Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [030] - Parallel 59 by Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

Author:Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555902
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2000-02-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

You Do It to Yourself

I imagined that blackness in the room, of course, I must’ve done. Or I had a funny turn of some kind – I’m not my mother’s son for nothing. Or it could’ve been some kind of trick – maybe even some kind of warning from the man I followed, I don’t know. But it wasn’t real. I must’ve imagined it.

I was shaken, whatever, and having legged it down the street I ran into the nearest bar I could find. It was the company of people that was the real draw, actually, not the Ethels. That surprised me. It became a kind of wry surprise, though, as I realised I was in Denna’s haunt again, despite the million resolutions I’d made to stay well away.

And I felt better pretty quickly, too. It’s funny how we end up ignoring anything we can’t explain. We worry at first, but its importance fades because it doesn’t make sense; we just reject it. Especially if there’s something else happening that we can understand to take our minds off it. And I didn’t have to be back until midnight for the group meeting to compare our reports. And I didn’t want to think about what I’d tell them of the thing in that building. You know, I actually nursed the pathetic hope that the cleaner was having me on, and that Filippa would tell me every admin block had a black thing hovering about. Kind of Mechtan shredding machines, or something.

The bar seemed a bit rowdier than it had been the night before, so I asked the barman what was the occasion.

‘Double red-car party,’ he answered. ‘Two Notifications through on the same day. It’s rare, is that. Almost unheard of.’

It was probably unheard of over the noise, I decided. The party was rocking, people yelling and singing and dancing. Weird songs; maybe they would’ve been better with music. To my ears it sounded like no one in the place could carry a tune in a bucket, they were all over the shop. I guess I was seeing it all as an outsider; what clue did I have about their culture? I felt lonely again, the loneliness of the long-distance runner, maybe. Gone to seed. Gone to ground.

Then I heard a familiar voice yell my name, and my throat tightened as Denna threw her arms around me and spun me around.

‘Come to play again so soon,’ she said, licking her lips needlessly – it was her eyes that were eating me up. ‘Thought you didn’t like coming out North.’

‘I don’t,’ I told her, which on reflection is about the only honest thing I’ve ever said to her apart from ‘You look fantastic’.

She took a seat by me, and I realised that the longer I stayed the trickier it would be to tear myself away, but she was just what I needed: light and bright and breezy, cooling me down as the evening hotted up. More and more people seemed to be getting

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