Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [79]
I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, holding the thing, and almost dropped it. It looked so bloody wrong.
There isn’t anything on Earth that’s shaped like a Y with banana-yellow fur for fingers. If it had been a trained monkey or a mutant crocodile or even a disfigured human child it wouldn’t have been so disgusting. If you’ve ever got a big spider, like a huntsman, on the end of a broom, only to have It run right down the handle into your hands, you know the feeling I had at that moment. I wanted to throw the thing away from me while my whole body shrugged back in the opposite direction. But that nauseating flinch was overridden by a new and different feeling: I wanted to hold onto the thing, grip it tightly, keep it as close to me as possible.
I snuck out of the bathroom and headed for the dark stairs.
Was this how Luis had felt about the monster? And now Swan? Was the monster clouding up the air around me with irresistible pheromones? Or was it doing something directly to my grey matter? The urge to toss it away rose up in me again, like the first thump in your stomach when you know you’re going to thunder and nothing can stop it. But something did stop it. The ugly fear that I was being reprogrammed faded into the background, beaten by my need to get the monster somewhere safe and start feeding it breakfast cereal.
Swan met me at the bottom of the steps. I was so wrapped up in my furry armful that she just stepped out of nowhere and hit me across the back of the shoulders with a baseball bat. All my muscles stopped working for long enough that she could take hold of her alien baby and shove me back onto the uncarpeted stairs.
The thump of wooden angles into my spine seemed to break the monster’s spell. Swan gripped the thing tight against her winter coat, and I had no jealousy, no urge to take it back from her. I could have got the baseball bat out of her awkward grip in a moment, but instead I just lay there, propped up on my elbows, waiting to see what she’d do next.
Swan cussed me out in no uncertain terms and added, ‘I’m going to ruin you, freak. Just ruin you.’
‘Screw you, lady.’
‘You must’ve realised the call at the office would warn me.’
‘I can’t believe you just left it there. Not with everybody that wants it.’
‘You’d never have got it out of the house,’ snorted Swan.
‘Is that right,’ I said, hauling myself to my feet. I was in her face, but she didn’t so much as take a step back.
I am lying on that second-floor bed in Los Angeles, naked as a snake, sunshine slanting in hot white beams across the room. I am yelping in time with Heart of the Sunrise. The record player is under the bed, speakers tipped onto their backs, so the sound is coming to me from another planet, through a wall of springs and mattress and bedclothes and my own skinny, helpless flesh. Each time the guitar starts its merciless climb and fall, like a race car driver accelerating, I am shouting out CHRIST JESUS and bursting frozen sweat through every pore. I’m riding a bull, naked, bareback, I’m flying and leaping over as it tosses me away again and again, circling round to land on its back, like a piece of stretched elastic snapping home. The bull will not stop, its buck and plunge matching the rise and fall of the guitar. The acid I have taken has turned out to be angel dust and everyone I know in the whole city is peeking in through the crack of the bedroom door.
I landed back in the present again, sitting on my ass at the bottom of the stairs. Swan and her baby were gone. Every inch of me was soaked, as though I had been covered in snow and thawed out. For a paranoid moment I was sniffing my own sleeves, nervous that Swan had doused me with petrol. After a moment I realised I was covered in sweat, my hair heavy with it and glued to my face.
I had never, never been able to remember that shit before.
People had told