Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [24]
He reached the mahogany desk at the chamber’s centre and, pushing aside a pile of paperwork, pressed the series of brass buttons on the desk top. The curtains surrounding the area swished up in sequence to reveal the walls behind.
The chamber was octagonal, apparently hewn out of living rock. The angle between each wall was bisected by a heavy stone buttress, its surface glistening with crystalline fragments. Outcrops of chrysoprase and rose quartz crystals clustered at points around the chamber. The walls were inlaid with wide screens that flickered with lozenges of coloured light — a living stained glass whose colours constantly changed and merged. The light caught in the prisms of the elegant chandelier hanging from the ceiling and was refracted through the shimmering haze like neon shoals of tiny darting fish.
In front of one wall was a carved slab of stone like a sloping altar. Nimrod fingered the coloured crystal rods that grew from it; they hummed and flickered, rising and falling in no particular sequence.
Reverently laying his hands on the slab, Nimrod bowed his head to an illuminated oval cell as wide as a man is tall which was set in the wall beyond it. The cell’s mouth was sealed over by a crusty opaque membrane behind which a shadow moved and turned against the glow, restlessly shifting its shape and form. Nimrod felt the waves of energy flowing out through the chamber. He tried to meet its thoughts, to appease its anger, but he could not commune with it. His instinct as a hunter drew his concentration elsewhere; he knew that he was being watched.
He left the slab and crossed the chamber to the dungeon door. There was no sound from the darkness inside, but he still tested that the bolts were firmly in place. The creature incarcerated inside was probably too terrified to make its usual grunts and snarls, even if lately the howls had become more like plaintiff wailing.
‘Poor silent brute,’ muttered Nimrod.
A deep rumbling note drew him back to his place at the altar slab. Behind him an eye appeared at the spyhole in the door, staring out from its tiny dark prison world into the world of light.
‘Not... silent... now!’ spat a voice, sounding each word as if articulating it for the first time.
Nimrod was too absorbed in his devotions to hear. He knelt at the slab, willing his mind into thoughts of propitiation and atonement, trying to appease the disturbed shadow behind the membrane. At last the restless movement and fierce glare settled into a gently pulsing glow.
The eye at the spyhole watched the manservant and then squinted as far round as it could see to an alcove curtained off from the rest of the chamber. The creature had only to whisper instructions. It had links to the outer world and was only now learning to use them.
‘Move yourselves. Move!’ it hissed.
It saw the curtain stir and draw back as something lumbered out of the alcove. The creature at the spyhole half saw the thing and half saw through the thing’s eyes.
The thing was an extension of the prisoner’s own self; it stumbled towards the kneeling manservant.
‘Move! Move!’
It took all of the captive’s will to control the thing’s flailing limbs as it moved closer and closer to Nimrod. It wore a dusty gentleman’s suit and black shoes, and carried a cane which it raised in its white gloved hand above its grey, bloated, reptilian head. One stroke and the Neanderthal was knocked senseless.
‘Did that hurt?’ came the voice. The prisoner stared through the thing’s eyes at the body of its jailer. ‘Good!’
Through its will it turned the stumbling figure of the thing towards the dungeon door.
‘Here!’ it ordered. ‘Here! Move! Now open door!’
The thing slowly