CLARE SAT IN an armchair in Professor Chronotis’s study and found that she was literally twiddling her thumbs.
Hang on. Hang on.
It was at least twenty minutes since that little porter person had gone off to ‘ring around’ and find his perfectly reasonable explanation. Incredibly, thought Clare, yet another man had told her to stop worrying her little head and go and wait for him to sort everything out. And yet again she had obeyed him. At least she fancied Chris, and had been overwhelmed by the Doctor’s force of personality. The little porter was just anybody, so she had even less excuse this time.
She leapt to her feet and glared around the room, searching for any clue to what had befallen Chris, the Doctor and the Professor and, come to that, this girl the porter called Ramona or something. If he had been any of the other men in the faculty, she might have suspected Chris was off gallivanting somewhere with this mysterious Ramona character, but in his case that would be ridiculous.
Determined to initiate some positive action of her own, Clare started a methodical search of the Professor’s rooms. She went into the little kitchenette and ran the taps, and though the pipes groaned and wheezed it was nothing like the groaning and wheezing she’d heard before. She caught her reflection in the glass door of a cupboard and winced. Her hair was all over the place, and she looked tired and crumpled in yesterday’s clothes and make-up.
She went back into the study and began opening drawers, peering under tables, and rifling through sideboards. There was nothing but mess and confusion. Heaps of paper, tattered files and random odd objects like an orange, a catapult and a loose cassette tape marked Bonnie Tyler’s Greatest Hits. Clare huffed. Bonnie Tyler had hardly had enough hits to warrant such a collection. I mean, she thought, apart from ‘Lost In France’ and ‘It’s A Heartache’, what had the woman done? She looked closer at the cassette. There were more song titles printed on it, songs she didn’t recognise. She squinted at the little smudged white letters of the copyright information. She blinked and squinted again.
This compilation © 1986.
Clare was at a loss. Why would anybody bother to make such a thing, have it done so professionally, then just leave it lying around? Clare tapped the cassette with her fingers, intrigued.
The simplest explanation? It was real. It did come from 1986. Somebody from the future, somebody who could travel in time, had brought it back with them.
No, no, that was the stupidest explanation. If somebody had travelled back in time from 1986 wouldn’t they have brought something more impressive from the future? A new kind of digital watch or a videophone? Not Bonnie Tyler’s Greatest Hits.
She didn’t know what to think any more.
So she put the cassette down, and grabbed Chris’s jacket. She could smell the cheap washing powder of the St John’s communal launderette.
‘Oh, where are you, Parsons?’ she said aloud.
And then a very curious thing happened. Her eyes were drawn to a cupboard in a far corner that she hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t the normal way your eyes are drawn to something, thought Clare. It was as if some exterior impulse had entered her head and made her look in that direction, literally turning her eyeballs to the cupboard.
She folded Chris’s jacket over the back of a chair and went to the cupboard. It was a big, old wooden-panelled thing, quite an antique. It was also firmly locked. Which was odd because nothing else had been, even the Professor’s front door.
She looked around the room. Presumably there must be a key somewhere in all this mess.
Suddenly, a thin shaft of sunlight shone through the small gap in the closed curtains of one of the windows. It seemed to be coming in at a very peculiar angle. It illuminated a particular section of the cluttered mantelpiece like a spotlight.
Clare stared, blinked – although all this blinking didn’t seem to be doing her any good – and saw, in the very spot the light was shining, between a stopped clock under a dome and a bust of Dryden, a small brass key. The sunlight made the key glint and sparkle in a ridiculously magical way, as if it had been lit by a Hollywood movie’s production team.
‘No, ridiculous,’ Clare said, out loud again.
Behind her there was a crash. She jumped and spun around. One of the teetering piles of books had chosen this particular moment to overbalance.
Clare gawped at the titles of the books that had collapsed, fanned out on the rug like a window display.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Secret Garden. The Phoenix and the Carpet. The Box of Delights. And finally, inevitably, what looked very much like it could be a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Clare was briefly transported back to a childhood world of wonder, adventure and excitement where anything could happen. Secret passages, hidden treasures, mysterious gateways, epic journeys through imaginary lands.
It was as if the room was encouraging her into a world of magic and –
Rubbish. She was an adult, she was a scientist, there was a rational explanation for this, and she was going to find it.
She grabbed the key, stormed to the cupboard and opened it, almost daring it to reveal an enchanted kingdom.
Inside were a pair of cricket pads, some ancient spiked running shoes, a punter’s paddle and an old, folding wooden toolbox. Clare angrily flung them aside. There was nothing at the back of the cupboard but the back of the cupboard. So she kicked it.
With a hydraulic whirr the back of the cupboard swung around like a revolving bookcase in a corny horror film. It revealed a triangular brass panel at waist height which swiftly extended itself forward with a grind of gears.
It took Clare a moment to comprehend what she was seeing. The brass panel was old and weathered, but it was covered with levers, switches and dials whose function she could only guess at, many of them marked with curious circular designs similar to the scrollwork on the front of that strange book. There was a row of little glass bulbs at the top of the panel, unlit.
Whatever this thing controlled, it was obviously inert, thought Clare. So there’d be no harm in touching it.
She reached out and pressed a button at random. It switched in with a satisfying, springy ker-clunk, like a channel button on a television set.
All the little bulbs lit up.
Clare had just one second to raise an eyebrow. The next second, the faint humming noise suddenly rose in volume, loud and insistent. The curtains at every window swished shut. The lights in the room flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed. There was a tremendous creaking and cracking like splintering wood. The vestibule door slammed shut. She heard that wheezing, groaning noise again, but this time it was even more pained and protesting.
And then she felt the ground move under her feet.
She was thrown violently backwards on to the floor. A bookcase toppled towards her.
Clare had a sudden vision of her gran standing at her bedroom door in their old flat. ‘Ruddy books!’ she was saying. ‘Books won’t take you anywhere, young lady.’
Then Clare blacked out.
Wilkin knocked on the door of Room P-14. ‘Miss?’ he called. ‘Are you in there, miss? I’m afraid I haven’t been able to locate Professor Chronotis. Miss?’
The plumbing was kicking up a hell of a row again. She probably couldn’t hear him over that din. Gently, he pulled open the door.
And staggered back.
The little vestibule of Room P-14, with its coat hooks and welcome mat was just where it should have been. But beyond it there was a howling blue vortex. A whirling, distorted tunnel of impossible beauty and complexity extending for ever.
Wilkin slammed the door shut.
He straightened his tie, adjusted his hat, and, deciding to ignore the vortex completely, he knocked once more and opened the door again. He would give the room a chance to sort itself out and behave like a respectable part of St Cedd’s college.
This time, beyond the vestibule, there was no vortex. Just a view onto the backs of the college and a large, flattened area of mud, surrounded by flowerbeds, to mark where Room P-14 should have been, but was decidedly not.
Wilkin did not believe in third chances. He slammed the door shut, turned on his heel and went to find a policeman.