Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [57]
Why on Earth hadn’t she just knocked? Anyone here must have been a friend of Sam’s, surely?
No. She couldn’t be sure of that. Besides, what was the point in being an investigative journalist if you couldn’t do a bit of breaking and entering before teatime?
Sarah surveyed the upstairs hall, with her heart beating at a rate that was just plain stupid. Several doors, possibly bedrooms. A hatch in the ceiling. The hatch was closed, but there was a rope ladder dangling from the lip. Sarah chose a half‐open door at random, and poked her head around it.
It was, as she’d expected, a bedroom. A lot less tasteful than she might have imagined, though, certainly less tasteful than the rest of the house. It was neat, but neat in a kind of careless, childish way, as if the owner had been forced to clean it up. There were various pop‐culture images Blu‐Tacked to the walls, a ‘Save the Whales’ poster that looked like it had been printed in the seventies, a big fractal pattern made up of tiny CND symbols, and some portraits of supposedly famous people Sarah didn’t recognise. The bed was made, but several T‐shirts lay scrunched up on the duvet. There was a TV on a plastic table at the end of the bed, surrounded by little wind‐up plastic things. And a couple of Gonks.
Sarah wrinkled her nose. The room stank of adolescence.
Disappointing. That was the only word for it. She could easily imagine Sam supporting great causes, but the political material in the room was all quite basic, the kind of thing you said you believed in when you were too young to know how grubby and nasty politics really got. She’d expected Sam to’ve been a member of some anarchist activist group, not the kind of person who painted little pictures of dolphins all over her furniture.
There was another noise. Muffled. It sounded like laughter this time and it was from somewhere nearby. Without thinking, Sarah stepped back out of the room, and glanced around the upstairs hallway.
Nothing was moving.
Her eyes settled on the rope ladder.
Of course. The hatch was shut, but the ladder was down. Someone was up there, up in the attic.
The laughter again. It was the kind of laugh you’d call loud and annoying if somebody did it in your ear. Female, certainly. And it came from the other side of the hatch.
Sarah looked around once more, just for good luck. Then she grasped the ladder, and started to climb. Just the first few steps, she decided. Just enough to be able to hear what was going on up there. She kept moving until the top of her head touched the hatch, and held her breath, listening to the murmurings. Girls. Girls talking.
‘No, really. It happened. In America.’
‘He ate them?’
‘Yeah. Killed ’em all, and ate their bodies. All five of ’em.’
‘Why?’
Odd. The girls sounded about fourteen, maybe fifteen. And if Sam lived here why would she be cohabiting with girls on the other side of the big hormone shift? Were these her sisters? Or had the UN computer messed up? If this is the wrong house, thought Sarah, I’m going to be really, really embarrassed.
Then something else occurred to her. The thought hung around at the bottom of her head for a while, not quite wanting to come up for air.
‘Well… ’cos he was a psycho,’ said the first voice.
‘That’s horrible,’ said the second.
‘Why?’ said the third.
The first voice mumbled something Sarah couldn’t catch. Then the second again: ‘It’s just horrible. Just the idea. Being eaten.’
‘Why?’ the third voice asked. There was something familiar about that voice, almost as if –
There was the sound of running water from downstairs. Somebody was making tea in the kitchen.
‘What d’you mean?’ said the second voice.
‘Why’s it horrible? They’re already dead. Why does it make a difference what happens to the bodies?’
Sam. That was Sam’s voice, no question. But Sam had been spirited away by the Cold, and besides…
Besides, this version of Sam sounded as young as the other girls.
‘You’re supposed to ask funny questions, aren’t you?’ someone was saying. ‘When you’re, y