Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [107]
Outside, it was cold and crisp, a frosting of ice making the path glimmer and sparkle. He ran round the side of the house to where Angus’s pride and joy was standing; and, as quietly as he could, he pushed it from its stand and wheeled it out onto the road. Jumping aboard, he let it coast fifty yards down the hill before he fired up the engine, hoping that Angus wasn’t so tuned in to the sound of his baby that, even in his sleep, he’d hear it.
The last thing Michael needed now was the police chasing after him – if they weren’t already.
Joyce leaned out of the window, narrowing her eyes in the hope of seeing Michael. Her room was around the back of the hotel, so it wasn’t until she heard the faraway, guttural roar of Angus’s motorbike and saw its dim lights flare into life like distant coals, that she spotted him. For one silly moment, she wondered if she should call UNIT HQ and tell them what was happening. This is what we UNIT people do.
Right now, though, she wasn’t a UNIT person. Just a mother and a daughter.
Less than fifty yards away from him, vague wisps of steam rising from the thawing grass, Michael could see the craft: low, sleek and utterly black. It had landed in the field at the back of Graystairs. Michael had left the bike at the front and sprinted to the hedge from where he now watched. An arc of soft yellow light, like a rip in the night, curved across the front, illuminating a figure, silent and unmoving. The light pushed out a long, skeletal shadow across the grass – a shadow that fell on another figure, coming from the direction of the house.
But where the first was just a middle-aged woman, the newcomer from Graystairs was nothing so prosaic. The height of a man, it was all stick-thin limbs and joints, elbows and knees.
Like a skeleton painted in washed-out blood, it advanced, and then inclined its ridged head sharply. The woman did likewise.
Michael heard a muttered exchange, the wind and the distance rendering the words incomprehensible; the woman reached into a bag slung over her shoulder and produced something, offering it to the twig-thing. It touched it, almost tenderly, with slender fingers; then the woman returned it to the bag and the two of them headed for the house. Silently, Michael followed.
‘Can we go yet?’ asked Connie, her voice full of trepidation, unsure as to whether she really wanted the answer. Jessie shook her head and pulled back from the window, letting the flowery curtain fall back into place.
‘Not just yet,’ Jessie said. Connie nodded, blankly. She’d always deferred to her older sister: Jessie was the sensible, practical one, the one who paid the bills, sorted out their savings, dealt with salesmen; Connie was, by her own admission, the scatty one – the arty, creative one who tended the garden, did the decorating and sewed garish cushion covers. She let her hand rest on a gold brocade one that she’d made in the last few days, taking comfort in the texture of the fabric, the warm familiarity of it. The two of them had been in the room for what seemed like days. After that Joyce woman had disappeared, they’d wandered around the house, avoiding the other residents, avoiding talking about what had happened to them. Although they both knew what had happened, there was a shared, sneaking suspicion that they might have imagined it: that the whole thing, perhaps, had just been a horrid dream or the scraps of something they’d seen on the TV. But as the night had drawn on and they’d realised that half the residents didn’t seem to be around, they’d got more scared and had gone to Jessie’s room.
For the fifth time, Jessie set about rearranging her ornaments and china knick-knacks on the dressing table, moved her slippers a few inches to the left – and then pushed them under the bed completely. Her sister sat, looking