Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [89]
Sam concentrated on her hand, because her hand seemed a fairly safe thing to concentrate on. It wasn’t likely to start talking to her, for example, or to turn into a small dinosaur. But the more she looked at the skin the more she could see the veins underneath, and the more she looked at the veins the more she could see the patterns in the blood cells. Tiny capsules full of genetic information, branches of pure red data stretching all over her body, signals being pumped in and out of her heart…
So she closed her eyes.
She was getting the hang of things now. When the tablet had started to kick in, she’d tried to fight the signals, to keep the hallucinations in check. But when she’d done that the angles of the attic ceiling had started closing in on her like something out of that Hitchcock film about the man who was scared of heights, and the whole world had turned into one big film script. Just to show her who was in charge. You had to go with it, she decided. Go with it, and see where the signals took you.
The others had left the attic now. They’d gone scurrying for cover when things had started to get rough, and Sam wasn’t sure whether they’d seen the same things she’d seen. There’d been a banging, crashing sound from downstairs, which she was positive had been one of the hallucinations, but the girls had heard it, too, so her head was probably leaking.
There was a creaking sound. Quite possibly real.
Footsteps. Quite possibly real.
Sam opened her eyes.
There was somebody else in the attic. A single figure, tall and long-limbed, standing by the hatch. The hatch was open, so at least she knew he hadn’t walked through the walls or anything. Sam had a funny feeling she was supposed to be scared, or startled at the very least, but those sinister old angles in the architecture seemed to be unsettled by the man, and they shrank back into the shadows as she watched, which was sort of comforting. Apparently, the man wasn’t bothered by the fact that there were bright-red radio transmissions coming out of her ears.
Sam tried to get a grip on the way he looked. His clothes were filthy, his shirt covered in sticky black dirt, his cravat stained with what may well have been blood. He’d tried to cover it all up with an overcoat, big and grey and leathery. In Sam’s current state, she could easily imagine the coat having wings, the enormous flaps billowing up around the man to lift him off the ground.
Oh, and he looked like James Stewart. Exactly like James Stewart. That was the other important thing.
James Stewart crouched down in front of her, folding his long legs underneath him, so his eyes were on a level with Sam’s. He was inspecting her pupils, she realised. Just like the police did on TV.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, quietly. ‘This really wasn’t a good idea, was it?’
He didn’t sound like James Stewart. He sounded English. Sam didn’t risk shaking her head, in case it fell off.
‘Careless use of psychotropics,’ James Stewart went on. It didn’t sound like he was lecturing her, though. It sounded like he was just stating the facts. ‘Not advisable under any circumstances. I’d leave that kind of thing to the shamen, if I were you.’ Then his face fell a little. ‘Or is it “shamans”? I can never remember.’
‘Why are you here?’ asked Sam.
He looked surprised by the question. ‘You know who I am?’
‘Yes. You’re James Stewart.’
‘Ah.’ The actor nodded. ‘All right. Just between you and me, I’m here because you’re vulnerable. You’ve made a serious pharmaceutical error, and now you’re open to… well, all sorts of signals. All sorts of transmissions.
Sam wasn’t sure what to say to that. She’d read in some magazine or other that you could have your entire personality changed while you were on hallucinogenics, if you were exposed to a strong enough stimulus. There was this case of a gay man turning straight… or was it the other way round? Either way, that was why Sam had come up to the attic in the first place, just she and her friends. No bad influences. No television. No radio.
Then again, did it make a difference? Our