Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [36]
‘By keeping us alive,’ the Doctor said.
‘Yes, but for how long?’
‘For now will do – for now.’
Leela drew her long hunting knife to make her point. ‘You have to face an enemy if you want to survive,’ she lectured.
The Doctor strove to be patient. He knew she was just repeating what she had been told but he had thought her more intelligent. ‘You have to find them if you want to face them,’ he said. He gave up trying to hurry her to the trees and strode on, relying on her impulse to finish the argument.
Leela sheathed the knife and loped along beside him. ‘You don’t find them by running away,’ she challenged.
‘We’re running away from the experiment, not the experimenter,’ the Doctor said as they crossed into the trees.
It was then that they heard the scream from the lake behind them.
‘Did you hear that?’ Sozerdor stopped and held up his hand.
‘Listen. In the distance. Very faint. That was a scream, wasn’t it?’
He’s doing it again, Kley thought. We’ve had this before and before and how often before. The laboratory maze was back in her mind. ‘Keep it moving, Sozerdor,’ she said, pushing on through the increasingly dense vegetation.
‘I heard a scream.’
‘Stop obsessing about dying, she said wearily. ‘The only person who doesn’t know you’re dead is you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he demanded.
‘It means if this place doesn’t kill you,’ Fermindor growled,
‘I will.’
‘I heard it too,’ Belay said. ‘I can still hear it.’
Kley stopped now and they all listened. Very faintly, in the far distance, someone was screaming.
‘Can you make out where they are?’ Fermindor asked.
Kley checked her compass. ‘I can’t even make out where we are,’ she said.
Rinandor screamed again and kept on screaming as Pertanor was dragged back under the water. The Doctor retrieved the vine-stem rope but by the time he reached the bank there was no sign of the young man.
‘Do something,’ Rinandor sobbed. ‘It’s killing him!’
‘What was it?’ the Doctor shouted at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she wailed. ‘I didn’t see it. It was waiting under the surface.’
Leela took the vine from the Doctor and looped one end of it round her waist and handed the other back to him. Before he could argue about it she had stepped into the water and started wading out. ‘If it wants to know about me then I will have to show it.’
‘Whatever this one is it’ll be driven by hunger, Leela,’ the Doctor called to her as he paid out the crude rope. ‘It’s looking for a meal, that’s all. But its real purpose, the reason it’s been put there, is to see if you can kill it before it kills you.’
‘Hurry up!’ Rinandor screamed ‘You’re wasting time. Stop wasting time!’ She limped round the bank towards the Doctor.
‘He’s still alive. You can still save him!’
Leela unsheathed the knife again and waded on through the deepening water which stayed just warm enough to feel as though it was not there at all. Suddenly she felt the lake bed drop away from under her feet. She ducked her head below the surface, then lifted up, took a deep breath and arched over and downward.
‘Keep your eyes open and don’t be long down there!’ the Doctor shouted after her and she heard his voice distorted and rippling, the weight squeezed out of it by the water. ‘I hate swimming!’ were his last recognisable words but they had little meaning as her concentration focused on diving down.
Her momentary impulse was to keep her eyes closed, but then ‘Keep your eyes open’ swirled into her mind, and she opened them quickly to find herself swimming down in a column of light surrounded on all sides by shadows, deepening to abrupt blackness.
She recognised immediately and without needing to think about it that the lake must be a squat bottle shape, with most of its volume hidden in darkness underneath the banks. The light was coming from the comparatively narrow neck of the bottle where the surface of the water was. Directly in front of her, the island was a rock pinnacle rising up from the gloomy depths. She kept on