Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [95]
‘This is a dining room in our house,’ Mrs Winfield said, not even whispering.
Trix ignored her. ‘He has a lot of books.’
‘Like I say, he was an author. He’d need dictionaries and things, wouldn’t he?’
Trix was looking over the shelves. It was gloomy in here, and would have been even if the small window hadn’t been blocked. It was possible to make out the titles, though, and the authors’ names. After a quick sampling of the other shelves Trix mentally moved the apostrophe.
‘They’re all by the guy who lived here,’ Trix said.
‘All of them?’
Mrs Winfield was working through a pile of Interzones.
‘There’s some stuff that’s a hundred years old, these are from the Eighties.’
Trix nodded, and pulled down the leather-bound volume that looked the most valuable of all the books. ‘Are they all first editions?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think they’d be that valuable. I doubt he’d want to sell them.’
Trix occasionally forgot that things could belong to other people.
A pile of books fell over, and the two women huddled up to face whatever had done it. But there was nothing there.
Trix picked out a couple of paperbacks. ‘They’re all science fiction?’
‘I’m not a fan,’ Mrs Winfield admitted.
Trix opened the first one, Valley of the Lost, and was surprised to see the word ‘Tardis’ there.
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‘It’s an acronym,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘An acronym? Is that some science-fiction thing?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
The rest of the book was a little more opaque. It was set on an alien planet, and there was some visiting delegation from a Three Minute City, whatever that was. It wasn’t the ideal way to discover an exciting new author, but after a couple of skim-read paragraphs Trix wasn’t exactly hooked.
There was absolutely no way that the TARDIS reference was a coincidence.
She and Fitz and the Doctor had been led to Earth by someone who knew about the Doctor, knew about at least one of his companions, knew about the TARDIS. Here, there was someone writing about TARDISes and. . .
‘Oh my,’ Trix said. ‘How long has Marnal been living here?’
‘A very long time,’ Mrs Winfield said. ‘As long as anyone can remember.’
These were books about the Doctor’s home planet. The one that not even the Doctor knew anything about, the one that had been destroyed leaving few traces. Written over a period of a hundred years, apparently by the same man.
An immortal time-traveller.
One of the Doctor’s own people.
She’d walked into a trap, Trix realised. Had the Doctor already sprung it?
It was like Gaudi had built an aqueduct.
The Vore had pushed the Doctor, Marnal and Rachel up to a narrow bridge across a half-mile-wide cavern. It was as level as any human engineer using a laser and GPS could have made it, but its lines were organic, pitted and curved as though it had been built from the bottom up out of mud pies.
Now the Vore started herding them along the bridge. They hadn’t come this way before. The Vore struggled to keep to the boundaries of the structure.
One fell off, making Rachel yelp, but it extended its wings and swooped up and landed behind them.
‘Where are they taking us?’ Rachel asked, before she had to stop speaking.
The smell in this place was terrible.
‘Very few people know anything about the Vore,’ Marnal said, still trying to excuse his earlier mistake. ‘They’ve killed everyone and everything they’ve ever encountered. I am the only person who has ever seen them and survived.’
‘I’ve seen them before,’ the Doctor said casually.
Marnal shook his head. ‘They track down everything that makes any contact with them.’
‘They’ve attacked Earth, Doctor,’ Rachel told him.
The Doctor looked over at Marnal, who confirmed what Rachel said: ‘In a matter of weeks the human race will be extinct, along with every other life form on Earth.’
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The Doctor smiled reassuringly at Rachel. ‘We’ll see about that. What’s happened? Has one of their spaceships appeared over London?’
Rachel nodded weakly. ‘Something like that. What do they want?’
‘They don’t want anything,’ the Doctor said. ‘They