Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [61]
Feet clattered back down the stairs and he started. Sasha swung round the frame into the room and grinned. ‘There is no one here, we’re requisitioning it.’
Fitz grinned and turned to the stove. ‘I’ll get this fired up.’
After a search, they found a salted ham hanging in a dark corner and carved it up. It went down well enough with some wine. A longer search produced a tin with some ground coffee in the bottom. Sasha brewed it up over the hearth. It was bitter and grainy with a film of something slick and oily over it. They clicked cups and knocked it back like shots, grimacing and then grinning at each other. Then they started on the wine in earnest.
When the last bottle of wine they had brought in with them clinked over empty, Sasha hauled Fitz to his feet and they staggered up the narrow stairs to the upper room. Fitz fell gratefully on to the bed, yelping as he rolled into the wide shallow dip in the middle. He managed to roll on to his back and toe off his boots, letting them fall to the floor with a thump. He looked up at the ceiling, a faint grey blur above him. He closed his eyes as a brief dizziness swirled over him. He was spending far too much time drunk.
‘What did you see at Guernica?’ he asked, willing his head to stop spinning and pay attention. Perhaps getting Sasha drunk was the trick to getting the truth out of him. Hadn’t he rationalised that hours ago, back on the first bottle? Well, at least he had remembered. Sasha settled on the other side of the bed, his hands behind his head.
‘I don’t know.’
Fitz stared at the ceiling for another moment, just to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, then looked at the dark blur of the Russian.
‘I thought it was German planes bombing the town at first,’ the other man admitted eventually.
‘At first?’
‘Yes. Have you got any tobacco? Thanks.’
There was another pause, broken with the rasp of Sasha’s lighter and the flare of its flame. ‘Then... it was like I was seeing all these different versions, all at once. And they are all correct. That makes no sense, does it?’
Fitz’s eyes had adjusted now and were trailing a crack in the ceiling plaster. Under the thin cigarette smoke and the alcohol on his breath, Fitz could smell traces of the people that had lived in the cottage, slept on the bed. Ghosts of people that weren’t dead yet. Just like the empty shells of the refugees who were dead inside but still moving.
He considered telling Sasha he had experienced the same effect on the hillside. Except... except hadn’t the Doctor said something about only travellers being able to see this kind of discrepancy? That was why the Doctor had needed a first-hand account. Fitz had been assuming Sasha was a Communist agent, but what if he was something else? As before, he found himself sobering fast at the realisation he had to be on guard.
‘No,’ he told the Russian, ‘there’s only one version of the truth.’
* * *
‘Tell me what you saw at the parc.’
Eleana looked up from her notebook, annoyed. Jueves was standing by her desk, or rather the half of a desk she shared with another writer. She had a stack of reports to sift and work into articles for the next paper, the deadline was starting to press and now she had Anji’s pet journalist asking her questions.
‘There was something – someone – following us through the parc.’
She shrugged and looked back at her work. There was a report that a prominent architect had gone mad on a rooftop and had to be led home in a state of terror, claiming the chimneys were watching him. Was that worth a paragraph somewhere? She hoped Jueves would get the hint and leave. Didn’t he have his own work to do? She didn’t want to talk to him. He was a freelancer, stringing for some newspaper back in the US, feeding the overseas desire for talk of failing revolutions. Oh, he was Spanish, but he wasn’t Catalan. He spoke it well enough, but the odd Castillian word slipped through revealing