Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [95]
‘God, yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Calamee suddenly felt very cold. She and her family could have been the creatures’ first victims. She looked around, up into the trees, into the bushes.
‘It’s. . . wrong. It feels different somehow. Too quiet, too. . . tame.’
‘There’s no birdsong,’ said Fitz suddenly. ‘Listen – no birds, no animal 170
noises.’ They listened, and there weren’t.
‘He’s right,’ Calamee said. ‘When we were here before, there were loads of birds, a few tree-rats. Nessus was all over the place chasing them. I had to go off and find him ’cos we thought he might run into something bigger than him.’ She gave a little shudder.
‘Maybe the night beasts have scared them all away,’ Sensimi suggested.
‘Maybe,’ said the Doctor, sidling up to Fitz. Calamee suddenly got the weird-est impression of the Doctor and Fitz doing some sort of strange little double-act. It was as if they were practising each other’s mannerisms, gestures, ways of speaking. Maybe they’d spent so much time together that they were now copying each other without realising it. How long had they spent together?
Did either of them actually know? The impression that Calamee had was that they’d been travelling together forever. She felt a twinge of sympathy for poor Trix: did she feel like the gooseberry in their cosy little team? She wondered where Trix had got to.
‘Well, we won’t find out standing here admiring the scenery, will we?’ said Fitz, suddenly striding after the beast. The Doctor gave a shrug and headed after him, with Calamee and Sensimi bringing up the rear.
Gentlemen to the last, the Doctor and Fitz held back all the bushes until they were sure that Calamee and Sensimi had hold of them. And then suddenly they were through, and Calamee heard the Doctor give an appreciative little whistle.
Laid out in front of them was a surprising little haven. In the dim early morning light, the plants, trees and bushes around them looked much the same as outside the bushes, but it was as if someone had gone around throwing copious handfuls of fertiliser at them. The vegetation was lusher, richer, and all around were bright gems of flowers, shining in the grey dawn, studding the bushes, sprouting up through the grassy ground. It was, thought Calamee – with a flush of embarrassment – quite enchanting.
‘It’s beautiful,’ gasped Sensimi, coming up behind.
‘Is it?’ said the Doctor in one of those voices.
‘Isn’t it?’ said Fitz, looking around as if there was something really obvious that he was missing. Calamee realised that the night beast seemed to have disappeared.
‘Take a closer look,’ said the Doctor, striding over to a clump of garish red blooms nestled in the shade at the foot of a bush.
Sensimi leaned in closer and sucked in a sharp breath. ‘That’s horrible,’ she whispered, clutching at the front of her dress.
And Calamee had to agree: what had, at first sight, appeared to be a beautiful floral display was, on closer inspection, little more than a breeding ground for maggots. Nestled in the folds of the carmine petals was a writhing clot of 171
wriggling, white grubs. They clambered over and around each other, and the group’s uncomfortable fascination increased when they saw that the maggots were eating away at the cores of the flowers.
‘I thought maggots normally ate meat or dead animals,’ Fitz said.
‘Well, we are on an alien planet,’ the Doctor reminded him. ‘And there are plenty of creatures that look like maggots that are strictly vegetarian.’ He looked up at them from his kneeling position.
‘Yeah,’ said Fitz, leaning in a little closer and pointing, ‘but that seems wrong, somehow, regardless of where we are.’
At his tone, everyone peered a little closer – and saw what he meant: as the edge of the cluster of maggots fed voraciously on the plant, the centre of the cluster seemed to be sucked down into the plant itself. What Calamee could only think of as lips were grasping at the maggots