Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [27]
Beneath the notes was a creature not unlike a small jellyfish. A delicate pink-grey in colour, its body resembled a translucent lens. Feathery frond-like tentacles fanned out from the body, quivering and twitching like nerve ends in receipt of constant stimuli. Seers reached into the drawer and picked the creature up. It sat in the palm of his hand, a soft, gel-like blob.
Tentatively at first, it curled its tentacles around Seers' hand and wrist, tightening them until it resembled a strange inverted watch. Seers extended the forefinger of his free hand and caressed the creature gently. The creature responded, first flushing a brighter pink, then extending a fringe of bristly appendages, like the antennae of a snail. Seers ran his finger gently over the appendages in an almost ritualistic pattern. The lens became a metallic silvery colour, and then, astonishingly, the creature emitted a crackle like radio static.
Suddenly, from the midst of the static, came a sibilant voice, a voice that seemed almost to generate a hissing echo of itself.
'Yesss, Commander?'
Seers raised the creature to his lips and spoke into it, as if it was not a living thing at all, but merely an artefact, a form of communicator.
'The Doctor is suspicious, and unusually intelligent. I want him followed. I want his movements monitored.'
'Yesss, Commander,' the voice said again, its warbling sibilance filling the room.
'But do not use Beech or Stoker. The Doctor knows them. Use... use Hetherington,' Seers ordered.
'I shall prepare him now, Commander,' the voice concurred.
'Good,'said Seers.'Keep me informed.' He touched the silver lens and the creature shuddered, loosening its tentacles from around his wrist. The metallic sheen faded from its body and it became translucent once more.
Chapter 3
Lair
Finally managing to shake off the attentions of the revolting Mr Stoker, Emmeline ascended the metal stairway to her father's office. She had always found Stoker a somewhat unwholesome man (the way he looked at her with his hungry eyes discomforted her greatly), but it was only recently that he had become arrogant and forceful.Today he had all but blocked her path, claiming that her father was too busy to receive her. It was not until Emmeline had reminded him, in no uncertain terms, who she was that he had stepped aside and allowed her to pass.
Now she marched up to her father's office and rapped on the door.Though the grinding roar of the machines was loud even up here, she heard what sounded like a drawer slamming inside the room, and then a voice that barely sounded like her father's barked,'Who is it?'
Emmeline put her face up close to the wood. 'It's me, Father. Emmeline.
May I come in?'
'Just a moment,' came the brusque reply.
Emmeline waited for considerably longer than a moment, and was about to knock again when the door opened. Her father stood there, or at least a cold, imperious version of him did. Emmeline could not believe how much he had changed in so short a time.Where had his warmth and affection gone, his smile, which had never been far from his face and which he had used to offer her whenever she came into his sight?
'Emmeline,' he said, speaking her name - the name he and Mama had chosen for her - in a voice that sounded almost contemptuous.'What do you want?'
'I wish to speak with you, Father,' she said firmly.
However, just as Mr Stoker had planted himself in her path on the factory floor not ten minutes before, so her father did now, stepping forward and spreading himself to fill the doorway to his office.
'I'm very busy,' he said.
'Too