Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [19]
The haphazard lash-ups of exposed joints and fibre leads that littered the ship slowly grew in number. They sprouted like rampant vines out of the recessed roundels honeycombing the walls, tangling their way behind the antique furniture and functional workbenches.
The corridors were interminable. They rambled on uncontrolled like growing capillaries. The Doctor had muttered about instability in the infinitely variable interior mapping. He had complained about fractal faults in the architectural configuration circuits. But he had done nothing. He hated decorating. In desperation, he had lately taken to traversing the corridors on a battered bicycle. Ace preferred to walk.
On previous solo trips into the TARDIS's depths, she had begun to get more than an inkling that the ship had had several previous owners before the Doctor. There were sections of the labyrinthine interior that had obviously once been well used, yet they were totally ignored now. Several times, she had taken a turning she thought she recognized and stumbled into a new compartment, room or cupboard.
She discovered an overgrown courtyard with crumbling stone arches that made her think she was in the open air. But when she tried to find it again, it seemed to have vanished completely. There was a room of tissue-thin circuitry screens like webs of white lace that crawled with strands of light like silk worms. Elsewhere she had found a gentlemen's changing room, full of neglected cricket bats and cracked red leather cricket balls.
In a dusty library, stacked with books and parchments, was a medieval manuscript entitled The Doctour of Science's Tale. It was inscribed Fare ful wel, Doctour, and signed Geoffrey Chaucer. Year of our Lord, 1388. Next to this was a volume of Baedeker's Galactic Guide, Volume XXVII, Bajazet Magna to Bali, and a stack of 45 singles and EPs by Billy Fury, Adam Faith and The Beatles.
In one corridor, there was an overhead trapdoor with a steel ladder strapped to the ceiling. Since it was out of her reach, Ace had asked the Doctor about it. He had looked a bit furtive and mumbled something incomprehensible, so Ace had called it the loft and had forgotten about it.
She had found another passageway that was lined with oil paintings and chugged with a sound like the engines of a steam ship. The corridor shut off abruptly in a blank wall, just over halfway across van Eyck's painting "The Arnolfini Marriage". Mr Arnolfini stood alone in his fur-trimmed gown and wide black hat accompanied by half a dog. This surviving section of the portrait was welded to the surface of the blank wall. Of Mrs Arnolfini there remained only a reflection in the central convex mirror.
This time, as Ace moved through the shadowy corridors at the edge of the pool of torchlight, there was nothing familiar. And no sign of the Doctor either.
The deeper she went, the colder it seemed to get. She could see her breath in the air. There were no longer doors in the walls, just the roundel recesses stretching away to the left and right, the pattern broken occasionally by the Palladian-style columns. She had tried to follow the right-hand turning at each junction, but she was still unsure that she would ever find the way back.
Eventually she rounded a corner and saw the Doctor's battered bicycle propped against a column. It was facing her, as if he had been returning. There were slimy footprints around it, leading off into the darkness. The Doctor was nowhere to be seen. She yelled for him several times, but her voice was dulled as if it carried no further than the torchlight.
The isolation hit her. She had not been alone for.., she was going to say months, but travelling with the Doctor made it difficult to gauge the passage of relative time. Her existence was spent in the haphazard jumble of other people's days and nights.
Who was she going to