Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [134]
He shouldn’t be on Dust.
And why on Earth was he thinking like this? Why was he acting like a man who thought he was about to die? Good grief. Stiff upper lip, Brigadier. Never say die, Jo. A tear, Sarah Jane?
No, wait a moment –
The dust was very nearly blinding him now, and the wind was getting worse by the second, so he didn’t notice that Magdelana had stopped until he walked into her back. He could make out shapes through the dust clouds up ahead, and he got the feeling they were close to the travelling show. He opened his mouth, to say something reassuring to Magdelana (for his own sake more than hers, probably), but something else had already caught her attention.
There was a shadow in the sky. The Doctor couldn’t tell exactly what it was, not through the dust, although he got the distinct impression that there were dark roots dangling from its underbelly, as if the thing had torn itself out of the ground and launched itself into the air. It was still some distance away, but the one thing the Doctor could tell for certain was that it was vast, nearly the size of the town itself. It was hard to get away from the feeling that the shape had caused the storm, that either its engines were tearing up the ground as it moved, or the planet was telling everybody exactly how it felt about something so big getting away from its grip.
Magdelana said something then, but there was a rumbling in the air that could have been wind, or could have been an engine, or could have been a combination of the two, so the Doctor didn’t know what she’d said until she repeated it. It turned out to be an English swearword, which, etymologically speaking, had changed surprisingly little over the previous two thousand years.
* * *
Meanwhile, at the travelling show:
Sarah had been outside the circle of wagons when the dust storm had started. She’d crept out of the show, if you could ‘creep’ anywhere in a town where nobody really cared what anyone else did, and started moving around the circle. Peeking through the gaps between the caravans, making sure nobody inside noticed what she was doing. She’d heard the sounds of the show on the way, I.M. Foreman and friends swallowing fire and predicting the future for the amusement of the masses, mixed with bursts of sick‐sounding laughter from the locals. If slugs could laugh, thought Sarah, then that was how they’d sound.
She’d inspected the wagons as she’d moved around them, just in case she’d been missing anything. All thirteen of them had been identical in design, but there’d been no clues as to what made the vehicles move, seeing that Sarah hadn’t spotted any horses or engines anywhere in the area. The wagons had wood‐and‐metal frames, like those old caravans that gypsies were supposed to trundle around in, each with a single wooden door set into one end. On a couple of occasions she’d squeezed between two of the wagons to take a look at those doors, always making sure she wasn’t being watched from inside the circle.
All the doors had been different. They’d been personalised, Sarah had realised, which suggested that each one belonged to a different act in the show. (Had there been thirteen acts? Maybe.) Most of the doors had been painted, although not with pictures that could in any way have been called attractive. The illustrations had looked personal, so personal that they’d been incomprehensible, as if the people who’d painted them had let their brains explode all over the wood. Icky, icky, icky. Every single one of the designs had incorporated a number, Sarah had noticed, although you had to stare at the patterns for a while before your eyes could untangle the knots of paint and make the numbers out.
The numbers had run from one through to twelve. When she’d eventually completed her circle of the show, and reached wagon number thirteen, it had turned out to be different from all the others. Mainly because it hadn’t been painted. There