Doctor Who: Paradise Towers (14 page)

‘Build High for Happiness!’

‘Build High for Happiness!’ came the answer of the other Kangs as they made the Kang salute.

Build High for Happiness, indeed, the Doctor thought as they hurried away from the Brainquarters. But, let us hope, not Dig Deep for Disaster.

9

‘Where are we now?’ Mel asked. The lift had finally stopped its dizzying descent and she and Pex waited anxiously for developments.

The door slid open. To Mel the exterior seemed pitch-black.

Pex, however, had barely poked his head out before his square jaw dropped in dismay. ‘Oh no,’ he murmured.

‘What is it?’

Pex gulped. ‘I think we’re in the Basement.’

‘As in “Forbidden to all Residents of Paradise Towers on Pain of Death”?’

Pex nodded. The horror of their situation rendered them both speechless. They peered out in the blackness together and, as she looked, Mel’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom and she could just about make out a long dark corridor. Then beyond it, huge studded doors. Worse still, she then perceived in the distance white-bodied Cleaners coming and going with trailers at their back. One approached the studded doors and they flew open to receive it. Smoke billowed out and then a huge mechanical roar echoed through the whole basement. At least Mel thought at first it was mechanical. Then, maybe because of her overwrought state, she started to think that the roar was really a voice.

‘Soon... soon... soon I shall be free...’

That was what Mel thought she could make out. But she couldn’t be sure. The whole atmosphere with the smoke, the dank corridors and the Cleaners shooting hither and thither was alarming enough without indulging in fantasies.

‘We have to get out of here,’ she hissed to Pex. ‘It’s only a matter of time before those Cleaners notice us.’ She frantically tried the lift-control button. ‘This thing is really jammed this time.’

‘Shall I hit it?’ Pex was already preparing himself mentally for another of his powerful blows. The physical preparations were about to follow. There was, of course, a very real possibility that this time Pex would break the control completely and they would be stuck here for good. Or until the Cleaners picked them off. But Mel also realised there was no real practical alternative to trying and so nothing to lose. She nodded her agreement for Pex to proceed.

‘Soon I shall be free... soon...’ the eerie voice still echoed down the corridor as Pex prepared.

For a moment she thought his nerve and his strength would fail him. But Pex lunged at the control button with even greater force than before and dealt it a savage and sudden blow. There was an ominous pinging sound and she thought he had merely succeeded in breaking it. The lights flickered ominously.

And then she knew instinctively before it happened that they were going to be all right. The lights steadied and the door shut, cutting out the mechanical roaring and the smoke-filled corridor. And there was even better news. The lift was clearly going up the building now. Very fast.

‘Chief... Chief... Chief...’

The Deputy Chief had managed to get free with the aid of some of the other Caretakers returning from duty on the streets of the Towers. But getting free now seemed to have been the least of his problems. His next worry was how to tell the Chief what had happened without undergoing the 327 Appendix 3

Subsection 9 Death himself. A less loyal or less stupid man might have delayed informing the Chief but the Deputy was trained to report to his superior immediately. Which led to a third problem that made the other two pale into insignificance. Finding the Chief.

It was quite without precedent and quite without explanation. No amount of running through the rule book could yield him a possible solution. However hard and however long the Deputy tried to contact the Chief via his Mark 12 LDCE all he received back was total silence.

The Deputy called out the Chiefs name until his voice was hoarse. But there was no getting round the dreadful fact. The Chief could not be contacted. And the Deputy had no inkling of his whereabouts.

Put more simply and more frighteningly, the Chief had disappeared.

At that very moment the Chief, flanked by insistent Megapodic Cleaners, was confronting through billowing smoke the two fiery red unblinking eyes of his pet. The eyes burned with a fervour that made the Chiefs blood run cold but he tried to put a brave face on it.

‘Look,’ he began, blusteringly, ‘I don’t understand what the matter is, my beauty. I’ve always made sure you’ve had lots of little tender morsels to make you big and strong. So why have you been giving my Cleaners orders that aren’t my orders and killing people I didn’t tell you to kill?’

There was no denying the power of the voice that replied now. Nor could the Chief any longer doubt that its mechanical rumblings framed words and words that showed the workings of a powerful mind.

‘The bodies the Cleaners brought were not right!’ the voice boomed.

‘Not right?’ the Chief queried, a tremor in his voice he could not conceal. ‘What for?’

‘For me to live in!’

The power and energy of the reply almost knocked the Chief off his feet but he managed to just about keep his balance.

‘To live in? I don’t understand.’

‘Neither could they,’ the voice replied, with withering contempt. ‘That was the problem.’

The Doctor and his three Kang companions heard this last exchange as they crept stealthily out of the Service lift and into the corridor. They were still breathing heavily from their frantic descent and the gloom of their surroundings immediately oppressed their spirits. But they had to persist. Led by the Doctor, they edged their way along the slimy corridor as near to the Chief as they dared to come without being spotted by the Cleaners.

From there, flattened against the wall, they were able to pick up the fatal last exchanges between the Chief Caretaker and his pet.

‘You see, my pet,’ the Chief was saying, still struggling to get control of the situation, ‘all these bodies disappearing. People are beginning to notice, you know.’

‘No matter.’ The two words were magnificent in their dismissiveness.

‘What did you say?’ The Chief peered through the smoke at the eyes, horrified by what he heard and saw.

‘I am ready now. I have my plan.’ The eyes were brighter and redder than ever.

The Chief was babbling now, completely unnerved. ‘Look...

it’s... it’s nice to have you chattier than usual, my pet. But I do think you might be a bit more grateful for all I’ve done for you.’

‘You have done all I need you to do.’ The voice boomed through the rapidly clearing smoke. ‘I need only one more thing from you.’

The Cleaners were edging the terrified Chief Caretaker through the doorway now towards the evilly glowing eyes. From his viewpoint, the Doctor could see only part of what was happening. But he could hear the roaring grow louder and louder. And see the outlines of a large pulsating machine in which the eyes were located.

‘Want something, do you?’ shrieked the Chief, as the Cleaners forced him relentlessly on. ‘And suppose I won’t give it to you?’

‘You have no choice,’ the voice replied. And the Doctor saw the machine start to burst apart in a horrifying explosion of energy and matter. The eyes glowed still stronger and stronger as the panel around them crumbled away.

And then a tube-like dome started to slowly descend from the ceiling of the inner sanctum. And the Chief was edged nearer and nearer until he stood underneath it totally deprived of all speech.

The voice seemed to be everywhere now. ‘I am Kroagnon, the Great Architect!’ it announced. ‘And I will put an end to you.

And everyone in Paradise Towers!’

The dome started to descend over the luckless Chief and he gave one last cry as it enveloped him. And the energy was everywhere, crackling like flashes of lightning all around the dome. Sparks shot everywhere and the stout doors themselves sizzled and buckled with the power. Then the machine and the eyes were gone. No sound came from inside the dome. And wherever Kroagnon was, he was no longer in his prison.

The studded doors banged to with a crash. The Doctor was so appalled that he was thankful not to see any more. The same was true of his companions, who stood, still mesmerised, staring at the door, their eyes seared by the image of the crumbling panel, the descending dome and their last sight of the petrified Chief.

What none of them had noticed was that the Cleaners who had guarded the Chief remained outside the doors. And now, their principal task over, they had become aware of the intruders. And two of them, their corkscrew blades whirring, were making directly for the group.

‘Ware Cleaners!’ called Bin Liner, the first to scent the danger.

‘Quick to the lift!’ the Doctor cried to the others. He gestured them to run as fast as they could but moved himself towards the Cleaners to try and delay them for a few vital seconds by battering at them with his umbrella.

‘No, Doctor, wait!’ Fire Escape called. The Kangs had no intention of abandoning the Doctor or gaining their safety at his expense. Instead they had their crossbows at the ready in a matter of seconds. But it was difficult for them to aim at the Cleaners while the Doctor was in the line of fire.

The Doctor’s umbrella was wrenched from his grasp in the struggle. And a moment later a grasping white claw fastened on his neck. He could feel it contracting, squeezing the breath out of him. Just my luck, he found himself thinking as he started to faint, the third time round I really have fallen for that old trick.

The Kangs fired their crossbows. They could not afford to wait for a more favourable opportunity any longer if they were to save the Doctor. And fortunately for him, their aim was true.

Both Cleaners were hit by an arrow on the body which embedded itself in the metal casing and the third struck the claw that held the Doctor itself causing the grip to relax for just a moment.

‘Doctor! Quick! Now!’

The Doctor summoned his last ounce of strength and pulled free of the metal claw. Abandoning his umbrella to its fate, he ran after the Kangs. The effect of the arrows was to momentarily immobilise the Cleaners but it would only be for a moment and then they would be in pursuit again.

The fleeing quartet made the Service Lift just in time. As its metal doors shut behind them, they caught a glimpse of the Cleaners already back in motion and coming after them. But for now, with the Service Lift speeding back up the Towers, they were safe. And even thankful that the Lift used by the Cleaners had been kept in working order while the rest in the Towers had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

The Doctor struggled to get his breath back.

‘The Doctor really is icehot –’ the Blue Kang remarked approvingly.

‘Very hot,’ the Doctor couldn’t resist putting in as he mopped his brow.

‘He’s not a yawny oldster anyway,’ Bin Liner agreed.

The Doctor turned to the Blue Kang leader, whose name, he had discovered, after all their adventures together, was Drinking Fountain. ‘Now you understand the dangerous position we are all in. We must get all the Kangs together, not just those waiting in the Brainquarters.’

Drinking Fountain nodded. The two Red Kangs meanwhile were trying to make sense of what they had seen.

‘And is the Chief Caretaker really unalive?’ Fire Escape asked the Doctor wonderingly.

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘As himself, yes. But you saw what happened. So far as I can understand what was going on, up to now Kroagnon has simply been a mind without a body.

Just as your parents left him when they made that fatal decision to lock him up in the Basement to stop him harming the new occupants.’

‘But the sparks and the dome –’ Bin Liner began, the vivid images still lodged in her brain.

‘Well,’ sighed the Doctor, ‘I fear Kroagnon may have spent his time down there devising a means to perform corpoelectroscopy – a way of transferring his brilliant brain into some host body.’

‘And what’s the comeout, Doctor?’ Three anxious faces peered at him in the half-light of the lift.

‘I can’t be certain,’ the Doctor replied. His face was grim and he was not going to insult the Kangs by failing to prepare them for the worst. ‘Kroagnon will undoubtedly not stay locked in his Basement much longer. He’s bound to show himself – in one form or another...’

The studded metal doors flew open. And a figure walked stiffly out. It was the Chief and yet not the Chief. It was the Chief’s face and yet the face was pale and strangely coloured with a greenish hue. It was the Chief’s voice but much more mechanical sounding with a soft, steely power the Chief had never had. It was the Chiefs body and yet its movements were stiff and robotic but at the same time powerful and menacing as the Chief’s had never been. And, most eerie of all, it was the Chiefs uniform but what was once grey and tattered had become white and glistening as if purged by some violent electrical process.

‘Attention all Robotic Cleaners... Attention all Robotic Cleaners...’

The figure waited calmly as the cohorts of Cleaners assembled. He had no need to hurry. All the power and all the time were on his side. It was not until the last Cleaner was in place that he began speaking in his soft, mesmeric mechanical voice.

‘At last Kroagnon can leave the basement prison they trapped his bodyless brain in and return in this borrowed body to the corridors and lifts of his own creation.’

As he spoke the figure seemed to grow in strength and confidence with every word. Now there were contempt and anger behind the soft control.

‘Paradise Towers has become filthy, crumbling and broken-down, a disgrace to me, the Great Architect who built it. And who is responsible for this disgusting mess?’ he demanded.

‘People are responsible, that is who. Dirty, untidy creatures of flesh and blood who should never have been allowed to pollute this beautiful environment.’

He advanced a few steps further and the doors that had led to the prison he had been held in for so long shut behind him with a finality that inspired him still further.