Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [69]
The set must have been faulty. Typical, wasn’t it? On top of everything else, even the TV didn’t work. Interference lines sparked across the picture, brilliant flashes of black and white bursting across the newsreader’s face. Snatches of other channels, all cut up and shuffled together.
Llewis reached out for the off switch. His finger was already hovering over the plastic button when he saw it.
Another flash. A big black flash. For a split second, the woman on the screen had too many eyes, and there were other mouths superimposed over her image, full of tiny teeth made out of static. The BBC globe behind her desk was staring out of the picture at him.
Llewis jumped. Took a step back. Fell over, and landed on the bed. When he pulled himself upright again, the faces had gone, but the screen was still flashing, images of people and architecture overlaying each other, interspersed with bursts of meaningless rubbish. Llewis felt his fist clench. His arm shot out, towards the screen, but he stopped himself at the last possible moment.
He’d been about to put his fist through the screen. Instead, he managed to steer his hand towards the buttons. He’d hoped to hit the off switch; instead, his knuckles cracked across the channel buttons, and the set tried to show him all the stations at once, forcing even more images through the screen. Llewis punched out again, hitting one specific button. He didn’t know which. Anything would have been better than this.
The flickering stopped. There was a single image on the screen, solid and stable. A woman. A naked woman, lying on a bed. The picture was muddy, covered in scratches of static.
Llewis felt himself relax a little. The hotel’s porn channel. He’d ordered it when he’d checked in, covering up his embarrassment by telling himself that every other businessman in the place would be doing the same thing.
It was over. The interference was over. Llewis took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the sweat as it trickled down from his forehead and into his eyes. Fast flashing images were supposed to affect the brain, weren’t they? He’d heard the Chinese used it as some kind of psychological torture, one of their little interrogation tricks. Well, that was it. He was under stress. The TV had malfunctioned, and the flickering had made him hallucinate. That was all.
A second figure appeared on the screen, crawling over the end of the woman’s bed. A big black man, Llewis noted. The same kind of thing you always saw in these cheap seventies skin movies.
The man’s skin was rippling.
Because he wasn’t black. Not the way Africans were black. He was dead black, jet‐black. The flesh quivered across his head, the eyes and mouths running like liquid down his face, joining a dozen other displaced features on his torso. The black man crept towards the woman, his skin sticking to her body as he touched her, the blackness spreading up her legs, biting into her flesh. The woman thrashed on the bed, her mouth dropping open in either ecstasy or agony, the sound from her throat a scream of pure white noise.
And now there was a new signal coming through. A picture of a tower block, or maybe a TV transmitter. Something tall and sharp, puncturing the sky above a great grey city. The picture was flickering, cut with shots of men playing cricket and fragments of an American sitcom, but Llewis could still make out the basic shapes, the spires and the domes, the walkways and the pylons, slabs of silver concrete huddling under a sky the colour of burning coal. And other images, other scenes from around the city. People with punctured ears. Multicoloured zombies, staring up into the smouldering sky, sucking TV signals into their lungs.
Then the faces came back. They stayed a little longer this time, and there was a definite shape to the blackness. A sphere. And every part of it was alive, the faces trying to gnaw their way through the skin of the sphere, the limbs twisting as they clawed and thrashed, never quite