Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [87]
Carefully, she slid the Doctor’s Chinese lockpick out of her sleeve. It took a couple of minutes to get the door open.
169
The shop inside was musty, full of grubby carpets standing in tall cylinders.
Like forgotten totem poles. Not a lot of carpet selling was going on here. In one or two places the ceiling gaped open, beams of light striking down into the room, dancing with dust motes.
No high-tech security device on the door; hopefully no booby traps inside.
Stairs went up to the second floor – probably living quarters, if they were still useable. Benny checked for doors. The kitchen, unlocked; a cupboard, unlocked; the front door, a mesh of boards covering it on the outside.
Basement door, locked. She flinched as she opened it, but nothing vaporized or otherwise killed her.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the new lighting. There was a gentle glow coming from the basement, illuminating the foot of the stairs. A reddish-green glow. A slow, pulsing sound.
‘If you want me,’ she muttered, ‘I shall be in the spleen.’
She hesitated half-way down the stairs. The walls were covered in thick, green gunk. Nodes of it gave off bright green light. There was a constant rustling, a whispering, the sound of jungles or forests. Patches of the floor were still flagstones, but ridges and layers of the living stuff had reached across it. Around the walls there were massive pods or maybe blisters. Great sacs filled with softly luminescent green goo, taller than she was.
As she came closer, she saw that the sacs were translucent. She could make out shapes inside them. Heads and limbs and . . .
There was a bench in the centre of the room, a small pile of folders at one end. Tiny sacs were growing all over the bench. There were shapes inside them as well, hands and heads and embryos, but also irregular, coiling things, no part of the human body. Nicolas had left his burden on the bench. A soldier, a man from the Garde Nationale, the bloodstain on his jacket already gone black with time.
‘Right,’ said Benny. ‘I flatly refuse to throw up. I deny all nausea. Otherwise I’m going to be useless for the entire rest of this adventure.’
Ace shrugged and fidgeted, stuffed into one of Mme Thierry’s dresses and into the back row between two women who were knitting. The room was packed with women. Most of them were wearing red belts, some with pistols stuck into them. Children milled about as best they could between the tight seating, or howled in their mother’s laps.
The two knitter’s elbows moved back and forth, nudging Ace. She could barely see the front of the room for cigarette smoke. A table was piled with books and papers. Several women with red belts and sashes, faces drawn and concentrated, sat there.
170
Ace closed her eyes. She was tasting the dust of the desert again, the dust of history: how many of these people would be alive in a week’s time? The Doctor had called it La Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, and it was going to start tonight. Why had she even bothered to come to this meeting?
‘Men are cowards!’ The speaker was young, angry, with large eyes and long brown hair. ‘They say they’re the rulers of creation, and then they complain they have to fight. Well, let them go and join the traitors at Versailles, and leave the defence of the city to us! We’ve got more to lose than they have.
We’ve got petroleum, we’ve got axes, we’ve got strong hearts. We’ll be the ones on the barricades. We’ll show them that they can’t tread us down any more!’
She sat down, breathless. There was scattered applause and murmurs. The woman on Ace’s left snorted a huge pinch of snuff.
Ace opened her eyes again. She startled. The young woman was looking right at her – no, she was just looking into the crowd, to see who had clapped and who disagreed. She couldn’t be twenty yet. And she’d be lying in the gutter by Friday, her anger silenced.
Another woman had taken the stand. ‘It might not be necessary to fight on the barricades. But we won’t make our grandmothers’ ghosts