Doctor Who by Russell T Davies

Author:Russell T Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

10

Inside the Box

She ran into a cavern.

She ran into a vault.

She ran into a cathedral.

She ran into a huge space, a vast dome, with the Doctor standing at its centre, the grinning lord of an impossible realm.

It was like being plunged underwater, the sudden pressure in her head, and Rose thought, simply, No! and ran back out again.

Into the yard. The same old yard. With headless Mickey still chopping away at the fire door.

She looked back at the blue box. She’d left the door open and she could see, in the gap between door and jamb, that huge, strange space reaching far beyond, with the Doctor somehow in the distance, a small figure, a good twenty metres away and yet within a box that stood beside her, no deeper than a metre in itself.

Headless Mickey began to kick away the last of the wood.

But she had to run around the box, a full circle, counting all four corners, one, two, three, four, but no, it was a straightforward solid box, no tricks, no traps, but how?

Wham! The final scraps of fire door went flying and the headless Mickey staggered into the yard, shovel-blade hands flailing as it blundered murderously towards her.

There was nothing else she could do.

She ran back inside the box.

She slammed the door shut, and then stayed facing it, because that was easier than looking at the space behind her. She flinched as she heard headless Mickey reach the doors, and hit them. The flimsy wood, painted white on the inside, shuddered, and yet … that was all. A simple shudder. The noise from outside was muffled and distant.

‘The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get through that door,’ said the Doctor. ‘And believe me, they’ve tried.’

Okay, she thought, now I’ve got to turn around.

So she did.

The Doctor’s blue box was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Much bigger. Hugely so.

She was standing on a metal ramp surrounded by curved walls arching upwards, studded with hexagons. What she’d thought was a dome was more of a sphere; she could look down, through the metal mesh at her feet, to see the curve completing far below in one vast circle. The whole interior was weathered, rusting, bruised, and yet humming with life, as though huge engines were brooding somewhere beyond the walls. The skin of the sphere was supported by weird buttresses, shaped like … coral? Yes, she could smell ozone, like the seaside, though this was a coral glowing with internal light.

The metal ramp at her feet was part of a suspended walkway leading to the centre of the sphere, to the Doctor. He stood in front of a sculpture, a coral mushroom out of which a glass pillar containing tubes of light soared up to the roof and down to the depths, like a linchpin holding the entire globe together. The Doctor had his arms folded, feet set apart in a classic pose of masculine supremacy, looking down at her.

And yet the most important thing was this: the Doctor had a copy of her boyfriend’s head plugged into the sculpture.

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