Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [71]
‘Open it,’ hissed Alexander.
‘Hang on, hang on. We don’t know what it is. It could be a bomb, or have some sort of alarm attached to it.’
‘You didn’t say that when you were breaking the window.’
Ace gripped the smooth handle, moulded into the front edge of the lid and gave an experimental tug. The lights on the panel changed the pattern of their flashing and with a sucking, dunking noise, the lid lifted like she was opening a chest freezer down at Iceland – or Iceworld, come to that.
‘Oh...’ she said, backing away and letting the lid fall with a thump. ‘That’s where the smell...’ She pushed Alexander out of the way as she rushed into the front garden and emptied the contents of her stomach all over the weeds.
‘Not the transmat, then?’ Alexander said as she wiped her mouth on a scrappy bit of tissue paper she found in her jacket pocket.
‘ Not the transmat. I dunno what that thing’s for, but it’s all caked with slime; and it doesn’t half stink!’ Breathing deeply, she stood at the door, gazing into the fusty gloom. ‘Right, we’d better try the other room.’
It was just as dark, but smelled a little less, A large, thin mattress lay in one corner. What drew Ace was a table along the adjoining wall, on which lay an assortment of electronic equipment. She swept the beam of her torch over it, picked up a couple of the smaller pieces and turned them over in her hands: their unfamiliar curves, colours and textures spoke dearly of their alien origin, and Ace felt a sense of satisfaction that her suspicions had been confirmed. It was a shame, she thought, that she didn’t have a due what any of the devices did. Oh for a handy Doctor to work out their functions just from the shape of the bobbles on the top.
‘Oh-oh!’ She heard Alexander’s low warning. ‘Tweedie alert!’
Bugger, thought Ace, taking a last look around the room. All this, and no transmat. She wondered, briefly, where the toilet was - and then remembered the coffin in the other room. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Come on!’ Alexander hissed. She saw him hovering in the doorway, and he beckoned to her. Sticking her head out into the welcome fresh air, she saw the tiny, distant figures of the tweedies, coming round the headland.
‘Crouch down,’ she said, ‘and get round the back of the cottage. Go on.’
He followed her instructions, and she dosed the door behind her. There was nothing she could do about the broken window; so she hoped that the tweedies either wouldn’t notice it, or wouldn’t think that she and Alexander were any kind of a threat to them. She had visions of the two old folk hunting them down in the middle of the night and dragging them back to the cottage to lock them in the coffin thing. Where, Ace thought with a growing sick feeling, they’d probably die choking on their own vomit.
Once behind the cottage, they clambered over the wall and sprinted back up the slope. They were still out of line-of-sight of the tweedies, but Ace didn’t stop looking back until they were over the ridge and lying, panting, on the grass, Hansel and Gretel escaping from the witch’s cottage.
‘You do realise,’ Alexander said between gasps, ‘that if they realise we’ve been in there and seen all that stuff, that we’re dead.’
‘What can two old fogies do to us?’
‘Two alien old fogies,’ Alexander reminded her. ‘Two alien old fogies with a dog and ray guns.’
Chapter Ten
The world was a series of reflections in shattered mirrors.
Fragments, curiously unnamed but still identifiable, surrounded the Doctor as his rescuer pulled him along. His sense of time had been disrupted by whatever had happened to him, he knew that. But although he could remember individual elements of the past few hours (or were they days... or even minutes?) he couldn’t put them all together. Like bits of old soap, they’d cling together in his hands for a moment and then fall distressingly apart again. He felt he ought to be much more worried about this fragmentation, but his sense of concern was as disconnected from him as