Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [109]
The doorway continued to spin and she walked with it. More confident and impatient to speed things up she pushed at the glass in front of her. The doorway stopped spinning abruptly.
Leela was furious with herself. She had sprung the trap. If she had not touched it she could have slipped through undetected. She had been caught like an unthinking food animal. She looked around and tried to decide where the weakest point of the trap might be. Without warning it all started to move again. This time Leela was careful not to touch it, and when the hole opened up she skipped out of it and into the first room of the stronghold.
She dropped immediately into a fighting crouch with her knife held low, her free hand extended. The shaman must be very confident to have trapped and released her simply as a demonstration of his superiority, she thought.
If he was underestimating her that was a mistake and that was good. If she was to fight him on his own ground she would not make the same mistake.
She knew the power his murderous acolyte, the Tesh called Josh Randall, could call on.
The first room was empty. Ahead of her on the other side of it she could see the floor was moving. She did not intend to let them play games with her again. Beyond the moving floor there was a door: a normal door. Above it there was a crude representation of a man and a stairway. That was the way she would go.
The Doctor saw there was no reality. The possible realities were not reality.
Nothing came and took what the Doctor had been and made it nothing. He flew apart in nothing. Reality gathered to the void and there was one dark flash
The door was operated with a push-bar. Despite her best efforts Leela could not open it quietly. The push-bar rattled and the door squeaked. She abandoned stealth and kicked the door open, plunging through with the knife held wider and higher.
The stairwell was empty. As she peered down it, lights came on. She could see the stairs went round and round and down and down, deep into the ground until they more or less vanished from sight. Was the Doctor all the way down there? How was she going to find him? No wonder the shaman was so confident. He had all this to hide in.
'Doctor?!' she shouted down into the echoing depths. 'Doctor where are you?!'
The Doctor saw nothing folding into the multidimensional voids as the line of singularities became infinite and there was one dark flash
'Doctor?!' Leela shouted again. Below her she saw the most distant of the lights had started to go out. It looked as though the shaft was filling with darkness like black water rising in a well. She looked harder. The shaft was filling with darkness. It was the same blank blackness that she had seen in the wood and in the laboratory of Ghostbuster Bazzer. She could feel the icy tug of it as it raced upwards. It was flooding up towards her.
Leela turned and fled back into the top room of the stronghold. She saw at once that the doorway had stopped spinning. The shaman had trapped her and sent his darkness to kill her in the worst way, the way of the coward, the way of the Tesh.
She looked for something she could use to smash her way out of the stronghold and escape the icy blankness. There was nothing. She shivered. The icy wind was pulling at her. She was going to die here in the freezing darkness. She would be swept away and swallowed by the freezing blankness. She would not die as a warrior. She was Leela of the Sevateem and she would die alone and helpless. Death was nothing if it was a warrior's death. Dying alone was nothing, and nothing to be feared, if it was in the way of a warrior of the Sevateem. This was dying alone and afraid, alone and paralysed by fear. This was the way of the Tesh. This was what the Tesh had told her would happen. This was the what the Tesh had threatened her with.
A fierce instinctive anger surged through her. Hot rage warmed her.