06 - The Stealers of Dreams

VIP免费

2024-12-08 0 0 578.04KB 136 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

In the far future, the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack ﬁnd a world on which

ﬁction has been outlawed. A world where it’s a crime to tell stories, a

crime to lie, a crime to hope, and a crime to dream.

But now somebody is challenging the status quo. A pirate TV station

urges people to ﬁght back. And the Doctor wants to help – until he sees

how easily dreams can turn into nightmares.

With one of his companions stalked by shadows and the other committed

to an asylum, the Doctor is forced to admit that ﬁction can be dangerous

after all. Though perhaps it is not as deadly as the truth. . .

Featuring the Doctor as played by Christopher Eccleston, together with Rose and

Captain Jack as played by Billie Piper and John Barrowman in the hit series from

BBC Television.

The Stealers of Dreams

Steve Lyons

Contents

Prologue 4

One 7

Two 14

Three 22

Four 30

Five 37

Six 44

Seven 52

Eight 60

Nine 67

Ten 75

Eleven 83

Twelve 91

Thirteen 98

Fourteen 105

Fifteen 112

Sixteen 120

CONTENTS 2

Seventeen 128

Acknowledgements 133

About the Author 134

For the Monday Night Group

– Dave, John, Pete, Phil and Tracy –

for having the imagination. . .

It was there again, at the foot of the bed. She could hear it.

She tried to do as she had been told. She gritted her teeth and closed

her eyes and made a humming sound in the back of her throat to block out

its shufﬂing and its scraping. She tried to focus on that, and on the drone

of the night-time trafﬁc far below.

It worked, for a short time. The noise was cathartic; it made her feel

brave. Until she ran out of breath.

Then she lay shivering in the darkness, hot on the outside but cold on

the inside, face buried in her pillow and sheets wrapped around her as if

she could hide from it.

As if it might go away.

Kimmi didn’t want to be a bad girl. But the monster was real. It was

real and it wouldn’t leave her alone.

‘An overactive imagination,’ the doctors at the Big White House had

said.

‘You’re ﬁfteen years old, Kimmi,’ her mother had sobbed, tearing at her

bedraggled hair. ‘You can’t live in this. . . this fantasy world any longer. It’s

dangerous, don’t you see? You have to grow up. Why can’t you. . . why

can’t you be like all the other kids? Why can’t you be normal?’

Kimmi hated seeing her mother like that. That was why she had kept

it from her for so long.

That, and the incident at school two years ago. It had been her ﬁrst

week. Her teacher had snatched the data pad from her desk, seen the

open ﬁle and let out a scandalised gasp. Kimmi hadn’t thought much of it

before then; she had just been daydreaming, letting her hands wander.

No one had cared about her doodles at junior school. She couldn’t un-

derstand why they were all making such a fuss now; why the eyes of her

classmates burned into her, some shocked, some mocking, some feeling

her embarrassment.

‘Perhaps you can explain to me,’ the teacher had said in tones dripping

with contempt, ‘what this diagram has to do with the life-support require-

ments of the early space pioneers. What it has to do with anything real.

PROLOGUE 5

I’ve certainly never seen such a grotesque creature in real life. Have you?

Have any of you?’

‘The product of a diseased mind,’ the email home had said.

In the Big White House, they had shown Kimmi shapes on a computer.

They had asked her what they were, then told her she was wrong.

She had tried to argue at ﬁrst, tried to tell them about the monster, but

she didn’t like the taste of the pills they gave her, so she had learned to

agree with them. She agreed that the shapes were just shapes and that the

monster wasn’t real.

And she had drawn in secret after that. Until today. Until this after-

noon, when Mum had arrived home early and surprised her.

She had snatched her pad away just like the teacher had, dashed it to

the ﬂoor. She had shaken Kimmi until her bones had rattled. She had cried

a lot.

Kimmi had cried too, sent to bed without supper, hysterical threats

ringing in her ears. ‘Do you want to have to go back to that place again?

Do you?’

She had dozed, for a time, and woken in the dark. With the monster.

She was listening for it, though she didn’t want to hear it. She couldn’t

help it. Her senses were hyper-alert.

There was nothing. She ought to have been relieved. But what if the

monster was just doing as she was: staying very still and very quiet, trying

to trick her?

She had no choice. She had to look. She raised her head hesitantly,

praying under her breath until she remembered what the doctors had told

her about prayer.

She stared for a long time, trying to make sense of the shadows. They

were moving, twisting, but that was just because of the info-screen on the

building across the road, casting its light patterns through the gap in her

curtains. Wasn’t it?

Then, a moment’s white light and she saw it. Its muscular black shape,

hunched into a crouch, a wizened limb draped lazily over the seat of her

chair.

Or was it just the shape of her own clothing, cast aside in resentment?

She was paralysed, her throat dry. She wanted to yell, but she knew

what would happen if she did. Mum would come and she would turn on

the light and the monster would be gone, and she would be upset again.

What if she turned on the light herself? What if she could will herself

to cross that expanse of carpet, to reach for the sensor?

And what if the monster leaped on her from behind and clawed her

down?

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Inthefarfuture,theDoctor,RoseandCaptainJackndaworldonwhichctionhasbeenoutlawed.Aworldwhereit'sacrimetotellstories,acrimetolie,acrimetohope,andacrimetodream.Butnowsomebodyischallengingthestatusquo.ApirateTVstationurgespeopletoghtback.AndtheDoctorwantstohelpuntilheseeshoweasilydreamscanturnintonig...

展开>> 收起<<

06 - The Stealers of Dreams.pdf

共136页,预览7页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

06 - The Stealers of Dreams

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: