Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [11]
She couldn't even tell how far away the creature - if it was a creature - was.
It could have been ten yards, or twenty, or more.
The Doctor held up a hand, urging her not to follow, then turned and began to edge slowly forward. It was obvious he wanted to help the man if at all possible.Willing her legs to move, Sam crept after him.
All at once the dark bulk ahead shifted, and Sam heard a sound, like a crocodile's slithering, magnified a hundredfold. She saw something waving vaguely from side to side twenty feet above her and looked up.
Her eyes widened in horrified awe. Could that be a head up there, on the end of a long neck?
It's a dinosaur, she thought. I'm looking at a bloody dinosaur!
Then she was clapping her hands over her ears as the creature let out a bellowing roar that seemed to rattle the stones in the wall lining the towpath, and reverberated out across the river, no doubt terrifying every boatman for miles around.
Even before the echoes of the roar had died away, the creature was moving in the darkness. At first Sam thought it had spotted them, then she realised it was actually turning to slide off the towpath. There was a huge splash and a great wave surged over the embankment. Water covered her boots, then, frighteningly, pulled her towards the river as it withdrew. The Doctor yanked her back, almost bruising her arm.As soon as the wave was spent, the Doctor rushed forward, splatting through pools of water that even now were draining back into the river. He stood right on the edge of the towpath, hands on knees, leaning forward as far as his balance would allow, peering down into the black water. Sam hesitated, then, deciding she was already as wet as she was likely to get, splashed forward and joined him, though as usual she could see nothing but fog and darkness. She could hear little waves lapping against the flood wall some way below her, however. She imagined the huge ripples of the creature's passage extending ever outward, a series of concentric circles like a widening shiver of fear on the dark skin of the Thames.
Chapter 2
PostMortem
Twenty minutes later the Doctor and Sam were sitting on hard wooden chairs, watching impatiently as the stout, bewhiskered desk sergeant across from them recorded the details of their experience in a large, cloth-bound ledger. Why was it, the Doctor thought as he watched the man dip his pen into a small pot of ink for at least the five hundredth time, that all Victorian policemen seemed cast from the same mould? Not only did they all look the same, but they all operated with the same ponderous, flat-footed precision. Mind you, the same was true of law-enforcers and authority figures everywhere. No imagination, no intuition, no sense of urgency. No wonder the universe was forever in such a mess.
The Doctor had told Sam to let him do the talking - an order that she had greeted with a look of contemptuous defiance, but had nevertheless obeyed so far - and then had proceeded to tell the desk sergeant, whose name was Tompkins, a series of half-truths. He had decided to leave out the bit about the gigantic monster disappearing into the Thames. Instead he had said that while giving chase to the evidently desperate man they had encountered on the towpath, the two of them had heard a number of cries and the sounds of a scuffle in the darkness ahead. By the time they arrived on the scene, however, the man had been nowhere to be found.
The Doctor offered the opinion that the man had been attacked, perhaps even killed, and then pushed or thrown into the river.
The sergeant had listened attentively, and was now engaged in the painfully slow process of writing down what the Doctor had told him. His patience at an end, the Doctor leaned back in his chair, swung his legs up, and placed his still-damp feet on the sergeant's desk.
Tompkins glanced disapprovingly at the puddles of water forming