Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [20]
The Doctor had produced money from somewhere to pay for drinks and rooms and train tickets, but Sarah - unusually for her, she prided herself on her practicality - hadn‟t thought to ask for any before they split up. She had a purse in her pocket out of habit, but examination revealed no coins dated earlier than 1965. She could take the chance that no one would notice - but with the royal upheaval that was going on at the moment, putting pictures into circulation of the King-to-be‟s ten-year-old daughter as a future monarch might not be the best of ideas.
She was going to go hungry today. In all the - well, excitement wasn‟t the right word, she wasn‟t excited about finding her best friend dead. Confusion? Emotion? Adrenalin-flow? Whatever, they hadn‟t thought to catch a bite in the inn. The Doctor would probably pick up a curled ham sandwich in the British Rail buffet. Perhaps she could get the inn to stick a bowl of soup on the slate, whenever she got back there. That would be all right. And anyway, a day without food wasn‟t so bad.
Sarah‟s stomach rumbled, alert as ever to attention being drawn to it.
No, her main concern now was getting to St Sebastian‟s asylum. No money for a cab, she‟d have to walk - through the wood - and she was tired and drained already, as well as hungry. And the light was fading fast - she‟d have to try to borrow a torch or lamp from somewhere.
She could leave it till tomorrow. Go back to the inn, that was only a mile or two away. Well, call it three. Eat soup and bread. Sleep. Wait till the morning, go to St Sebastian‟s in the light - maybe even cadge a lift off someone from the village. It wasn‟t like she couldn‟t be persuasive when she tried.
But she was a journalist. While there were facts to be found, she couldn‟t sleep.
Especially these facts. She‟d touched on it to the Doctor, but he‟d skated over the issue, not really addressed it.
She just couldn‟t believe that Harry Sullivan was dead.
This is what she thought - wondered - hoped had happened. They would, in the future, go back in time to the 28th of November, pick up Harry. In all the confusion, he was presumed dead. (But why dig him a grave...? No - no, there could be a reason for that.) So he was both „dead‟ now, and also alive in her time, her relative time, the time which had seen them together only a few hours ago in the TARDIS
control room.
But to get the Doctor to go back in time to the 28th November, she would have to convince him that he had always gone back in time to the 28th November, or he would start running on about causality and using long words that even she couldn‟t spell. So she had to make sure that no one had seen Harry die. She had to talk to an eyewitness. And she couldn‟t rest until she had.
As Sarah trudged down the country lane away from the little station, the first flakes of snow fell from the sky. It was, after all, nearly Christmas.
They‟d let her have a window, although it did have iron bars across it. Iron didn‟t hurt like silver did, but she didn‟t like the feel of it. But she couldn‟t reach that far anyway, because of the cuffs and the chains. And she didn‟t think she‟d be able to bend the bars, even with the strength of the wolf. And how would she grip them? Paws weren‟t made for that sort of thing.
She watched the snowflakes falling. It was something to do, a relief. Even when the day turned dark she could see outside, she could still count the snowflakes. Her vision was very good - better than that of other people, she knew. She tried to look harder, see if she could spot two snowflakes the same, but that defeated her.
She didn‟t fear the darkness, she knew that tonight at least she was safe. Not safe from the people in here, but safe from what was inside her. She hadn‟t kept track of the days she‟d been imprisoned here - too confused at first - but she could feel the cycle of the moon inside her, lapping in her blood like the tide, and knew that the old moon was nearly at an end.
Nothing