Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [1]
‘You’re nearly fourteen, Dorothy, so grow up, will you!’
The animals always hung around the back alleys on the estate. Sometimes they mugged a lone victim late at night in the underpass by the shops. They daubed their fascist ignorance on stairwells of the flats. Now they had poured petrol through Manisha’s letterbox and set light to it. And no one would do a thing about it.
Indescribable rage filled her and she kicked at a heavy, half-rotten door in the wall. It had always resisted her attentions until now; today it splintered apart. She pushed through. There was no way she would go home tonight.
Beyond the door she was touched by the cool green light beneath the trees. It cleared her head as quickly as it seemed to shut off the nearby roar of the traffic on Western Avenue. Time had stopped here, or at least moved at a different rate.
The girl pushed through the bracken when suddenly her foot struck something hard. She looked down and for a second she thought there was an eye staring up at her.
Half hidden in the undergrowth was the head of a lion.
A few feet away lay the rest of its stone body. Although the lion’s features were weathered and blotched by lichen, they were still noble and regal.
The girl almost laughed in shock and revulsion: there was a large, glossy backed beetle resting on the statue’s eye.
She briefly thought of childishly pencilling a pair of spectacles across the beast’s stone face, but dismissed the idea as kids’ book stuff.
There was something unnerving about this place. It was too cool and too dark; the overgrown garden was too lush and too quiet.
The beetle crawled off the lion’s eye, over the forehead and down the petrified mane into the damp leaves on the ground.
The girl could see the crumbling edifice of an old house between the trees. The undergrowth went right up to the walls and climbed in through the black, open eyes of the windows. She walked towards the building.
Inside was an open area which must once have been an entrance hall. A shattered, stained-glass window overlooked a half-collapsed, mossy staircase; passages led into the house; doorways led to other rooms. Ivy wound in through the cracks and clambered up the inner walls. It was possible to see through a hole in the ceiling up several floors to a few spindly rafters and the sky beyond.
Picking her way over scattered planks to the other side of the area, she looked through the missing upper floors.
High above her she could see a broken dome: it looked like the interior of an observatory.
The sky was turning a coppery colour: it pressed in through the rafters, threatening a storm. It was hot inside the house, but the girl felt cold inside as if something was watching. She could sense it just beyond the edge of her vision; it moved as she turned to face it.
Something fluttered.
An exotic butterfly with wings as big as fists glided past, catching the light in a flash of kingfisher blue. It had as much right to go about its business as anything else in this sub-tropical pocket of west London: she was the intruder.
The butterfly vanished into the depths of the ruin. The girl, however, could still sense something else was there.
Outside, she heard the distant roar of a DC10 taking its place in the procession of jets into Heathrow.
Inside, something slithered — something she couldn’t see. Was it inside the walls? Or could it even be the walls themselves?
She watched a group of tiny crimson mites moving on a door frame, but it wasn’t easy to ignore the notion that the whole place was staring at her. She had become the object of its scrutiny. It was almost creaking as it leaned inwards to get a better view of her, almost as if it recognized the unwelcome infiltrator.
The girl reached out for support and put her hand into something slimy. Her T-shirt caught on splintered wood.
She could always run, but the house fascinated as well as frightened her. It was alive. It might be as rotten and corrupt as fly-blown carrion yet it still teemed with life.
The house was angry too. Its very fabric was imbued