Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [31]
Penelope decided that if she was not released shortly she would begin to scream at the top of her lungs.
Outside, the shouting began.
‘Flying heads!’
63
Chris sat up. He had been sitting with his chin cupped in his palm, staring at a wall of the house.
The guards at the door were standing up. ‘Flying heads!’ shouted someone again. He could hear a commotion outside. Chris got up and went to the door.
There were heads flying through the village. Samurai and peasants were running around as the heads zoomed past huts and houses. Some of them chased people for a few feet before soaring off to skim over the roofs. One was spiralling lazily around a tree trunk.
The Doctor was still busy with the Times crossword. ‘What is it?’ he said, pencilling in an answer.
‘There’s a bunch of heads flying around out there,’ said Chris.
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘What kind?’
A samurai ran into the house, sword drawn. He waved his arms. ‘Flying heads!’ he shouted, and ran back out.
‘You know,’ said Chris. ‘Just heads. Of the flying variety.’
The Doctor folded away his piece of newspaper and tucked his pencil behind his ear. He walked over to the doorway.
One of the guards turned, noticing that his prisoners were getting restless.
The Doctor told him, ‘I just want the answers to two questions. Are these the demons you were, er, escaping?’
‘No,’ said the samurai. ‘Those were tengu – these are rokoro-kubi.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor. The samurai turned his attention back to the chaos in the village. One head was skimming through a flock of yelling children.
Chris asked, ‘What was the other question?’
‘An Egyptian deity,’ he said. ‘Two letters.’
‘They look like robots,’ said Chris. ‘What’s a rokoro-kubi?’
‘A flying head,’ said the Doctor. ‘A sort of vampire that can detach its head, anyway. You’re right, they are robots.’
‘Dual spy cameras,’ said Chris. ‘We’re being observed.’
‘And not by someone with a sense of subtlety.’
The heads were coming together now, forming a sort of swarm above the central square of the village. They bobbed in a loose cloud, perhaps three dozen of them. When they weren’t moving so quickly, it was easy to see that they were spherical drones, metal and plastic faces formed by components and the double lenses.
They buzzed and twittered at one another. Tête à tête,’ said the Doctor.
Chris groaned.
As one, they descended towards the shrine.
‘Oh dear,’ said Chris and the Doctor.
After that, things really started to get interesting.
64
7
Coffin cure
Joel wriggled his shoulders again, wishing he could get the crick out of his neck.
Penelope was getting very antsy. Either that or she had a cramp in her leg.
Joel hoped she didn’t have claustrophobia. There hadn’t been time for her to protest when the villagers had pushed the pair of them into the box.
He remembered the first time he’d seen her, a dishevelled madwoman in a police lockup in Swindon. She had summoned what was left of her resolve, looked him in the eye and told him that she came from the year 1883. When he had believed her, she’d nearly fallen over.
She was all determination and no experience. They had a lot of people like that in the railroad these days. After thirteen years Joel was familiar with five local alien races and had met two dozen, maybe three dozen more. Whenever they got someone new on staff – a ufologist or psychic who’d tracked them down, more often than not – Joel loved introducing them to whatever aliens were being harboured in Little Caldwell, and watching their brains shut down with amazement.
He’d never seen Penelope achieve that deer-in-headlights state. She was too curious to let anything really bamboozle her. He could imagine her up a tree in the Amazon, ruthlessly tweezering new species of scorpion into labelled boxes. Or in the appliances section of a big department store, going berserk with a magnifying glass and a bunch of screwdrivers.
He stuck his eye up against the hole again. No one. The villagers had left