Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [46]
‘This is all we need,’ he scowled. He paused for a moment, then made up his mind and marched inside.
Tegan and Will hurried in close behind him.
Will had given up being surprised. When he had been bobbing and swinging about in the cart and feeling sure that his tomes were splintering inside him, he had made up his mind that if he survived he would take everything in his stride from now on. He had discovered that when absolutely everything is extraordinary, nothing is astonishing any more. Running into a blue box, therefore, was simply another wonder to be accepted without demur, and he shrugged as he ran in through its door, as though this sort of thing happened to him every day.
It was not so with .Jane Hampden and Ben Wolsey, however. They looked at the TARDIS in wonder, approached it warily, gazed at each other with a wild surmise - then they, too, shrugged and went inside it.
Once inside they - and Will Chandler, despite his newly-trade resolution - were more overwhelmed than ever. For a moment they were struck dumb by the sheer size and technology of the TARDiS’s interior. But, as Tegan had found out so many times before, there was no time for discussing trivial matters like the feeling that they had just walked into Aladdin’s cave, for Aladdin himself was already fuily occupied at a large illuminated console, pounding switches as fast. as his fingers would move.
The Doctor was looking for instantaneous results and, when they didn’t come, he threw up his hands in disgust.
He pressed more buttons - and a low, steady hum of machinery was heard. Then, without turning round he pointed backwards and upwards to the wall above the door.
‘Quietly now,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t alarm it.’
Startled, they looked up and saw the lights which had alarmed Tegan and Turlough earlier. They were still shimmering, still moving in a seemingly random pattern, but there was something else now: inside the lights, clinging to the wall, was the obese, bloated, spider-like shape of another rapidly-forming Malus clone.
It was like the one which had invaded Wolsey’s house, except that if possible it was even uglier. its head, much too large for its body, possessed hair like clustering snakes, bulging eyes, a misshapen chin and vicious, shark-like teeth. Its arms and legs were thin and over-long, and the lingers and toes were attenuated and spindly like the bones of a deformed skeleton. There was a ribbed, scaly tail which helped it to cling to the wall like a stone monkey.
And it was coming to life.
They were too amazed to speak. The heavy atmosphere of the console room seemed doom-laden and full of threat -
an impression which was strengthened by the urgency with which the Doctor was flying from one bank of instruments to another.
It was Tegan who dared to speak first. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him.
Stopping his frantic activity for a moment, the Doctor surveyed his handiwork, and frowned. ‘if I can lock the signal conversion unit on to the frequency of the psychic energy feeding it, I might be able to direct the Malus.’
Wolsey looked at him sharply. ‘Is that possible?’
‘Well, there’s a remote chance.’ The Doctor did not sound very optimistic. As an afterthought, he operated the scanner screen mechanism; the shield lifted silently and showed Joseph Willow and a trooper creeping across the crypt towards them.
‘Doctor!’ Tegan shouted.
The Doctor had already seen them. ‘Ah,’ he said quietly,
‘perhaps you should close the door.’
Wolsey gazed at the screen. ‘They didn’t waste much time,’ he said, frowning. He was very disappointed that, his adversary had caught up with them so quickly.
Jane, intrigued, watched Tegan run to the console to operate the door lever. The door slid shut. Tegan breathed a sigh of relief: they were sae her the moment. Except, of course, for that thing