Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [58]
‘Saying?’ Marielle queried. ‘I’m not sure I understand. The machine does not use words.’
‘The TARDIS doesn’t use words. But the interface does.
Just listen.’
So she listened. Chris watched, and waited, as a puzzled frown crossed her face.
Something rippled through the library, riding on a wave of liquid intelligence. Chris saw Marielle’s hand shoot towards the base of her spine, and she made a tiny gasping sound that under any other circumstances Chris would have found quite appealing. He, meanwhile, found himself thinking about his dad throwing a frisbee. Again, he had no idea why.
Marielle was looking at him, eyes wide in the dark hollows of her face. ‘A voice. English, I think.’ A frown. ‘It does not seem to like me.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It said... use the secret passage.’
‘What?’
And there was a sound, a popping, springing, boinging sound. Like the noise you hear when a cartoon character gets hit in the face by a brick. Chris had heard it before; the TARDIS occasionally made it when there was a minor systems fault, or when the Doctor thumped the console too hard. The sound was so absurd that Chris had always assumed the TARDIS was making it purely for the benefit of its human passengers.
Now the sound was ringing through the library, a hundred times louder than he’d ever heard it before, and books were hopping like jumping beans to its echo. The part of the corridor where they were standing was breaking away from the rest of the ship. The larger sections of flooring pulled themselves apart, the smaller sections turned to dust. Islands broke apart and formed smaller islands. Marielle yelped.
Again, under other circumstances, it was a sound Chris would have appreciated.
Once, there’d been another witch-woman. Out on the other side of the state, when Daniel had still belonged to a town, or almost belonged to one. The town had been five or six families big, families who knew him so well that he’d just had to move from house to house to stay alive, instead of town to town.
They must have felt sorry for him, what with his father having been carted off to the funny-house when the War was in full swing, when nobody took the time to look after the mad ones.
He’d played with the other boys, stayed clear of the girls, pretending to be part of one family or another for as long as he thought he could get away with it, ten years old and learning to live in the cracks already.
A small town. Five or six families, and a witch-woman.
The woman had been white, and her face had looked like the world had grabbed hold of her loose skin and tried to pull her down into the ground. She’d worn things in her hair.
‘Coon charms’, one of the men in the town had said, grinning with green-speckled teeth when he’d said it. The woman had owned a garden, where she’d grown herb-plants like the ones the Indians used, and she’d let the boys play there, in the remains of the older buildings that backed onto her house.
Games in the ruins. Building things out of the rubble. The woman would watch them and nod, like she’d been happy that they knew how to make things, like she’d thought the world had needed more things to be made, since the War had broken so many.
The boys had played in the foundations until one day they’d grown up too much to play there anymore. That was when they’d started playing inside the witch-woman’s house, creeping in at night to break the bigger ‘coon charms’ inside, throwing stones at it by day. No one had noticed when the old games had stopped and the new games had started, but the other men and women in the town had watched it happen because no one trusted a witch-woman and they’d never liked her anyway. She’d stopped showing her face after that.
Stopped even coming to the windows.
One day, Daniel Tremayne had crept into the house, stolen the most expensive things he’d been able to find, and run out of the town. He’d needed to get away from that place, more than he needed to get out of