Doctor Who_ The Sea-Devils - Malcolm Hulke [1]
‘Lifebelts!’ Mason shouted. ‘We can throw them lifebelts!’
Two of the engine-room men struggled along the lurching deck to get lifebelts. But they were not going to save the five men now struggling desperately in the water. As Mason and the Scouse watched, one of the bobbing bodies abruptly disappeared under the water, as though grabbed and pulled down. There was a brief underwater struggle, evidenced by bubbles and foam—then nothing.
‘Sharks!’ said the Scouse. ‘Killer sharks!’
Mason did not bother to argue. Killer sharks do not use underwater blow-lamps, don’t set fire to lifeboats. Killer sharks do not lurk in the waters off the coast of southern England. Mason grabbed the handrail and pulled himself up the steeply sloping deck towards the radio-room. As he left the Scouse, who stood staring at the men in the water, another man was savagely pulled under. By now Mason knew that they were all doomed... the ship would be gone in another minute, and every man who got into a lifeboat, or into the sea, was going to meet the same fate as the men he’d already seen go down.
The stricken vessel was almost on its side as Mason yanked open the door of the radio-room. Sparks, as they had all called him, was still at his post, calling urgently into a microphone:
‘May Day, May Day! This is s.s. Pevensey Castle. We are abandoning ship!’
‘Give me the microphone,’ ordered Mason. He reached out and took the microphone from Sparks.
‘We are being attacked!’ Mason screamed into the microphone. ‘The bottom of our ship has been ripped out. Men are being pulled down into the sea—’
Mason stopped abruptly and stared at the Sea-Devil now standing in the doorway. It had the general shape of a man, yet its body was covered in green scales, and the face was that of a snout-nosed reptile.
‘Sea-lizards,’ said Sparks, seeking some explanation, however unscientific, for the creature standing before them.
The Sea-Devil turned its head and looked at Sparks, as though it had understood what he said. Then it raised its right paw, and Mason saw that it carried a highly sophisticated weapon—a sort of gun.
‘You’re intelligent,’ said Mason, ‘you understand. You’re not an animal at all!’ For a brief moment Mason had hopes that this thing, whatever it was, might be there to save them. It was, literally, the hope of a drowning man clutching for a straw in the water.
The Sea-Devil killed Sparks first, then Mason. No trace of them, or of the s.s. Pevensey Castle, would ever be found — except for one empty lifeboat that the Sea-Devils somehow failed to destroy completely.
2 Visitors for the Master
Jo Grant definitely felt sea-sick. She had travelled through Time and Space with the Doctor in the TARDIS, but that was very much more comfortable than sitting, as she was now, in a small open fishing-boat with a noisy outboard motor. It wasn’t only the motion of the boat that made her feel ill: the fast-revving little motor was blowing off petrol fumes that a slight breeze blew straight into her face, and the water they were crossing had on it slicks of oil, occasional dead fish, empty bobbing plastic milk bottles, and some rather unpleasant-looking items that may have come direct from the main sewer.
The Doctor leaned towards Jo, shouting above the noise of the little engine. ‘Feeling all right?’
She nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said, without much enthusiasm. ‘When do we get there?’
‘As the porcupine said to the turtle,’ shouted the Doctor, ‘“When we get there”’. It sounded like a quotation from Alice in Wonderland, but Jo suspected the Doctor had just made it up. The Doctor turned to the boatman, a Mr. Robbins, and shouted at him: ‘Is it in sight, yet?’
The boatman nodded and pointed with a rather dirty finger. Jo looked towards the island to which they were heading, and now, as they rounded a headland, she could see a very large isolated house, something on the lines of a French château. ‘That’s where they got him,’ Robbins shouted. ‘It’s a disgrace, if you ask me.’
‘Not large enough?’ said the Doctor, trying to make a joke.