Doctor Who: The Rescue (12 page)

Ian watched impatiently while Vicki knelt by the communications lashup and switched on the radio signal that would guide the rescue mission to the exact spot. As the equipment came alive the drain on the feeble power cells caused the lights to fade to an even dimmer level. The compartment now looked much less inviting.

‘I hope the power will last,’ Vicki murmured gloomily.

‘If the beacon fails we may be stranded here for ever.’

Impatient to be away, Ian took her by the shoulder.

‘Come along, Vicki. Let’s get back to the TARDIS,’ he insisted.

The Doctor had almost dozed off once or twice despite the hardness of the stone seat. In spite of all the menacing and violent images of the huge masks and the vivid murals looming in the shadows, the vast ceremonial chamber exerted a hypnotic and dreamlike effect, and the Doctor had noticed that the colourful vapours rising into the vault above him were filling the air with a pungent sleepy haze, like incense in a cathedral. He had deliberately seated himself with his back to the entrance but in such a position as to enable him to see the dark doorway reflected in the glass front of one of the display cabinets. He could also see his own reflection, and in the pale overhead light his dark clothes, flowing white locks and severe profile gave him a quite terrifying aspect which made him jump the first time he noticed it! Indeed, he looked like the effigy of an ancient god sitting in judgement.

After what seemed like an eternity, even to the Doctor who was accustomed to insulating his senses from the frustration of passing time, he heard a soft clicking noise behind him. Then the stone panel swung open on its shrieking hinges with a terrifying sound which echoed thunderously around the huge chamber.

After a pause, the Doctor heard an eerie hissing and wheezing sound and then an awkward scratching noise slowly came nearer and nearer. Squinting into the glass front of the cabinet, the Doctor made out a hideous spectral shape lurching up behind him between the pillars.

Koquillion’s head seemed to hang suspended in the air while the darker body merged eerily into the deep shadows. The reddish eyes burned like angry gas jets on their thick probing stalks and the beak hissed and flapped behind the gleaming white sabre fangs. The monstrous head nodded menacingly at each squeaking step as the giant curved talons scratched at the polished rock floor; the jerkily clutching claws flashed in the light as the creature swung ponderously from side to side, sniffing out its prey.

The Doctor waited until the thing was almost upon him. Then he rose to his feet, keeping his back to Koquillion. ‘Come in, come in. I have been expecting you for some time,’ the Doctor declared, his firm authoritative voice echoing impressively around the vault above.

Koquillion stopped in its tracks with a fractured squawk of surprise.

Very slowly the Doctor turned to face the hissing dragon across the burnished stone altar. Like a beast from the underworld, Koquillion loomed through the tangle of coloured shafts of light which reflected from the polished slabs.

‘This used to be the Didonian Hall of Judgement,’ the Doctor said with a grandly sweeping gesture around him.

‘Their equivalent of a Supreme Court, I suppose.’ The Doctor smiled, his face an almost skull-like mask, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked under the overhead illumination.

‘Rather appropriate in the circumstances, do you not agree?’

Cautiously the Doctor walked round the altar and stopped in front of the glowering monster. ‘Koquillion, perhaps I should remind you that...’ The Doctor’s voice seized in his throat and he dived sideways just in time to avoid the slashing razor claw as Koquillion lashed viciously at his face.

The beast lurched forward and the Doctor backed away around the altar, keeping his eyes fixed on the hideous apparition. With a deft movement he whipped the torch from his pocket and switched it on, directing the powerful beam straight into Koquillion’s goggling eyes. The creature stopped again, blinded.

Warily the Doctor edged forward again. ‘Perhaps I should remind you that the costume of
Khakhuiljan
was only worn by the most senior Didoi and on the most solemn ceremonial occasions,’ he said in a low calm voice.

‘And, flattered as I am that you should consider my demise to be such an occasion, I do not feel that you are a worthy executioner...’ With a sudden movement the Doctor reached up and grasped the head by one of the sabre fangs.

He gave a sharp tug and the beast’s huge head came away in his hand.

‘Mr Bennett I presume...’ the Doctor said wryly, keeping the torchbeam directed relentlessly into the startled grey eyes which stared at him in disbelief. ‘Allow me to introduce myself... the Doctor!’ He chuckled genially, but then grew solemn as soon as he realised that Bennett did not appreciate the joke.

The Doctor glanced inside the huge hollow head. ‘A most ingenious little voice distorting mechanism, Mr Bennett. I congratulate you. I must admit that your entrance through the chamber was really quite dramatic—

almost unnerving.’ He put the heavy mask down on the altar, taking care to keep the torch full in Bennett’s eyes while he studied his gaunt, bearded face. ‘Well, Mr Bennet, I am intrigued to know the reason behind your elaborate masquerade,’ the Doctor continued calmly. ‘You see, I happen to know something about the Didoi and their civilisation and what I heard about recent events here made me suspicious.’ The Doctor paused, his body alert and poised to react.

Bennett backed off a little, blinking his watering eyes and turning aside. ‘Then you might as well know the rest, Doctor,’ he replied hoarsely, his voice still sounding a shade artificial even without the miniature device fitted inside the mask. ‘I was forced into all this to save my life...’

The Doctor kept his eyes on the vicious talons gleaming at the end of Bennett’s huge arms. ‘To save your life? But from whom? Not from the Didoi I venture to suggest,’ he said acidly. ‘There is no more peace-loving species in the entire Universe.’

‘From the crew of
Astra Nine
,’ Bennett retorted savagely, needled by the old man’s scornful tone and by his own helplessness in the glare from the torch. ‘I killed a member of the crew. I was arrested and then the craft crashlanded here and I managed to escape. The killing had not yet been notified to Intergalax, so I knew that if I disposed of the rest of the crew I would be safe.’

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed with contempt. ‘Disposed of the crew?’ he echoed. ‘Of course. How convenient for you to blame their deaths on the innocent inhabitants of Dido.’ The Doctor threw back his head and his mouth curved tightly downwards in a grimace of disgust.

Bennett ignored him. ‘After we crashlanded here the inhabitants invited the crew to a kind of congress.’ Bennett grinned and shook his head at the naïveté of his victims. ‘It was so ridiculously easy. I rigged a booby trap using the craft’s electrophase condensors. Then...’ Bennett crossed two claws as if for good luck, ‘... just two little wires touched and the whole congress went up. The entire population of the planet and the crew.’

The Doctor’s face was impassive and frozen. ‘You are insane, Bennett. You massacred an entire population just to save your own skin?’

‘I saved the girl,’ Bennett snapped. ‘Vicki did not know what I had done. She was unaware I had even been arrested. She thinks the crew were killed by the aliens and that I survived. Neat idea, wasn’t it! When we are picked up she will corroborate my story.’

The Doctor nodded gravely. ‘And you masqueraded as Koquillion to make her feel threatened by the planet’s terrible inhabitants.’

Bennett laughed. ‘She came to rely on me to protect her from Koquillion, so I kept control over her.’

The Doctor shook his head, sickened by the warped logic of Bennett’s story. ‘And if your plan had succeeded you would have been safe,’ he sighed. ‘Your guilt would have been concealed for ever.’

Bennett stared directly into the Doctor’s eyes, no longer affected by the brilliant beam of the torch. ‘
If
it succeeded?’

he echoed scornfully. ‘But, my dear Doctor, nothing has changed. Except that there are now three more people for Koquillion to dispose of...’

A claw suddenly flashed through the air knocking the torch out of the Doctor’s hand and Bennett lurched forward, his cold grey eyes bright with ruthless purpose.

Ironically, he looked even more fearsome now without the huge head: the combination of human head with reptilian body and insect claws suggested some nightmare mutation from the secret laboratory of a demented scientist.

Mesmerised by the slashing talons cutting the air only centimetres from his face, the Doctor backed away, desperately trying to think of a way to defend himself. All at once he felt the edge of the altar in the small of his back.

With a croak of dismay the old man bent backwards over the ancient sacrificial slab, gaping wide-eyed at the loathsome hybrid figure looming over him in preparation for the kill...

Behind the blind gaping rectangle of an empty window up on the terraces, Barbara, Ian and Vicki had watched the nightmare figure of Koquillion crossing the shallow crater and entering the tunnel leading to the entrance to the Hall of Judgement. By the weird light of the three moons and against the fantastic wasted landscape the monster had looked like something out of a dream.

‘Well, we certainly can’t risk going through that way,’

Ian declared.

Barbara grinned weakly. ‘I’m so glad you said that. I don’t think I could face another confrontation with Mr Koquillion.’

Vicki shuddered. ‘Nor I.’

Ian looked worried. He had forgotten all about the terrifying obstacle course of narrow ledges, gates made of knives and the fiendish booby trap of moving walls which lay between them and the safe haven of the police box. Nor was he entirely convinced that the sand monsters—if there were any more of them—were quite so harmless as Vicki and the Doctor had claimed.

‘Not only that,’ he murmured, ‘the Doctor and I came out that way and there’s an awful cave with a ledge only six inches wide high up along the wall. I’m not sure I could face it again, especially with you two in tow.’

Barbara bristled indignantly. ‘What do you mean,
us two
in tow
?’ she demanded, nudging Vicki for moral support.

‘Just you wait, Ian Chesterton. We girls aren’t so useless as you boys like to think!’

Ian was about to describe the knives and the moving slab but then decided not to mention them, just in case they were forced to take that route after all. ‘Come on, you two, we’ve got to look for another way through to the TARDIS,’ he said with artificial eagerness to boost morale.

He turned to Vicki, who had hardly said a word since they had left the wreck. ‘Vicki, you don’t know of any other ways into the mountain, do you?’

Vicki shook her head. ‘Bennett told me never to stray far from the
Astra Nine
. He said Koquillion’s people would most likely kill me.’

Ian exchanged bleak glances with Barbara. ‘Any suggestions?’ he asked gloomily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could break into the tunnel up on the ridge, Barbara, the one Koquillion blasted to bits?’

Just then Vicki’s body tightened like a drumskin.

‘Look...’ she whispered, staring across the crater towards the huge dark bulk of the silicodon’s corpse.

They saw the two tall silver figures striding gracefully into view over the lip of the crater. The figures stopped and turned to one another. Then they turned and seemed to stare at the tunnel mouth. Finally, they set off round the edge of the crater towards the tunnel with long loping steps.

There was an awed silence.

‘What the dickens are they?’ Ian gasped eventually.

‘Those are the silver things that came into the wreck while you were looking for the Doctor and Bennett,’

Barbara gabbled in her haste to explain. ‘Don’t you remember? I caught a glipse of one when we were outside while the Doctor was having his little talk with Vicki.’

Ian stared open-mouthed at the shimmering creatures.

‘But what
are
they?’ he asked Vicki.

But Vicki seemed to have withdrawn even more into herself, like a child trying to make something nasty disappear simply by refusing to look at it. She seized their arms. ‘We must get away. They will kill us!’ she said.

But Ian and Barbara were so fascinated by the ghostly figures that they resisted Vicki’s efforts to persuade them to flee. Suddenly, without warning, Vicki broke away and ran off into the depths of the ruin.

‘Where is she going?’ Ian muttered, hurrying after her.

‘Vicki, come back here! Vicki!’

Barbara waited by the gaping hole in the stone wall, watching the strange figures pause by the entrance to the tunnel into which Koquillion had disappeared. She felt her skin creep as the figures stared around and seemed to look straight at her with their luminous green eyes, though she was fairly sure they could not see her in the shadows. She sighed with relief when at last they turned and vanished into the base of the cliff. She listened for some sign of Ian and Vicki returning, but the musty ruin was deathly quiet.

‘Ian... Are you there?’ she called, straining to see into the dusty blackness.

There was no reply.

Stretching out her hands in front of her, Barbara inched her way into the void with hammering heart and trembling limbs. The walls of the ruin felt powdery and her searching hands sent a fine choking dust into the air which stuck to her bone dry throat. She stumbled blindly through echoing empty chambers deeper and deeper into the mountain, croaking Ian’s name over and over again. Eventually she heard muffled voices in the distance. It was hard to make out what they were saying.

‘Try to reach up...’ Ian seemed to be telling Vicki.

‘But I can’t move...’

‘Try to press your feet against the sides and use your back to lever yourself up...’

Then there was a terrible scream.

‘What’s happened? Where are you?’ Barbara shouted, trying to orientate herself and decide which direction to take.