Doctor Who: Telos Novellas [011] - Frayed by Tara Samms

Author:Tara Samms
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9781903889220
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Published: 2003-10-16T22:00:00+00:00

IX

‘What was that?’

Susan could hear a stealthy scratching noise coming from outside the cupboard. She gripped Jill’s hand, and the little girl squeezed back.

Their fingers were slick with the blood dripping down from her gory mouth. Their eyes met. Jill’s were wide and sad, like Susan’s had been at home, before she left. The sadness of the dispossessed.

‘It’s all right,’ Jill whispered in Susan’s head. ‘It’s part of the plan. Open the cupboard door. Very, very slowly.’

Scared without really knowing why, Susan gently nudged open the cupboard door a crack. Chloe the cat slinked inside, but she hadn’t been the one that had made the scratching noises. It had sounded like many claws, working together.

Susan peered out at the gloomy room beyond, and caught her breath.

In the same low doorway through which she’d entered sat a big fat rat.

It scampered inside, soon followed by two white mice and another rat, slimy and scabrous. The rodents began to pick at the mouldering floor as if it was quite delicious.

‘It’s made of cheese, you see,’ said Jill.

Susan looked at her, bemused. ‘Why?’

Jill laughed out loud, releasing a gout of blood from her ragged mouth.

The blood splashed on the cupboard’s wooden floor, but she paid it no heed. ‘I told you. It’s part of the plan.’

More rats crept in, and more mice, squeaking and coiling around each other as they hunted out space on the floor, stabbing at the tough cheese with their sharp incisors, feasting on its stink. Susan looked away in disgust.

‘Why do you want those filthy things in here?’ she hissed.

‘You’ll see,’ Jill said, sucking on a lock of her bloodied blonde hair.

‘Because you are Tres Ojos, like me.’

Susan turned back to the chink in the door. There was something else in the doorway.

A grizzled old cat. It was white as a sheet and wiry and thin as a whisker. Its head looked too big for its skinny neck, but its blue eyes gleamed as they took in the feast of mice and rats cavorting on the cheese floor. Behind it, another cat stole into the room, ghostly and dark with sunken blue eyes just the same.

They were Jill’s eyes.

Then over the heads of both cats jumped another. Susan cried out as the marmalade beast shot from the shadows, claws out and jaws open wide, orange and stripy and hungry.

At the sound of her voice, the cats vanished. The rats and mice scattered.

Jill gripped Susan by the throat, pushed her up against the dark wall of the cupboard. ‘You fool!’ she rasped, her wide mouth tearing into her cheeks a little further. ‘You scared them away and spoilt everything. Everything. You don’t use real voices here, because they can hear.’

Susan squirmed in Jill’s bloody grip. ‘Who are “they”?’ she said with her mind.

‘The jailers. The owls. Hunhau, the death god.’ Jill slackened her grip.

‘You’d better get used to using your smart mouth, Susan. Soon it’s going to be the only one you’ve got.’

Susan pressed her fingertips to her lips. They were coming off in strips.

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