by Doctor Who
and live. And we will all perish. Very well. I should have known. You snivelling worm.’
Tiermann flung himself forward, before the creature on the screen.
He fell to his knees. ‘What else can I do? I must save my family. This is logical! The only logical thing!’
The face in the flames sneered at him. ‘What do I care about logic?
I defy logic!’
The Doctor stepped forward and faced up to the Domovoi. ‘What are you going to do? Will you let them go?’
The Domovoi glared and crackled; shimmered and simmered and considered. And then she announced: ‘I will do what I have always done for the occupants of the Dreamhome. I will continue to make you safe.’
Tiermann was back on his feet, looking alarmed. ‘What?’
They could hear, from all over the Dreamhome, electronic switches and gears and levers humming with energy as the Domovoi silently instructed them to do her bidding.
‘I will keep you safe and sound. I will protect you from the Voracious Craw. At least, I hope so. I will try my utmost, as I always have.’
‘What are you saying?’ thundered Tiermann.
‘I am going to lock you all inside the Dreamhome. For ever!’
There was a stunned pause, and then all three of the Tiermann family burst out in cries of protest. Martha whipped round to look at the Doctor. ‘Mm, yes,’ he said. ‘That was on the cards, wasn’t it?’
They could hear the swift, ominous clangs coming from all over the house. Metal shutters crashing down over windows. The light in the drawing room itself became murky, all at once, as the shutters dropped down with a noise like an axe on the executioner’s block.
Now the room was a baleful green from the flames on the screen.
And the Domovoi was laughing at them. ‘You will stay here for all time! One big happy family! And if the Dreamhome must die this very night, then we all will die!’ The gaping mouth quivered and shook with its horrible laughter. ‘It’s only logical, Tiermann. It’s only 79
fair, isn’t it? Like one big happy family, no? And we shall all go together!’
Then the Domovoi stopped laughing. ‘I’ll be watching you,’ she said, in a very nasty voice.
And the fiery screen went dark.
Suddenly it was quiet in the drawing room.
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Tiermann screeched in fury. ‘How dare she do this to me? I created her! She has no right!’
Behind him his wife was sitting with her head in her hands. ‘We’re never going to get out of here. He has doomed all of us.’
Solin drew the Doctor’s attention away. ‘What can we do?’
The Doctor looked troubled for a moment. But he forced a smile onto his face. These people were depending upon him. He had to get them through somehow. ‘Well, there has to be a way, doesn’t there?
The Dreamhome can’t be completely sealed. . . ’
Solin coughed nervously. ‘I think it can, you know.’
Tiermann snarled. ‘I made it perfectly impregnable. This house could withstand almost anything. There is no getting in, or out. . . ’
The Doctor’s two new robot friends had shuffled closer to Martha by now, as if seeking protection. ‘We’ll think of something, won’t we, Doctor?’ she said hopefully.
Tiermann wasn’t done with ranting yet. ‘She will not succeed so easily! I, Ernest Tiermann, will not submit! She is but a machine!
They are all machines, and I refuse to allow them to decide our fate.
I declare war on the Dreamhome!’
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‘Oh, very helpful, Ernest,’ the Doctor snapped sarcastically. ‘And what use is that? Declaring war on the Servo-furnishings? We need you to use your brains, you silly man.’
‘Doctor,’ gasped Barbara. ‘You mustn’t insult him. He is very powerful. . . ’
‘All of these creations are my enemy now,’ said Tiermann darkly.
Something had caught Martha’s glance. Something in the half-light just beyond Tiermann. It nagged at her attention. Then she realised.
It was the red eye-lights of Walter the drinks robot. He was shuffling closer to Tiermann.
‘Doctor!’ she cried out, in warning.
The Doctor stepped back smartly from Tiermann, just as the drinks robot whirled into action. Faster than anyone had ever seen him move, Walter lifted up a bottle and threw it hard. It smashed noisily against a marble side table. He hefted another bottle, and another, and soon the space around Tiermann was hissing with deadly missiles.
Shards flew everywhere and Tiermann cried out as he was hit again and again. A mirror exploded and the impact threw Tiermann sideways. He fell hard onto the floor and howled out loud as he dropped onto the broken glass.
Cries went up from the others. Tiermann was crumpled inside his billowing cloak. The Doctor darted forward, as did Solin, bravely attempting to wrestle Walter away from his master.
Martha hurried to Tiermann and found him writhing dazedly, and bleeding copiously.
She set straight to work, snapping orders to
Amanda, and using whatever came to hand to staunch his cuts.
‘Doctor, allow me,’ cried Toaster, stepping sharply into the fray. He interposed his awkward body between the Doctor and Walter. A savage bolt of blue lightning went up with a colossal, deadly crackle.
Walter shrieked once and all the glasses and bottles slid off his head and crashed onto the floor. Then he tipped over backwards and lay still.
‘Owwww,’ Toaster sighed. ‘I think I’ve done myself a mischief.’
‘You destroyed him!’ Barbara cried, amazed.
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‘That drinks robot was always getting above himself,’ Toaster said, looking pleased but worried.
‘Well done!’ The Doctor clapped Toaster on his angular shoulder.
‘It’s a terrible taboo,’ Barbara said. ‘Robot killing robot. We are strictly commanded not to.’
The Doctor looked sharply at the vending machine. ‘The Domovoi isn’t going to take you over, is she?’ Barbara looked alarmed. ‘Not yet.
Oh my. What a terrible thought!’
‘She is bound to try to call us back,’ Toaster said. ‘We are her creatures. But we must face that challenge when we come to it, Barbara.’
She gulped. ‘Perhaps we should have stayed down there. On Level Minus Thirty-Nine.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the Doctor. ‘You want to survive, don’t you? You want to get out of here?’
‘But will we?’ Barbara’s electronic voice quavered. ‘Are we really going to get out?’
‘Doctor!’ Martha’s voice came sharply from across the room.
‘You’ve done a good job,’ the Doctor told her, once he saw what Martha had done in patching up Tiermann. ‘Just a flesh wound, a few scratches,’ she told him. ‘But the old man’s making a song and dance about it. But Doctor. . . inside, he’s –’
‘Betrayed,’ Tiermann muttered bitterly, trying to sit up. ‘I am betrayed in my own home.’
Amanda had her arm around his shoulders.
‘Martha says you
mustn’t move too much, my love.’
‘The bottle didn’t get to any vital organs, at least,’ Martha said.
Tiermann grunted with wintry humour. ‘The ones on that side aren’t organic anyway. They’re plastic and metal. I improved on them myself.’
‘Impressive,’ said the Doctor, watching as Tiermann gritted his teeth, leaned heavily on his wife and son, and struggled to get back to his feet. The heavy, oily scent of his spilled blood was on the air.
‘So you replaced some of your own innards with small versions of the Servo-furnishings.’
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‘I did,’ Tiermann said gruffly. And then, when he was face to face with the Doctor, all the blood seemed to drain out of his face. He went even paler than before. ‘Are you about to say what I think you’re going to?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘That depends if you’re hardwired into the system. Are you?’
‘No! Of course not! If I was, then how would I ever be able to get away?’
‘That’s all right then,’ said the Doctor. ‘So long as the Domovoi can’t control the workings of your organs, the same as she can the workings of your Dreamhome. . . ’
Tiermann gritted his teeth furiously. ‘I will be all right, Doctor. And I will survive, with my family. I will get us all out of here.’
‘How, Father?’ Solin asked. ‘How do we get up to the spacecraft from here?’
Tiermann winced, and paced to the far end of the room. ‘The landing pad is on top of the Dreamhome. We are above ground. There is only one storey above ground. We just need to open up a gap in the ceiling, somehow. . . ’
The Doctor suddenly felt his arm seized by Martha. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she shouted.
All of a sudden, he could. They all could.
The whole room was listing. Fabulous ornaments were crashing to the floor. Paintings were sliding sideways.
Barbara was squealing on her castors. She slammed on her brakes with a shriek of dismay. ‘What’s happening to the floor?!’
They were all yelling now, and grasping hold of the heavier items of furniture, as if that could prevent the inexorable slide downwards as the whole room tilted at an ever-increasing gradient. . .
‘Look!’ Amanda shrieked. ‘The floor is coming away from the wall!
It’s opening up into a great big hole!’
And it was quite true. The marble floor was sliding away and they were being tipped, like so much rubbish, into the gaping blackness beyond. . .
84
The Doctor was clinging onto both Martha and the back of a sumptuous, tapestried settee. ‘I think the Domovoi’s one step ahead of us!
She’s sending us down. . . deeper underground!’
The Doctor’s words were the last that Martha heard, or could pick out amongst all the tumbling shrieks and crashes, as the whole lot of them plunged into the empty space beneath the floor. . .
It was hard to tell, in the silence that followed their crash-landing, just how many levels of the Dreamhome they had fallen through. The drop had been brief, dark and startling. The strange thing was, they had landed softly, in a room filled with luxurious billowing fabrics and cushions.
The Doctor was the first to spring back onto his feet. ‘Is anybody hurt?’ he asked urgently, as the others untangled themselves and groaned.
‘Nothing broken. . . ’ Martha told him.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Barbara was sobbing. ‘I’m not used to this! I’m not built for jumping around the place!’
Toaster was picking large splinters of broken glass from his innards.
Tiermann was up and stalking painfully about the large, dimly lit room. ‘What’s she put us in here for?’ he snarled.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ the Doctor said. ‘She’s proving that she can push and prod us anywhere she wants. She’s burying us in the Dreamhome.
And making sure that our landing was relatively safe and comfy. But leaving us no doubt as to who is in control.’
‘Which level is this, Father?’ Solin asked.
Tiermann looked blank. ‘I don’t know! It’s so long since I’ve been down here. . . ’
‘Think, think, think!’ the Doctor urged him.
Martha was glancing about at the beautiful room, with its silky wall-hangings and soft floor. It was lovely, but she was desperate to be out of the place. Outside, the morning was advancing. Their last day in the Dreamhome was passing by. She could still see that Voracious Craw on the screen in her mind, and the image of it made her shudder.
She forced herself to think logically, and clearly. ‘What about. . . !’ she 85
snapped her fingers. ‘Look, I don’t believe that you built a super-computer without creating some kind of override option.’
‘What?’ Everyone whipped around to face Martha. The Doctor beamed delightedly. ‘Brilliant! That’s brilliant, Martha! Go on!’
‘Tiermann’s a clever man. There’s no way he’d put someone else completely in charge. So he must have. . . I don’t know, created some way that the Domovoi could be bypassed. . . or switched off. . . ’
Then all eyes were on Tiermann. He nodded and looked shifty. ‘Of course I did. You’re right. There is, in fact, such a room, secret from even the Domovoi herself. She doesn’t know anything about it. And it contains the necessary means of. . . detaching her consciousness from the Dreamhome. It was necessary for repairs. But the Domovoi repairs and maintains herself. And so the override was never needed. I had almost forgotten it. But even now, it seems like murder to consider using it, and disabling her. It seems wrong.’
The Doctor was just about pulling out his own hair with frustration.
‘But why aren’t we there? Why didn’t you lead us to this override room straight away? Take us there! Now!’
Tiermann was looking confused. ‘I-I never thought she’d go this far.
I never thought she would disobey me. . . ’
The Doctor tutted at him. ‘Where is it, Ernest? You have to take us to this room!’
They realised then that they were being watched.
A screen on the far wall shimmered into life. They whirled to face it, just in time to see familiar emerald flames crackling with annoyance.
The Domovoi’s spectral features appeared. ‘There is no secret room! I would know about this, if there was! How can there be a room, as he says! He lies!’
Tiermann replied, very calmly: ‘No, Domovoi. It exists. And I will utilise it. You have gone too far. We will be free of you.’
‘Just try,’ spat the flames. ‘Remember. I am aware of your every footstep. I can follow you anywhere.’
The screen went dark.
‘Look!’ shouted Solin. ‘By the screen. A door. . . ’
But it slammed shut before anyone could get there.
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The Doctor buzzed it with the sonic screwdriver. ‘It’s a bit hit-and-miss, the old sonic. It’s being affected by the Voracious Craw’s approach, just the same as everything else,’ he observed. But the door opened just enough to let them through. ‘It’s drained of almost all power!’ the Doctor cried, inspecting his miraculous device. ‘But. . .
it draws its energy from the TARDIS. The poor old TARDIS must be really suffering because of the Craw.’
Martha patted his shoulder. ‘We’ll get back to her in time,’ she said.
The Doctor brightened determinedly. ‘Come on, then! Let’s press on!’ He led the way into a darkened corridor beyond.
‘Level Minus Six,’ Martha pointed out a discreet sign. ‘Not as bad as I thought,’ said the Doctor. ‘I thought I’d been sent right back to the bottom again. Minus Forty. It could have been a lot worse.’
‘It’s like Snakes and Ladders,’ Martha said.
‘What’s that?’ Solin asked her.
‘You’ve never heard of Snakes and Ladders?’
Leading the way, the Doctor tutted and sighed. ‘It’s true. You’d be shocked, Martha, at the way they got rid of board games in the future. I thought it was a real shame myself, when everything went, you know, digital. But that was happening back in your time.’
‘What are you two talking about?’ Tiermann hissed. ‘Your prattling isn’t helping our situation one little bit.’
Martha ignored him. ‘I loved board games, though. Makes me think of Boxing Day. The whole family arguing. . . ’
‘It was a big mistake, everything going digital and being on screens,’
the Doctor sighed. ‘Look at the Domovoi herself! That’s where it all goes wrong. Now, if old Tiermann here had cut her shape out of a really big bit of cardboard. . . then we wouldn’t be in any of this mess, would we?’
‘But then,’ said Solin, pitching in, ‘Mankind would never have reached the stars, would he, if his technology was based on bits of card rather than computers and stuff?’
‘Oooh,’ said the Doctor airily. ‘Not so sure about that, Solin. What about
the Origami Empire of Draxos-Eleven-and-Twelve? Or the De-coupage Queen of –’
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‘Enough!’ gasped Tiermann angrily. ‘I am trying to concentrate my thoughts. . . ’
The Doctor whipped round to face him. His voice was suddenly steely. ‘If you’d done a bit more thinking a bit earlier on, we wouldn’t be in this nasty fandango now, would we?’
The tension between the two men was crackling on the air. It was Barbara who interposed herself and tried to calm everyone down.
‘Crisps and pop for everyone!’ she cried.
Martha was grateful to the bulky android for making them sit and take stock. There was a sense of panic just bubbling under the surface for each of them. The air seemed thinner and staler down here. With a gasp, she realised that the Domovoi could probably switch off the air at any moment. How long would it be before the oxygen went thin enough to suffocate them all?
To distract herself from these thoughts, she asked Barbara about herself and her sun bed colleague. The vending machine gladly took up the tale of how the Doctor had rescued them both from their en-forced retirement on Level Minus Thirty-Nine. When Barbara men-tioned the Doctor’s name she seemed to go shy and girlish. She’s got a crush on her saviour, Martha realised. The Doctor’s got a drinks machine who fancies him! Which, at one level, was ludicrous, but at another was quite touching, and Martha found herself warming to Barbara. Even if the crisps she’d handed round were really soggy.
‘Hang on,’ said the Doctor suddenly. His head was cocked like a spaniel’s. He was crouching on the floor across the corridor from Martha. His hands were flat on the metallic walls and it was as if he was listening, or. . . ‘Can you feel it?’ he asked the others.
‘What?’ Amanda asked him wearily. She was just about fainting with shock and tiredness anyway. She staggered slightly, and pulled at the neck of her gorgeous robes. ‘Why is it so hot down here. . . ?’
she gasped.
And, as she said it, the others all realised at once what the Doctor was getting at.
The temperature was shooting right up. Hotter and hotter in the darkening corridor underground.