Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [43]
She caught her breath and moved on.
There was a hut at the garden’s centre, its roof partly obscured by old, rich moss. The doorway was so low that Penelope had to get down on her hands and knees and crawl inside.
Inside, the hut had six sides. Six smooth, featureless walls, a high ceiling, out of reach. The doorway she’d crawled through was gone.
Penelope sat against one of the walls, knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, hands clasped, staring from behind her spectacles.
She took up just a tiny corner of the huge, empty, closed room.
‘Out,’ whispered Penelope.
It was neither hot nor cold in here. It was neither dark nor fight in here. No one ever came here. And she would never get out.
She turned her face to the wall. ‘Out,’ she sobbed. ‘Let me out.’
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Pigeon English
Chris pulled on his clothes, scratched at his stubble, and peeked around the corner of the sliding door. Penelope was still asleep beside the smouldering firepit. He decided not to wake her. If today was like yesterday, she’d need her sleep.
Lucky her. He’d managed to stay awake all night. Lucky him.
He got the Doctor’s satchel and took out the rainbow egg. It pulsed with light where he touched it.
OK, so how did you play back this thing’s recordings? Chris cradled it in his palm, willing it to show him the last day’s worth of temporal fluctuations. He turned it around in his hands, squinting in concentration.
It took him five minutes to work out how to do it, imagining time unwinding like a coiled ribbon, feeling the colours rush over the surface of the egg in reverse.
There. Kame’s death, yesterday morning. He let the recording play back for a few seconds – nothing but a murmur of chronons – and then wound it forward, fast.
Nothing. Nothing but the background noise of time.
So Penelope had been wrong about time turning back. Kame had come back to life some other way.
It didn’t make sense. The headman had been healed by the pod; it had done all that other stuff. . . so why not Kame? Was there something else around, something they hadn’t detected, that was doing it all?
It would really suck if there was a war over the pod, and it turned out not to have any powers at all.
And nobody would listen to him. Sonchou had faith in it; Penelope didn’t want to interfere; Kame was bursting for a fight. Everyone wanted the pod just where it was. Except the demons, of course, and seven zillion samurai.
There was a sound like a whip cracking somewhere nearby. It took Chris a moment to recognize it. He dropped the sphere on to his bed and grabbed his 87
shoes as the sound came over and over.
When he opened the sliding door, Penelope was struggling out of her sleeping bag.
‘Gunshots,’ she said. ‘It’s started.’
Joel woke up with a dreadful crick in his neck. He fumbled for his glasses, sitting in their case on top of his PowerBook, and looked at his magic nerd watch.
‘I’m thirty-three today,’ he told the Doctor.
The Time Lord didn’t stir. He had been sitting in the lotus position all night –
at least, he’d been sitting there when Joel had got to sleep, and he was still there now. He was back in his own clothes, the borrowed Japanese outfit neatly folded in its box beside him
Joel realized the Doctor was about an inch off the floor. Very clever, old man, but I’ve seen the future and you’re not it. He wondered if he was going to get a chance to drop that little fact into the conversation. Best to save it.
He pulled on his clothes, the jeans and the suede jacket and the Real Ghost-busters T-shirt. He was tugging on his overcoat when he saw that the Doctor had come back down to Earth. The Time Lord blinked at him.
‘When do you suppose breakfast is?’ said Joel.
The Doctor uncurled himself and stretched. ‘We’ll have to wait