Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [130]
She might have found the rest of the show too grotesque to deal with, but there was no way she could resist a challenge like this one. She carefully threaded her way between the people around her, until she was standing right in front of the tent’s entrance. She took one last look around, making sure nobody else was prepared to go first, then gritted her teeth and stepped through the flaps.
It wasn’t hard to see why the tent hadn’t appealed to the masses. There wasn’t much to look at. The place was pretty much empty, with none of the ornaments Sarah had expected, none of the usual odds and ends that cluttered up carnival exhibits on Earth. There weren’t even any signs to tell her what kind of services were offered here, or how much they might cost. Just plain, grey, canvas walls, the desert floor underfoot, and…
And one single object, sitting in the dust right in the middle of the tent. Sarah had no idea what it was, but it wasn’t doing much. It was small and lumpy, shaped like a barrel about two feet high, with rubbery limbs sprouting out of its surface at peculiar angles and rooting themselves in the ground. It was a darker shade of grey than the tent itself; with a skin like blubber, and small scars across its framework that looked almost like the gills of fish. Beyond that, Sarah found it hard to concentrate on the details of the thing. The impression it left on you was so downright odd that it was hard to care about the specifics.
No wonder the locals hadn’t been interested. It was impossible to make head or tail of the thing. Probably a piece of machinery, albeit weird and sticky alien machinery, left out in the open by mistake. Sarah had more curiosity in her left earlobe than the entire population of the town put together, but even she was on the verge of turning away when it suddenly struck her.
Limbs. Skin. Scars. Gills. Head or tail. All the words that had crossed Sarah’s mind when she’d seen the thing were organic. Animal words. So did that mean…?
She felt herself take a few steps towards the object. Once she was within a yard of it, she finally noticed that it was breathing, with its bubbly grey skin bulging in and out as she watched.
Alive. One of the performers.
No. There was no way, no way on Earth – or anywhere else – that this thing had started life as a human being, or even anything like a human being.
Still…
‘Hello?’ Sarah tried. ‘Can you hear me?’
Then one of the slits on the thing’s body opened up and breathed on her. The If told her its name, but that was all it managed to say before its breath filled up the air around her and took her to a different world altogether.
The CD jukebox in the corner of the pub was pumping out an utterly ridiculous techno version of the theme from Space: 1999. Sarah rested one elbow on the table in front of her, and started playing with the empty cigarette packet that had been left there by…
By who?
Or should that have been ‘whom’?
In the seat next to her, Sarah’s best friend – whose name she didn’t seem to be able to recall – put down the Bacardi bottle, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Sarah found herself staring at the message on the woman’s sweatshirt. pedant. first class, it said not celebrating millennium until 2001.
‘He won’t come,’ the woman declared.
‘Oh, come on,’ Sarah heard herself say, even though she had no idea who or what the woman had been talking about. ‘Even he can’t miss a party that size, can he?’
The woman shook her head. ‘He’s already been to Earth on the last day of 1999. That’s what he told me, anyway. He’s not going to be in two places at once, is he?’
‘He’s done it before,’ Sarah sniffed Then she became aware of the third presence at the table, sitting in the chair to her right.
‘Is this one of those conversations I don’t want to get involved in?’ asked her husband.
Husband?
Sarah stumbled backward, not being