The Doctor (11 page)

‘See what?’ he replied, nonchalantly. Clearly he couldn’t. I shushed him and turned towards the eye. If the person the eye belonged to was going to attack us, they surely would have done so by now. I got the impression they had been following us for quite a while. So much for my abilities stopping people from sneaking up behind me.

I searched hard, trying to find a connection to the hidden person, whilst still keeping the wolf contained. There was nothing to be found. The wolf must be taking more energy than I’d realised; I’d never failed to reach someone who was standing so close.

Sounding braver than I felt I spoke aloud, ‘Come out from behind the tree. Who are you?’

Slowly the eye moved. Long, blonde curly hair came into view, falling carefully around the very pale face staring at me through the gap in the trees. The young woman was wearing a green dress that was torn and dirty. I took a step back uncertainly, practically stepping on Daniel who was close behind me.

‘Jack,’ the woman whispered, her arm outstretched towards me.

I shook my head. This was not happening. ‘No, you are just in my head. Go away. You don’t exist.’ I backed up even further but Daniel’s arms gripped my shoulders and stopped me.

‘Jack,’ he said, the concern clear in his voice, ‘What’s happening? There’s nothing there. It’s just us.’

The solid sound of his voice shook me to my senses and the woman faded away in front of my eyes. My mother. Looking exactly like she had when she’d disappeared. This had been a very bad idea.

‘Are you okay?’ Daniel asked quietly.

‘Y—Yes,’ I replied shakily, trying to pull myself together. ‘Could you not see her?’

‘Who?’ he asked looking around the area. Looking back at me he raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘The woman I saw in the trees,’ I sighed, pointing in the direction she had stood moments before. ‘It was my mother.’

Dan didn’t say anything this time, but his eyebrows just raised even higher.

‘She disappeared when I was a child and I haven’t seen her since. The police, both ours and yours, were unable to find any trace of her and I ended up being shipped off to live with my aunt,’ I told him, ‘The woman I just saw… she didn’t look a day older than when she disappeared.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel said quietly. He paused for a moment, then continued, ‘Are you sure you didn’t just see the shadows, it’s dark in here, it could just be your mind playing tricks on you.’

I shrugged my shoulders. I preferred his assessment of the situation to the ones that were currently running through my head. My imagination, that’s all it had been.

‘What happened to your father?’ Daniel asked.
 

‘He left,’ I replied shortly, ‘or rather I left. I never saw him again after I went to my aunt’s house.’ Daniel seemed to take the hint and stopped asking questions. My father was not a subject I liked to discuss. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We mustn’t stand around for too long. Though I suspect the Doctor already knows we’re here.’ I said the last bit quietly so Daniel wouldn’t hear.

We walked in silence for a while. I kept a wary eye out for any more ghostly visions, it had creeped me out more than I wanted Daniel to know. To be honest, the whole island made me nervous. How had we even got here? I had my suspicions but they were just that, suspicions. However, if I was right and my suspicions were true, then things weren’t looking good for us. I decided not to mention that.

The trees began to thin out as we walked and I dared myself to hope that we would soon be making it out of this forest.
 

‘Take it slowly,’ I warned Daniel as we neared the edge of the forest. I could see something through the thinning trees. He slowed down his pace and tried to tread as quietly as I was doing. He hadn’t quite got the hang of it and was making much more noise than I would have liked. I flinched at every twig breaking and every crunch of dry leaves under his feet.

Keeping hidden behind a nearby tree and glancing out of the forest, I looked around carefully. There was a large old stone building not far away. It looked as if it had been made to blend in with the surrounding rock, but the moonlight fell on the barred windows, betraying it.

Daniel came up beside me and peered through the gap in the direction I was looking. ‘That’s where we go,’ I said.

‘Oh great, another creepy old house,’ he replied, a fake look of joy on his face.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said grimacing, ‘I don’t think we’ll find an island inside this one.’
 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Daniel

‘Note to self: Next time Jack tells you to get in the car with him. Don’t.’
 

Moving quietly across the field, we kept our bodies low to the ground to avoid detection. Try and keep the element of surprise if we can, Jack had said. The ‘if we can’ had not sounded very convincing.

The muscles in my legs were burning with the effort of trying to crouch down, whilst walking as fast as I could across the grass. The area between the forest and the building was too open should someone be watching for us, so we tried to stay close to anything that might give us some shelter from prying eyes.
 

Clumps of rocks were lying here and there providing a good place to hide behind and rest, and sections of the grass were so high we could almost move without being seen. Clearly we didn’t think about the swaying grass, and we might as well have had a big sign pointing at us saying ‘we’re down here’, but we were having an ‘if we can’t see you, then you can’t see us’ moment, and being out of sight made us feel better. Luckily no one seemed to be watching us, as we managed to make it to the edge of the building without any attacks, and we were both still in one piece.

‘How do we get in?’ Jack mumbled to himself. I ignored him and looked around. We were facing a solid stone wall that continued as far as I could see to my right. Popping my head around the corner to my left, it was the same in that direction too. What I couldn’t see were any doors.

I pulled my head back and leant up against the stone wall, trying to blend in as best I could. Unfortunately fur doesn’t blend in well with stone.

‘How are we going to get in?’ I asked Jack in a hushed voice, ‘There are no doors as far as I can tell.’

‘Not sure,’ he said looking up towards the roof of the building. I did hope he wasn’t planning some sort of acrobatic, down the chimney manoeuvre. Luckily I hadn’t seen any chimneys poking out of the roof. ‘Let’s walk the perimeter. There has to be an entrance somewhere.’

He set off down the side of the building and I followed, treading carefully on the loose stones that lay underfoot, trying to make as little noise as possible. It wasn’t easy. We did a full walk around the building ending up back where we started. There had been a few barred windows that we’d dared to peek through; they had just led into empty rooms. However, the building was definitely lacking doors of any kind.

Jack was looking particularly dejected by now, and my stomach was growling. ‘Why don’t we have another piece of that chocolate,’ I suggested, ‘It might give us an idea.’

He smiled at my hopeful face and sat down, pulling out another chocolate bar. I really hoped we could find some food inside the building. That was if we ever got inside. I’m not sure how I had gone from wanting to get off the island, to wanting to get inside a building that more than likely housed a lunatic who would, no doubt, be delighted to have us wander so willingly into his home. Hunger probably had a lot to do with it.

As we finished the chocolate I was feeling much better. Clearly Jack was too because he was eyeing up the roof again. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said gruffly, ‘I am not Santa Claus. And neither are you.’

He laughed. ‘You got any bright ideas?’

I thought carefully for a minute, pulling a few blades of grass from the ground and running them through my furry fingers so they disappeared into my clenched hand. ‘You said this Doctor is a telepath, and he’s definitely crazy considering his favourite hobby is turning people into monsters; so, what if he’s just playing with us. There’s got to be a door into the building, what if he’s just hiding it from us so we can’t see it?’

Jack looked impressed. ‘You might just be on to something there. Come on, let’s take another walk around.’

We followed the same path as we had before, but this time we ran our hands over the stone wall, feeling for any changes that could suggest a door lay hidden from view. We made it half way round and I was starting to feel like this had been a very stupid idea, when my fingers fell into a deep crack in the wall. One I couldn’t see. This was weird, the wall looked completely solid, and yet my fingers were definitely reaching into a crack that wasn’t there.

‘Hey,’ I said, keeping one hand pressed onto the wall and grabbing Jack with the other, pulling him sharply back to where I stood. ‘Feel this.’ I placed Jack’s hand next to mine on the wall.

‘You’ve got it,’ he whispered excitedly, running his hand down the gap and trying to find a way to open the door. I wasn’t feeling quite as excited. It had just dawned on me that I had found an entrance to the building. To the place that most likely contained the maniac serial killer who had put the werewolf into my head. No, excitement was not top of my list right now.

 
Within minutes Jack had opened the door and stepped inside, beckoning me to follow him. With some trepidation I entered the building and closed the door behind us. Looking back I checked it was still there a moment later. The disappearing house earlier had given me the heebie-jeebies. We were standing in a long corridor that was poorly lit by small, flickering lights, dotted here and there on the walls. A low humming sound could be heard every time we passed under one of them. The flickering on the walls made me look around nervously; I felt like someone was following us, watching our every move. But there was never anything there when I looked round.

We walked from one corridor to the next for what felt like hours. Jack seemed like he knew where he was going, but I was fairly certain we were walking in circles. This whole place was a maze of corridors. We’d be lucky if we found anything in here, let alone anyone. Not to mention, I still wasn’t quite sure what Jack’s plan was when we found the Doctor. I didn’t like to ask as I had a horrible suspicion there wasn’t one. He seemed like a wing-it-and-see kind of guy.

As corridor after corridor passed us by, my mind wandered to the werewolf. I could still feel him fighting inside me, but Jack was keeping him under control. I had to work out how to do that myself. Jack had explained that the Doctor created monsters by convincing his victims—I hated that word—they had the monster inside them. That it was nothing more than a mind trick. The problem was convincing my mind that it was doing this to me. Mind over matter, that’s all it was.
 

We were moving slower now, still in circles as far as I was concerned, but Jack seemed confident, so I followed. I held my hands out in front of me and stared at the fur covering them.
Focus
. I just had to convince myself that my hands were not covered in fur, that they were normal, skin coloured, non-furry hands.
 

I’m not sure what I expected. The fur to magically disappear because I told it to? Regardless, nothing happened.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it,’ Jack said in an optimistic voice, ‘You’ve got the right idea; you need to show your mind that you’re in control. That you will tell it if and when the wolf comes to life.’

‘I can’t stay next to you for the rest of my life so you can suppress the damn thing though can I?’ I said in frustration.

‘You won’t need to,’ Jack said, glancing around the wall into the next corridor. He paused for a moment and took out the phone from his pocket. Without turning it on he held it up towards my face. After a few seconds I realised what he was doing, trying to use it as a mirror. I took it off him and moved it to different angles until I could see my reflection. Wow, my face was almost beginning to look like me again. Well, except for the fur. I handed the phone back with a huge grin.

He took it off me and put it back in his vest. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing—clearly it’s working.’

The corridors all looked the same to me, but I was pretty sure we’d been down this one before. I recognised the broken light on the wall next to me.

‘You sure you know where you’re going?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ Jack said brightly. How was he so chirpy when we were lost in a creepy old building, one that had a serial killer somewhere in it who was probably playing games with us right now, and the one person he’d brought with him had a werewolf trapped in his head?

He turned and grinned at me. ‘I can smell food.’

I sniffed the air purposefully and immediately cheered up. He was right. I just had to hope there wasn’t a Doctor eating it. It didn’t take us long to track down the food; we found it in a little kitchen a couple of corridors down and thankfully there were no serial killers in sight. It smelt so delicious as we entered the room, something was bubbling away in a pot on the cooker.

Jack went to the pot and was about to dip a spoon in and taste it when I stopped him. ‘What are you doing? That could be poisoned for all we know.’ I said, holding his arm away from the food.

‘Dan, he knows we’re here, I can feel it. He’s not going to poison us—he wants to play, and I intend to let him if it means I can eat something.’

That did not sound fun. ‘Please tell me you have a plan Jack?’

He didn’t answer.

After we had filled up on water and food, which thankfully didn’t appear to be killing us, we went back into the corridor and continued on our search. We only made it a few metres before Jack beckoned me over towards another room.

Peering through the open door, I could see a computer, and a desk that was covered in papers and mugs.

‘Looks a lot like my desk at work,’ Jack said grinning. Now why did that not surprise me?

‘See that?’ I said, pointing to the scattered remains of ripped up paper on the floor. Jack crossed into the room and leant down to pick up some of the pieces.