Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [1]
Chris got up and padded across his bedroom. He hadn’t tidied up the place for a while. There were souvenirs and junk from half a dozen planets, some comic books, a bunch of T-shirts and underthings that needed washing.
He’d been sleeping in his Daffy Duck boxer shorts. Now he tugged on a threadbare dressing gown, and pulled on a sandshoe and had done up the laces before he remembered that he still hadn’t found the other one. He took it off, tossed it under the bed and went barefoot into the corridor.
He wondered if the Doctor was asleep. Most nights the Time Lord went into his room and locked the door. Sometimes shouts and even screams came from in there. You got used to it. Chris didn’t want to know what the Doctor dreamt about.
It would be nice to go one night without any dreams.
The TARDIS liked to redecorate sometimes, moving the rooms around.
Tonight it put the kitchen across Chris’s path. There was a food machine, programmed with about four bazillion recipes. A huge, untidy scrapbook was leaning against it, with the codes for each meal written down in a jumble of Gallifreyan and English and other languages Chris didn’t recognize.
There was a twentieth-century fridge, adding an unapologetically low-tech electric hum to the TARDIS’s own quiet sound. Chris looked inside and found 3
a fossilised Archaeopteryx, a skateboard and a single glass bottle of milk. He peeled back the gold-foil lid and sniffed cautiously. It was fresh. He ate the cream from the top and put a mugful of milk on to warm on the stove.
He paused for a moment, eyes half closed, the taste still in his mouth.
You bastard, you could have killed me.
If it hadn’t been for Elizabeth Shaw, he wouldn’t be here now, breathing, tasting this.
There was a notepad tacked to the wall, with ‘mushrooms chickpeas cereal helium’ written on it in faded ink. Chris took it down, found a pen in the top drawer, and doodled on the pad while he waited for his milk.
Amongst the squiggles and rocket ships he found himself writing the words
‘Dear Doctor’. He looked at the pad.
‘Dear Doctor,’ he wrote, ‘I give up.’
He scribbled that out and started again: ‘Dear Doctor, these have been some of the best years of my life. Travelling with you has. . . ’ Hell’s bells, the milk!
He snatched the saucepan away from the heat, just in time to prevent one of those gross skins from forming on the top.
‘Can’t sleep?’
Chris nearly spilt the milk.
The Doctor had noiselessly appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. He had dark hair and a lined face and deep blue eyes, and was wearing an oversized orange dressing gown with a little cat embroidered over the breast pocket.
‘You’ve got the right idea,’ said the Tune Lord.
Chris glanced at the notepad on the counter, the saucepan steaming in his hand. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘I have?’
‘Warm milk.’ The Doctor didn’t look as though he’d been sleeping. Maybe he was just wearing the pyjamas for show. ‘Best thing for insomnia.’
‘Do you want some?’ said Chris, immediately wishing he hadn’t. He sort of casually shuffled around until he was between the Doctor and the notepad.
The Time Lord shook his head. ‘I just popped out to check the instruments.
We’ll be landing in about five hours. Get some sleep.’
‘Will do,’ said Chris. ‘Um.’
The Doctor hesitated in the doorway. They looked at one another for a few seconds.
‘You’d better drink that before it gets cold,’ said the Doctor. He smiled at Chris and went back out.
Chris put down the saucepan, ripped the sheet of paper loose from the notepad, balled it up and stuffed it into his dressinggown pocket.
The Doctor took one more look at the console room. The ship’s instruments were flashing and beeping softly to themselves as she drifted through space-4
time. He watched the rhythm for a little while, a moire of light moving over his face, until he was satisfied with the erratic patterns.
He went back to his book-lined study and sat down at the typewriter. A single sheet of paper was protruding from the old machine, like the tip of a white tongue.
He put his hands on the