Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [29]
Faces. Dozens upon dozens of faces, their mouths wide open, screaming out of the TV set. It was like one of those Magic Eye pictures in a way. You stared and stared and stared, until suddenly the full horror of it just popped out at you. Some of the faces were bigger than others, and some were half formed, as though they were growing out of the screen, the freeze‐frame catching them before their skins could finish growing over their skulls. Some of the faces grew out of others, blooming from eye sockets like sores.
It was like looking down into hell, and seeing all the lost souls there crushed together in the darkness, howling up at you. Every so often, you got the feeling the white dots on the picture were their teeth, jagged and uneven, pressing against the other side of the screen.
Perhaps they were.
‘I taped it two days ago,’ Sarah explained. ‘In this room. On this television. It was only on the screen for one twenty‐fifth of a second. Took me ages to pin it down.’
The girl – Sam, wasn’t it? – gawped at the picture for a few moments more, her eyes all big and dopey‐looking. Surprisingly, the next thing she said was actually quite intelligent.
‘Subliminal messages?’ she tried.
‘That’s what I thought, to start with. But I don’t think this was broadcast deliberately. There’s been interference on all the sets in the hotel. The guests have been complaining about it for days. Ever since Mr Guest turned up.’
That got Sam’s attention. The girl turned to look at her at last. There was definitely something familiar about Sam, as if Sarah had seen her face in some dream or other, but that wasn’t too surprising. Sarah’s dreams had been moving backward and forward in time for nearly twenty years now. Occupational hazard, probably.
‘There are lots of different images on the recording,’ Sarah went on. ‘There’s no pattern to them, though. And most of the images don’t make sense anyway. I think the TV sets are picking up transmissions they shouldn’t be. Like this one.’
Sarah had offered Sam a seat, but the girl had refused. She was nervous, which was understandable, but she also seemed dead set on proving that she wasn’t, which was… unusual. So Sarah sat on the end of the bed, in front of the TV screen, having left the alien binoculars on the comfy chair by the door.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Sam asked.
Sarah smiled. ‘There’s more.’ She stood, and stepped over to the desk under the window. The desk was grey and plasticky, and thus fitted the decor of the hotel perfectly. ‘I had a friend of mine come over from London yesterday. He works in graphic design. I got him to bring one of those… what do you call them? Things that can print a picture straight from a TV set.’
Sarah opened the top drawer of the desk, pulled the manila envelope from under a two‐inch‐thick wad of COPEX brochures, and slid out the prints. She passed them to Sam without looking at them. Sam took them from her in a way that suggested she was expecting them to bark. ‘The top one’s a print of the picture you just saw, only with a couple of computer enhancements. You can see the faces more clearly.’
Sam grimaced. ‘Yeah. Great.’
‘Now look at the next one. There. It’s a blow‐up of one of the faces. I thought it might help. See? There’s another face growing out of its eye socket.’
The girl peered at the picture. Then her eyes popped wide open.
‘You can see it, can’t you?’ said Sarah. ‘The little face has got more little faces growing out of it. Not just faces, either. You see that smear across the right‐hand side of the face? The one that’s covering the right eye? It looks like part of a wing. Like a bat’s wing.’
Sam must have got the point, because she started shuffling through the prints at high speed. ‘We sat here all afternoon, blowing up parts of the picture and then blowing up the blow‐ups,’ Sarah went on. ‘It never stops. Faces growing out of faces. After a while, they stop looking like… well, like people. They go all twisted. And