Doctor Who_ The Nightmare of Black Island - Mike Tucker [37]
There was another reason too. The machine was operating on a psychic level in some way. The Doctor could feel a persistent tickling at the back of his mind. Its effect on the children of the village was now obvious; its effect on him was merely an irritation – his own 87
mental discipline was more than enough to keep the intrusion of the machine at bay – but Bronwyn was another story. Her mental state was in a very delicate balance already and the Doctor couldn’t say what effect the machine might have on her.
‘Assuming it hasn’t had an effect on you already,’ the Doctor muttered.
‘What was that?’ Bronwyn frowned at him. ‘You’ll have to speak up.’
‘Nothing. I’m still trying to formulate some kind of plan, that’s all.’
‘Well, we can’t stay in the lighthouse for ever.’
‘We’re hardly likely to make it back to the shore in one piece either!’
The Doctor could imagine what aquatic horrors lurked in the waters around Black Island.
‘What are we going to do, then?’ Bronwyn asked, wincing as the lighthouse reverberated with another attack from the creatures outside.
‘I think our best bet at the moment is to try and get to the cave and its mysterious spacecraft. There’s a possibility that I can open the main hatch and we can shelter in there. I doubt that even these creations of nightmare could break into a duralinium hull.’
Bronwyn snorted. ‘How are you going to get into an alien spacecraft?’
‘I’m quite good with locks.’ The Doctor gave her an apologetic smile.
‘Look, Bronwyn, I’m trying to concentrate. Please?’
He stretched his neck with a view to squeezing himself further underneath the machine. He was determined to get a closer look at the mechanisms. It wasn’t easy, though. The machine was huge and heavy, bolted to the floor of the lamp room with massive, blind-headed nuts. The base was only thirty centimetres or so off the floor and pipes wound through every available space. The Doctor peered through the tangle.
‘Aha!’
Six ugly metal lumps studded a curving section of the machine’s underside.
88
‘ That’s how you affected Rose’s dreams in the TARDIS!’ The Doctor shifted his position, trying to get a closer look. ‘The machine has telepathic aerials of some kind. Not only is it sending out transmissions that affect the children’s dreams, but it’s also acting as a receiver, storing those dreams, utilising them in someway.’
The TARDIS had its own telepathic circuits – that was how it translated languages for him and Rose whenever they landed on an alien world. It must have picked up transmissions from the machine when they materialised to take bearings, meaning that Rose’s dream had been influenced in the same way as the dreams of the children in the village. The Doctor’s mind was racing, piecing the puzzle together.
‘The machine must be tapping directly into the psychic reservoir of the children’s nightmares, manipulating them in some way and then taking images from those nightmares and generating them as physical entities. But why? Who would want to populate Wales with creatures from children’s nightmares?’
One thing was certain. He had been right that this machine was the key to everything that was going on. If he could just disengage the telepathic circuits then the machine would no longer function.
‘Disable the machine’s telepathic ability, stop the monsters. Easy.’
The Doctor stretched again, trying to reach the cluster of metal protuberances. His fingers brushed the side of one of them, but the space between floor and machine was too tight for him to reach.
‘Then again, perhaps it’s not going to be that easy.’
He sat back upright,