Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [53]
‘Poor Control wanted freeness. They promised freeness, but no one gave it. So Control took freeness all on lone!
Hers now. No taking it way gain.’
She had soon learned to deal with doors without the help of a husk. By pressing on the handle and pushing, or by simply kicking them in, she was slowly uncovering the secrets of the new world she had escaped into. There was so much to watch, touch, smell, taste and hear; some of it familiar from the pictures and few words she had recognized in The Times. ‘I have brought you your copy of The Times,’ or ‘Here is your Times,’ said her grim jailer every day, and although the other patterns changed, the symbol at the top was always the same: The Times. Her first words.
Other things in this green world were new: the brightly coloured insects that flew and crawled among the furniture; the high, draped openings that looked onto darkness. Perhaps there was a new world beyond each door. Thrilled, she greedily absorbed all information and put it to good use. Squinting cross-eyed down her snout, she saw that her skin was turning pale and pink. Her nose was less squat and was no longer cold and wet to touch.
Smelling danger, she dodged through a door to avoid the crocodile of maids that passed along the corridor. At their head, Mrs Pritchard paused for a second to listen to the chorus of insects alive in the panelling. Then she led her minions on, down the back stairs to their duties.
Control emerged from hiding and gazed at the wonders of her new world. Crickets hopped from drape to drape; a millipede wound its way along a gilt picture frame; a glossy beetle scuttled across a veneered mahogony table. Control caught the beetle in her glove, popped it into her mouth and crunched happily. It tasted far better than the cockroaches in her cell.
She froze, suddenly aware of a figure pushing towards her through the fronds of a large potted palm. It moved cautiously and held out a handful of sparkling objects in her direction.
‘Take them,’ said Redvers, offering out the handful of beaded necklaces and bracelets he had found in one of the bedrooms.
Control stared warily at the beads and snatched them away.
‘You like them. You keep them,’ said Redvers. ‘Then we trade words.’
Control looked into Redvers’ face, but had no words to say that she might trust him. She held the beads tight in her hands and remembered what they might mean.
‘Ladylike?’ she said hopefully.
He nodded.
As he led her away from the beaten tracks, hunter leading the hunted, the Doctor and Ace rounded the far corner of the passage. Given half a chance Ace would have legged it by now, but there was no way she was letting the Doctor out of her sight. Of course she was jumpy with so many loonies about: what did he expect? It reminded her more and more of what the house had been like the first time she got in. Up here, the humid air was getting too clammy to breath easily; it had the rich smell of damp earth in a hothouse and the insects were really giving it some stick. It felt alive. It was like the reptile house at the zoo.
The altering state of the house reminded the Doctor of the oppressive luxuriance of some tropical swamp, possibly in Java. He wondered where Light was: it was almost certainly checking its location using the data banks in the spaceship. Through the chorus of insects, he fancied he heard the scuttering of information across the ship’s screens. Nonsense, of course — they were much too high.
The important thing was to find Control before she fell into the wrong clutches.
Light stood in the hall and stared up at the stained glass window over the stairs. Data symbols flickered across its surface, hierographics and hologlyphics like those the Doctor had seen on the screens in the ship. No, this could not be the Earth. If it was, the implications were too momentious to contemplate, so let the idea be.
Repeatedly, the screen identified the