As he pressed on, the Doctor felt that metallic taste in his mouth again and began to think that having a plan at this point might have been a good idea. There was something dreadfully uninviting about the warm, thick, damp air slowly oozing from the pool. And wouldn’t it maybe have been safer to split up, to let his companions wander off and not run the same risks as he was about to?
The Hydro Room lighting was on the red part of its cycle and the wide, round pool was bubbling and seething dramatically. Agnew was lolling back in it as if he was having the time of his life – eyes closed and a slight smile on his lips.
The Doctor understood at once that many things were terrifyingly wrong and he regretted absolutely having brought the others with him. He said, very quietly, ‘Perhaps you two should go outside.’ His head throbbed and his ears seemed filled with the roiling of the pool waters. His tongue and lips were coppery.
Putta stared at the red, restless liquid and at Agnew. And he was annoyed. Really as annoyed as he’d ever allowed himself to be. ‘It’s no use pretending to be asleep!’ he shouted. ‘You left me out there. With that thing! Now, what is it? Tell us what it is! Tell us what you are!’
The Doctor said, even more quietly, ‘He can’t tell us.’
‘Of course he can!’ Putta was enjoying being angry. Other people had always been angry with him and this time it was going to be his turn. ‘You! Wake up!’ He leaned right over the edge of the pool and shouted with all his might across the water to Agnew: ‘Wake up!’
Which was when the colour of the lights changed to soft and flattering white and yet the water and Agnew’s face were still thickly red and patches of damp on the floor were red and Bryony felt sick and then she was sick and the Doctor seemed to be walking over to comfort her, but then he cried out, holding his head and dropped to the red-spattered tiles, kneeling and rocking, apparently in torment.
As Bryony rushed to him she heard Putta call, ‘Bryony! Bryony! Get out! Leave us! Bryony! Run!’
And when she looked up she saw the thin, funny, little man called Putta trying to rush away from the pool, but what looked like ropes, like purple-red muscular ropes, were undulating and rushing out of the water and they caught at the hem of his red-stained bathrobe, snaked into its loose sleeves and wrapped around him, dragging him slithering and fighting back towards the water.
Bryony met his eyes and thought that he was a very brave man, or being, or whatever, and a good one and that it was a shame he’d never realise it. She thought he would have liked himself more if he had.
The Doctor yelled to her, ‘It’s a feedback loop – the pain drove it back here. Get out now! With no mind to control the creature, it will devour everything it can find! I should have known! Quickly! It doesn’t know what else to do!’
And then a huge thought swept through him again.
BLOOD
He’d led them all into the same trap that had just turned on Agnew, its creator.
‘Run!’
Bryony wavered, as the Doctor convulsed and Putta battled the swift, repulsive arms swarming around him. Clearly it would be sensible to run… She paused for a breath.
‘Go!’ Putta was fighting desperately to get out of the bathrobe that might very well kill him, as the pulsing tentacles slithered over his body, scraping his skin like gluey sand as they went. ‘Please!’
But Bryony couldn’t run.
‘It was feeding on his rage!’ The Doctor, was holding his head in both hands. ‘I can feel it… this… fury… magnifying. It’s so angry… so… scared…’
BLOOD
‘Then don’t be furious! And don’t be scared!’ Bryony was yelling herself now. ‘Relax!’ Putta looked at her in utter bewilderment. ‘Relax, Putta. Trust me. You can trust me, can’t you, you stupid space man!’
And she said this with such affection that Putta did relax. The arms immediately drew him right against the low wall that contained the pool, knocking the breath out of him, but then they too relaxed slightly. They seemed indecisive. The ends of a few tentacles twitched, shivered.
‘Pat them!’
‘What?’ Putta looked at her as if she was insane.
But the Doctor, still pale and wincing, nodded. ‘Yes. Of course! Of course! The field is still operational. It will magnify whatever we feel.’ He focused on thinking clearly, gently, willed the agony in his skull to retreat a little. ‘If we can’t dissipate it, we can change its orientation and bring it back under control. Well done, Bryony. Well done.’ He trembled, frowned, but also managed to nod encouragingly. ‘You’re terribly good at this.’
‘Then let’s blooming well get on with it!’ Bryony yelled again.
Putta just stared, locked with fear. He was in danger of quite literally terrifying himself to death. The Doctor knew that if Putta made the creature too frightened it would defend itself – by killing Putta.
The Doctor tried to help, ‘Imagine it’s a big… like a giant…’
BBBBB…
He tried to imagine something huge but loveable with lots of arms, and couldn’t bring anything to mind apart from an immense and fluffy tarantula – which very few beings would find that adorable – so he just suggested. ‘Tickle it. Go on, Putta. Tickle it.’
Bbbb…
Putta reached out gingerly – in as far as he could while the tentacles were tight round him – and patted and then did tickle the muscular bond fastening his other arm to his side. He was wrapped in an immense, clammy strength, but it was no longer contracting. It no longer felt quite as horrifying. He tickled some more. He patted the flesh he’d been trying to keep away from his throat.
‘That’s it.’ Bryony nodded. ‘It’s working. At least, it’s stopped.’
‘Of course it’s working!’ The Doctor was still clearly in pain, but looked less grey. ‘And we have to… we have to think calmly, we have to be friendly towards it. We have to love it. I think. If we…’ He broke off for a few seconds as his headache peaked. ‘We need to love it. We need to be very, very fond of it indeed.’
‘Are you out of your mind!?’
‘Just do it, Putta!’ both Bryony and the Doctor bellowed. So he tried.
Aaabbb…
Bryony concentrated on attempting to find anything endearing about the heaving red and purple mass which had almost overwhelmed Putta. As she did so, the creature seemed to shudder and lose definition. Putta started to be able to gasp in complete breaths – much to his relief – and could move a little more.
As soon as he did move, the beast tightened around him again, but he tried not to panic, tried to let his limbs flop, relax, relax, relax, and to encourage the grating, sliding pressure to release again. It made his skin crawl. Which was because it was crawling over his skin. But that was fine. If it would just let him go that would be fine. Even if it simply didn’t eat him, but kept a hold of him for the rest of his life and he just had to get used to wearing some kind of immense purplish slime and grit monster that would be fine… it would all be fine… he could be calm…
The Doctor filled his consciousness with the faces of all the companions he had enjoyed knowing – their faces and the times when they had helped him, the times when they had been amazed by the universe along with him. He thought about the universe: the light-producing microbes that danced on the walls of the Delling Caves, the Great Library, the Song Towers of Und, the unlikeliness of life existing anywhere in the first place and yet the way it blossomed and flourished and celebrated itself and was so beautiful.
A
A
a
a
b
c
d
And finally Putta found himself dumped onto the floor as the creature trapping him simply collapsed into sand, warm sand, warm wet clinging sand and a kind of rush of dissipating motion.
He looked up at the two beings he would most want to nearly be killed with – if he had to be nearly killed – as they came cautiously towards him. His bathrobe was several feet away, partly obscured by a sand dri
ft – which meant that Bryony had seen him in his trunks. And being nearly crushed to death. And covered in slime. And sand. Which was also inside his swimming trunks. Oh, but things could be so much worse. They really could.
The Doctor set out his arm to keep Bryony back and advanced slowly, but with an increasingly enormous smile. ‘Not so tricky, really once the problem was fully understood.’ He kicked gently at the sand heaped around Putta. ‘I had my suspicions, naturally.’
Bryony, punched his arm. ‘Your suspicions…’
‘Naturally.’ He winked. ‘And we would undoubtedly all be dead without you. It was incredibly prescient of me to have chosen you. A sign of true genius.’
‘I beg your pardon.’ Bryony couldn’t help smiling, too. ‘You chose me?’
‘I just said that. Do keep up.’ The Doctor grinned.
*
Back at Julia Fetch’s cottage the twins were still leaning against each other, palm to palm with arms outstretched.
Slowly their hands melted and melded and reformed, looking for a while like a reddish pink ball of dense fluid, caught spinning and writhing at the ends of their arms. Their enchanting faces blurred and their eyes blinked unnaturally open.
There seemed to be a vibration in the air around them and, had anyone been looking at them, it would have been difficult to see them clearly. Even the grass around their feet became almost liquid. Reality itself seemed willing to melt and pour away
But then – slowly, delicately, the grass blades solidified, the air stopped shimmering and the twins’ faces became suddenly very clear, peaceful, loveable and their hands became only the usual kind of hands, with the usual kind of fingers. Everything, everywhere seemed to be held in suspension – as if the universe was a sleeping cat, just about to stretch, but not yet – and if Julia had looked out of her window, she would have noticed that the area around the cottage seemed impossibly bright and perfectly formed.
And then Honor and Xavier – slightly as if they had been dreaming for a while – shook their heads and laughed and the universe stretched and settled back into place and they shouted together, ‘Tea! Tea! It must be time for tea!’ and scampered towards the cottage door.
*
The Doctor had thought it best to lead his two companions out of the spa through the fire exit. None of them remotely resembled individuals who had been through a sublimely tranquil and restorative experience of balanced wholeness. They looked if they been buried at sea. And that might have alarmed the Spa Manageress. Who would eventually discover the scene of horror they were leaving behind. The Doctor found that leaving behind scenes of horror was usually wise, particularly if you might be likely to get the blame for them.
Their unconventional route out – which hadn’t passed the changing rooms – meant that Putta now had to cope with being outdoors in a sand- and slime-covered bathrobe (without flip-flops) in the presence of Bryony. Who had saved his life. Again. He was unsure about whether he wanted to burst into song, or make a break for his Type F378a Abrischooner, fire up the engines and never be seen again. At least he had discovered that it wasn’t actually possible to die of shame. Which, in a day of hideous shocks, had still come as something of a surprise.
Bryony herself was sporting a marginally less grubby bathrobe. She was, Putta thought, looking quite graceful as they set off back towards the golf course. Trotting barefoot next to the Doctor, she peppered him with questions. Putta had never seen anyone trot barefoot more beautifully. Actually, he’d never seen anyone trot barefoot – but that didn’t make her any less monumentally lovely.
Lovely and frustrated. ‘But I don’t understand—’
‘Naturally, you don’t,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘You have no experience of what would happen if a completely reckless interplanetary vandal managed to both spill psy fluid on a planet where it didn’t belong and accidentally introduce a sandmaster larva to the perfect environment to hyper-accelerate its developmental cycle. Beings who shall remain nameless should remember to decontaminate their hulls before they make planetfall… You…’ He growled at Putta as if he was only letting him remain nameless because he couldn’t bear to pronounce his name and shot him a glance that made him huddle deeper into his oversized, but tattered robe. ‘You, Putta, came much closer to wiping out every life form on Earth than anyone should on their first visit. Or on any visit. Do you intend to destroy every civilisation you encounter?’ He continued to glare and then seemed to find further scolding impossible and lapsed back into explaining how cleverly he had worked things out, despite being subjected to a massive psychon dose.
‘I had the largest available consciousness, you see… So it attacked me the most.’
‘But where has it gone? Where’s the monster?’ Bryony still wasn’t satisfied and she didn’t think this was because she hadn’t got enough experience of sandthings. She thought it was most likely because the Doctor was extremely bad at explaining and possibly because he was improvising and still unsure of what had really happened himself. ‘Doctor, one minute, it’s eating everyone it can get a hold of and the next it’s a heap of muck. Which there will be complaints about. And… oh, lord…’ Bryony remembered the body in the pool – Agnew’s ghastly, bloodless face above the bubbling, crimson water… She felt chilled and bewildered, and the Doctor put his arm around her to keep her steady.
He gently distracted her with information. ‘The sandmaster’s life cycle was advancing so rapidly that, while it was highly aggressive, it probably only had a few hours left before it would either join a mating stream – which it couldn’t because we’d surely know if there was more than one around here – or… well, they tend to either explode or dissolve. We seemed to speed up its decomposition—’
‘Explode? You didn’t tell us it might explode!’
‘Would you have been happier if I had?’
‘No, but—’
‘Then I made a terribly wise decision by not mentioning it. And they don’t often explode. Then again, they don’t often come into contact with psy fluid and have their psychic abilities massively magnified so that they can control matter, interfere with minds…’ The Doctor made a noise somewhere between a snarl and a sigh. ‘Those twins seemed quite perceptive, didn’t they. And not a little odd. I suspect they were affected by the psychic field, though I doubt for a moment that they noticed.’
Putta winced, expecting to be shouted again. But instead he felt the strong and heavy thump of the Doctor’s free arm hugging his bruised shoulders. ‘Putta. Let’s go and have tea. Don’t you think that would be a good idea? Tea, anyone?’
‘Oh, well…’ Putta gulped and felt mildly tearful. ‘Um, tea. I think I’ve had that before. It was nice. It didn’t try to kill me.’
And Bryony found herself making the decision unanimous. ‘Tea.’ Because tea might be what you should have after vanquishing an alien, emotionally sensitive carnivorous golf bunker monster. As far as she could tell.
‘Yes. The cottage is this way, isn’t it?’ The Doctor released them both and paced languidly ahead across the grass, accompanied by his scarf and his new excellent friends.
But then he stopped, turned.
‘By the way, Bryony. Thank you so much for saving my life.’ And he looked at her, his eyes quickly serious, frighteningly intelligent, a quality in them that seemed to know her right down to her bare feet. ‘I would have been completely done for without you.’
Then he rubbed his face and looked more playful, seemed to be waiting for a compliment. Bryony duly delivered one. ‘Well, but you were the expert.’
‘Yes, I was, wasn’t I?’ The Doctor nodded without a trace of modesty. ‘I almost always am.’ And he unleashed a startlingly huge smile.
‘As long as the thing’s gone…’
‘Oh, I’m sure it is. Either that or I’m completely wrong and we’re all still in horrible and increasing danger.’ He chuckled and dodged from foot to foot. ‘Only time will tell.’
And then the Doctor turned back and
headed off again, calling over his shoulder. ‘You didn’t do so badly either, Putta. There may be hope for you yet.’ His long form loping over the grass as if he liked nothing better than walking across strange planets full of promising people with tea and perhaps cake at the end of his journey. Tea and cake or horrible and increasing danger. Either one would do.
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Published in 2013 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
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Doctor Who: The Death Pit Page 6