Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [4]
‘Get her out of here,’ said someone, taking Benny by the arm.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay with him.’
When he woke there was a lump in his throat, and he was still alone.
Breakfast was cold cereal and milk. He crunched on it despondently. ‘Company, that’s what you need,’ he told himself. ‘Before you start talking to yourself.’
He washed and dressed, buttoning a paisley waistcoat over his shirt. Judging by the haze over the ocean, it would be a warm day. He changed the bandage on his hand. The cuts were healing nicely.
He stopped at the upstairs bathroom. The floor was still covered in broken glass. So room service was limited to meals.
Gingerly, he picked up one of the larger pieces, an inch across. It glinted in the morning light, its surface lightly spattered with his blood. Let me out hate you, it said. He wrapped it in a handkerchief, put it in his pocket. It muttered to itself, irritably.
He rolled up his trouser legs and splashed through the surf again. The tide had left thick banks of seaweed to cook in the sunlight. He didn’t find any interesting shells. It should take less than an hour to walk into town.
After three hours he sat down on a rock.
A memory flashed into his mind: making this journey with Mel, to buy milk and ice creams. She’d striped her nose and cheeks with fluorescent-coloured zinc cream, given him a lecture about sunburn. The recollection was as clear as if it had been yesterday. Which, given his current state of mind, admittedly wasn’t saying much.
The horizon was remarkably clear, sun and sky sliced in two with a line that was almost geometric. The tide had come up the beach, soaking the ends of his trousers. It was hot.
Even the seagulls must be sleeping somewhere; the bright sky was empty of wheeling dots and hungry cries.
He had a sudden vision of Wells’s time traveller, looking at a bloated sun across a steaming ocean, utterly alone at the end of the world. Could this bit of Australia have become an island since he’d last visited? Had he simply been walking around its circumference? Had hundreds of years passed?
Thousands? And if they had, why hadn’t his house been swept away with the passing time?
Reluctantly, he took the piece of mirror out of his pocket and unwrapped it.
He dipped it into the water around the rock with his unbandaged hand, rubbing off the clinging blood with his hanky. The silver backing caught the sunlight in a blinding flash.
The piece of mirror looked up at him from the palm of his hand.
He sighed. ‘Who are you?’
You sound like you don’t want to know.
‘Look,’ said the Doctor. ‘We have something in common.
You’re trapped in that bit of glass. And I’m — I’m trapped on this island.’ He squinted at the fragment. ‘Did you bring me here? Trap me here?’
The thing in the mirror laughed. Tiny cracks spread across the glass with a tinkling sound.
The Doctor was about to toss it into the surf when he thought better of it. That could give someone a nasty cut. He wrapped it up again, pushed it back into his pocket. At least it was someone to talk to.
That evening, the piece of glass watched him from the table as he peered at one of the kitchen walls, nose an inch from the wood.
What are you doing?
‘Looking for cracks,’ said the Time Lord.
Oh yes?
‘Specifically,’ said the Doctor, ‘I want to see if the pattern of the wood has been determined by a fractal algorithm.’
The piece of mirror laughed. You think this is a virtual reality!
The Doctor glanced at it. ‘It’s on my list of possibilities.
Or, rather, was on my list.’
What makes you think this isn’t real?
‘Pieces of mirror,’ said the Doctor, ‘don’t generally talk to me. And then there’s the omelette.’ He waved at the half-eaten meal. ‘It tastes like cardboard. The Chardonnay’s like water. You sometimes get that effect in a simulation when the batteries are running down.’
What else, what else?
‘I thought I might be dreaming. But my nightmares aren’t like this. There’s too much sunshine, the surroundings are too