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By Root 139 0

He returned to the back room where he’d noticed a television set: it didn’t work. He tried the lights: no electricity. Daylight was beginning to fail. He searched the cupboards for candles: there was a bundle next to the dead electricity meter. He lit one, stuck it to a saucer, and left it in the back room; then lit another and carried it to see by as he investigated the rest of the house. No one had told him whose house it was, but in one room he found children’s toys, so presumed a family lived there. In a front room there was a double bed. All the drawers in the room were open. Clothes were strewn about on the floor as though people had packed hurriedly, leaving behind what they didn’t want to carry.

In the front bedroom, partly hidden at the back of the wardrobe, Shughie found the six bottles of whisky that were to be his only companions for the next four days.

After half an hour staring at the crack in the ceiling and thinking about his life, Shughie McPherson got up. Now, after four days, he had become accustomed to living in this house on his own. He kept hoping that his friends would come back, and had completely forgotten why or how they went away.

He stretched and yawned, pulled on his trousers and shirt and went down the stairs to open another tin of food. Then he remembered that last night he’d eaten the last tin of corned beef and drunk the last drop of whisky. Standing in the hallway, he scratched his throbbing head, and decided the time had come for action.

He went to the house next door and knocked. The front door was unlocked. It swung open when he pushed it.

‘Hello?’ he called out.

No answer.

He stepped into the hall. ‘Anyone at home?’ Still no answer.

‘I’m from the house next door. There’s no food or water or anything...’ He listened. Silence.

He tried the next house. The door was locked. He pressed the bell push, but it didn’t ring. ‘Probably didn’t pay their electricity bill either,’ he said to himself, and moved on again. No answer this time, either. Shughie began to wish he was back in Glasgow, in the friendly district where he had always lived.

A sudden panic gripped him. Where were all the people who lived in these strange houses? Were they all dead?

He started running and shouting. Street after street was deserted, front doors of houses gaping open. And then turning a corner, he sighed with relief: a familiar sight. A friendly milk float was standing in the middle of the road.

Shughie ran forward. ‘Hey! Milkman! Where are you?’

He stopped dead. The milkman was lying on the road on the other side of the float. He was a young man with very fair hair. He lay on his back, mouth open, eyes staring in death.

Cautiously, very afraid, Shughie crept forward to look at the dead young milkman. The fair hair at the back of the young man’s head was a tangle of congealed blood and gravel from the surface of the road.

Shughie fell to his knees, clasped his hands together, and started to say the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father who art in Heaven, hallow’d be thy name...’

His words were drowned by a sudden roar from the monster behind him. Shughie turned and looked up. A massive claw hit him in the face. In his last moment of life, Shughie McPherson resolved to give up drinking whisky.

The TARDIS, looking as always like an old-fashioned London police telephone box, materialised in a pleasant suburban park. The Doctor and his young journalist companion, Sarah Jane Smith, stepped out into bright sunlight.

Sarah looked about and sniffed a little dubiously. ‘It seems all right.’ She was hoping they hadn’t landed in the poisonous atmosphere of some distant planet.

‘Of course it’s all right! I promised that I’d get you back home safely,’ replied the Doctor indignantly.

Sarah looked at some abandoned cricket stumps on the grass near by. ‘We set off from the research centre, not here.’

‘Don’t expect miracles,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘The co-ordinates were a bit off beam. But we can’t be far away from UNIT Headquarters.’

‘So where can we be?’

‘Somewhere in London,’ said the Doctor.

‘And what about the date?