Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep by Victor Pemberton Read Free Book Online Page A

one last anxious look at his wife, then left.
     
    For a moment or so, Maggie remained still and silent. She was breathing heavily, but felt no real discomfort.
    As the thaw continued outside, long icicles from the roof began to melt. Their intermittent dripping sounds onto the window-sill could almost have been notes from a song. A warning song perhaps.
    Maggie was falling deeper and deeper into sleep. The song of the icicles could have been a million years away in comparison to the sounds that were again creeping into her subconscious. Thumping.
    Pulsating. The pounding of a heartbeat.
    Maggie's eyes sprang open. But she was not awake. The thumping sound was closer, and she lay there listening to it. Then, almost as though on the word of a command, she threw off the duvet, rose up from the bed, and walked slowly towards the door. As she left the room, the last of the icicles outside finally melted.
    Out into the hall, then into the kitchen. Maggie had no sense of where she was, or what she was doing. Her eyes were wide open, but she was fast asleep. She was living through a nightmare where some mystical force was commanding her to do something. But what?
    As Maggie entered the kitchen, the heartbeat sounds were becoming louder and louder, faster and faster. The door! The door to the back patio! That's where Maggie was determined to go, had to go. But she didn't know why. Like an ethereal angel, she seemed to glide across the kitchen floor, step by perilous step, closer and closer towards her destiny. At last, she was at the door. Her hands blindly searched for the handle. They clasped it with a grip of iron. Slowly, it began to turn...
    Maggie paused. Her own heartbeat was now competing with the one on the other side of that door. In one swift movement, she pulled open the door.
    The noise was horrific. Thumping. Pulsating. Shrieking.
    Hissing. The seaweed clump was expanding in size, out of control.
    Maggie clutched her ears in agony, slammed the door, and locked it. Rubbing her eyes, struggling to breathe, she just stood with her back to the door, totally bewildered. It was as though she had suddenly been awoken from a nightmare.
     
     
    'What's all the panic?' Robson was pushing his way through a crowd of engineers who were anxiously watching a cluster of meters on the wall of the Impeller Area.
    'It's the pump, sir!' said the Chief Engineer, urgently. The strain of the past few hours was beginning to catch up on him, for his eyes were glazed with tiredness. 'The revs have dropped.'
    'The pump is slowing down, ja?' Van Lutyens was clearly shocked by this new development, for it was very rare that he slipped back into his native language, even one word of it.
    The Chief Engineer tapped one of the meters with two of his fingers, then checked it for any change in movement. 'She's not holding steady even now,' he said nervously. 'I don't understand it!'
    'Well, don't just stand there looking at it, man!' Robson was literally pushing the other engineers out of his way. 'Do a complete check!'
    'Excuse me. D'you mind if I make a suggestion?'
    Robson turned around with a glare to see the Doctor calling from the back of the group.
    'When I was in your pipeline room just a short while ago, I distinctly heard some kind of movement coming from inside the pipeline tube. It was identical to the movement I heard coming from inside the pipeline on the beach,' said the Doctor in a stern voice. 'A thumping, pulsating type of sound.'
    Van Lutyens immediately became very animated. 'That is what they heard out on the rigs!'
    'Nonsense!' snarled Robson, aware that alarm was being generated amongst his crew. 'What they heard and what everyone's heard is a mechanical fault somewhere along the line!'
    'But why did they hear it way out on the rigs?' insisted the Doctor.
    'Because, my friend, beneath this impeller shaft is a vast steel gasometer buried in the earth. It's like an echo chamber. Drop even a pin down there and it'll sound like a