Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [36]
‘What is it?’ asked Barrington as he saw Paynter’s jaw visibly drop.
‘You’d never believe me if I told you,’ said Paynter. ‘Have a butcher’s at this!’
Barrington bounded up the stairs, oblivious to the creaking beneath his feet.
Paynter was right. He would never have believed it.
68
Beneath them, through the window, was a ‘clean room’ similar to the kind they had both seen at Porton Down. Numerous white-coated technicians wearing contamination suits scurried about like white ants around a cylin-drical, cigar-shaped object two hundred yards long.
The object was pinkish-red in colour, though at points it seemed almost translucent. At its centre pulsed a throbbing strobe of light that was com-pellingly hypnotic to the watching UNIT men. At its base a row of small, brilliantly white lights revolved in a seemingly perpetual circumnavigation, each circuit lasting exactly eighteen seconds. At its apex the vehicle – for that’s undoubtedly what it was – had a jagged section missing from the fuse-lage through which poured a shaft of green light that stretched up towards the rafters of the clean room.
‘If that isn’t a space capsule, then I’m my Aunt Fanny,’ said Paynter.
Even Mark Barrington didn’t have a pithy comeback to that.
69
Chapter Eight
Semantic Spaces
The little man whistling a tune inside Turlough’s brain had obviously forgotten the words. Turlough’s head ached. No . . . Ache was too dreary a word to describe just how badly it hurt. The thesaurus in his mind went into overdrive.
Distress, discomfort, anguish, misery, agony. That only made the pain worse; let’s stick with ache for the time being he told himself.
He opened his eyes, but they simply refused to focus.
Fair enough.
The only sensation they allowed through to his muddled brain was white.
A moment later he tried again, and this time his senses decided to try and co-operate. But it was hard work. He was in a white room.
Right, got that.
And he was naked.
That was a surprise.
Turlough propped himself up on one elbow despite his head screaming its protest. The floor was padded, as were the walls. A little smaller, and it would have been womb-like and Turlough could comfortably have curled up into a foetal position and stayed there for ever.
Then the sensory bombardment started and Turlough knew what real cephalic pain was all about.
The sonic attack came in waves of rippling noise that skewered him on to his back and pinned him to the floor. His hands flew, instinctively, to his ears where he could feel the blood dribbling out. His eyes clamped tightly shut and his body went rigid as he felt as though his skull must surely explode.
Finally, it stopped.
Turlough opened his eyes. The pain in his head was gone, as though the sonic attack had shaken every atom in his body clean of the drugs that polluted his system. For a moment, just a moment, he allowed himself to breath out, slowly.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he stammered. There was no reply.
He felt a warm sensation on his torso. He stole a glance down at his body and was horrified to see a red pinprick of light concentrated on his rib cage.
He spun over and curled into a ball. Seconds later, he felt the laser slash 71
across his back. He screamed and struggled to stand, but his legs gave way beneath him and he slumped against the wall, sliding to the floor as the laser was joined by others at various sensitive points on his body.
‘Stop it,’ he screamed. ‘You’re cooking me alive.’
This time there was a reply. A monotone, female voice.
‘Stay where you are. No harm will come to you.’
Turlough, strangely, didn’t believe her.
Tyrone still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d been asked to drive the Doctor up Coldwater Canyon Avenue to the peak of the Santa Monica hills behind Grey-stone Park. The Doctor, however had been very specific about the destination.
‘You’ve been in the city before?’ asked Tyrone.