Doctor Who_ Foreign Devils - Andrew Cartmel [34]
night.' Zoe had a private opinion about that, which she thought was
best left unexpressed. They both turned to the Doctor, who seemed
about to express an opinion of his own.
Then the screaming started.
The air outside was clean and cold and almost intoxicating in its sweetness, at least to Zoe, who was accustomed to breathing the canned atmosphere of the Space Wheel. She was wearing a borrowed pair of boots that were too tight and pinched and the heavy navy blue overcoat she had stolen when she arrived. Nonetheless she found herself trembling with cold.
The cold didn't seem to bother the Doctor. He had come outside dressed in nothing more substantial than his old jacket. Carnacki had donned some kind of canvas hunting coat trimmed with fur. They had all hurried outside at the sound of the screaming and, with his long legs, Carnacki had been the first to see the cause of it.
He'd taken one look, then hurried off to question the servant. The Doctor and Zoe remained where they were, gazing at it.
About a hundred metres from the house the ground rose up then took a steep dip down towards a small stream that wound across the property. At least, it had once wound across it. Now the snow clad property ended in a sharp rim that excluded the stream and everything beyond it, like a carved piece of cake with white icing. The edge of the ground had a horrible bitten-off look, as though some unimaginable enormous mouth had chewed away at its perimeter. Beyond that ragged edge of raw loam, there were stars. 'Stars,' whispered Zoe. 'My God, stars.' She stared, her breath rising in tattered luminous whisps on the cold air. She felt light headed, a tremulous sense of vertigo. After all, she had become accustomed to seeing stars in the winter sky, above. But not directly in front of one. Or below.
Zoe stared out at the edge of the garden, where a few hours ago the land had receded gently into the distance, the grounds of Fair Destine giving way to the snow covered fields and hills of Kent. Now there were no fields or hills. Just stars in an infinite black sky that began a hundred metres from the house. Zoe shuddered and hurried to join the Doctor and Carnacki.
They were standing near the bitten-off edge where the snow ended and the sloping dark loam stretched out for a few brief metres before giving way to the star spattered void. 'Look at the stream,' said Carnacki. Zoe saw that the last of the water was draining from the stream, running over the edge of the grounds, off the dark apron of earth and turning into a glittering mist that drifted with great slowness out into the dark void, thinning and dispersing.
'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'It's turning into ice crystals as soon as it hits the vacuum. I wouldn't get too near the edge there, Zoe.'
'You don't need to tell me twice.' She stepped smartly back.
Everyone else was already standing well away from the edge, most of them looking in the opposite direction as though averting their eyes. Staring back towards the house. Not that any of the guests seemed anxious to actually go back inside, to return to the scene of the murders. Instead, they milled about in a dazed confusion, their exodus aborted. Some were openly weeping. Like survivors of a bomb blast, thought Zoe.
But it was a bomb that had gone off in their minds, when they saw what had happened.
'According to the servants it's like this all around the house,' said Carnacki. 'Forming a ragged elliptical perimeter with a circumference of perhaps three hundred yards.'
'And everything else has vanished,' said the Doctor staring up, then down into the night sky. The stars were bright and cold and distant, stark clusters and swirls of them in the dizzyingly deep vaults of infinitely receding space.
'Or we've vanished,' said Carnacki. 'And everything else is still there . . . Somewhere else . . . '
'I don't understand,' said Zoe. She felt like crying.
'About three acres of irregular garden and