Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [54]
‘Oh. It’s not important.’
Interface finished making its mouth, and had just opened it when that particular part of the wall broke away from the cloisters and tumbled into the space where the Eighth Door section had once been.
Roz Forrester had walked past the house before, usually very quickly. It wasn’t that the place was frightening, or ominous, or dangerous-looking. It was just generally unpleasant. The frontage had been stripped down so many times that the place seemed like a half-formed thing now, like a zombie of a building. Roz scowled at herself. Stupid metaphor.
They stood in a tiny alley at the side of the house, half-lit by the gaslights of Hazelrow Avenue. The alley was full of bric-à-brac, if bric-à-brac had been invented yet. Daniel was standing by the cellar door, looking around furtively. A born sneak-thief, thought Roz. Someone had closed and locked the door since his last visit.
‘Can you open it?’
Daniel glanced over his shoulder at her. His face looked more exhausted than a teenager’s was entitled to be, in Roz’s opinion. ‘I can still hear it. Not as strong, though.’
‘Can you open it?’
‘You’ll make it stop calling me?’
‘Let’s just get inside. Then we’ll see.’
It took no time at all for Daniel to spring the lock, and Roz got the impression that some automatic function of his brain had done all the work. The door creaked open in the traditional melodramatic style. Roz listened. No movement inside.
Daniel didn’t want to go in, of course, but she persuaded him with a well-placed poke or two in the back.
The space behind the door was dark, but the darkness began to lift as Roz passed through the entrance, like someone was turning a dimmer-switch in the room on the other side. Or like she was walking through a fog, and the further she went, the thinner it got. All her senses went blurry for a second, and it reminded her of the way she felt whenever she used a transmat beam, or whenever she walked into the –
She walked right into Daniel’s back. He’d stopped dead, and Roz noticed how tense his body had become. Then she looked over his shoulder into the cellar, and her body tensed up, too.
It was as though the normal architecture of the building had been forced aside, and replaced by something much larger and much more impressive; something with cream-coloured walls, indented with crater-like circles, and lit with an off-white glow that came from nowhere in particular. There was even a console in the centre of the room, a hexagonal surface supported by a metallic trunk. The place was darker than it should have been, though, much darker, shadows everywhere.
Daniel started making tiny clucking noises in the back of his throat. Roz took another look around the room, feeling the vibration that ran through the structure, the atmosphere that practically buzzed in her ear. She knew. She didn’t know how, but she knew one thing for certain about this place.
‘This isn’t a TARDIS,’ she said. ‘It just looks like one.’
She stepped forward, around the frozen form of Daniel, examining the walls, the floor, the corners. The TARDIS was a constructed thing, perfect in every geometric detail, but here... the angles were all in the right places, but there was a sense of randomness built into it. Effortless. That was the word. Effortless.
She turned to Daniel. He stared at her with wet, uncomprehending eyes.
‘TARDISes are built,’ she told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand a word she was saying. ‘This one just happened.’
The town was panicking. Erskine Morris had never seen that before, an entire town panicking.
He couldn’t recall exactly what had taken place on Eastern Walk, though he was dimly aware that it had only happened five minutes ago. The watchman, Silkwood, had turned up.
More rumours, more whispers. Someone had asked Erskine what was going on, and where the diabolists were, but he hadn’t even had the energy to swear at them. Someone else asked whether Silkwood was in league with the forces of Satan. Silkwood! Silkwood, for Christ’s sake, the man who’d once arrested a six-year-old child for showing