Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [112]
Creed scrambled back to the open tail-gate and sucked in lungfulls of the cold clean morning air. The sky above him was a deep beautiful blue, a tiny jet leaving a vapour trail across it like a white scar.
‘Are you all right?’ said the Doctor.
‘Yeah,’ said Creed, taking a final lungful of air, then crawling back into the hearse to join him. ‘The smell of the warlock was starting to get to me, that’s all.’
‘Forgive me,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.
Could you give it to me please?’
Creed handed him the small enamelled box, leaning across the glass cylinder with Jack inside it. ‘Was this a life-support tank?’
‘That’s right. We just drained the fluid out of it. Jack isn’t conscious but we still thought it would be reassuring for him.’
‘Reassuring?’
‘Yes, we had to bring him up to London with us. He was our guide. He enabled us to find you.’
‘How?’ said Creed, trying to concentrate. The heady liquorice smell of warlock was beginning to get to him again.
He shook his head to clear it and the Doctor noticed.
‘It’s all right, Creed. I’ll seal this box up properly in a moment and then the smell will be gone. Just let me do this first.’
He reached into the enamelled box and fished out a small fragment of dried mushroom.
‘What are you doing?’
The Doctor leant over the glass cylinder. ‘I’m going to feed this to our friend here.’ Creed realized he meant the White King.
‘Won’t we have to mix it with some dog food or something?’
Not with this dog.’ The Doctor reached his hand out towards the White King, who lay panting on a pile of cushions beside the cylinder.
The old dog sniffed at the piece of mushroom in his hand and then suddenly caught it between his teeth, shook his head and gulped it down. The Doctor leant back and snapped the small enamelled box shut. He glanced up at Creed who was staring into the glass cylinder.
‘Jack... Isn’t he the guy we had to rescue from the animal experimentation lab?’
‘Yes, it’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. They’d dosed him with warlock and something very weird happened to his mind, didn’t it.’
‘Yes, he lost it.’
‘Lost it?’ said Creed.
‘Yes. He lost his mind, but not in the conventional sense.
When Jack lost his mind it went somewhere else.’
Creed looked up from the man in the glass cylinder. He stared at the Doctor, then he looked at the White King.
The dog was pressing its nose against the glass of the cylinder, peering lovingly at the man inside.
‘You’re kidding,’ he said.
‘No,’ said the Doctor. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the cylinder where the dog’s breath had fogged the glass, revealing the pale face inside. He stuffed the handkerchief back in
his pocket and patted the dog on the head. ‘Jack is coming back,’ he said.
The sun was rising, lighting up the country lanes ahead of them as they drove south and east, following the small secondary and tertiary roads into Kent.
The hearse was a large vehicle with a spectacularly wide front seat, from an older and grander age of motoring. But it was still quite a squeeze with the five of them sitting up front.
Oddly enough, no one wanted to sit in the back with Jack and the White King.
Benny found it annoying that no one would sit in the back. The truth was, they were scared. Well, perhaps scared was too strong a word. After all, there was indeed something strange about the unconscious man in the glass cylinder wedged in the back of the hearse, and about the dog which lay worshipfully across him.
It had the others spooked. Benny felt a little contemptuous. It was so ridiculous that none of them would sit in the back. They were all grown-ups.
Not that Benny wanted to sit in the back, herself.
The Doctor wouldn’t have minded, of course. But he wasn’t the problem. He was so small that he took up virtually no room in the front seat. It was Creed and Redmond who took up the room.
Roz had insisted on driving, so Benny ended up wedged between the two big men.
‘Why did you insist on coming with us, anyway, Redmond?’ she said. Benny realized that she sounded rather unfriendly,