Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [16]
For a moment, she thought her mother had got up and was sitting on the bed. She opened her mouth, the good news bubbling out of her. But as the figure turned, the words clotted in her throat. Thin and white, hairless like some dwarfish, Tolkienesque figure that had ascended from its subterranean lair, the man parted pale lips and a hiss emerged, like the snarl of a cornered cat. She had a brief impression of papery, ivory skin, somehow ratlike, and tiny pink eyes in milk white corneas. The man was holding a slim, chromed cylinder, aiming it at her mother’s face.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
The man’s eyes flicked to her side, and only then did Joyce realise that there was a fourth person in the room.
As she turned, something thumped into the base of her skull and the room slammed up in her face. She was sent spinning down into darkness and silence.
The Doctor breathed deeply as Ace tumbled out of the TARDIS
behind him. In front of them, basking in the bright spring sun, was the Dumfries village of Muirbridge. At least that’s where Ace had been assured they were – not that she really trusted him, of course. The greens and purples of heathers spread away, down into the crook of the valley where the village nestled at the crossroads of two skewed country roads. The sky was almost cloudless and a pale, duck-egg blue.
‘Very picturesque,’ exclaimed Ace dubiously, clouds of steamy breath forming in front of her face. ‘A bit cold, though.’
‘That’s because this is April, 1982, eight o’clock in the morning, and we’ve just come from August, 2012, just after lunchtime. Do try to keep up, Ace.’ His tone was dark and irritated, and Ace noticed how he was avoiding looking her in the eye. So he should, she thought. The mention of lunchtime had set her stomach rumbling, and she wondered if her body had forgotten that she’d had fish and chips in London just before they’d left.
He shut the TARDIS door behind them as Ace hoiked her rucksack onto her shoulder. She glanced back at the Doctor, and noticed him looking around in an absent-minded-professor sort of way, as if he’d lost something.
‘Doctor?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped back. ‘I’m coming.’
‘No need to bite my head off!’
He sighed and dredged up a fairly poor imitation of a smile.
‘Up for a little stroll?’ he said with a rather forced jollity, rolling his r s as if getting in practice for later. He strode off ahead of her, umbrella swinging on his arm, one hand clasped to his hat as the wind struggled to snatch it from him.
‘So what are we looking for, then? Alien invasion? Mad scientists? Spatial anomaly?’ She caught up with him after about ten yards.
‘Yes, yes, I expect so. But first there’s something more important to attend to.’
‘Which is... ?’
‘A nice cup of tea and a good fry-up.’
Behind them, back up on the hillside, and just a few hundred yards from where the stocky blue shape of the TARDIS stood, a slender figure dragged itself painfully up from the shelter of the heather and watched the departing figures. Its eyes were bright and knowing: perfect timing, it thought, and sank silently back into the heather.
The village of Muirbridge was as peaceful and picture-postcard as it had looked from up on the hillside. A scattering of tiny, whitewashed shops and houses, a village green, and the few locals they’d seen had, bizarrely, resembled extras from an Agatha Christie. Ace gave the Doctor a sideways glance as they strode into the village, past a stark, grey war memorial and onto the main street.
‘1982 you said? Are you sure?’
‘Trust me, Ace. Not everywhere in the world in 1982 shares Perivale’s cutting-edge taste in rah-rah skirts and eyeshadow.’
They passed a couple of young men in jeans – farm