Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [11]
Sir, regarding the circumstances of our previous dealings...
Oh God, this was awful. Talking to Catcher was like talking to a clock; you could almost hear the ticking going on inside him, but you couldn’t expect him to smile, or frown, or do anything that might make him look half-human. Daniel was only here because he was desperate. A day and a half he’d been in Woodwicke, and he hadn’t found a single place that wanted him. He hadn’t even been needed at the McClellan house, where the new slave had asked about space–time engineering (hahh?), then told him to ‘piss off’ in a voice that made her sound like an English noblewoman. He’d spent the previous night in the ruins of an old pub, staying half-awake in case the watchmen turned up, because everyone knew what watchmen did to vagrants and wanderers and itinerants.
Mr Catcher, sir, I was just wondering...
And that was when he first heard the call, from somewhere on the other side of the door. Like a humming, like a hissing, noises twisted out of shape by half a dozen walls or more.
Call? What kind of a call? Nothing important, Daniel Tremayne, nothing that’s any of your business. You’ve lived seventeen-and-a-half years by keeping your head down and not getting mixed up in other people’s fights, and it’s not a call, it’s just a noise, that’s all. Who’d be calling you, anyhow?
But he was already hopping down off the stoop, checking the street – instinctively – to make sure no one was watching him, and creeping around the corner of the building, because Daniel Tremayne crept everywhere, whether he needed to or not. The shadows at the side of the house were thick enough to hide him from the eyes of any passers-by, and there was another door set into the brickwork there, in the narrow channel between the main building and the shithouse. An entrance for servants, salesmen and anyone else who was too poor to use the front door, Daniel guessed. He crept between the piles of junk and firewood that had built up around the entrance, listening for the call. The noise was stronger here, like a pulse, like a Negro rhythm. Or maybe it was just the thought of a noise, a kind of feeling you couldn’t pin down, like the way you could tell a storm was coming before it arrived?
‘ This is none of your business, Daniel Tremayne, ’ someone squealed, and he almost started to run before he realized that he’d said it himself.
The door was locked. Daniel wondered how he knew that, then remembered that he’d just tried to open it, without even noticing what he was doing.
‘This is none of your business,’ he insisted, and the lock clicked open. Daniel knew maybe half a dozen ways of opening locks, but if anyone had asked him which he’d used, he wouldn’t have been able to say. Burgling. Didn’t they still hang you for that, in this town? You trying to get yourself killed all of a sudden, Daniel Tremayne?
But the call was telling him to open the door, and the hinges were squeaking, and the sound was already rushing out of the darkness and going for his throat.
‘Catcher!’
During his forty-three years on the planet Earth, many opinions had been formed about the temper of Erskine Morris.
Some – mainly his close family, admittedly – claimed that his loud, aggressive nature was just a façade that hid a deeply lovable ‘inner self’, while others just wished that he’d keep the noise down. Even Erskine had to admit that, from time to time, his perpetually foul mood was a social drawback.
Now, however, he had cause to be very, very glad of it.
Because although he would never have admitted it – not even to the holy bastard son of Galileo, by Christ – right now, it was the only thing stopping him from being utterly terrified.
‘Catcher! For the sake of Saint Peter and all his baby catamites, man, you’ve got thirty seconds to show yourself or I’ll rip your damned heart out!’
It had all started at the meeting, of course. Erskine had finally snapped, looking into Catcher’s blinking pebble-eyes and accusing him of any number of things, from being an irrational mystic to bringing the Society