Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [68]
'What makes you think that they were associated with Baron Maupertuis?'
Holmes snapped.
'The address labels were in his handwriting. I checked them against the hotel register.'
He smiled.
'An excellent piece of work. I could not have wished for a better agent in place.'
The Doctor raised his eyebrows at me. I smiled back. We went to dinner happy.
We discussed all sorts of things while eating. Over lobster curry with various spicy vegetable dishes Holmes and the Doctor had a running argument - good-natured on the Doctor's side but I'm not sure about Holmes - about the Basque language and its relationship to the ancient Cornish tongue while John Watson asked me what I thought about women playing sphairixtike for the first time. When I admitted my ignorance of the game he told me that it had recently been renamed lawn tennis. I was still none the wiser. Over a pudding made from boiled rice and coconut flavoured with rose essence we all discussed the recent testing of a machine-gun by Hiram Maxim. Watson ventured to suggest that it would put an end to war. I pointed out that the same was said of the bow and arrow. The Doctor muttered something about Z-bombs. We finished off with coffee and liqueurs, and debated our next move. The general consensus was that we should follow the Baron and his tame gorilla to Hyderabad in the morning.
When Holmes and Watson lit up foul-smelling cheroots, I decided to retire for the night. The Doctor and I walked through the decaying splendour of the hotel to the door of his room.
'You seem to be fitting in to the era very well,' he said.
'No thanks to you. Your Time-Lord gift of the gab is fine for alien languages but lousy on slang. I've got a feeling I'm a few decades out'
'I'm sure nobody will notice.'
'And what's all this boat travel rubbish? Why not travel straight here in the TARDIS?'
He smiled.
'It was a ship, not a boat. And I prefer the scenic route.'
By that time we had reached his room. I didn't want to say goodnight, so I told him what I had been thinking earlier, about him probably not sleeping, or even using his room. He smiled bashfully.
'I'll be doing some reading tonight,' he said, patting his pocket. 'I've brought Siger Holmes's journals with me. Siger was definitely on to something. I've been trying to make out the underlying meaning of the chants he reproduces. I'm close, but there's still something I'm missing..'
'Do you intend getting any sleep at all?'
'I tell people that I don't sleep,' he admitted, 'but that's just for effect. I do sleep. Once every hundred years I have a kip for a decade or so.'
He yawned suddenly.
'Excuse me,' he said, 'I'm suddenly very tired.'
He vanished into his room like a rabbit down a burrow.
I stood for a moment, staring at the door in bewilderment, then turned and headed off to my room.
I was four steps down the corridor when a sudden series of crashes and thuds made me whirl and run back to the Doctor's room. I put my ear to the door. It sounded as if there was a fight going on, and it sounded as though it was a big one.
'Doctor?' I yelled. No answer.
Glass crashed inside. I kicked the door down.
The window was broken and the furniture was smashed to matchwood apart from a wardrobe which had unaccountably escaped intact. The carpet was ripped into tatters. The Doctor was standing in the centre of the room with his umbrella held in front of him like a sabre. Before him, crouched but still brushing the ceiling, was a creature from a nightmare. It was a venomous crimson colour, armoured like a crustacean, and it walked on the taloned points of its billowing leathery wings. A coiled tail with a wicked spiked club of flesh on the end brushed the floor beneath its glossy body.
Its head was low-slung and vicious. It had no eyes, no mouth, just a set of thorny growths which jutted forward and seemed to swing from the Doctor to me and back, weighing up the threat.
It shuffled round to face me, the claws on the ends of its wings churning the carpet.
'Get out, Benny,' the Doctor