Doctor Who_ The Stealers Of Dreams Part 6

She could hardly bring herself to think the word. But the image was there, clear in her mind. A whitefaced creature in ragged clothes. Peeling skin, vacant eyes, arms reaching limply for her as if they were worked by strings.

A zombie, straight out of Domnic's comic strip.

Rose shook her head to dispel the image. A leftover fragment of a dream, perhaps. But it stayed with her, itching in the back of her brain as she stepped out into the dreary hotel corridor and shut the door behind her.

Domnic's flat wasn't too hard to find. The roads were numbered rather than named, laid out in a grid system, and Rose was relieved to find she had only a few blocks to walk. She hadn't fancied trying to negotiate this world's public transport system without any cash and without the Doctor.

The lifts in Domnic's building were out, but fortunately he was only a few floors up. The bare concrete stairwell reminded Rose of the one in her own block, back home, but there was no graffiti. As if no one had anything to say.

She knocked on a flimsy wooden door for several minutes. She called through it, trying to rea.s.sure Domnic that she meant him no harm. She thought about kicking the door down, and would have done if she'd heard the slightest sound of movement from behind it.

He was probably at work. The call centre. She could have kicked herself for sleeping in, for leaving it too late.

What now?

She was trudging back to the hotel, deep in thought, when he leaped out at her from a table in front of a cafe. He'd been sitting, pretending to be engrossed in a newspaper in which the pictures seemed almost to outnumber the words.

'Domnic!' Rose squealed as he grabbed her arm and propelled her away.

He shushed her urgently. 'Just keep walking. They might be following you.'

Rose resisted the urge to look behind her. 'Who might be?'

'You've been to my flat. They've had cops patrolling all day, in plain clothes. I've been watching them. The same man, circling the block clockwise every three minutes. And there's someone in the flat across the road. I saw the sunlight flas.h.i.+ng off an ocular lens.'

Rose did look now. 'I can't see anyone,' she said dubiously.

Domnic was setting a brisk pace, weaving expertly through the crowd, and Rose was struggling to keep up. She kept b.u.mping into people. They reached a junction and abruptly he set off at a right angle. A moment later, he broke into a run and darted down an empty alleyway.

She caught up with him on the street at the far end. 'Look, I think it's OK,' she said. 'I don't think there's anyone...'

'They'd been in my flat,' said Domnic. 'I stayed last night with a friend and when I got home... They'd tried to put everything back as they found it, but I could tell. It was like everything was just... just a fraction out of place, you know? I came down the fire escape.'

'That's getting to be a habit.'

'Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I thought you were... well, I guess that was obvious. It must have been... The stress, the excitement, it must have made me a bit fantasy crazy. I realise now the chances of you being right there in that hotel room if you were... and, I mean, the police do lie to us, everyone knows that now, but the stories you were telling, they were too fantastic, unbelievable. They'd never...'

'OK, I get the point.'

'He was on again this morning,' said Domnic. 'Did you see him?'

'If you mean Hal Gryden...'

'Yeah,' he said excitedly. 'So you found him. What he was saying... I mean, this morning, I thought it was all over. You know, the police have my name they must have forced it out of someone in the group and I can't go home, but I know now it won't be for long.'

'Why? What did he say?'

Domnic frowned. 'I thought you '

'I only caught the last bit,' explained Rose.

Domnic was getting twitchy again, looking around them. His eyes narrowed and he took Rose by the arm again and pulled her down another alleyway. Paranoid, she thought, definitely paranoid. But maybe he had good reason. She was just pa.s.sing through, but this was Domnic's life that had been turned upside down. She remembered how she had felt that first time, when the monsters had come to her workplace, her home. Like nothing made sense. At least she'd had the Doctor. Who did Domnic have?

Who else but her?

There was a sc.r.a.ping sound. As if someone had knocked against one of the bin lids behind them. They turned in unison, then looked at each other.

'There's no one there,' said Rose, trying to persuade herself as much as she was her companion.

Domnic nodded, but didn't look convinced. They hurried on, back into the crowds.

'You were gonna tell me about Gryden,' Rose prompted.

Domnic's voice was quieter, more subdued, than before. 'A year ago, he was nothing, just a rumour. I didn't think he existed. Now...'

'You really think he can change things.'

'I know he can. People listen to him, and now they know the truth the real truth. And this morning... He's hinted about it before, but he's never actually come right out and said... A revolution, Rose. Hal Gryden says it's time for us to rise up and overthrow this police state. It's because we don't have a government, you see. There's no one to... to look at the way things are, to listen to us and to make a difference. So we have to form our own government! Gryden says it's time to repeal the antifiction laws, to demand our dreams and all the things they won't let us dream about. Yeah, those were his words... Rose, I think we're being...'

'I know.'

It was nothing she'd seen, nothing she'd heard. It was more a sense of dread, something lurking in the back of her brain. The sort of feeling she would normally have dismissed, but this time she couldn't. She was scanning the faces around her, looking for the one that would meet her eye.

And she gasped as she saw it, a halfblock behind them, standing at the junction, its eyes black and vacant, its skin white and peeling.

And then the crowd closed around it and parted again, and it was gone.

Domnic must have seen it too, because suddenly they were both running.

They cut through a large department store, where everything was in plain black, white or grey packaging. She was beginning to doubt her own eyes. A zombie? How could there have been a zombie, right there on the pavement? With people walking past it as if it was nothing, as if they couldn't even see it?

Onto the street again, where they came to a stop because Domnic was out of breath.

'Did we shake her off?' he panted.

'"Her"?'

'I thought you saw her. The policewoman.'

'Um, yeah.' Now Rose really did feel stupid, seeing monsters where there had been none. But she'd been so sure. 'Yeah, I think we must've.'

To her surprise, Domnic placed his hands on her shoulders and stared earnestly into her eyes. 'I want you to know, Rose, that if we get caught, I won't tell them a thing. I'll say that I... I lied to you to make you help me. That in all the time I was with you I never heard you say anything that wasn't the whole truth...'

'Shut up, Domnic,' said Rose.

He recoiled, looking hurt. She had that dreadful feeling again. There was something behind her. To the left. To the right. But everywhere she turned, there were just ordinary people, most of them ignoring her but some now staring at her clothes again? No, at the way she was acting. All twitchy.

The way Domnic had been acting last night. And now.

And it occurred to Rose that maybe this was how he felt all the time. As if there was something about this world... something she couldn't quite put her finger on. But she remembered what the Doctor had said about things beneath the surface, where most people couldn't see them. The feeling that, somewhere, there were monsters. If only she could work out where they were and shake off the awful fear that, if she could see them, they could see her too.

Fantasy crazy.

And with that thought, Rose remembered something else she had heard. From Domnic, last night. About Hal Gryden. 'He opens our eyes...' 'He opens our eyes...'

'Static,' she gasped. 'That's what it's doing, isn't it? The programmes... somehow, they're making people see see.'

'...makes us look at the world in a different way.'

Now it was her turn to take Domnic's arm and drag him along with her.

'Where are we going?' he cried.

'Find Jack and back to the TARDIS,' said Rose. 'And hope the Doctor finds us there. C'mon, it isn't safe out here.'

She wasn't running away, she told herself. She didn't run away. She was just... This made sense. This was more than she could handle. She needed...

'I... I can protect you, Rose.'

'You what?'

'It's up to me. I'm the man. I'm the hero.'

'Like h.e.l.l! You ever done anything like this before?'

'Well... no, but...'

'Stick with me, then. I'll ' The words froze in her throat. She had caught the eye of a pa.s.serby, just for an instant before he had looked down at his feet again.

And she knew knew.

'It's all of them,' she whispered.

'Wha what do you...'

'They know, Domnic. Don't you see? They know that we know! All the people, everyone you can see, they're under the control of this... this... whatever it is that's controlling this world. Only we're free and they know.'

Domnic was nodding his head vigorously even as his eyes betrayed his lack of comprehension. 'You mean they're all informants. The police have put out a wanted bulletin, haven't they, and everyone knows our faces.'

And they were running down another alleyway, to the spot where it was crossed by another, and here they stopped because in all four directions there were roads and people maintaining their fronts, the facades of their everyday lives, but Rose knew the truth. She knew the truth, and she knew they wouldn't allow her to expose it.

A shuffling sound. A woman cleared her throat and appeared through a tall wooden gate, weighed down by a pile of cardboard. Putting out the rubbish, or something more sinister? Rose wasn't sticking around to find out.

The first gate was locked. The second opened to her frantic jiggling of the latch and they burst into a tiny builder's yard. They were surrounded by piles of timber. Two doors led into the building proper, one directly ahead of them, the other at the top of a single flight of metal stairs. Rose's first thought was to take shelter inside, but she braked as some sense warned her of danger.

Was that someone at the window?

She'd only caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye. A whitefaced figure with hollow eyes and ragged clothing. When she tried to look at it directly, it disappeared and there was just the reflection of the sky in the dark gla.s.s.

The gate banged shut behind her, like a gunshot, making her jump. Rose knew there were more monsters behind it, sneaking up on her through the alleyways.

'Can you hear them?' she whispered.

'I can hear them,' Domnic confirmed, eyes wide with terror.

'This is it, Domnic. We're surrounded.'

He tried to pull away from her. 'I'll give myself up. I'll tell them it was my fault. You... you hide behind one of these piles of wood and maybe they won't...'

'This isn't one of your comics, Domnic, and you aren't my knight in s.h.i.+ning armour. There's no way out of this for either of us.'

Rose grabbed a length of timber and wielded it like a club, her eyes fixed on the closed gate. The itch in her brain had turned into a fullblown buzz which seemed to drown out everything. The only semicoherent thought she could form, somewhere in the back of her mind, was that the lighting was all wrong. Too bright. It was daytime, when night was the time for monsters.

Then the sun was swallowed by a bank of clouds and the yard fell into shadow.

And they came for her.

The gate flew open and there they were. Four of them, fighting to be the first to squeeze through the aperture. Rose turned, knowing what she would see before it happened: two more zombies appearing in the doorway of the building behind her. And another, emerging onto the staircase above her head, silent but for the shuffling of its feet.

Rose and Domnic stood back to back, surrounded. Domnic was whimpering. Rose hefted her makes.h.i.+ft weapon, ready to swing it at the first creature to come within range.

'I know what you're thinking,' she said with as much confidence as she could muster. 'I know what you want but I'm not gonna scream or faint or fall out of my clothes, all right? So, if you want me... well, just bring it on!'

The zombies closed in.

SEVEN.

The Big White House was big. It was white. And it was a house.

At least, it had been a house once: a sprawling multiwinged mansion, built to a cla.s.sical design, as distinct from the concrete towers around it as could be imagined. It even had its own grounds, to the Doctor's surprise, though they were small and paved aver. He suspected that much of the house's land had been carved off for neighbouring developments and what was left was cluttered with parked cars.

It couldn't really be described as a house any longer. It had had too many extensions grafted haphazardly onto it. The ugliest of them was a square block, five storeys high, which jutted up from the building's centre.

There was some peace to be gained here, though. The grounds were ringed by a wall, three metres high, which deadened much of the sound of the city though the Doctor knew that that certainly wasn't its primary purpose.

A grey plaque on the outside of the wall had given the building no name, just a description: Home for the Cognitively Disconnected.

They'd been nodded through the gate by a guard as soon as he'd seen Waller's police bike and illfitting uniform; the Doctor had been reaching for his psychic paper, but had had no need of it. Anywhere else, he'd have been surprised by the lack of security. Here, though, he doubted anyone could conceive of anything so audacious as a jailbreak. Anyone outside of this building, anyway until recently. Until Hal Gryden had begun the process of change.

The hallway was airconditioned cool, painted in pastel colours. They were met by a young man of Oriental descent who wore a white coat over his grey jumpsuit. His eyes were redrimmed, and the Doctor guessed he'd been working all night.