Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [4]
Benny carried on walking, past the tulips, through the shrubbery and towards the gate. Every so often she'd look back at the house, hoping to see the TARDIS arrive.
The statue of the girl was still by the gates, hidden among the leylandia. It was life-size and dull grey, the colour of concrete. The subject was fifteen, at most, with hair that fell down her back. She wore a miniskirt and cropped jacket, one of her high heels was missing. Her face was set forever in an expression of terror, her arms were held out in front of her as if she was trying to keep something away. Benny didn't know which thought was more disturbing: that the Doctor had chosen to put the figure in his garden for aesthetic reasons or that it hadn't always been a statue. She certainly had no intention of asking him about it.
Benny reached the iron gates and checked the postbox. The first thing she found was The Mirror, which she stil hadn't got around to cancelling. Eschewing both the state visit to Washington and the Mars landing, the front page had decided instead to reveal that a voluptuous young woman (pictured in a white basque and stockings) was having sex with someone famous that Benny had never heard of. This, the headline declared, was a 'world exclusive'. A quick flick through the paper revealed that many other people were doing much the same. A couple of years ago, Benny would have tutted at the demeaning and trivial nature of the stories, now she just felt the faint ache of jealousy, the belief that all the young people were off somewhere else having more fun than her.
Behind the paper there was a single letter. Benny frowned when she saw it. The envelope was dul grey, it was the type used for official communications in her native twenty-sixth century. Before she picked it up, she checked around but there was no sign of who had delivered it. There wasn’t a stamp, there wasn’t a postmark, there wasn’t a corporate or military logo. The only thing printed on it was her name: PROFESSOR BERNICE SURPRISE
KANE-SUMMERFIELD. She looked at it for a moment. 39 characters, not including the hyphen. Opening the envelope and was rather shocked to find that it offered her the chair of archaeology at St Oscar’s University on the planet Dellah. There was a reasonable wage, a rather generous research grant and free board and accommodation. The Vice-Chancellor looked forward to meeting someone of her repute. Benny read the letter again to make sure she wasn’t missing some vital point, or perhaps the punchline. She had been given to understand that to get that sort of job, one had to apply for it. The date on the letter was March 2593 - almost a quarter of a century after her own time.
Somewhat preoccupied, she tucked the letter and the newspaper underneath her arm and set off. The journey back up to the house always seemed to take longer than the trip down. As it sat on the green grass below the clear blue sky, the house looked like a natural feature rather than anything man-made. Simultaneously it looked well-tended and half in ruin. It seemed quite small from the gates, but inside it was a labyrinth of empty bedrooms and dusty storerooms. She'd been dropping in for years, but Benny still couldn't think of the place as a home. The house had stood for centuries, but no-one had ever lived there for more than a couple of weeks at a time. It had compensated: filled its rooms and landings with the creak of floorboards and the rattling of pipes. Lying awake in the middle of the night, something she did every so often, Benny always got the impression that there were other people staying in the house. Not ghosts, or burglars: nice people.
By the time she returned to the house, Benny concluded that the Doctor wasn't turn up for at least another day, and had reconciled herself to another day of dozing in the sun. Perhaps later she'd try her hand at sketching: the orchard about a hundred yards to the west looked like a good prospect: recent storms had brought down a couple of the trees, and made the woodland look terribly dramatic. There was a tin of pencils