Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [40]
As she made her way back across the moonlit fields, the frosty ground crunching beneath her boots, she found herself growing uncharacteristically maudlin. Since she and the Doctor had arrived in future London, no one had seemed to want to be straight with her. Secrets and lies, she thought bitterly. No, that was unfair. Just secrets. And maybe things that the Doctor simply didn’t know about: he couldn’t know everything, after all.
And maybe Michael was exaggerating – bitter and unhappy, but exaggerating. She took a deep breath to clear the fugginess in her head; her throat and stomach still burned from the brandy and she remembered that she hadn’t eaten for hours.
Clambering back over the fence, she nearly tripped. Swearing loudly, she told herself to shush. Maybe she should have stayed with Michael and slept the drink off. But there was no way she was going to go back there now, just to have him laugh at her.
She checked her watch – nearly three in the morning. If she could get back into Graystairs without being caught, then she’d have a better chance to poke around, find more evidence. Maybe even find Joyce. Maybe she should have told Michael where she was going, got him to come with her. No, bad move. She didn’t know whether she really trusted him yet. Better to stick with the one person you could trust.
The sensitivity of Ace’s hearing seemed to have been turned up from ‘attentive’ to ‘paranoid’: every crack of a twig, every rustle, every innocent animal noise had her glancing around, expecting her stalker to launch himself – or herself, she realised
– at her from the darkness. She picked up a branch and hefted it clumsily. If nothing else, it gave her a bit of extra confidence.
There were still lights on at Graystairs: a couple of ground floor ones, one first floor and one on the third floor. She grinned as she imagined Connie and Jessie sneaking down to the kitchens for a midnight feast.
The door, as she’d expected, was locked; so she slipped round the side of the house, and after a few minutes found a ground floor sash window that was open – in fact the frame at the bottom was splintered and chipped, so perhaps this had been the site of a recent breakin.With a bit of effort, she managed to get it open, wincing at the rumbling of the sash weights in the frame. She was in the residents’ lounge, the armchairs painted with silver moonlight, the air curiously dry and dead.
She slid like a shadow to the foot of the stairs, paused for a moment as she heard muffled voices from upstairs – the bleeding out into the real world of some elderly nightmare – and headed for the cellar door. As she opened it, she smelled something both welcoming and disturbing. Someone was cooking bacon down there. Her stomach growled.
She found the light switch, and winced at the brilliance of the single bulb as she flicked it. Blinking away the after-images, she tiptoed down the stairs to the lab – pristine, sharp and, thankfully, deserted. The smell of bacon grew stronger, and she felt her stomach rumble again – loud enough, she was sure, for the mystery chef to be able to hear. For a few moments she waited at the foot of the stairs. She thought she could hear noises in the distance, through the far doorway where, she presumed, there was a kitchen. Scanning the room, she smiled as she caught sight of a half-eaten bacon butty on one of the worktops. In a single, deft movement, she ran over, snatched it up and took a bite. She swallowed greedily and took another, moving sideways towards the other doorway, keeping her back pressed against the workbenches that ran around the room.