Doctor Who_ Enlightenment - Barbara Clegg [36]
‘I thought it seemed different when I took it off,’ she panted. ‘That was what had changed! It was there – like a diamond – right in the centre of the tiara!’
‘What happened when you were in the wheel-house with Wrack?’ the First Mate asked, keeping pace easily at her side.
‘Nothing – I can’t think–’ Tegan felt her head beginning to whirl.
‘Come on!’ the Doctor shouted, and disappeared round a corner ahead.
Turlough watched in horror, mesmerised by that pallid face floating in the gloom. The beam of darkness grew more Stygian still, and still the deep voice, reverberated.
‘Focus... focus... Your mind is a channel... through which power will flow... focus your mind...’
In Tegan’s cabin, the tiara was lying on the bed where she had thrown it. But the crystal which shone at its centre was changing. It was darkening. And it was beginning to throb.
Tegan’s lungs felt as though they were bursting. When she saw the Doctor stop, she thought at first that he must need a breather too. But he simply opened the glass door of a fire-prevention cabinet on the wall, grabbed an axe from inside, and ran on. Tegan moaned with exhaustion. Then, ignoring Marriner’s sympathetic glance, she pulled herself together, and with a colossal effort, flung herself forward again.
On the bed, the crystal in the tiara was darker still. It was pulsing faster... and faster...
Wrack’s lips moved, but the voice had sunk to a whisper, hissing in the darkness. ‘Focus... focus... focus...’
The crystal was now coal-black, with a life of its own. Its pulse filled the room like a drumming noise, and in the beats sounded the Black Guardian’s sibilant voice, ‘Focus...
focus... focus...’
There was a crash as the door was flung open, and the Doctor dashed in. Without even pausing, he grabbed the tiara from the bed and hurled it on the floor. When Tegan and Marriner arrived, he was slashing at it with the axe.
They gaped at him, appalled, as the throbbing in the room grew louder and more insistent. And then the Doctor was on target. A blow from the axe caught the crystal and smashed it into fragments. For one moment of blinding relief, he thought he had succeeded. But, to his horror, each of the fragments’seemed to take up the beat, each pulsed darkly, each one became a Focus. The voice became several voices, overlapping, whispering. ‘Focus... focus...’
In the darkness of the grid room, Turlough stared in terror as Wrack’s face, pale in the gloom, multiplied into many faces, like the heads of a Hydra, all whispering...
‘What is it? What’s happening to it?’ Tegan gasped appalled.
‘I can’t destroy it!’ The Doctor was furious with himself.
‘I’m a fool! Its power has multiplied!’ He glanced frantically around the room, and grabbed the first thing he saw. It was a flimsy scarf of Tegan’s, lying over the back of a chair. Frantically, he started shovelling the pieces of crystal into it.
‘Help me!’ he panted ‘I’ve got to get rid of it!’
Tegan and Marriner dropped to their knees, scrabbling urgently for the black fragments pulsing on the floor. The minute they were all collected, the Doctor was on his feet and twisting the scarf into a bundle, he dashed from the room with it clutched in his hand. The other two hurried after him. Along passages they ran, up ladders, along more passages – Tegan thought she was going to collapse.
‘Where’s he going?’ she gasped, with a stitch in her side.
‘The deck!’ Marriner answered, grabbing her hand and pulling her along. ‘All the portholes are sealed –’
The top companion-hatch was flung open and the Doctor almost fell through on his last legs. He tried to stagger to the rail, but collapsed, the bundle in his hand buzzing like a swarm of bees. Driven on by desperation, he crawled across the deck. Still holding the bundle, beating now to a crescendo, he dragged himself to his feet, and with one last effort, hurled it over the rail. Out into space it went, in a great arc. And as Marriner reached the top of the ladder, there was a blinding flash of white light, and it exploded.