Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [126]
That had surprised her at first. After she’d been separated from the Doctor – and for once it had been his fault, seeing as she’d just poked her head around a corner while he’d been gawping at one of the posters, and he’d wandered off by the time she’d turned back – she’d been careful to stick to the backways of the town, so as not to draw attention to herself. But whenever she’d passed anybody, they’d barely blinked in her direction. Every pair of eyes she’d seen had looked empty, or at the very least been gummed up with sleep.
The Doctor hadn’t been back at the TARDIS. Sarah had decided that there wasn’t much point going to the local authorities, so she’d headed for the travelling show instead. She was pretty sure the Doctor would find his way there in the end, bearing in mind that he’d been paying more attention to the posters than to her.
She wasn’t exactly well equipped for this sort of thing, though. The local weather was already trying to rip the dye out of her clothes, and her shoes really weren’t made for desert planets. She didn’t have any money, apart from a wrinkly pound note in her back pocket which almost certainly hadn’t been legal tender for several hundred years, so she wasn’t even sure she’d get into the show to begin with. Worse, she hadn’t eaten in about twelve hours, and a short while ago she’d had to take a pee behind someone’s house in the town. She doubted that anybody around here would have cared, even if they’d noticed.
Funny. For some reason, she’d never had to think about these little biological details on most of the planets she’d been to. But, as the Doctor had already made quite clear, this was a different kind of world altogether.
She stopped at the entrance to the travelling show, and watched as the people around her hauled themselves inside. To her, the words ‘travelling show’ suggested something slightly disturbing, a place for carnival freaks, pickled deformed animals, and (ugh) juggling amputees. But inside the ring of wagons, there was… a kind of calm, really. She could see the townspeople jostling against each other up ahead, forming a great mass of flesh that smelled of leather and dried sweat, but that was about as bad as things got. Sarah could hear a voice from the centre of the circle, somebody addressing the crowd, although she couldn’t make out the words over the mumbling of the audience.
She took a deep breath and put her best foot forward. Nobody asked her for any money as she stepped into the arena, which was something.
The space between the wagons wasn’t huge, but whoever had set up the show had obviously made the best of the land available. Half a dozen smallish tents had been set up around the show, too grey and grubby to look like circus marquees, although you could tell they were there for the purposes of showbiz. The tents had been set up so that the crowds had to move around them in very specific patterns, turning the people into a kind of architecture, like a living, breathing, sweaty labyrinth. Sarah guessed that there were well over a hundred locals on the site, which had to be about half of the town. In the end, she joined the nearest of the human corridors, and let herself be carried towards the middle of the ring.
‘…but that’d be too easy,’ the voice from the centre was saying. It was ringing out over the heads of the crowd, bouncing off the sides of the wagons, every echo somehow sounding more dramatic than the last.