Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [59]
She smiled and all but skipped the last few steps to the mouth of the cave. She was immediately struck by an unpleasant smell - like dead fish and rotten vegetables - but she took a step inside. Instantly the stench wrapped itself around her like a winding sheet, making her gag. She clamped her hands over her mouth and nose and took a hasty step backwards. The stench was pungent as ammonia; her eyes began to water, her surroundings dissolving into a blur of watery shadows. Something must have died in here, she thought. There was no way that Terry would have lingered here.
Without any warning a figure stepped into view from behind a shelf of rock in front of her, making her jump. In the dim light its head was a bleached skull, its hands held out before it, palms up. As it moved towards her June’s heart skipped a beat and then she gasped as she realised that it was indeed Terry, after all. His sunglasses and her blurred vision had made his eyes look like nothing more than dark, empty sockets. She blinked to clear her vision, and was only partially successful. Terry’s outstretched hands looked dirty, but as he stepped forward into the sunlight she saw that they were not black, but red.
‘Blood,’ he said before she could speak.
There was a beat of silence as she took this in, then, ‘My God, what have you done to yourself?’
He frowned as if he didn’t understand the question, and shook his head. ‘Not mine. It’s all over the wall.’
She glanced behind him, fighting off the smell. ‘My God,’
she breathed. ‘Terry, we’ve got to tell someone.’
Then the interior of the cave erupted.
June’s first thought was that a bomb had gone off. All at once sand was geysering up and out of the cave in a great plume, covering them both. June felt it blasting through her hair, stinging her eyes, crunching grittily between her teeth.
She was thrown backwards, on to her knees, swiping at her face as if she was being attacked by bees. She coughed, sneezed and spluttered, her eyes streaming.
She straightened bolt upright, however, when she heard Terry begin to scream.
The first, a terrible, wrenching scream of mortal agony, was rapidly followed by a succession of others. June felt every muscle clench at the sound, felt a bolt of coldness tear through her stomach. Despite the stinging pinpricks of sand in her eyes she forced herself to open them. When she saw why Terry was screaming, she forgot her own discomfort in an instant. Her eyes widened in terror and disbelief.
The thing that had erupted from beneath the sand was an impossibility. Part bull, part spider, part scorpion, it was massive, its jointed, spiny legs at least eight feet long. Even its bristling, multi-eyed head, which looked tiny in relation to its muscle-packed abdomen, was substantially bigger than June’s. It was tearing apart the figure pinned to the ground between its two front legs. Blood was gushing out over the sand as it feasted, trickling down the rocks, swirling around June’s feet like a sticky incoming tide.
Within seconds Terry had stopped screaming. His body jerked spasmodically. His mouth was open and full of blood.
His sunglasses had fallen off and his eyes had rolled up into his head.
The scene was so appalling, so unbelievable, that June was numbed almost to the point of inertia. But acting with an odd, distant composure, she stepped out of her flip-flops, turned from the scene and walked away. She moved carefully as she picked her way across the rocks, taking pains not to slip. It was only when she reached the edge of the formation and she had jumped over the blobs of jelly nestled in the crook between rocks and sand that she began to run, heading back the way she had come.
She had progressed no more than a dozen yards when she heard