Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [64]
They scrabbled over scree and jagged shingle as they neared the entrance, none of them sure what they were looking for, or knowing what to expect, but drawn by some simple, almost primal force towards the darkness. Martha supposed that, as a human, she had some innate urge to seek shelter in caves – and these people, however artificial their existence might be, were doubtless subject to the same drives. But she also felt a growing apprehension, for caves meant darkness and shadows and creeping, unseen things.
But a cave, at the centre of the island, seemingly in the centre of an artificial world… She suspected they’d find more there than just bat droppings and water dripping down stalactites.
Martha, suppressing a shiver and, with Petr and Saul close behind her, stepped into the echoing cavern.
The Doctor found some controls on the wall and within moments the door was rolling open.
Beyond was an enormous, rounded chamber, its walls punctuated with random red lights. By the time it had illuminated the floor and its occupant, the radiance took on a pinkish hue, giving the entire room an organic air.
Occupant.
Jude blinked quickly, not at all sure what she was looking at – but she understood, wordlessly, that she was looking at a person, not a thing.
The room was full of wires and tubes, but they were twisted and overlapping, creating complex patterns like a spider web covered in dew. In the centre, suspended some distance from the floor and slowly revolving and spinning, was some sort of creature. It had huge globular appendages that pulsed with an internal light but seemed more like additional brains or heads, and smaller limbs – if that was the right word – that ebbed and flowed like hair in an invisible ocean. There was a central body, a bloated yet somehow still elegant succession of rounded shapes; most of the tubes and wires were attached here, the skin seeming pock-marked and blistered wherever the probes broke through the skin. Like the dark angel thing they had encountered, this entity seemed to fade and brighten from time to time. One moment it seemed almost invisible, as substantial as mist and memory; then it became full of force and flesh and was as real as anything that Jude had ever witnessed.
Jude could see no eyes or ears or mouth but, again, she knew somehow that this creature – this person – was quite capable of communication, despite the constraints of its surroundings.
The Doctor, too, was quiet and deferential. He walked further into the room only after a small sort-of bow, his hands slowly fidgeting behind his back. Jude somehow sensed that he was on unknown ground and was about to address an unfamiliar individual; he was, she suddenly decided, the best teacher she had ever encountered, if only because he himself was so keen to keep pushing back the barriers of his own knowledge and ignorance.
She wondered what his first words would be, how he would greet this emissary from faraway and perhaps unknowable worlds.
The Doctor paused, blinking for a moment, and then took another cautious step forward.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
Of all the things Martha had expected to see in the cave, the last – barring, perhaps, an ice-cream van operated by her father and a crack squad of long-eared elves – was a door and the grinning form of the Dazai. The plain door was set into a cylinder of rock that ran from floor to ceiling in the middle of the chamber; the Dazai stood to one side, clearly both amused and delighted to see Martha and the others.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ exclaimed Martha, as she stood in the centre of the cave, soaking wet, exhausted and still terrified beyond words.
‘I went for a walk,’ said the old woman simply. ‘Long ago, I discovered that if you try to reach the far side of the lake, walk through a particular arch way of trees… You end up here.’