Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment by Ian Marter Read Free Book Online Page B

made of...’ Then he turned and lumbered away.
    Sarah waited for a moment and then ran towards the opening. Even before she reached it she knew there was no escape. The narrow space between the buttresses wobbled like a distant heat haze, and the air surrounding it crackled as if with a fierce electric charge. She sank down disconsolately in the centre of the mossy floor, utterly alone. Harry had disappeared and the Doctor was lying injured—or perhaps even dead—at the bottom of the pit.
    There seemed to be no hope for her. She was completely at Styr’s mercy.
    As her hands ruffled the moss around her, she suddenly glanced down and then examined the multicoloured
    ‘carpet’ more closely: it was not moss at all, but a vast cluster of tiny ends of wire. She sprang up and peered closely at the walls of the alcove: what appeared to be intermingling veins of different rock strata were in fact wire elements embedded in the rock surface. Just as she stretched out her hand to touch them, the whole alcove seemed to suddenly come alive around her.
    With a thunderous tearing sound, the surrounding rock began to bulge and twist into nightmare shapes. Gigantic gnarled faces with bottomless pits for eyes, and grinning mouths bristling with razor-edged fangs, burst out at her from the heaving walls of the alcove. Bubbles of loathsome, oozing liquid seeped from thousands of tiny fissures and formed into strands of molten rock—thin as cobwebs—
    which enveloped her like a cocoon. It seemed to Sarah that unmentionable horrors which had lain hidden at the back of her mind all her life were suddenly becoming reality all around her.
    She flung herself onto the undulating floor and covered her face and screamed as the rock reared up in waves and folded around her, engulfing her slowly like a huge, bellowing maw...
    The Doctor was eagerly exploring the depths of the pit using the sonic screwdriver—switched to photon emission mode—as a torch.
    ‘Fascinating,’ he muttered as the sharp beam illuminated a cluster of bubbles of rock swelling out of the cavern wall like huge boils. ‘A sudden release of pressure in the magma...’ he mused, sweeping the beam over the glassy surfaces. ‘The temperatures must have been colossal...’ He tapped one of the bubbles with his finger. ‘Certainly not the Piccadilly Line,’ he murmured, sniffing the warm sulphurous air. ‘Smells more like the basement of the Savoy... which reminds me,’ he suddenly cried, ‘I haven’t had any breakfast...’
    The Doctor listened intently to the mingling echoes of his voice until they had died away. ‘Sounds like the Whitehall warren,’ he exclaimed, directing the sonar-photon beam into a gaping black opening above his head.
    Then stumbling across the mound of shattered rock, he seized the dangling end of the scarf.
    ‘This is no time for idle speculation,’ he told himself, giving the scarf a sharp tug. It immediately fell in a series of snakelike coils around him. For a moment, the Doctor stared at it with a mortified look and then glanced up at the edge of the pit, five or six metres above him.
    ‘Harry couldn’t have gone that way,’ he muttered. He scrambled back and peered up into the dark shaft again.
    The sonic torch-beam revealed protruding spurs of rock studding the twisting sides of the shaft before it curved away into darkness. With a few quick movements, the Doctor deftly fashioned a small lassoo with one end of the scarf. He then flung it into the shaft several times, as high as he could. At last it hooked itself round one of the projecting spurs and the Doctor pulled the loop tight.
    ‘Hope I don’t burst in on a Cabinet Meeting,’ he grinned, and hoisted himself rapidly into the booming honeycomb of tunnels.
    Harry lay flattened amongst a dense mass of gigantic thorns, oblivious of their piercing sting as he strained his ears to locate the direction of the eerie humming. He had searched for what seemed like hours to find a way out