Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [51]
From the front, the place looked dark, but when the Doctor walked around to the left he saw that the back corner room was dimly lit, the long window partially blocked by a live oak growing next to the house. The Doctor looked up. No stars. And the rising breeze smelled of ozone. He went back into the TARDIS and exchanged his long coat for a battered jacket more appropriate for climbing trees and getting rained on.
The old tree's huge lower branches swept the ground, and the Doctor climbed up easily. The hanging grey moss, which looked so soft from the ground, scratched at him. He settled himself in the junction of a branch and the trunk and peered through the leaves. Someone was standing at the closed window, back turned, blocking most of his view. The room was lit only by a single candle at the far end, and he had a very poor sense of what he was looking at. There were a number of men and women standing in a circle. They all appeared to be naked. Certainly the man by the window was. He was soft-muscled, like someone who worked in an office. The Doctor moved around a bit to see if he could get a better vantage point, but the best he managed was to stretch out on a branch so that the man in the window obscured only the left half of the room. He lay on his stomach, watching.
The people in the circle were either singing or chanting softly. The breeze picked up and the ozone smell sharpened and, abruptly, the Doctor was almost sick with dread. He nearly lunged forward to bang on the window.
This should not be. It should not be! Hang on - he literally gripped his branch harder - this was exactly the sort of impulse he mustn't give in to.
He had no idea what the circumstances were, what he'd be preventing, or interrupting, or shoving in a different direction. He made himself lie still. The man at the window moved towards the circle, limping horribly, supporting himself with a hand braced on the head of a small naked boy.
'No,' said the Doctor. He sat up, hit his head on a limb, cried more loudly, 'No!' Nobody inside gave any sign of hearing him. He scrambled down through the branches. He couldn't watch anyone harm a child. After all these decades, he still wasn't callous enough for that. Maybe in another hundred years.
He was halfway down the tree when the house imploded.
Being in the oak undoubtedly saved his life. As a surge of water burst towards the sky, like some impossibly huge geyser, the mansion's walls hurtled inwards and the tree was sucked after them. The trunk was between the Doctor and the house, and he was pulled flat against it, like the coyote in the cartoons hitting a cliff. The wood split and shrieked as the immense roots dragged out of the ground. Then the water slammed down, knocking the Doctor into mud, and everything was abruptly silent.
The Doctor pushed himself up, gasping and spitting, wiping his eyes, hi front of him, the house was a pile of brick and shattered boards. The oak tree leaned precariously over the wreckage, frozen in mid-fall by the pull of its roots. The Doctor falteringly rose, soaked and trembling. 'Is anyone there?' he called. 'Can anyone hear me?'
A child began to cry. The Doctor clambered over the rubble towards what had been the back corner of the house. 'I'm coming! I'm here!' The child wailed louder. The noise guided the Doctor, and in a minute he was bending over a drenched boy of four or five pinned beneath a board. 'Don't be afraid. Are you all right? Hang on.' The board was both heavy and wedged down. The Doctor took the boy's hand. 'It's going to be a moment or two. Are you hurt?' The pale blur of the child's head moved from side to side in the negative. 'Good. Here.' The Doctor peeled off his jacket, the inside of which was still fairly dry, and eased it under the board and around the boy's body. 'Right. Here we go.'
It actually took about twenty minutes for the Doctor to clear off the wedged end of the board and very carefully lift it.