Doctor Who BBCN17 - Sick Building (8 page)

It was the size of a vast spacecraft and it was hovering low over the valley. It was a pale, putrid, grey-green colour. And its mouth was huge enough to swallow a town centre in one go. It had no other features. And the mouth had no teeth. It was just a great absence of features, and that made it all the more terrifying.

Martha and Solin watched it feed.

The ground beneath the Craw was churning and quaking, as if a tremendous gravitational force was at work. The very matter of the place – animal, vegetable, mineral – was being sucked into one long, spiralling strand that looked, from this distance, rather like a tornado.

And it was being fed straight into the hungry mouth of the Craw.

The screen itself was vibrating with a very dense grumbling sound.

Martha felt her throat constrict as the noise intensified. She realised they were hearing the scream of the world itself as it was attacked by the Craw. There was a whole lot of other, vastly unsavoury noises emanating from the Craw itself.

51

‘It’s just sucking everything up. . . ’ Solin cried. He touched the delicate dials again. The picture shivered with pixelated mess and then steadied. It came into even greater focus. Now they could see a ring of wicked, jewel-like eyes around the crown of the being’s head.

Martha had seen a picture of the Craw from space, as it hovered above one of the land masses of Tiermann’s World. A huge, pallid tapeworm. Now she really understood the danger they were in. To a creature like this, they were nothing. They weren’t people. They weren’t individuals. They were just matter. Same as the plant life and rocks out there. They were here to be pulped and fed indiscriminately into that obscene, palpating mouth.

The noises were getting ever louder. Solin shut off the sound, but still it rang horribly in their ears.

‘We need to get moving,’ Martha said, very quietly.

52

There was no way of knowing the time of day, down here on Level Minus Thirty-Nine. There was no natural light, of course, this far down. Nor were there any clocks. The place existed in a permanent half-lit limbo.

Luckily the Doctor had an excellent sense of time. He knew he had been down here for just over six hours. Six fruitless hours had elapsed since those Servo-furnishings had roughly manhandled him into the elevator and then out again, at the very bottom of the Dreamhome.

The morning saw him bruised and rueful, and seething with frustration.

Foolish Doctor, he seethed. What a complete div. Once more he had let his insatiable curiosity get the better of him, and with disastrous results. He had effectively given in and allowed himself to be brought here and imprisoned. He had been keen to see what went on down here, close to the Dreamhome’s power source. The make-up of this fantastic building fascinated him, and its secrets had led him into this disastrous situation. Here he was, trapped now. And the hours until the advent of the Voracious Craw were slipping away. . .

He hoped Martha was all right. She had looked so shocked and horrified as he had allowed himself to be dragged off by those robots.

53

Perhaps he should have resisted. Disabled them. Grabbed Martha and left the ungrateful Tiermanns to it. That would have been the best and most logical thing to do. Ah well, that wasn’t the Doctor’s way.

Now he had to make the best of it.

The thing was, there wasn’t much down here on Level Minus Thirty-Nine. Just a few mostly empty rooms, dusty and disused. A few hunks of rusting machinery and leftover bits of robots. The Doctor had to hand it to Tiermann. He really was a whizz with all that stuff. He had built robots out of seemingly everything – old lamp stands and drinks cabinets. . . everything! He could bestow intelligence on any kind of inanimate object, it seemed. Tiermann was like some kind of Frankenstein. . . but using furniture and household objects, rather than human body parts. . .

Exploring the rooms of this desolate level, the Doctor found that he soon returned to the doors of the elevator. He gave the controls another go with his sonic screwdriver, but with no result. Somehow they were completely impervious to the old sonic, which the Doctor took rather personally.

Hmm. Something different about the doorway this time, though.

He blinked. That wasn’t there before, was it? He was sure it hadn’t been.

There was a bulky vending machine standing next to the lift door.

It certainly hadn’t been here, last time he had wandered through this way. It was one of those machines with the glass front, showing the rows of cans of pop and bags of crisps for sale. The Doctor stared at it and realised he was quite peckish. He fished around in his overcoat pockets, finding coins which, if not the correct currency, were about the right size. He had just forced one of the coins in when the whole machine shook and gave a sort of cough.

‘Oh hello,’ said a velvety female voice, emanating from deep within the vending machine. ‘Good morning. I think you’ll find that coin is the wrong sort.’

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Course. The machine talks. All the machines talk. Why should this one be different?’ Rather shamefacedly, he pocketed his inappropriate coinage. ‘Erm. I don’t have the right 54

money. But I’m starving hungry. Any chance of some crisps?’

‘My name is Barbara,’ said the machine, in its smoothly seductive voice. ‘How may I help you?’

‘Crisps!’ the Doctor shouted, into the metal grille next to the coin slot. ‘I could eat my own trainers, here!’

‘You’ll just have to owe me,’ Barbara sighed, and all her insides lit up suddenly. There was a clunking and a thunking from within and suddenly a can of pop and three packets of crisps shot out into the tray near the Doctor’s feet.

‘That’s great,’ he grinned, grabbing them up. ‘Thanks, Barbara. I’m the Doctor, by the way. And I’ll see that you get paid.’

‘Oh, no matter,’ sighed Barbara, rather voluptuously. She shrugged her shoulders – and that was the first the Doctor realised that she had arms hanging down either side of her squat bulk. She was the most ungainly robot he had ever seen. She went on: ‘I’m just pleased to be of service, Doctor. It’s been a long time since anyone’s shown any interest in my comestibles.’

The Doctor opened up a packet of smoky bacon. ‘Nothing like crisps for breakfast,’ he grinned. Then he pulled a face. They were soggy.

It was like eating old leaves fished out of the gutter. He tried to hide his disappointment. He didn’t want to upset Barbara. ‘Delicious.’ He really hoped the pop wasn’t flat. But the can opened with a reassuring fizz.

‘So. . . you have been relegated to the Minus Levels, too, have you?’

Barbara said, looking the Doctor up and down. ‘I must say, you don’t look much like a Servo-furnishing. Has Tiermann taken up fashioning androids?’

‘I’m not an android,’ the Doctor shrugged. ‘I’m a prisoner down here. Old Tiermann wanted me out of the way.’

‘Oh well,’ said Barbara. ‘He’s like that. I fell from favour a good while ago. I don’t even know why. Years ago, it was. I’ve been here ever since. Shuffling about on Minus Thirty-Nine. Hoping that, some day, someone like you would turn up. Someone who wants crisps and pop for breakfast!’ There was a lift in her tone, like the Doctor had made her happier than she could ever remember being.

55

Suddenly the Doctor was imagining days stretching out ahead, with nothing to eat but stale crisps. Except – he reminded himself – there weren’t endless days stretching ahead, were there? There wasn’t even a tomorrow morning waiting for them. Today was the day the world ended, remember? He gulped down his pop.

‘We have to find a way back to the surface, Barbara. And we need to do it now.’ He belched. ‘Sorry.’

‘We?’ cried Barbara. ‘Me as well?’

‘Of course!’ the Doctor said. ‘We need to get. . . ’

‘What about my friend?’ Barbara said.

‘Your friend?’

‘He’s down here as well. Been here years. We need to get him out as well.’

The Doctor was starting to regret starting this. ‘Oh, erm, OK then.’

Barbara lurched out of her place by the wall and began squeaking away on her castors. ‘He’s not far away. He’ll be so delighted. We thought we were goners, we did. We thought we’d be left down here, hidden in the house. When you-know-what happened.’ She turned to the Doctor. ‘You know what you-know-what is, don’t you?’

He nodded solemnly. ‘The Voracious Craw.’

Barbara gave a shudder. ‘Exactly. And the Voracious Craw won’t be satisfied with a can of pop and some mouldy old smoky bacon crisps.’

The Doctor followed her as she bustled arthritically down the corridor. ‘But Barbara, how do you know about the Voracious Craw?

Hidden away down here?’

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘Well, um.

The house told me, didn’t it?

The

Dreamhome told us. The Dreamhome has talked about little else for days now.’

‘Has it?’ The Doctor asked, a little surprised by this.

‘And the Dreamhome isn’t very happy, Doctor,’ she sighed. ‘About any of Tiermann’s plans.’

‘I bet it’s not,’ the Doctor said, just as they rounded a corner and entered a rather darkened, dusty room.

‘Here’s my friend, Doctor, here he is. Toaster! Toaster, wakeup!’

56

The Doctor moved to help Barbara wake her friend and fellow prisoner. It was a sun bed, lying there somewhat despondently in the shadows.

In the main living area of the Dreamhome, Ernest Tiermann was ranting and raving to his wife.

‘Desperate measures,’ he cursed, taking off his blackened gloves and slinging them down. ‘Never did I imagine myself setting light to our grounds like that. Burning our prized possessions. . .

as a barrier

against outside.’

‘I know, my dear,’ Amanda fussed round him, along with two of the Servo-furnishings.

‘None of it would have been necessary if the shields were fully functional,’ Tiermann shouted. ‘And that’s all down to that idiotic Doctor.

We should have sent him off with a flea in his ear yesterday.’ Tiermann grunted vengefully. ‘Well, at least we will have the satisfaction of knowing that he will meet his demise along with the rest of everything here.’

These last few utterances were overheard by Martha and Solin, as they returned from watching the Craw on the monitor screen. Solin could hardly believe his ears. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Father, you surely don’t intend to leave the Doctor underground when we leave. We can’t! That’s inhuman. . . ’

Martha tossed her head. ‘It’s no more than I expected.’ She glared at the professor. She wasn’t intimidated by him. She’d come across bullying experts just like him throughout her training. The thing was, not to be browbeaten by them. Now she was facing up to him. ‘Look.

The shields are failing because of the approach of the Voracious Craw.

Not because of anything the Doctor or I did to them. The Craw makes technology go haywire. It’s part of its effect. That’s what the Doctor said.’

Tiermann sneered. ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Martha was close to losing her temper. ‘But we’ve seen it happen with other things.

The robot in the kitchen. That went peculiar, didn’t it, Solin?’

‘She’s right, father,’ said Solin urgently. ‘I was there.’

57

Tiermann looked affronted. ‘Nothing can interfere with the functioning of the Servo-furnishings. I made them impervious to. . . ’

‘It’s happening, Professor Tiermann,’ Martha told him. ‘This whole place is cracking up.’

As if on cue, there came a great scream of terror from the direction of the kitchen. Solin jerked into action. ‘Where’s Mother?’

The sun bed coughed and spluttered, making the ultraviolet tubes in his transparent body crackle and spark with brilliant blue light.

He was in much worse condition than Barbara, the Doctor thought.

He looked like he had been worn into the ground and then cast down here, into the dark recesses of the Dreamhome, once he had been deemed useless. The Doctor experienced a flash of anger, and then determination to do everything he could to help these mechanical unfortunates.

‘I do hate you to see me like this, in my decrepitude,’ Toaster sighed.

‘I wish you could have seen me in my prime.’

‘He was magnificent,’ sighed Barbara huskily. She was standing back and observing as the Doctor buzzed his sonic screwdriver into Toaster’s various nooks and crannies. ‘Can you fix him up with that device, Doctor? Can you help him?’

Only superficially, the Doctor thought, as the sonic went about its busy work inside the sun bed. Only enough to get it on its feet again for a day or two. ‘I’m trying my best,’ the Doctor grinned, reassuringly.

‘Hmm,’ said Barbara. ‘Maybe when you’re finished you could have a little go with that gadget on my ailing parts.’

‘We’ll see,’ said the Doctor.

‘My prime!’ Toaster was waxing nostalgically. ‘Nobody could tan like me! I was like, FLASH! Instant tan. WHOOSH! That’s you done.

Turn them over! FLAA-AA-SSHH! That side’s finished. Easy as grilling sausages! I was brilliant! I was like a supernova! FLAASSHH!’ His tubes gave an over-enthusiastic burst of light, almost blinding the Doctor. ‘Oh, sorry about that. . . ’