Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [96]
How had the cages come to be unlocked? Who had released the other two cats and the dog? Who or what?
Tommy repressed the thought again and forced himself to step around the corner into the darkness. As he did so the whole annexe lit up with a ghostly light. A pale green light which rolled across the ceiling and vanished again.
Tommy almost laughed out loud. It was the photocopier. Someone had switched the photocopier on and it was flashing its green light on and off.
Something else was wrong. His feet made a sloshing sound as he crossed the floor of the darkened annexe. Tommy realized vaguely that the tipped‐over water bottles were leaking. Someone had punctured their membranes and the concrete floor was now awash with water. In the narrow corridor of the annexe it was slopping around his ankles.
For some reason this made Tommy think of run‐out, a common problem in the lab. It happened when an animal’s – usually a rodent’s – water bottle discharged into a cage, and led to hypothermia or drowning. He remembered after such accidents seeing mice huddled in a corner to keep warm, including a mother and her dozen pups. On other occasions he’d found rodents stacked four or five deep in an attempt to avoid the rising water. It had occurred to him at the time that this was an interesting experiment which revealed the pecking order of the animals in a cage.
Tommy waded forward through the flooded annexe. This was madness. He had to see what was going on. The intermittent green flashes from the photocopier only made things more confused. He needed proper light. He had to get the desk lamp on again.
As before, he bent quickly under the table. As he kneeled in the water, reaching for the wall switch, it occurred to him how closely he was mirroring his earlier actions. Like a laboratory animal which had been taught a pattern of behaviour and, when given the correct stimulus, repeated it.
As he turned on the switch, the photocopier on the table above hummed and sent another wave of eerie green light rolling through the annexe. It flashed off the ceiling and was reflected on the water all around him. That was when Tommy saw the power cable from the lamp.
Only it was no longer connected to the lamp. It had been raggedly severed, bare wires trailing from one end. The other end was still firmly plugged in at the wall socket, though.
The socket he was switching on.
The last coherent thought of Tommy’s life was that a cat might be able to flood a room. And a cat might be able to chew through a power cable.
But a cat certainly wasn’t smart enough to know that a man would be electrocuted by the cable, or smart enough to trick him into doing it.
The thought brought Tommy no comfort at all as 240 volts surged out of the torn cable; as it flashed through the water and into his drenched body.
As the photocopier slammed to a halt and fuses blew and his corpse crashed back down onto the shallow water on the floor of the annexe.
* * *
Chapter 22
It had been a pure accident.
Sure, Webster had been looking through the computer network ever since he’d moved into the King Building, eager to ferret out its mysteries. But he’d given up on this particular file. It appeared to have been corrupted during the catastrophe, years ago.
He’d cracked it open and taken a quick look and seen nothing but binary garbage. So he’d ignored it for weeks. But then he’d found the decryption program. It lived under an icon of a strange green beast with claws. When he activated the icon Webster had no idea what he might find. He was like a man with the keys to all the lockers in a big urban bus station. Opening files on the computer was like randomly opening lockers. There was no telling what you might discover inside, what people might have left behind. Usually it was something about as interesting as a stale sandwich or a worn out pair of sneakers. But there was always the chance you might find a million dollars in unmarked bills.
Or a severed head.
When Webster clicked on the icon of the clawed green beast he had no idea that it contained