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СКАЧАТЬ took his jacket off and hung it in the narrow hallway before following her into the kitchen. Carol Thornbury was a pretty woman, seven years his junior, with dark brown hair and a feisty personality. If there was one word to describe her, it would be ‘capable’. But then, as a nurse, she’d have to be. Whatever life threw at her, she dealt with it in her usual efficient manner. She might have a bit of a rant to begin with, but she quickly applied her common sense to whatever the problem might be, without any unnecessary fuss or drama. When her husband had walked out on both her and their five-year-old son, she had been as organised at sorting out that mess as with everything else in her life. She had managed perfectly well without a man for several years until her path crossed Martin’s. Sometimes he felt that she had even organised getting the two of them together. If she had, he was thankful.

      “You got a parcel today,” she said, waiting for the microwave to ping. “I think I see more of that postman than I do you. Wouldn’t mind if he was remotely dishy, but he looks like Fungus the Bogeyman’s uglier brother.”

      Martin’s face lit up and he hurried into the lounge where a medium-sized parcel stood on the coffee table.

      “Bless you, eBay!” he cried, snatching the package and dashing upstairs with it.

      “What about the lasagne?” Carol called.

      “In a bit!” he answered. “First things first.”

      Carol rolled her eyes. “We’re going to need an extension at this rate,” she told herself.

      It was a three-bedroom semi, but only two of those were ever slept in. Whenever guests came to stay, they were compelled to sleep on the sofa downstairs. The third bedroom was Martin’s own private sanctuary. Somewhere he could escape the grinding rigours of teaching at a modern High School and the Emma Taylors of this world. A place filled with things that his pupils would hang him out to dry for if they ever found out about them.

      “Paul!” he shouted, knocking on the box-room door as he passed by. “It’s here!”

      The maths teacher took a shallow breath before entering his own ‘inner sanctum’. Then strode inside.

      The few visitors who were ever privileged to be ushered in here were always lost for words. There was too much to see, too much to take in straight away to be able to formulate any coherent sentence, so they always made the same sort of exclamations.

      “Oh, wow!”

      “Amazing!”

      “Blimey!”

      Only Carol’s mother had ever been practically minded enough to come out with, “How do you dust it all?”

      Martin Baxter, the cynical, down-to-earth maths teacher who took no nonsense from any of his students, was a monumental, dyed-in-the-wool, sci-fi and fantasy geek – with a capital G.

      His special room was crammed from floor to ceiling with all manner of merchandise: DVDs, costumes, props, limited-edition prints, toys, action figures, models, replicas, books, comics, magazines and framed photographs of himself meeting the stars of his favourite films and television shows. There were busts of just about every character in the Lord of the Rings movies and daleks of every dimension, from the tiny ‘Rolykins’ version up to life-size (a particularly extravagant, pre-Carol present to himself). Spaceships from diverse universes flew in formation from the ceiling – followed incongruously by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There were Star Fleet uniforms, complete with a selection of various comm badges and tricorders, and even a genuine phaser from the first season of the Next Generation (another expensive present to himself in his bachelor days).

      A preposterously long, multicoloured scarf festooned a hatstand, an Alien egg with the face-hugger just crawling out of it, a bottle of Tru:Blood, a prop business card used in the 1957 movie Night of the Demon by the black magician Julian Karswell – with the silver warning written on it – the Clangers, together with the Soup Dragon, Iron Chicken and froglets, a lamp housed within the golden head of C-3PO, several magic wands in display cases, a chunk of Kryptonite that glowed in the dark, a top-of-the-range lightsaber which made movie-accurate sound effects and many more objects which had taken Martin years to accumulate. One of his most prized acquisitions, however, was also one of the smallest – an actual authentic Liberator teleport bracelet from Blake’s Seven. Now that had been expensive!

      Even with his mathematical skill, Martin had given up trying to calculate how much it had all cost him, but he knew it was far, far more than the sum Carol’s identity thieves had stolen from her account.

      He set the parcel on his crowded desk and began tearing off the packaging. A young face appeared around the door behind him.

      “Let’s see!” Paul cried.

      Paul Thornbury was eleven. He had curly, fair hair and was small and slight for his age. He shared Martin’s love of fantasy though and the two of them could spend hours together glued to a DVD or poring over comics or discussing the latest monster in Martin’s all-time favourite show. Was it as good as the Zygons, or was it as dismal as the Myrka? During such conversations they spoke in a language that Carol, quite frankly, didn’t understand. She had no use for science fiction and fantasy. She preferred real life, but was more than delighted to leave them to it, while she sat in front of Casualty or House with a glass of white wine. Martin could never understand why she watched those programmes. Didn’t she have enough of that at work? Carol would always nod, but added that she enjoyed laughing at the mistakes.

      Paul stood beside Martin and watched him pull the bubble wrap and newspaper out of the adapted cardboard box. He had found this for Martin. He had entered it as a special search in eBay and had been checking it for the past seven months, without success. Then, a few weeks ago, one had come up and now here it was.

      Martin tore the last piece of packing from it and turned the glass object in his hands so that it caught the light. It was a fresnel lens. Quite hard to come by nowadays, but essential if Martin was going to build the full-size Police Box he had always wanted. It would be nothing without the lamp on top.

      “Mum’ll go spare,” Paul chuckled.

      This was their big conspiracy. They had been keeping it a secret from her for ages, ever since they discovered a website giving instructions on how to build one. When they had moved in, Carol had consigned all of Martin’s ‘toys’ to the one room and not even the mugs or fridge magnets were allowed in the rest of the house. If so much as an X-Files coaster appeared anywhere, it was swiftly returned to the inner sanctum with a Post-it note attached, on which she’d drawn an exclamation mark.

      “We’ll just have to outvote her,” Martin said. “How good will one of these be in the garden?”

      “Most excellent!” Paul agreed.

      Martin rubbed his hands together gleefully then hid the lens inside an accommodating R2-D2.

      “She’ll come round,” he said hopefully. “We’ll get it started one weekend when she’s working and she won’t be able to stop us.”

      “What happened after school?” Paul asked. “I heard Mum talking on the phone.”

      “Good job you had your piano lesson and weren’t there,” Martin told him. “Two very nasty fights. The Head is furious.”

      “Wish I’d seen it,” the boy said, disappointed. Then he added, “She put too much salt in the lasagne again.”

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