Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [4]
The Doctor stopped and looked at me, his eyes almost frightening now, lost in shadow beneath his thick brows.
'Sorry, love,' the young guy called to me. 'You can't come in here.'
'What's in there?' I said. And then: 'What happened ... what was that?' I was starting to panic. After all my fears about Denny, being in such a strange, strange place with no real home and hardly any food, I felt like crying.
The Doctor must have seen this in my face because he said quietly, to his friends, 'Look, why don't you two go with this young lady and help her look for her friend. I'll just do a bit of poking about into this other business by myself for a while, and we can all meet up back here again later this evening.'
The younger guy immediately looked anxious and suspicious. 'Hey, hang on a mo. You wouldn't just be trying to get shot of us for a while, would you? I mean, the Cybermen –'
'–Are not a problem to be approached in a headlong rush. I need time to think about this.' Without further ado, the Doctor slipped through the door into the tiny box, pausing briefly to cast me a strange glance. I couldn't read it at all. There was a hint of a smile, but I couldn't tell if it was supportive or mocking. In the brief time I'd known him, he'd made me feel strange, like he wasn't one of us at all.
The couple introduced themselves as Ben and Polly. Ben offered to buy me a coffee with a few dollars he said he'd found buried away in the depths of the Doctor's police box. They both shared a secret joke about this, but I was too freaked out to try to make any sense of it.
The truth is, what I'd seen that afternoon paled into insignificance beside my feelings for Denny. I'd tried not to think about it too much – good, old, optimistic Summer – but deep down I had this sick feeling that something bad had happened. There was no reason why Denny wouldn't have wired me to come and join him. All he had to do was find a place for us – it didn't have to be anywhere special. But since he arrived in San Francisco I hadn't heard a word from him.
The setting sun made the place even stranger. As the shadows crept across the road and the buildings took on a reddish tinge, the night people came out, distorted into twisted insects in the half-light.
'He said he'd seen the Devil.' I was haunted by the look of fear on the boy's face as his senses came back to him.
'Something scared him.' Polly stared into the growing dark, then caught herself and made an effort to raise my spirits with a bright smile. I liked her. She reminded me of how I used to be before all the troubles and the tears.
'That thing he was carrying – that robot head. You'd seen it before.' Ben and Polly exchanged a glance. 'Look, don't try to keep things from me, just because you think I can't deal with it. After all I've seen, I can deal with anything.'
Ben wasn't convinced, but Polly trusted me enough to spill. She was faltering to start with, not sure if she was going to blow my mind, always checking my face for reactions. She talked about other worlds, other times. How could I not believe her? It sounded so crazy and wild, but wonderful too, just what we all believed there in the Haight – there's more than what we see around us. But it was scary as well. The Cybermen sounded so cold and emotionless, so utterly ruthless. If they were in San Francisco, what did that mean for all of us?
We reached the I-Thou coffee shop just as darkness fell. Light blazed through the windows on to the sidewalk, and as the door jangled open and shut the aroma of fresh grounds and patchouli drifted out into the night. Clouds of steam burst at regular intervals behind the counter as if from a fabulous Victorian machine.
You could always count on seeing life at the I-Thou. Some beat poet dreaming he was Allen Ginsberg gave an impromptu reading in one corner: black turtleneck, black jeans, black sunglasses, black attitude. A chick swayed to music no one else could hear, smiling dreamily, and every now and then she'd