Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [89]
But this house was fifty miles from the sea in every direction.
Fat old‐fashioned lead wiring entered the room through corroded lengths of pipe which had been set into the walls, high up, in three corners of the room. At night the wind came through the pipes with all kinds of odd atonal noises. The lead wiring ran along the moulding near the ceiling of the room, lines of wire connecting with the crude pipe ducting in the three corners. In the fourth corner of the ceiling the wires met and ran down the wall in parallel. They ended halfway down the wall, curling raggedly. There was a large stained space on the wall just below where a large piece of machinery had once been attached.
You could get on to the red tiled roof of the house from the windows and Ace had often climbed out there with a blanket to sunbathe. Once she had tried following the wires. They had led her across the roof to a large lump of cement that had been trowelled crudely on to the tiles at the base of one of the chimneys. The wires ran into the lump and disappeared. The cement looked like it had been slapped down in a hurry and there was something simultaneously familiar and disturbing about the shape of the lump. It certainly looked too large to be cement all the way through. It was hard to tell, standing there on the roof with the birds singing and the sound of the wind, but Ace had thought she could hear a faint electrical humming sound. The low buzz of something like a transformer.
Ace had crouched by the chimney, the sum warm on the skin of her back, and studied the cement shape for about five minutes before she came to a decision. She’d wiped sunbathing sweat from her eyes and reached out to touch the cement.
Luckily she’d been able to pull her hand back quickly, before it had been too badly burned.
She looked at the burn now, on the edge of her hand between her wrist and the knuckle of her little finger. A slightly swollen red line of scar tissue. She’d climbed back through the window and gone down to the kitchen. There had been plenty of ice in the refrigerator and she’d spent the next hour with her hand in a bowl of ice cubes, telling herself that on a summer’s day like that, with sun bright and constant, a piece of cement could naturally acquire a very high temperature.
‘He’s breathing too fast,’ said Justine.
Ace looked up from her hand, over to where Justine was standing by the bed. The girl was looking at Ace, frowning with concern. The emotion made her look younger and Ace revised her estimate of the girl’s age downwards again. At first she’d guessed early twenties. Now she thought maybe sixteen or seventeen. ‘Don’t panic,’ said Ace. She went over and stood beside the girl, looking down at the bed. ‘At least he’s breathing.’
The boy, Vincent, was lying under a dusty floral quilt in a bed that Ace sometimes used. He was propped up on two fat pillows. His eyes were shut but he didn’t look as if he was asleep. He looked like a runner who had just finished a difficult race, lying with his eyes shut, trying to get his breath back. Ace went over and sat in a wicker chair beside a window that was open to the cool night air. Justine stayed by the bed, watching over the boy.
There was an old card table covered with boxes beside Ace’s chair. She put her feet up on it now, trying to look casual. She wished Justine would sit down or something, get away from the thing in the bed.
The boy, rather.
Ace remembered the sound the Kharman Ghia had made when the gas tank went. She had spent the last three months restoring the car and had just fitted it with a new automatic Porsche transmission. All that was left of it now was a slug of melted metal cooling under the pear trees.
Justine was standing bent over the bed listening to the kid’s breathing. Ace found herself listening as well, and staring blankly at her wristwatch, unable to register what time it said. ‘Just relax, would you? The Doctor said he’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.’
The other girl didn’t reply and Ace made herself look away. She turned to the card