Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [39]
Another raid had started.
The Doctor got the door open and they tumbled inside. It was still dim, Anji realised, just the bare emergency bulb letting out its faint glow. The Doctor had immediately turned to one side and was kneeling, frantically turning a brass handle sticking out of the side wall, as if he were trying to start a Model T. The doors closed slowly, jerking whenever the Doctor’s speed slowed. There was only the one handle and all Anji could do was stand and watch anxiously. With the doors closed they would be safe, the Doctor always assured her, as the outer shell had survived two world wars already. Anji hadn’t liked to point out that the TARDIS wasn’t exactly running at full strength. Finally, the edges sealed with a clunk and the Doctor leaned on the handle. He huffed his long fringe out of his eyes, although some sweat-dampened strands resisted.
‘Will we hear the all-clear in here?’ she asked.
The Doctor rocked back on his heels and stood up. He brushed his face clear of hair, and then ran his hand over his light stubble as if more concerned about whether that beard had suited him after all. ‘Yes,’ he assured her eventually, as he crossed to the central console. The inert central console. ‘Yes, we’ll know.’
He flicked a button over, then back. Nothing happened. Nothing had happened for three months now. Not since November.
Anji glanced about, taking in the latest changes. In her head, the main room in the TARDIS still looked like a corporate office, with pale wood panels and smart slimline equipment. She idly remembered her desire to install a water-cooler and a ficus to complete the effect. They would look out of place now, in this version.
The kitchen was gone completely, the blank archway merely a bas-relief line in the wall. The door to the interior rooms was locked, although she could see a screwdriver and a lockpick set lying by it, suggesting the Doctor had been trying to get through again. The library was still there but it wasn’t possible to access the books: all the shelves had been put behind unbreakable glass. Although again, a crowbar on the floor and a spider-cracked pane suggested the Doctor had been trying to smash his way in. Everything they needed could have been behind the barriers, but they couldn’t get to it. It was why Anji had stopped coming back every day: watching the Doctor’s increasing fury at the locked away knowledge disturbed her.
The most disturbing aspect, though, was the silence. Before, the main room had hummed faintly, as if some hidden air-conditioning was just ticking over. The sort of background noise that you became accustomed to, that was filtered out. Like the 3 a.m. rattle of an old refrigerator in a downstairs room. Instead, there was the dead, echoing silence of an abandoned place. The crowbar lying in the library had not been there on her last visit, but it looked as if it had been thrown to the floor years before.
They’d struggled back here, through the mourning crowds, on November 23rd. She had been ill, the Doctor had collapsed in the foyer and then he had looked up at them and begged to be taken back to the TARDIS. Anji had forgotten her own screaming pain, the way her head had been thundering with jolts of agony. Pia had been yelling at Cristo to get medical help but the Doctor had uncurled enough to grab her shin and plead to be taken back to Plaça Reial. Between them, they’d got him to his feet and helped him back the TARDIS. Anji had gritted her teeth with every pain-filled movement but she had known that if the Doctor said he should go back to the time machine, they should go back. It would be resolved. She had wondered briefly if it was his heart again but hadn’t dared mention it aloud.
Weaving across Las Rambles, they had veered into a side street, then through the wide archway to Plaça Reial. She had seen the blue box standing in the arcade