Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [33]
He strode from the library and up the stairs, heading for the source of the footsteps. Right at the top of the stairs was a bathroom with an open door that revealed a cheap, green suite that probably thought it was ‘avocado’, not
‘snot’.
The house was clean, but cluttered. The carpets were thick with dense, rather unaesthetic patterns. The next room was full of boxes of all shapes and sizes. In a house where every room was a junk room, this was the junk room.
‘Hello there,’ the Doctor said to the woman he met in the next room along.
It was a spare bedroom, and she was lying face down on the neatly made bed reading a yellowing science-fiction paperback. There was a pile of them on the small bedside table.
She jumped up and shouted something. It was only then that the Doctor realised she was wearing tiny headphones and had been listening to a portable CD player.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, holding his hands up. ‘I’m the Doctor. I believe you have something of mine?’
The woman was young, a little prone to puppy fat. The jeans and unflat-tering blue top she was wearing looked like workclothes, not something she’d wear from choice.
‘How did you get in here?’ she asked nervously.
The Doctor smiled. A fair question, but not one he was going to answer.
‘You first. I saw you watching me. I can tell you recognise me, and you have my police box.’
She glanced down and behind the Doctor, to his left, and didn’t even realise she was doing it.
‘The garage,’ the Doctor concluded, without looking round. ‘The first place I should have looked.’
70
‘Are you reading my mind?’
‘No. Would you like me to?’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have anything to be afraid of, I wouldn’t harm a fly. Not unless it was a particularly wicked one.’
He stepped into the room.
‘Stay back!’ She was almost shaking.
The Doctor took a step back. ‘Is this your house?’ he asked. ‘Do you live here with your parents?’
‘How old do you think I am?’
‘What a terribly rude question to ask a lady. Twenty-seven.’
‘I’m thirty-three.’
‘Really? You really do seem younger. You still live with your parents, though, don’t you? Not here. This doesn’t seem like your sort of house.’
‘You don’t even know anything about me.’
‘No. But this is very clearly a spare room. The bed hasn’t been slept in; I doubt those dusty old pictures are the ones you’d choose to put up; there’s nowhere to put your CDs or books; from the marks on the glass you’ve tried to open the window but gave up because you don’t know how to; that old wardrobe hasn’t been opened for years; your book, bag and keys are on the floor there; there’s no dressing gown hanging on the back of this door, and you’ve not taken your shoes off. All of which is suggestive.’
‘You’re Sherlock Holmes, are you?’
‘No, but as I was just saying, I met him a few –’
The young woman was trying very hard not to look over his right shoulder.
A floorboard squeaked behind him.
The Doctor saw something in the corner of his eye.
The world filled with crackling green energy that surged through him, filling his body with agonising pain for a moment. Then he collapsed into the dusty, thick carpet.
71
One particularly obscure text from the period comes close to fulfilling the criteria listed, but does not in all honesty provide much to discuss.
Published in 1899, Marnal’s Journeys or the Modern Crusoe purports to be the diary of a traveller from a distant, highly advanced civilisation, washed up on the shores of 19th century England. The conceit is a clever one – while Defoe’s Crusoe was stranded from 18th century European civilisation on a desert island, Marnal is similarly forced to subsist in the
‘primitive’ culture of Victorian England. Unfortunately, the novel is let down by the preoccupations of its narrator: Marnal expends many thousands of words deriding the culture he finds himself in, but references to his own background are maddeningly opaque and inconsistent. It is as a worldbuilding exercise that the text’s unknown author (the book is credited to the fictional Marnal) fails, denying