Doctor Who_ The Tomb Of Valdemar Part 4

The growling is emanating from somewhere between them and the TARDIS. The Doctor isn't sure what has happened, but he knows growls when he hears them.

He lowers Pelham into a seat as Romana clangs the hatch shut. 'What now?' she asks.

Indeed. It's a quandary. Once again, events seem to have conspired to prevent his reunification with his s.h.i.+p. And poor old K-9. For a moment he feels irritated by this human woman. Why did she have to come here just at the wrong time and start messing about and causing all this trouble?

Doesn't she realise what this delay might mean?

He sighs. Because she is human and that is what humans do.

'I don't mean to worry you, Doctor,' says Romana. 'But that growling is getting louder.'

'Hmm,' he replies. 'We need to go up. You'd think they'd have a telephone. Or a bell.' He looks at the crude operating controls. Bra.s.s levers and switches and round clock dials, a nostalgic facade for such powerful instrumentation.

Shouldn't be too difficult.

'Doctor!' hisses Romana, just as Erik thumps on to the bathyscape. He bangs and pounds at its sides. Through the portholes the Doctor sees eyes grown over by matter resembling black coral, a face warped as if by tremendous gravity, a mind gone.

The man is bellowing, screaming. The sounds are odd, as if something has added tones to their range. The bathyscape rings and echoes with the noise and thumping.

'Please...' pleads Pelham, 'get us out of here.'

Without further ado, the Doctor hauls one lever back. It snaps into its new position with a clunk. There is a feeling of antic.i.p.ation as the chain tautens. Somewhere up ahead, metal grinds.

He looks at a worried Romana and gives her his smile.

'Going up!' he says.

The bathyscape rocks as the chain yanks them aloft. The Doctor is ready, he has braced himself. Black rock speeds by.

Romana and Pelham, on the other hand, are tumbling all over the place. Outside, Erik scrabbles and, by accident or design, grabs the hatch lock. The bathyscape begins to swing as its speed increases. Climbing over the women, the Doctor clamps a hand over the inner locking wheel on the hatch, just as the unfortunate creature starts to turn the latch.

He is surprised by the strength Erik is exerting. Like a man possessed.

'Help me, Romana!' the Doctor bellows, feeling the wheel start to turn. She is at his side in an instant. She feels cool next to him. Her slender fingers grip the wheel. Still, the shrieking creature outside is twisting. Through the gla.s.s in the hatch, the Doctor studies his adversary's face. The ears, nose and brow have been subsumed by the coral growing from the eyes. The skull is changing shape, becoming elongated. Only the large, slack, noisy mouth points to the original species. Its breath steams the window. The Doctor feels pity for the unfortunate man. He knows, with finality, that this process is irreversible.

Still, there are more pressing concerns. As the bathyscape is reeled in ever-faster to wherever it is heading, the creature's strength is intensifying. Wind generated by speed tries to haul it off. The wheel turns some more. Romana grits her teeth.

Then they are out into the red and gold sky. The grip releases. There is a final wail of despair and the Doctor turns away. He doesn't need to see; he knows precisely what the concentrated acid, the pressure and the heat will do to the creature's flesh. Something liquid drops like rain over the porthole.

'Erik...' moans Pelham, clutching the jewelled bangle on her wrist as if it were a life belt.

The vessel is swinging more freely now. The Doctor clumsily reaches for the leather hand-straps to keep himself upright.

Romana is still gripping the wheel. She is struggling to remain detached. 'What affected him? Those were the same symptoms as K-9.'

The Doctor nods, nasty theories swirling inside his head.

'You know, I've got a feeling that someone here is trying to open the tomb of Valdemar.'

He looks at Pelham, who reacts to the name. 'How...' she stumbles, 'how did you know?'

'Because wherever there is trouble, I must always find it.'

Pelham is staring at him and Romana, as if aware of their presence for the first time.

'You're from the Protectorate...' she says.

'Oh no,' Romana replies instantly, 'we're travellers. This is the Doctor and I am Romanadvor-Romana. We arrived by accident.'

'That's impossible.'

That word again. If there is one thing the Doctor finds tiresome above all else, it is this re-explaining of himself that he always has to go through. He tries to use the word to his advantage, find out what's going on. 'What do you mean, impossible?' he snaps.

He is surprised when Pelham bites back. Not as stunned as he'd believed.

'Because this is Ashkellia and you mentioned Valdemar.

Put those two together and the "accident" thing seems, shall we say, unlikely.'

'Mmm. Good point. How do you explain us then?'

'I think Hopkins sent you; you're New Protectorate agents.'

The Doctor considers this.

'I'm sorry but ' Romana starts. The Doctor cuts her off, instantly.

'New Protectorate agents. I suppose it's possible. If we were, would that be good or bad?'

Pelham eyes him suspiciously. 'Don't play games with me.

I'm in enough trouble already. When we get to the palace, Neville isn't going to be best pleased. If you tell him you're Protectorate agents he will kill you. Eventually.'

'We're not New Protectorate agents,' says the Doctor cheerily.

'Which is what I tried to say from the off,' sniffs Romana.

'What is a New Protectorate agent anyway?'

Pelham starts to back away. 'You know, I have the feeling that perhaps I didn't escape from the tomb at all; that this is all some sort of hallucination and I'm still back there in the tunnels...'

The Doctor senses the cracks in her composure. She has been damaged by the experience. He has to know. 'What happened to your friends?'

Pelham is staring into s.p.a.ce, trying to remember. Or trying to forget.

'I... Erik found a huge hall. A great gateway. It had to be the entrance to the crypt itself. We felt like something, someone, was guiding us. Like they wanted to be found. I was afraid, hanging back...' Her eyes clear momentarily. 'I told them not to, you understand? I know it's my fault but I tried to stop them. Together, Erik and Prahna, they opened the tomb. The light... the cracking noises and the light...'

'The energy wave?' asks Romana.

'Yes,' the Doctor says, feeling the weight of his words in his mouth. He looks at Pelham. 'You didn't get it open did you, not fully?'

'How... how do you know that?'

'Because if you had, the consequences would have been catastrophic. You would have released forces that are infinitely more powerful.'

'And they... started to scream,' says Pelham, disbelieving her own words. 'I ran to help and then... then they turned round. Prahna and Erik turned on him, attacked him, started to... I ran. I panicked. I've never been so afraid in my life.'

She lapses into silence. All the Doctor can hear is the grinding of the chains that haul them up and up.

'Where are we going anyway?' asks Romana. 'Who is pulling us up?'

Pelham smiles but with little humour. 'You may wish you had stayed in the tomb.'

'What do you know of Valdemar?' asks the Doctor abruptly.

'He would have been destroyed millennia before the birth of humanity.'

'Over a million years.' Her reply is muted. The Doctor hopes he is taking her mind off the horror she experienced in the cavern. 'And Valdemar is my job. I found him and I re-invented him.'

'Would someone mind explaining to me,' Romana asks patiently, 'just who this Valdemar is?'

The Doctor and Pelham begin to speak at once, both eager to tell their stories.

'Valdemar was a G.o.d...' says Pelham.

'Valdemar was a cancer...' says the Doctor.

And all the time the chain pulls and pulls... lifting them higher, to Paul Neville.

For the Doctor, memory is a hazy thing. He recalls events and names more clearly than he recalls himself. Who was the man who found the Daleks on Skaro, ready to emerge from their metal city and make war with the universe? Who was the man who tricked the Great Intelligence, deep in the tunnels of London? Who was the man who solved the riddle of Peladon? He does not know.

Someone, it must have been him because he remembers, was once young. Centuries young.

He recalls the two students hooked up to the Matrix, their joint consciousnesses wired into headsets for the illegal terminal they had lashed-up, to prove that they could. Two students, in Prydonian robes. One dominant, clever, cunning. The other cautious, patient, thorough. Him.

At the Academy. Where his friend, the Time Lord who went bad and became the Master, revealed to him: Valdemar.

When the universe was young, younger than he, younger than even the range of a TARDIS, a race now known only as the Old Ones (a translation, but typical of the colourless, literal and long t.i.tles ascribed by the Time Lords. Old Ones was a name they gave to any long-dead, highly technologically advanced alien beings with incredible powers.

As if they were afraid to give them real names) disappeared.

Exterminated.

Why?

Valdemar.

The Doctor and the other student had travelled back, through the Matrix safeguards, tapping back through Gallifreyan history, through universal history.

Nothing was left of the Old Ones, except warnings.

They had released or created something, some black ma.s.s of life. Valdemar may have been the name of the first Old One, which it took for itself, or perhaps it was always called that. No one knew. For the two students, a.n.a.logues of Valdemar portrayed it as a stain, blotting out stars, consuming planets, transforming races into servitors to sustain itself. Valdemar the Unstoppable, the Destructor, the universe at its mercy.

And then, somehow, the remnants of the Old Ones defeated it. No record survived of how. It just stopped. Correlations from dozens of races' mythologies were processed by the Matrix, the result an aggregation of them all: Valdemar was killed and its body placed in a tomb. The tomb was sealed for ever under acid skies, lest Valdemar transcend death itself and return again to complete its destruction.

The students had emerged from the Matrix, the eyes of one them s.h.i.+ning. 'The power.' he shouted joyously, 'Think of the power.'

The Doctor had stared at his friend and wondered just who, what kind of person, would gain so much unrestrained pleasure from such a nightmare.

Pelham, for her part, is finding life a little too much. She can't... won't remember what happened down there in the tomb... Erik and the other one, she has already forgotten his name. Her worst fears confirmed. Then these two strangers.

The woman in a mishmash melange of styles from the last two decades and the man with no recognisable style at all.

Both talking gibberish. Is this some plot by Valdemar to drive the last remnants of sanity from her, an arcane revenge for all those stories she wrote about him?

They have to be from Hopkins, they have to be Hopkins's agents. There is no other sane explanation. Which, as it's true because it must be, means that more trouble awaits them in the palace. She feels the b.u.mp as the bathyscape is jostled by the core updraught. Suddenly their ascent, already speedy, becomes stomach churning. The updraught of gases pushes them on, threatening to loop the giant chain.

The Doctor is staring out of the porthole, eyes a-goggle, staring at the rus.h.i.+ng coloured air pulsing upwards. 'You know Romana, I do believe I know where we're going. That is a core updraught. Superheated gases from the planet's core rising in a high-yield energy stream.'

Romana stops preening herself to rise and look upwards through the gla.s.s. 'I've seen it proposed as a theory, but never realised on any kind of scale.'

The Doctor turns to Pelham and suddenly she finds that her hand is in his, being warmly shaken up and down.

'Congratulations, Ms Pelham,' he beams. 'You've discovered the principle of atmospheric flotation, about six hundred years early. How did you do it?'

'I don't understand,' she stutters.

'How did you ensure stabilisation?' asks Romana curiously.

Pelham believes the woman is serious. 'Wide-band streaming? Retro thrusters? Rotational spin?'

'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about,' she replies, suspiciously. 'And to answer your question, we didn't do it we found it.'

'Ahh. That explains a lot,' says the Doctor.

'Not to me it doesn't.'

'You knew the tomb was here didn't you?'

'We guessed.'

'You're some kind of historian? Archaeologist?'

'Novelist.'

'Really? That's interesting.'

'I'm glad you think so.'