Doctor Who_ Last of the Gaderene - Mark Gatiss [28]
He stepped back, feeling his heels sink slightly into the marsh. Despite the black night he could see that the wetland ahead was moving.
A huge shape was rising out of the darkness, dripping with water, its vast jaws clicking open, its fetid breath blasting all over him.
Noah opened his mouth to scream, but no scream came out.
Bliss gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles blanched.
The mind of the other reached out again. It was wild with energy, pursuing, attacking, wanting to kill. Yet the dark intelligence that survived at its core seemed to hold it back.
In the void, it felt her mind and pleaded with her to end its agony.
Bliss shook her broad head. Shook it until flecks of spit flew from her mouth.
‘I cannot,’ she sobbed. ‘I cannot help you. Let me be...’
The screeching in her mind abruptly ceased. Bliss put her head in her hands.
The Doctor’s car approached Culverton a little after sunset.
The dying rays of the sun set the flat landscape ablaze and he slowed down a little to enjoy the sight, He remembered another evening like this, sitting alone by the Thames, trying to come to terms with his exile.
In his early days as UNIT’s scientific adviser, a long time before Axons, Daemons and Daleks had come to bother him, he’d put on a good show of ignoring the Time Lords’
sentence. But in truth, he’d found the routine unbearable.
Stifling.
To think that he, of all people, should be marooned on one tiny world, in one time period – a heartbeat in the great scheme of things.
At first, he had thrown himself into his researches, working ridiculously long hours in the lab, trying desperately to work out a means of escape from the twentieth century.
I am no ordinary man.
The thought resounded again and again inside his head.
I am no ordinary man.
Yet how could he pretend to be otherwise when he was surrounded by the Brigadier’s personnel, clocking in and out, going back to their families at night?
The winter evenings were the worst, the English night pressing against the laboratory windows, black as molasses while the room’s primitive yellow electrics blazed away.
For a while, he’d taken to wandering through the TARDIS, as though its endless labyrinth of corridors would somehow lead back to the wandering life he had known. But this had grown too painful, the paraphernalia of previous adventures bringing him sharply, and literally, back down to Earth.
After a time, though, something had changed inside the Doctor. He began to find the Brigadier’s blinkered military mind less objectionable and rather more endearing. He secretly looked forward to each new problem, relishing the dangers it might bring. On an evening like this one, by the Thames, with the insignificant sun setting over this insignificant but wonderful little planet, the Doctor had felt suddenly... happy.
Then, out of nowhere, the Omega business had come up and, with its successful conclusion, release from his exile. The whole Universe was his to explore once again. He remembered the tiny twinge in his stomach as he stepped across the threshold of the TARDIS for the first time after his knowledge of the dematerialisation codes had been restored.
What was it? Excitement? Adrenaline? Or was it just the slightest hint of fear?
It was an uncomfortable fact to face but the Doctor knew that his first thought as he’d leant, exhausted, on the console after his escape from Xanthos had been... home.
He glanced down at Jo, tucked up, fast asleep beneath her fur-collared coat, and brought Bessie in a large circle around the village green. He let Jo sleep on as he parked by an antiquated water pump, then swung his legs over the side of the car and stretched. It had been a long and rather tiring drive.
Slipping into his emerald-green smoking jacket, the Doctor shot his ruffled cuffs and looked around.
Post office, pub, shop. He rubbed the back of his neck.
Green, pump, houses. Charming. Quite charming.
He leant over into Bessie and shook Jo gently by the shoulder. She groaned and rubbed her eyes sleepily.