Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [57]
‘The difference was that you were there.’
He didn’t say anything. Just waved his foot from side to side, as though accompanying some unheard tune. She stared intently at his face, determined not to let that alien expression scare her off. He was not going to shut her out.
Slowly, the foot stopped its movement. He sat stock‐still.
‘It wasn’t only the world which had changed,’ he grated. ‘It was me.’
Benny closed her eyes. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘La mort ne surprend point le sage; Il est toujours prêt à partir,’ said the Doctor. ‘A change of place, a change of face… To you it’s always been the Doctor and Benny, but to me it’s been the Doctor and Ace, and the Doctor and Dodo, and the Doctor and Leela… Change is the only thing that doesn’t change.’
‘But that, that thing –’
‘It’s not a cuckoo that’s invaded my nest,’ he said. ‘It’s a hummingbird.’ The look he gave her was sharper than the edge of a knife. ‘He wants the very core of me, the only part that remains the same. He wants my heart, Bernice. And he can’t have it.’
* * *
He came in through the basement window. It was round the side of the dilapidated Georgian terrace, at street level, an inch of snow piled up against the dirty glass. Macbeth crouched against the fence, carefully scooped the snow away, and swung the window outwards.
The window was not especially wide, and his descent into the basement was less than dignified. Fortunately Molly had thought to pile up some black cloths on the floor under the window.
MacB picked himself up and dusted himself off. His gloves were wet with snow.
The basement was small, the walls glaring white; the inevitable naked lightbulb hung from the low ceiling on a dubious bit of cord. The marijuana odour of the main flat had not penetrated down here. It smelt of damp concrete, old rags and fresh paint.
MacB closed his eyes and waited until they adjusted to the strange light.
When he opened them again, he saw three things in this order:
A huge Aztec calendar, hand‐drawn on a massive square of plywood, hanging over:
A bed, with:
A pair of handcuffs attached to the bedpost.
No wonder they’d thrown him out. There was stuff here they just wouldn’t want people to know about.
MacB picked up the handcuffs, puzzled. Hippies had a reputation for weird ideas about sex – mostly invented by the tabloids, he suspected. No, that was the obvious guess, too obvious.
He fished under the bed, and discovered more handmade stuff, all with an Aztec look: little wooden statues, some candles and incense. A couple of overdue library books on Mesoamerican civilizations. He flipped through one, and it fell open at a picture of a particularly grisly human sacrifice.
It was a shrine. Or a prison… the room had been prepared, made ready for something. The bed’s single sheet was crisp and new, smelling of starch.
God only knew what they had in mind, With the solstice coming up. He needed to know more. If the hippies wouldn’t talk to him, what about their strange visitor of yesterday?
* * *
It wasn’t scary, thought Molly, that she might get it wrong. What was frightening was the thought that she might succeed.
The plan was a simple one. It had taken all her bread, but everything was going just fine so far. She tapped her foot on the floor of the lift, impatient to get on with it. It was like speeding; once you’d made up your mind to do something, you just went out and did it.
The uniform was too tight, made for a boy and not a girl. At least the bellhop was about her height. She hoped he enjoyed his night off and didn’t get too uptight about what happened in the hotel while he was away.
The lift slowed and bumped, making the plates on the trolley rattle. Molly gripped the handle tightly and slid the trolley out onto the faded carpet.
The carpet was alive with crawling orange colours; she felt them slither under her hair, under the bellhop’s cap. But she