Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [62]
Nothing vestigial about her appendix, thought the Doctor.
The house was still there and largely unchanged. Part of the Victorian greenhouse had succumbed to rust and fallen in. The satellite dish he had mounted on top was long gone. The grave! drive had been scattered by the overgrown lawn. The stables had been mended and there was a muddy trail leading away from the doors. Horseshoe shapes baked into the ground by the sun
The windows of the house were still paned and someone had painted the frames blue sometime in the last ten years. The Doctor loved the house because it was solid and immovable Unlike the TARDIS the same landscape greeted him every time he opened the door. It had occurred to him that during the gaps between his visits the house was inhabited. Furniture changed positions, holes in the plaster were mended, lightbulbs replaced It gave the house a haunted quality.
Mind you, he thought, it could be me.
He walked around the back of the house and tried the handle on the kitchen door. It wasn't locked. He would have been very surprised if it had been.
'This can be your room,' said the Doctor, opening a door at the top of the house.
Inside, half the ceiling sloped down towards the floor; a window was inset into a kind of alcove in the ceiling. Blondie thought that the architect must have been crazy to build a room shaped like that: you lost a third of your usable floor space.
'Why is it such a weird shape?'
'We're in the attic,' said the Doctor. As if that explained everything.
Most of the space left over was taken by a kingsize bed made of brass tubing welded together into a grille shape at each end It looked very old. There were cotton sheets on the bed and the duvet was neatly fumed back. They had a fresh smell of sunlight and lavender. Blondie wondered who had prepared the room he'd seen no signs that anybody lived in the house and certainly no cleaning drones.
A purple bathtowel was draped over the bedstead.
'I expect you'll want to bathe,' said the Doctor. 'The bathroom's down on the landing, third door on the left.' He left the room and padded down the stairs.
Blondie had never seen a room so bare of electronics before. Even in the Stop the projects had been hardwired for multimedia, infrared I/O ports or sockets to run consoles and noiseboxes. There was only a single light fitting dangling from the flat bit of the ceiling, terminating in a cylindrical paper lampshade. The light was a blown glass bulb with a coil of tungsten filament inside. Blondie thought that the design was probably illegal.
He took his armour off while standing up; he didn't want to dirty the pristine sheets. As the breastplate came away he was assailed by his own ripe smell. There was nowhere to hang it up, so he settled for piling it neatly in the comer.
The Doctor paused in front of the larder. 'Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her dog a bone,' he said and opened the door. 'But when she got there the cupboard was bare, except for a sack of onions, three kilos of tagliatelle, two tins of chopped tomatoes and a bottle of cod-liver oil.'
He removed the items and placed them neatly on the kitchen table. At least nothing was mouldy. 'And today's special is pasta a la Dottore.'
The fridge was the colour of dirty cream and massive, with rounded comers. Since he hadn't returned to the house for ages, the Doctor had deliberately searched the larder first. The stainless steel handle hummed in his palm. 'This fridge,' said the Doctor, 'will be bursting with all manner of good things to eat. I will remember to go back and fill it especially.'
The fridge door unsealed on the Doctor's third pull. A river of freezing air flowed out over his knees. Waving away the vapour he peered in at the empty shelves. So I forget, thought the Doctor. There's never a temporal paradox around when you need one. Right at the back of the bottom shelf were a pair of grey deodorant spray cans. The Doctor didn't try to take them and closed the fridge door gingerly. He wasn't