass of the compartment window. It was a grey day, and periodically the landscape outside darkened enough for him to glimpse his reflection, pale and partial, like a ghost. Did he look different now? He didn't think so. The same face a man, just under forty, that human beings apparently found handsome. His appearance didn't really change, hadn't changed for a hundred years now. Maybe some strands of grey in the thick brown hair. And before that? What had he looked like when he was young, a boy? Had he ever been been a boy? Did whatever manner of being he was have a childhood? True, he sometimes got the impression that he'd once been shorter. But there were also moments when he could have sworn he had once been taller. a boy? Did whatever manner of being he was have a childhood? True, he sometimes got the impression that he'd once been shorter. But there were also moments when he could have sworn he had once been taller.

The Doctor sat back and shut his eyes. Thackata-thack. Thackata-thack. Trains. What memories he had began a hundred years ago on a nineteenth-century train like this one. A second-class carriage. A wary woman opposite. Himself, just returned to consciousness. Confusion. Then panic. Then fear. Then something worse: the understanding that his past then was as lost as his heart was now. Gone, the both of them. Why even think about it? A waste of the time he seemed to have so much of. Better to concentrate on the matter at hand. That certainly provided enough mysteries of its own.

Octave could never see over the footlights into the dark, high-vaulted hall, so before a performance he would slip around to the back of the theatre to get a look at the audience. He did this early, before he was in makeup and while people were still finding their seats, so he could lurk unobtrusively and get a look at the faces. He liked to get a sense of whom he would be playing to.

Though the rather lurid posters outside proclaimed him Octave the Uncanny and showed him communing with skull-faced spirits and sharing a drink with the Devil, he was in person an unprepossessing man, thin and sallow with a scanty moustache and a hairline that was receding early. No one ever gave him a second glance when he loitered in the lobby or took a turn up and down the aisles.

Aside from getting a general sense of his public for the evening, Octave kept an eye out for other magicians and professional debunkers. He hated dealing with that sort of nonsense, and it was best to be prepared for it. Just a few weeks ago, Maskelyne had stood up from a seat and challenged him in mid-show. Maskelyne himself. Octave had been impressed in spite of the circumstances. He'd also been quite nervous when as he had to, naturally, to avoid a fuss he'd invited him up on stage. Not because he feared exposure, obviously. Simply because it was... Maskelyne. A legendary member of the legendary conjuring family. And of course, even the great Maskelyne had come away impressed in turn.

Afterwards he had bulled the unwilling Octave out for a drink and tried to persuade him to bring his act to London. It had been very difficult putting him off. Quite understandably, Maskelyne couldn't see why a man who bothered to perform as a professional magician wouldn't want to make the best living possible at it why, in short, he wouldn't seek his fortune in London, where Maskelyne was certain he would find not only fortune but fame beyond his dreams. Octave explained that he had no dreams of fame, and that the money he made touring the North was sufficient for his needs. This latter wasn't precisely true. But then the precise truth was... untellable.

Maskelyne had gone away disgruntled, possibly a bit insulted. But genuinely mystified. Octave had been afraid ever since that he would send some friend or colleague up to Liverpool to see the act. But so far there had been no one.

Until tonight.

As Octave was coming up the left-hand aisle, surveying what looked like the usual crowd of entertainment seekers, his eye fell on a man at the back of the theatre who had paused to look around for a seat. The newcomer was perhaps forty, slender and handsome, his hair cut long. Something about him disturbed Octave very much. He stood still as the man came down the aisle, glancing at his hands as he went past. Long-fingered, deft they could be a magician's hands. The man's profile was dramatic, rather beautiful actually, and he was dressed with a certain amount of flair. Yet somehow Octave doubted he was a performer of any sort. He seemed too remote.

Octave watched him take a seat in the eighth row, and half an hour later, when he came on stage, he sensed him there, though he couldn't see anyone in the glare of the footlights, not even the people on the front row. Octave felt rather than observed his audience. They were a single entity, with a single mood, a beast that laughed as one and gasped as one and, if displeased, booed as one.

Octave knew all about the booing. People arrived at his performances having heard that they would see something spectacular. He had become dismally used to the slow atmosphere of disillusionment, like air leaking from a bicycle tyre, that settled on to the audience as the evening commenced. For, to be perfectly frank, his opening acts were not very exciting. Coloured scarves in a stream from his sleeve. A rabbit from a hat. Linking and unlinking metal rings. A performance of the venerable but familiar cup-andballs routine. Nor, to be equally frank, was he very good at any of these acts. Oh he was competent enough. He never actually failed to execute a trick. But he was uninspired, he lacked stage presence. And his moves were clumsy. Occasionally he dropped things. That was when there was sometimes booing.

Tonight, the presence of the man in the eighth row had him particularly on edge. The fellow was invisible, of course, but all the more present for that. Octave sensed a stillness stillness emanating from him. If he had to, he could have pointed into the darkness straight at him. emanating from him. If he had to, he could have pointed into the darkness straight at him.

Not that there was anything hostile in the man's attention. Indeed, as the show progressed, Octave felt dimly that he was on his side, sympathetic even. Wishing him well. He began to find this comforting. He pulled the scarves from his sleeve with an extra flourish, and hoisted the rabbit (which had behaved itself tonight, thank God, and not urinated in his secret pocket) high. In the perfunctory applause, he thought he could single out the man's more vigorous clapping. It gave him a sense of relief. Perhaps the fellow was a performer of some sort after all. He seemed to understand understand.

As he continued, though the audience became slowly more bored and disappointed, Octave's spirits nonetheless, as always, rose. He was approaching the act that filled the house nightly, the illusion, so-called, that had brought the great Maskelyne up to the unappealing provinces. In some ways, he was glad of the boredom he had generated. What a preface it made for what followed! What a turnaround the audience was about to experience, as if their very heads would swivel one hundred and eighty degrees on their necks. They were going to be stunned, agape, astonished. Amazed. Amazed.

'And now, ladies and gentlemen,' he announced, straining, as always, to be heard at the back of the house, 'I will perform... The Illusion of the Time-Travelling Cabinets!'

He felt the crowd's attention shift and sharpen. Ah, now, Ah, now, it seemed to say in its single voice. it seemed to say in its single voice. This is This is it. Yes, he thought, this is it. it. Yes, he thought, this is it.

'I need a volunteer!' A murmur of accommodation came at him. He swept out his arm and pointed to his unseen supporter. 'You, sir! In the green coat!'

Though he couldn't see it happening, Octave knew an usher was guiding the man to the steps at stage left. He turned that way, and in a moment, the man came out of the darkness. Octave had hoped, imagined, he would be smiling. But he wasn't. His expression was focused, more watchful than curious, and Octave saw for the first time what a strange colour his eyes were, an unnatural blue-green, too pale rightly to be as intense as they were. Dismay slid down his spine.