Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [85]
carefully avoiding the gaping hole which the creature had Nightshade turned around and retched as an appalling ripped through the floor.
smell assaulted his nostrils. This was all wrong. This His jacket lay in tatters in the corner next to the tubular belonged to someone else’s life.
ashtray and there were black bloodstains all over the walls.
He fell back against the armchair as the window shattered, It had been real, then. He breathed out noisily.
a great, glistening black claw ramming its way inside.
Trevithick pressed the Level 8 button and the doors slid
‘Trevithick,’ rustled the voice.
shut with a soft click.
Trevithick
He had little idea what he would do when he got to the Trevithick
control room; after all, daylight was only safe in fairy stories.
Trevithick blinked twice and opened his eyes. He was What if there were more of them waiting for him? It would lying with his back against the wall of the same corridor certainly be the end. He hadn’t the strength left to...
into which he had tumbled the previous night.
Trevithick frowned as the floor indicator reached Level 8
He craned his neck and looked over towards the tiny and then continued downwards. A cold chill ran through portal through which daylight was streaming. The dish of him. Not again. Not more.
the telescope dominated the view.
He’d always had a horror of being inside a plummeting Of course, he was on Level 18. That’s where he’d reached lift. Was this it? Wasn’t there a position he had to assume, after destroying the creature. Then he must’ve dropped off bend his knees or something? Or was that just an old wives’
to sleep.
tale?
He cursed his old body again. This wasn’t the time for The lift, however, continued to descend in its own stately frailty. He had to make sure the others were all right. He way.
had defeated that monster, but there had been at least five Trevithick jabbed at the Level 8 button again but there others. Getting back to the control room was now a priority.
was no response. He glanced down at the floor and felt Trevithick looked about for a doorway, expecting an compelled to peer through the hole out into the dark shaft.
entrance to a flight of stairs, but the corridor walls were Grunting with effort, he crouched down on his hands and blank. He turned and regarded the closed lift doors with knees and put his face as close as he dared to the hole.
dread. That was obviously his only way down.
Expecting only darkness, Trevithick was taken aback by the sight which met his eyes.
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
The lift was descending into a network of glowing light, The room was buzzing with energy once more, the noise wisps of fiery energy cocooning the entire shaft like a from various machines almost deafening.
spectral spider’s web.
‘Any change?’ said Vijay as Cooper hobbled back to her There was a deep, throbbing pulse emanating from the consoles.
light as it progressed upwards.
She sifted through a sheaf of paper and frowned. ‘There’s Upwards.
a real pattern now. Still makes no sense, but it’s a pattern.
Trevithick got to his feet and pressed the first button that Regular. Like a pulse.’
met his trembling fingers. Nothing happened.
‘A pulse,’ said Holly calmly.
He swore savagely and kept his finger on the button until Vijay ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I still don’t see how the nail whitened.
a nova could produce this kind of data.’
It seemed as though the lift were being dragged Holly slapped herself across the forehead. ‘It’s so bloody inexorably down into the pulsing entity below.
obvious!’
Insubstantial tendrils were already groping their way Cooper smiled. ‘What is?’
through the hole in the floor.
‘The Doctor was right all the time, only he didn’t know Trevithick panicked and stabbed at the ‘doors open’
what about. We’ve been acting on the assumption that all control, his whole frame shaking in fear. The floor indicator this data is coming from space. Because that’s where