Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [37]
He remembered the UNISYC building. Fact. He remembered opening the door of his room, to annoy the guard outside. Fact. He remembered the men who’d been out in the corridor, the weapons they’d been carrying, the hole in space they’d used to get into the security complex. Fact, fact, fact.
He remembered them spraying him with something. One of them had been holding a spray can, like an aerosol, only… more mean‐looking. If a can could be mean‐looking; that may have been one of the bits his subconscious was making up. But he definitely remembered looking down, seeing his body being covered with the stuff, all black and wet and sticky.
Then the stuff had winked at him.
Or had he made that up? The idea that the black stuff was growing eyes, just so it could see him, and growing mouths, just so it could bite him. He didn’t remember any pain, but he was sure the mouths had started to chew away the skin, opening up holes in his flesh, letting him see the nerves underneath. Then the nerves had vanished. Then the bone.
He didn’t remember seeing any more. Probably, he told himself, because the men sprayed some more of the stuff in your face after that, and it ate away your eyeballs.
Oh yeah. That’d be it.
So where was he now? And come to think of it, what was left of him?
Every now and then he felt other shapes in the blackness with him, other bodies, making ripples in the dark as they swam, struggled, and tumbled past. Other people who’d been eaten by the black stuff, he guessed. He tried talking to them, but the darkness poured into him every time he opened his mouth, and started biting into his tongue with its tiny little teeth. Besides, Fitz wasn’t entirely sure that he had any lungs left. Or vocal cords.
Oddly enough, though, there was a brief period when he could hear another voice in the emptiness. He felt something pass close to him, a shape he was pretty certain qualified as human, although he wasn’t sure which of his senses was telling him that. The voice was whispering, but not to Fitz. To itself, maybe.
‘There’s a word they’ve got in Haiti,’ the whisperer said, as the body floated by. ‘It’s in your English dictionaries, but the people who write the dictionaries never understand a thing…’
Fitz had no idea what that was all about. He decided it probably wasn’t important. This was obviously one of those extradimensional realms where nothing made any sense, so he didn’t see why he should waste time worrying about it. Sooner or later, someone would come to get him out, and the odds were that it’d be the Doctor. Until then, he had nothing to do except think things through. Again.
* * *
Eventually, someone did come to get him out. But only after a very, very long time.
* * *
5
Unfortunate Episodes
(Sam finally gets into television)
Scene 1. The Hotel Room
[We assume it’s a hotel room, although we can’t make out much of the decor. Most of the room is in darkness, so we can’t even see the walls. The impression we get is of a kind of void, with a small well‐lit area at its centre; there’s a swivel chair in the middle of the floor, and various pieces of incomprehensible equipment arranged around it, but, if we didn’t already know we were in the hotel, there’d be no way of telling. The whole thing looks more like a stage set than a real place. It’s all terribly expressionistic.
[SAM sits in the chair, her arms tied behind her back. Her head is bowed, suggesting that she’s unconscious, or semiconscious at best. Another figure stands in the gloom at the edge of the visible area, the darkness obscuring his/her face.
[As we watch, SAM stirs. She seems to be coming to her senses.]
SAM [murmuring, probably delirious]: Don’t you get it? It’s tomorrow. I’m in the hotel, and tomorrow’s the day it –
[Suddenly, she opens her eyes, and sits bolt upright in the chair. She scowls when she realises her hands are tied.
[Seeing her in close‐up, we notice a small piece of technology pressed against her neck, stuck to the skin with ordinary masking tape. To our