Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [30]
For a long Moment, nothing happened. The crowd held their breath. The men with the poles leaned over the fence, tension evident in their faces.
The gate slowly opened as something pushed against it from the other side.
A greyish-green form slunk into the arena. It was about the size of a great dane - some five or six feet from nose to tail - but thicker-set and built closer to the ground. Its head was flat and pointed, its ears lay furled along the side of its head. A ruff of coarse black fur extended from its neck along its spine to where a thick tail flicked restlessly, but otherwise it appeared to be covered with rough scales. Pure red eyes, with no distinction between pupil, iris or cornea, took in everything around it - the crowd, the fence, the men with the poles - and it snarled its defiance. Two enlarged incisors at the front of its mouth gleamed with spittle.
As if the creature was not strange enough, it only had one rear leg. For a moment Holmes assumed that it had lost the limb in some other bout, but then he saw how thickly muscled the remaining one was, how it sat centrally beneath the creature's pelvis, and how nimbly the creature pivoted on its rear leg and scampered around the ring. It had obviously been born that way. Holmes had seen nothing like it.
'It's some bastard offspring of a rat!' yelled a wag in the crowd.
'A rat like you've never seen before and will never seen again,' the master of ceremonies yelled back. 'A giant rat, caught in the depths of Sumatra, the most vicious and dangerous beast you ever set your peepers on.'
As the crowd jostled for a better look, Holmes tried to place it. The resemblance to a rodent was obvious, despite the massive rear leg and the scales, but certainly not rattus rattus or rattus norvegicus. Holmes had read of rhizomys sumatrensis, the great Sumatran bamboo rat, but this bizarre monstrosity bore little relationship to the descriptions. It looked to Holmes more like some tripodal lizard. He watched as it made a deceptively casual scuttle for the nearest section of fence, culminating in a short leap powered by that massive rear limb. The crowd jumped back as one, all except for Holmes and one of the men with the poles, who lashed at the beast with the sharpened end. It twisted in mid-air and landed gracelessly on the blood-soaked ground. The level gaze and low hiss with which it favoured the man seemed to promise much for later. He blanched, and wiped his brow. Holmes leaned closer, watching the way the creature moved.
Judging by the matting of the fur around its neck, the apparent softness of its scaled but almost human hands and the casual manner with which it treated the crowd, Holmes judged that it had seen the inside of a circus tent or a travelling exhibition more recently than it had seen Sumatra. The thought made Holmes's blood run slightly colder. What next: tiger fights in Hyde Park? Panther races across Tower Bridge?
Everybody in the crowd bar Holmes was placing bets, and the odds heavily favoured the creature. Holmes wasn't so sure. Its lack of scars and the nervousness with which it sniffed the blood which had been spilled during the earlier dog-against-dog bouts indicated that it was a newcomer to this sport. The dogs, of course, were not.
The ringmaster was watching carefully from the sidelines, and as the betting began to tail off he raised a grimy handkerchief.
'Gents, are you ready?'
A howl went up from the crowd. The creature grew agitated, as if it knew what was about to happen.
The ringmaster dropped his handkerchief.
Three squat, scarred bulldogs raced through the gate. Quick hands immediately fastened it behind them. The creature whirled at the noise of their yapping, jumping backwards in surprise, and snarling. The crowd leaned over the barrier, screaming encouragement. The first bulldog saw its prey and flung itself straight across the arena. A sudden presentiment, perhaps the first