Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [26]
We made it down a fire escape and hurried down empty roads to my place, our footsteps coming back in deadened echoes so that we often stopped in fear that someone was following us. By that stage, the only remnant of the trip was a faint fuzziness on the edge of our vision; the scratching in my mind was long gone and for that I was immensely thankful.
When I reached the house it was immediately clear something was wrong. The front door hung on shattered hinges. In my room my things were scattered around, smashed, my bedroll torn to pieces. Jen emerged from her room at the sound of my voice. Her left eye was swollen shut and her lip split.
'What happened?' I hardly dared ask.
Jen fell into my arms. 'The Goblin,' she sobbed. 'He was after you, Summer. He wants you dead.'
***
I couldn't stay there. The Goblin wouldn't give up. He'd be back sooner or later, and even if I hid he'd take it out on my friends. I salvaged what I could from my possessions and told Jen that I'd find somewhere else, but Polly put her arm round my shoulders and said supportively, 'You should let us look after you for a while. It'll be safer.'
I looked to the Doctor, but he was staring into space, preoccupied. I guess I wanted him to make the offer – I still wanted to think good things of him – but it seemed then that he wasn't interested at all.
We spent the remaining hours until morning in an all-night café. Ben, Polly and I all dozed off for a while in our seats, but the Doctor didn't seem even remotely tired, and shortly before dawn he abruptly got up and left. After the rest of us had had some breakfast – health food and ice cream – we finally felt able to talk about what we'd seen the previous night, and how close we'd come to death.
'That Mathilda is a witch in more ways than one,' Polly said.
Ben picked seeds from his teeth, examining them distastefully. 'And she's got her own private army going on.'
'But what's the point of it?' I said tearfully; my emotions were all over the place. 'It doesn't make any sense. Why feed people the drug if you know it's going to do that to them?'
'You're not going to make any money from it, are you?' Ben agreed. 'The effects are pretty terminal.'
'Maybe she doesn't like young people,' Polly mused. 'Take a bite from this apple, Snow White.'
I shook my head. 'The word would soon get round. I can't believe she was doing it there, at her place. When all those kids don't come home from her party, what are people going to say?'
'Desperate,' Ben said.
'What?'
'I said, she seemed desperate. You could see it in her face when she came in to us. Like we might mess everything up.'
'Like time was running out,' Polly added.
I closed my eyes and saw skin peel back from flesh, fall away from bone. 'She is a real witch,' I whispered. 'She must have real powers to do something like that to those kids. Maybe every single pill is a spell, transforming them into demons.'
'The Colour-Beast.' Ben looked away; I'd never seen him look so disturbed.
'That's what they called it. You saw it?'
'I don't want to talk about it.' He picked up the empty ice cream cartons and took them over to the trash can, busying himself so he didn't have to think.
'It was coming out of those poor kids. Or they were becoming it.' Polly stared into the middle distance, pale and uneasy. 'I didn't really see it. I think the drug was helping me ... but it was becoming clearer. There were colours ... lots of amazing colours. At first the shape wouldn't settle down, it kept moving all the time, and it felt like my mind was having trouble pinning it down. And then the beast started to come out. It looked – ' She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a gag.
'Demons,' I said. I'd never been much of a church person, but my grandmother was