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.Something deep and long-buried that had been suppressed by centuries of logic and reason and dogma.'I don't believe in ghosts,' I repeated in an almost inaudible whisper.Nevertheless, when I left the lounge, I was chilled to the bone.Literally, as well as metaphorically.Outside, in the lengthy and empty corridor, I stood with my back to the polished, oak-panelled wall and closed my eyes, breathing in and out slowly and relaxing, trying in vain to clear my troubled mind of appalling images of burning soldiers, slashed wrists in tiny bathtubs and bodies hanging limply from light fixtures.After several seconds of welcome isolation, I opened my eyes again, hoping that all these imagined horrors might have packed up their kit bags and just gone away.Instead, to my amazement, an ill-defined apparition floated through a cabin wall in front of me.And that was very odd because I don't, actually, believe in ghosts.CHAPTER THREEDEAD SOULSFor it is a ghost's right, his element is so fine,being sharpened by his death, to drink from the wine-breath,while our gross palates drink from the whole wine.W.B.YEATS, ALL SOULS' NIGHTTHE APPARITION'S VISAGE WAS EXACTLY HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED to appear from within the realms of popular fiction.Of urban myths and oral folk tales of phantoms and ghosts.From down the aeons on many worlds and in many cultures.Spectral, indistinct, almost like an image drawn by fingers in smoke.I was, I freely admit, terrified, if only momentarily.A repulsion from the hard-headed scientist within me rose to a shouting crescendo of outraged disbelief.'This is not real,' I found myself saying.That is often the last refuge of the foolish.But if this were an hallucination, which was the only alternative, rational explanation available to me, then it was as vivid and real as any I had ever witnessed or heard about.I repeated my assertion of the unreality of the situation several times, like a mantra.Like a stylus stuck and locked into the groove of a gramophone record.Denying reality was, I reasoned, something that had worked successfully for me in the past.But I was convincing no-one.Least of all, myself.And a part of me desperately wanted to know more.The adventurer.The dreamer.Perhaps I am over-exaggerating my wish to know more at this point – it is difficult for me to be certain that I was merely curious, because I expected that I should be curious.I am the Doctor, after all.This is what I do.My trembling hand stretched out towards the spectre and, in the fraction of a second between me touching it and it being touched, it vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.I stood motionless, rooted to the spot and staring at the place just two feet from me where it, whatever it was, had once been.Finally I roused myself from my stupor and crossed the corridor to touch the wall where my ephemeral visitor had first appeared and then disappeared.It was just a wall.Solid.Tangible.Utterly real.My knuckles scraped over smooth hard wood, polished daily.I could see my face reflected in it.My puzzled, bemused face.The wood was, I noticed, cold to the touch.Like the ship itself.Just as the immediacy of the experience was beginning to fade in me and I was attempting, with some initial success, to rationalise the entire experience as a by-product of an overactive imagination, I turned.And, in the half-distance, I saw the unmistakable form of my visitor floating down the middle of the corridor away from me.The hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight to attention as if affected by static electricity.This time, I could not only see the spectre but also feel its presence.My skin reacted badly to the invasion of my personal space, and I shivered.'What are you?' I asked in a voice that was unsteady and emotional.There was no reply.I repeated the question, feeling strange and inarticulate.What was I expecting in reply, I now wonder?It is what it is, and was, and shall be.Once again, the vision was gone in a blinking.To a bare patch of corridor I repeated my demand for the third time.'What are you?'A terrible, lonely silence was my only reply.The visitations then continued all over the ship wherever I wandered, andmy apprehension increased with each successive sighting.Sometimes they were very ill-defined, almost wisps of cotton-wool cloud passing briefly through the periphery of my vision either to left or right, to become lost in the labyrinth of corridors and rooms.On other occasions there were forms that I could almost recognise as human.With arms and legs, torsos and faces.Still little more than afterthoughts, like the negative image from a photograph, two-dimensional and translucent, but with substance.With meaning.And, also, with a curious, disarming smell.A caustic, pungent, sickly sweet aroma that reminded me of burning rope and rotting skin, but also rosemary and oranges and wet autumn leaves [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]