Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [50]
But after the Yeti had come, the military’s minds had been blown wide open. If hairy robots could take over London, anything was possible. Their research had been ruthless and flawless; they’d discarded thousands of hopefuls and nutters and come up with a handful of people with demonstrable psychic talents – nothing spectacular yet, but it was all consistent and replicable. And it all came under the aegis of the Official Secrets Act.
And in the meantime, Hank Macbeth had followed up a few leads, found out about the operation, and landed himself on their doorstep with the twin observations that he knew exactly what they were up to and that he needed a job. They’d checked his academic qualifications and made him a lieutenant the next day.
The Paranormal Division was small, but it was organized with military efficiency – four lieutenants, fresh from university; twelve lab assistants still struggling through degrees in psychology or physics; six honest‐to‐God psychics. Macbeth could talk to them for hours, and he had done, hearing the stories again and again – how they’d hidden their powers away, how they’d been frightened and lonely, how much better they felt now that they knew they weren’t alone. Oh yeah. They were cattle, bloody cattle, and God knew what the army were going to do with them.
MacB, in the meantime, had other fish to fry. If UFOs and psychics were real, reasoned the UNIT people, what about other phenomena? They’d put him in his civvies and dispatched him to investigate, of all things, a haunted house.
He was carrying a big leather briefcase, packed with haunting goodies – string and chalk and glue, plaster of Paris, big camera. He hadn’t done too many ghosts, though there had been that flat in Piccadilly – at least before the media got hold of it, and the landlady started to get calls all day and night from people wanting to see the spectre…
No more of that amateurish stuff, freezing his brass monkey in someone’s garden waiting for the poltergeist in the potting shed to turn up. Thank Christ. This job was a simple one: pop round to a house in St John’s Wood, introduce himself, and keep an eye and ear out for what the neighbours had reported: strange noises, stranger manifestations, and Things that Went Bump in the Night. Though given who lived in the flat, he could already guess why they were seeing things.
* * *
Ace’s body was furiously at work on the machines, muscles stretching as she moved weights in endless, repetitive patterns. Her mind was moving slowly, separated from the gym and the exercises. She was trying to find a shape.
She remembered a book the Doctor had given her about optical illusions, full of straight lines that looked crooked and crooked lines that looked straight. There was a picture made of blobs labelled What is this? She stared at it for an hour before she’d worked it out, leaving the book on her dresser while she perched on the bed ten feet away. Seen from a distance, the meaningless blobs had resolved themselves into a photograph of a shark. Spotting the shape. Pulling it out of the background.
The enemy was hidden, moving underneath the water, surfacing from time to time in ways they’d couldn’t predict. When Bernice had come close to finding that book, he’d had Fitzgerald try to kill her. When Fitzgerald had failed, the enemy had made Bernice kill him: dead men tell no tales.
What did he want? Was he after something that only the time travellers could provide? Or was he just a hidden canker that didn’t want to be brought out into the light?
Canker. They were all contaminated. Only poor Cristián had come through it, pushing aside his fear at the last moment. And then the psychevore had eaten him whole. How the hell