Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [65]
‘So how long will it take me to get back to Dumfries?’
Alexander grinned awkwardly. ‘Well, let’s see. The post and supply boat calls round every fortnight – so the next one should be calling, oh, Friday I reckon. As long as the weather holds.’
‘But it’s only Sunday! Couldn’t you just drop me off? Not all the way to Dumfries, obviously,’ Ace added, mentally picturing the shape of Scotland and realising that the boat would have to go all the way around the top to get to Dumfries. ‘Just on the mainland where I can get a train or something?’
‘I don’t think John would be too happy about that – we’re up here doing a survey for John’s doctorate. Marine life in the area - or the lack of it.’
Ace’s shoulders slumped. Stranded, hundreds of miles away from where all the action was, in the middle of nowhere on a crappy old boat with two nerds looking for fish. Great.
She caught sight of the spacesuit, crumpled like a shiny rag in the corner of the room.
‘Well it looks like there’s only one thing to do. I’m gonna have to dive back down to the ship and get back in through the airlock.’
‘You an expert diver, then?’
‘Well I managed to get up OK.’
‘Going down’s a bit more complicated – especially if you’ve never done it before – even if John lets you use his equipment.
Which he won’t. Anyway,’ Alexander said, ‘John couldn’t find a way into it – you got a key or something? From what he said, it was just a big, mirrored dome – no entrances, airlocks. Nothing.’
Ace remembered the brief flash she’d had of the ship exterior as she’d rocketed from the airlock: it looked, as far as she could recall, like any old battered spaceship – metal plates, a few tiny lights, bumps and sticky-out-bits all over.
‘Are we talking about the same thing?’ she asked, getting yet another Bad Feeling. ‘This dome of yours doesn’t sound like the ship.’
Alexander rummaged about on the shelves and pulled out another crumpled map, folded the wrong way into an unwieldy bundle. It was a larger scale map than the first one. Alexander pointed at what looked like a whopping great island labelled
‘Kelsay’ – but from the scale at the edge of the map, Ace could see it was only a few miles across.
‘We’re here, he said. ‘And this is where the ship is.’ He indicated a biroed cross, half a mile or so away.
‘So we’re not directly over it, then?’
Alexander shook his head. ‘How long had you been making for the shore?’
‘I hadn’t. I came up from the ship and just floated about for about fifteen minutes before you guys came over and rescued me.’ Alexander rubbed his chin. ‘The mystery deepens,’ he said and raised his eyebrows. ‘Unless you’ve been pulled about by some weird, freak currents, we’ve got a puzzle.Whatever this ship is that you came out of, it’s not the same thing that John found.’ He looked up at her with a frown. ‘It looks like there’s more than one mystery down there.’
The treatment room always filled Sydney with a cold, sick feeling. He didn’t know why – it was the treatment room, so it was where he was going to be made better. So that must be good, mustn’t it? He wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with him, but he’d been told that his memory wasn’t what it was. And when he thought about it – when he wasn’t busy with his scissors and glue and scrapbook – he knew in a vague and detached way that they were right. But wasn’t everyone like that?
Hadn’t he always been like that?
He couldn’t remember.
The pills that Doctor Menzies had given him were starting to take effect, and he felt his arms and legs grow fuzzy and distant as if he were a puppet, someone else pulling his strings, but he managed to clasp his scrapbook possessively to his chest.
Bernard and Claudette led him down the corridor, opened the door to the treatment room, and guided him in. Although he couldn’t remember what lay behind the simple, white door it triggered ghostly memories as it opened, an uncomfortable déjà vu. The room was