Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [117]
It was while she’d been standing over the controls that she’d seen the blood. It had just been a smear, in the middle of the shiny white floor by the side of the console, so at first she’d guessed that the Doctor had cut himself at some point and not bothered mentioning it. But the smear had started growing in front of her eyes, and it definitely hadn’t been dripping from the ceiling.
Sarah had started to panic only once the patch had touched the base of the console, and she’d had to move around the floor to avoid it. She’d rested her hands against one of the control panels, then peered over the edge of the console, watching the way the blood spread. The puddle hadn’t got any deeper. If anything, the floor had looked like a piece of blotting paper, with the stain spreading across it but never actually breaking through the surface.
That was when Sarah had felt it on her hands. She’d taken her palms away from the console like a shot, but by then the blood had already covered her fingers. She seemed to remember screaming at that point, although now she was starting to tell herself that it couldn’t really have been a scream, that it had probably been more like a bit of a startled yelp. She’d moved away from the controls after that, watching the way the blood had formed in gooey patches across the console. It had been ugly, wrong and horrible all at the same time, like watching your favourite teddy bear going through open‐heart surgery.
Suddenly, the room seemed a lot more pink than it had done. It was the roundels, Sarah realised. The roundels were all turning pink, as if the blood had been building up behind the walls, trying to burst through the access panels. Sarah kept her eyes on the walls, every now and then stepping back to get away from the puddle on the floor, so the was already staring in the general direction of the doorway when the Doctor hurried into the console room. Then stopped dead.
Sarah’s first instinct was to apologise. She wasn’t sure why. But the Doctor didn’t look angry as he stood there in the doorway. His eyes were wide, as wide as they ever got, the same way he looked when some alien master fiend or other finally revealed its horrifying plan for galactic slavery. Appalled, yes. Angry, no.
‘Good grief,’ he whispered. Somehow, he managed to make it sound like something other than ironic understatement.
‘Doctor?’ Sarah asked. She was going to follow it up with ‘what’s happening?’, but it didn’t really seem necessary.
He strode across the floor, carefully avoiding the blotchy patches, looking at every facet of the console without ever touching it. The rotor in the middle of the control panels stopped moving at that point. Looking back on it later, Sarah would realise that this was the exact moment when the puddles of blood stopped growing, but at the time she was too busy watching the Doctor to notice.
Slowly, and cautiously, the Doctor raised his hand. He pressed his fingertips against one of the bloody patches on the console, then took them away again. Sarah saw the look on his face as he stared down at his open palm. No emotion. Eyes like a hawk’s. Nose like a hawk’s as well, come to think of it.
It was only then that Sarah figured out exactly why she’d been so disturbed by all of this. Why the bleeding had made her scream, rather than panic in a more generic sort of way.
This wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to happen on board the TARDIS. In itself, bleeding architecture was no stranger than, say, being menaced by an intelligent city, or finding a crashed spaceship in the middle of fourth‐century Arabia. But the style of it was wrong.
This wasn’t space opera. It was sheer horror. The Doctor was a Time Mechanic as much as he was a Time Lord, repairing the worn‐out parts of history in the same way he’d fiddle with bits of old cars and hovercraft in the UNIT garages. He’d told her that he and the TARDIS were linked, somehow, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that wherever they went they seemed to run