Doctor Who: BBC Past Doctor Adventures [030] - Verdigris by Paul Magrs

Author:Paul Magrs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555926
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2000-04-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Night

All night there is the sound of the trains.

Our heroes – in two distinct camps: one beneath London, the other, far above – both lie awake in the same night and they can all hear the rumbling hiss and screeching of trains.

The kind of noise that keeps you awake at night because you think yourself tied to those tracks by a moustache-twiddling villain.

In his own sumptuous pad, the most luxurious room in the secret lair of Destiny’s Children – all black sheets and zebra flock wallpaper – even the Master has this thought.

The hideout underneath New Cross shakes, rattles and rolls with the distant reverberations of tube trains.

During the night the Master decides to contact his own Master. He needs a little boost; he needs a chance to show off what he has accomplished so far. And so he pulls back the red curtains that cover his viewscreen in the corner of his room and activates the machine, tuning into the bristling, malevolent thought waves of the man who has set him upon this mission.

When the screen clears all that can be seen is a dark silhouette in a smoky room.

‘Yeees?’ asks the silhouette.

‘Master,’ says the Master, with a tight bow and then he draws himself up to report on progress thus far.

The figure on the screen nods contentedly throughout and when his servant is finished, though he is not excessive with his praise. Then he starts to give his creature further instructions and the Master starts nodding in turn.

What a relief, to have someone telling you what to do!

‘Soon,’ says that dark shadow on the screen, ‘the Doctor will have nowhere to go! He will be forced to leave this world… for ever!’

And both figures laugh for an appropriate length of time, at the end of which the Master clicks off the viewscreen and returns to bed.

Outside, in the main room, Simon is working in the night – totting up new figures and probabilities, the bright sparks dancing in his massive, lucent brain – and he curses the trains for their impact on his sums.

The glasses left on the tables by the Children before they went to bed tinkle and crash against each other.

Jo Grant lies on the settee in the main room, right beneath the pulsing mind of Simon, and at last she re-gathers her wits enough to realise that the Master has tied her up with silk handkerchiefs.

Now she is out of her spell and free to wonder at this new environment: a brand-new lair in which she has been trapped, another nightmare location.

She is wondering at the Master’s place in recent events; no one she knows has heard much from him recently. Not since the last UNIT Christmas party, in fact.

The Doctor believed his old foe was off-Earth at last, and up to his business elsewhere, having grown bored with the humdrum doings of Terrans.

Jo is convinced that it is the Master who has interfered with the proper running of UNIT and this, curiously, comes as some relief to her.

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