Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [2]
There was also a plastic bag containing what looked like dried mushrooms. It was sealed with a twist of wire and a handwritten note taped to it read: Please do not eat. I hope I don’t have to emphasize how important this is.
Ace recognized the spidery slanting handwriting as the Doctor’s. The note was written in faded fountain pen ink on a brownish scrap of old paper. Ace peeled it off the plastic bag, teasing the fragile paper carefully off the tape so she could inspect the other side.
As far as she could make out, it was a Russian railway ticket which had been issued sometime between the world wars. The dried mushrooms were an odd mottled colour, splashes of deep indigo and faint delicate green still discernible on the wrinkled brown caps. Ace shrugged, stuck the note back on and replaced the bag in the refrigerator. Time for coffee.
The coffee pot was a cafetière, an elegant streamlined glass and stainless steel object. Ace always thought it looked as if it had been looted from a laboratory on an alien spaceship – as indeed it might have been.
She pulled the conical lid and plunger out of the glass cylinder only to find that there was still a hard‐packed residue of old coffee grounds in the bottom, an interesting varicoloured fungus growing on it. ‘Just a little science experiment,’ she said to the ginger cat, who was wandering around the tiled floor, rubbing against her ankles.
‘Why doesn’t anybody ever clean anything in this bloody place?’ She dug out the diseased plug of coffee using a wooden spoon and dumped it in the bin before thoroughly washing the glass cylinder.
The kettle, of course, was still out of action. No one had bothered to replace it or even remove it from its appointed place on the window‐sill above the sink. It still sat there, a deformed lump of metal, possibly interesting from a sculptural point of view but quite useless for boiling water.
Shooting a .45 calibre bullet through a kettle does tend to do that. Ace took the useless piece of metal and slung it into the swing‐bin in the corner of the kitchen to join the mouldy coffee grounds. The cat flinched at the sudden violent sound. ‘Sorry,’ said Ace.
She put a saucepan full of water on the stove and left it to boil. On the door of the tall refrigerator there was a pad of paper and a pencil fastened with magnets. Ace took the chewed stub of pencil and wrote New kettle on the pad. Then, as an afterthought, Please clean the coffee pot after use.
When the water had boiled she poured it over the fresh coffee granules, waited a minute and then plunged the cafetière down. The coffee emerged dark and rich.
She poured a cup, sniffed a bottle of milk, added a drop, found the bag of sugar in the spice cupboard and then went hunting for a spoon.
She opened the drawer where the cutlery was normally kept, only to find it empty. Even the antique sheet of newspaper that lined the drawer was gone. Ace was rather sorry. She had spent many happy moments studying the photograph on that page: 1950s people standing cheerfully in their swimsuits and sunglasses, preparing to watch the distant mushroom cloud of an atom bomb test.
Now she stared at the bare wood that lined the drawer and slammed it shut, cursing. People were always moving things around in this place.
The adjacent drawer normally contained a cardboard box chaotically jumbled with electrical components, old Bakelite plugs, scraps of wire, every kind of fuse imaginable, silicon chips which had been salvaged from a G-8 police hovercraft in New York and several odd‐looking glass objects which the Doctor solemnly advised them not to mess with. Now Ace opened the drawer and found that the box had been removed and the cutlery was in residence. She selected a small silver teaspoon with RFC embossed on the handle and stirred sugar into her coffee.
The smell of hot coffee instantly triggered her appetite and she wandered back to the refrigerator, feet flinching at the touch of the cold tiles, the cat circling, rubbing her bare ankles