Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [94]
had landed. Fitz’s liver was still broken, Calamee probably still had whiplash, and Sensimi was dragging along behind like she’d come on a school field trip in high heels and was refusing to admit her mistake. Even the Doctor, normally indefatigable, was breathing heavily. A light sheen of sweat glossed his forehead. They were all very, very tired, thought Fitz.
‘You’re all knackered, aren’t you?’ said the Doctor with a fatherly smile.
‘Have you got a wire running into my brain or something?’ asked Fitz, waving his hand behind his head. ‘That’s about the third time you’ve done that, guessed what I’m thinking.’
‘Think of a number,’ said the Doctor sharply.
‘Eight.’
‘Nope, another one.’
‘OK, seventy-two.’
The Doctor’s face fell.
‘Wrong – eleventy-seven.’
‘That’s not a number,’ said Sensimi.
‘It is where I come from,’ said the Doctor haughtily. ‘But it’s wrong anyway.
No obvious telepathic link then.’
‘So what did that dream mean – the bottom one?’
The Doctor raised a cheeky eyebrow.
‘Stop it!’ warned Fitz. ‘I’m serious. In the dream you said it was significant.’
‘Erm, it was a dream, Fitz,’ piped up Calamee unhelpfully.
‘Yes, but it was more than that. It was like I was being told something’ Fitz paused.
‘Stop thinking about it,’ said the Doctor, plunging his hands into his pockets and staring around at the bushes, ‘and it’ll come to you. Always works with me.’
Fitz pulled a sneer. It so did not. If that was the case, how come the Doctor didn’t remember blowing up his own planet?
Fitz felt a cold shudder run through him as he realised that he didn’t remember much about it either.
‘Oh-oh,’ said Sensimi. ‘Company.’
Everyone looked. Standing silently on the grass, a few feet from a wall of bushes, was one of the night beasts.
The creature waited until they were all looking at it, and then, in a curiously human gesture, beckoned to them – before turning and vanishing into the undergrowth.
169
‘Come into my bushes, said the spider to the fly,’ muttered Fitz.
But the Doctor shook his head. ‘if it wanted to kill us, it could have done that here.’
‘How do we know we can trust it?’ whispered Calamee to the Doctor as their little party followed the creature.
‘I don’t think we do – know for sure, that is,’ the Doctor said. ‘But. . . ’ He shook his head, as if shaking off some memory.
‘You OK?’ asked Calamee. Nessus was struggling in her arms, but she kept a firm hold on him.
‘I think it’s the fact that me and Fitz were attacked round about here.’ The Doctor looked around, as if expecting at any moment to be assailed by another of the creatures. Calamee was surprised at the calmness with which the Doctor and Fitz had agreed to follow the creature, considering what they’d suffered at the hands of one of its friends.
‘I’m getting. . . ’ The Doctor paused. ‘Not quite flashbacks, but little pinpricks of memory. It’s all a bit unsettling.’
‘I’d have thought you’d be used to it by now.’
The Doctor threw Calamee a look, half fatherly disapproval, half annoyance. Up ahead, the night beast pressed on through the bushes, pushing them aside with a scary, casual ease, and passed on into the heart of the copse.
As Calamee reached out to hold back a branch, Nessus seized his chance and leaped from her arm. With a triumphant squeal, he ran after the night beast. Calamee let him go: this whole affair was making him skittish and she knew that calling him back would be fruitless. Besides. . . ‘I know this place!’
she suddenly said, stopping sharply so that Fitz almost bumped into her.
‘You do?’
She nodded.
‘We came here for a picnic, my parents and me. A year or so ago.’ She looked around, suddenly seeing the place in a different light. She could picture them – her mother, father and house-mother – all sitting down, unpacking their lunch from a couple of huge bags, while Nessus scampered around, clambering up trees in a vain attempt to catch birds.
‘Really?’ The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘You were very lucky, then. Perhaps that explains Nessus – his altered DNA. Wasn