Doctor Who: The Death Pit Read online

  Putta waved his hands despairingly, ‘And… you’re an Earth person, a human being, and human beings are famous all over the… well, you would call it the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex – famous for being…’ He sighed and then blurted out, ‘You kill everything you don’t understand and then sometimes you eat it. You don’t even like people from other continents on your own planet, you…’ He faltered, while the Doctor chuckled audibly.

  The Doctor was strolling easily next to the cart, covering the ground in that particularly light-footed, long-striding, tiptoeing way he had. ‘They also have very promising features. And there’s always evolution. They could improve endlessly. Almost endlessly.’ The Doctor’s large eyes shone benevolently. ‘If the black tip sharks and fruit flies don’t get there first.’

  But Putta wasn’t paying any attention to the Doctor, he was meeting Bryony’s eyes and blushing, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t intend to be rude about you.’

  ‘Not just rude about me, rude about my entire species… that’s a first.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Putta squirmed visibly.

  ‘Then next time maybe mention that we do…’ Bryony tried to think of anything human beings were good at. The 1970s hadn’t been inspiring so far – starvation in Biafra, nuclear testing, terrorist attacks and hijackings, Nixon being Nixon… at least the war in Vietnam was over, but things in Cambodia didn’t look good… ‘We do make a lovely shepherd’s pie. For example. Sometimes. Some of us. By which I mean we kill things we don’t understand and put them into pies… I don’t mean we would make good pies by being put into them as a filling, although I suppose we could… By a superior alien race…’ While Putta desperately tried not to look superior and absolutely managed, Bryony grinned, ‘We are a bit disappointing… And shepherd’s pie isn’t even a pie – no pastry.’ She nudged him on an especially tender bruise. ‘You’re from outer space. How great is that? That’s just…’ And she thought about kissing him, but then reconsidered and acted cool again.

  ‘While I am glad that we’re all friends…’ The Doctor leaned in under the golf cart’s gaily striped canopy as they progressed across the turf and fixed Putta with an icy look. ‘Apart from the multiple treaties and byelaws you’re transgressing… Explain yourself, young Putta. What are you doing here so far from Yinzill? It is Yinzill, isn’t it? Your home world? Yinzill in the Ochre Period.’

  Bryony interrupted. ‘Never mind that – what happened to him?’

  ‘Which is also a good question,’ the Doctor admitted.

  Bryony continued, ‘And what happened to the bunker? I’m not a big fan of golf, but I do know bunkers aren’t supposed to reach up and grab people’s feet. Or Yinzillites’ feet.’

  Putta was, of course, aware that the proper word for a being from Yinzill was a Yakt, but thought it was sweet of her to make the effort and didn’t like to correct her in case she punched him. She seemed to be a very physical kind of Earth person and was quite possibly stronger than he was.

  ‘Well?’ And she was glowering at him in expectation of an answer.

  Putta tried to organise his information in a logical stream, ‘Well, I… that is… My family… several of the other Puttas have done very well as… I mean…’ He sort of knew this wasn’t going to go well. ‘I am a bountykiller.’

  ‘Wha-at!?’ The Doctor made the word sound much longer and more threatening than usual and suddenly looked completely furious. ‘Barging round the universe, collecting trophies for ultra-millionaires? Making the shells of barber sylphs into finger bowls…!?’

  ‘But I never—’

  ‘You criticise human beings and you’re throwing stun canisters into bandan nests!? Of all the idiotic…!?’

  ‘I haven’t… I like bandans… And sylphs… We only target predator species.’

  The Doctor’s whole frame was bristling with outrage and suddenly he didn’t look at all like an amiable fool, more like a formidable enemy of injustice and wasteful harm. ‘And who decides which species is a predator? You? You think you have the right?’

  ‘There’s a list…’ Putta scrabbled in his inside pocket, then in each of his pockets… with increasing levels of despair… ‘They give us a list.’ He couldn’t find the list. It was gone, along with his fusion lance. (His lance not-very-cunningly disguised as a golf club, given that he couldn’t play golf – he’d somehow put his name in the Form section of the formatting instructions and ended up with a putter…) And he no longer had his Model G50 Threat Detector, which started leaking psy fluid after he dropped it on a hard surface – which you weren’t supposed to – so he’d had to throw it away before it dissolved his control panel, and his hands for that matter, it was appalling stuff, psy fluid…

  The Doctor raged on. ‘Is she a predator?’ He pointed at Bryony who couldn’t help being slightly alarmed. She’d never seen him like this. ‘Is everyone who eats shepherd’s pie a predator? Shouldn’t they be?’

  ‘I don’t… I’m not sure… That is, I’ve never…’

  ‘So many lives, so delicately balanced, so close to the abyss, so full of hope, and some greedy squad of imbeciles classifies them as a predator, as a resource, and you and your kind of destructive idiots come along and harvest them until they’re gone.’ The Doctor looked both furious and implacably sad.

  He seemed so alone in his grief that Bryony touched his arm. ‘I don’t think he meant any harm.’

  ‘His kind never mean any harm – they still do it!’ The Doctor stopped himself, quietened. ‘Very few species truly understand that actions have consequences. When you destroy something, that isn’t an isolated act.’ And for a second or so he looked like someone who had understood far too many consequences and who had been made very tired by that. Then he patted Bryony’s shoulder. ‘Our lives are connected. And other lives are connected to those lives and on and on. We are even connected… to Putta Pattershaun 5.’ He glowered at Putta.

  Putta responded with an apologetic babble. ‘I thought it would be a good idea, I mean I don’t like it, haven’t liked it, haven’t done it, not properly… I’ve never killed anything. I took aim at a Parthian mind wasp and I couldn’t fire. And they’re terrible. They can eat your whole personality and then lay their eggs in your face. But they have wonderful wings. There were colours in the wings that I’d never seen on any planet… I just couldn’t…’

  Bryony kept on with what she thought was a promising line of enquiry which would be much more use than additional shouting. ‘Patter-Putter, whatever your name is. Never mind all that – what happened to you? Did you do something? Did you bring some alien thing with you that ended up in the bunker? A whatsit, sense wasp? Something else? Or do your people have a problem with sand? Does it usually eat you?’

  ‘Which is what I would have asked. Roughly. What I would have asked if you hadn’t kept interrupting,’ nodded the Doctor. ‘Except for the sand part.’

  ‘Sand? No, we like sand,’ Putta bleated miserably. ‘Unless it gets into our shoes, or… elsewhere… Oh… I don’t know. I thought… My detector, just before it broke it showed this, this signal that couldn’t even have been true, but I landed here to look for – no one has even heard of them, not for millennia, and I didn’t expect to find… but then maybe the detector was broken already, giving a false reading before I dropped it… and I was left, anyway, with no more detector, no more signal, no more…’ Bryony was glowering at him with such impatience that he gulped and steered himself round to the events of the afternoon. ‘There was this man, this human man and I met him in the bar.’ Bryony snorted with derision which would have made her seem slightly unattractive to anyone but Putta. He continued, ‘The man definitely… he lured me into that sandpit. I’d never even seen him before.’

  ‘Did you do something to him?’ Bryony asked, with a hurtful level of suspicion.

  ‘You are quite annoying you know,’ confided the Doctor. ‘That could rub people up the wrong way. Not to mention your profession. Did you mention your profession – Bountyki
ller Putta?’ He pronounced the last two words as if they were a disease.

  ‘I didn’t mention anything,’ whined Putta. ‘I was being as human as possible and that appears to involve golf and sandpits.’

  ‘Bunkers,’ corrected Bryony and then disliked herself for it.

  ‘Bunkers. He was very angry all the time. I mean, so angry I could feel it on my skin somehow…’ Putta wrung his hands.

  ‘Can you usually feel other people’s mental states?’ the Doctor asked sharply. ‘And did you have a strange taste in your mouth?’

  Putta nodded and looked calmer, as if he now had the resident expert on his side. ‘Yes, a funny taste and, no, I can’t usually feel… well, my own feelings are a bit of a problem without anyone else’s…’ He caught sight of Bryony’s frown and got back to the main issue. ‘The man… Mr Agnew… I think he knew about the bunker and he got angrier and angrier as he walked me over here and then he made me play golf and got angrier still – only in a nasty, happy kind of way – and then the bunker got angry and then he left as soon as… once it started trying to eat me… he ran away.’ He looked a bit sickly as he remembered. ‘It grabbed my feet. If I hadn’t already got out my fusion lance…’ And then he didn’t want to finish the sentence.

  The Doctor tsked. ‘Running around showing off advanced technology to a less developed and very… emotional species…’ As if he’d never do such a thing himself. ‘You ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘Thank you for saving me.’

  ‘Well, it’s all part of a day’s work, really, I—’ The Doctor broke off when he saw Putta smiling carefully at Bryony and nodding.

  Bryony wasn’t currently that interested in gratitude. She thought she was on to something. ‘If he laid the trap… If Mr Agnew laid the trap, he must know how it operates and what it is. It must be his trap.’

  ‘Yes, you know, if you think about it, whoever laid the trap would understand what it is and be the one to use it,’ the Doctor added. In case anyone had forgotten he was a genius. He was already hypothesising about how a telepathic bond would react if it were partially corporeal and suffered pain, because – for example – someone had repeatedly fired a fusion lance at it… if the mild psychic abilities of a sandmaster had been somehow magnified and tamed… and if its governing consciousness had run away and abandoned it while it was injured… A feedback loop in that kind of situation could be extremely bad news for everyone concerned.

  Bryony burst in with, ‘Then we have to find Agnew!’ and looked pleased with herself. ‘I mean, shouldn’t we?’

  The Doctor nodded absently, murmuring to himself. ‘My tracking skills are a bit rusty. I studied with the Miccosukee people for a while…’ He began to stare significantly at the grass. ‘It will take great skill…’

  ‘Or we could look in the spa,’ suggested Putta.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘He mentioned he was going back to the spa.’ Putta blinked. There was a pause.

  The Doctor boomed, ‘Why on earth didn’t you say so?’

  ‘But you didn’t ask.’

  ‘Turn that thing round at once and back to the hotel!’

  As Putta and Bryony swung the golf cart unsteadily round to follow the Doctor, the twins trotted swiftly into their path and stood.

  Xavier told them, firmly, ‘I don’t think you should. Grandmother is expecting you.’

  ‘Yes. And you shouldn’t disappoint Grandmother.’ Honor looked sad, but also very determined. ‘She likes tea. A lot.’

  The Doctor adopted his most persuasive voice, ‘Oh, but we can come back. Yes, we can. Immediately. We have this one thing we must do together by ourselves in the Spa and then we’ll be back and then absolutely tea with Grandmother will happen. I look forward to it, I do.’ He wondered how a powerful effusion of psychons might affect the malleable minds of children. Probably quite badly.

  The twins stared at him and suddenly didn’t seem even slightly adorable. Their limbs stiffened and their faces hardened. It was possible to think that they might be dangerous in a fight – very swift and unforgiving.

  Bryony found herself thinking they should just abandon the golf cart and run – it would be faster, even with Putta’s badly bruised ankles. She also suddenly felt certain the twins would turn out to be much faster than anyone else running and that their speed might not be a comforting or unthreatening thing.

  ‘It isn’t four o’clock yet, you know. And four o’clock is tea time,’ the Doctor wheedled. He very carefully pretended to be someone who didn’t feel scared in any way. ‘We all promise we’ll be back here by four. If you wait for us. And then we’ll have fun, which I always enjoy, there’s nothing as much fun as fun, I find. Don’t you find?’ He wagged his hands and shrugged like someone who wasn’t rapidly calculating and puzzling and trying to get back to the hotel fast and to work out the twins’ real nature, while soothing them with unstoppable courtesy. Soothing with unstoppable courtesy often worked on most planets. It was one of the many reasons why the Doctor didn’t carry a gun.

  And then, as if the sun had come out – or as if they had finished their own calculations – the twins giggled and stood aside and Honor said, ‘Yes, we’ll see you later then. That will be terribly nice. And fun.’

  And Xavier patted Bryony on her arm and said, ‘Good luck, old girl.’

  This felt just a little bit creepy, so Bryony put her foot down and the cart zoomed – in as far as it could zoom – back towards the spa with the Doctor loping alongside as though what he loved most in whole the universe was rushing towards dangerous situations without having a proper plan. Or any plan at all.

  *

  The three arrived at the Fetch Hotel to see that the foyer was full of dissatisfied guests. Mr Mangold was just saying, ‘I am doing my best, sir. Miss Mailer, my receptionist, has disappeared…’ So he didn’t call her Junior when she wasn’t around, Bryony noted as she hurried past, shouting, ‘Guest emergency! Can’t stop!’

  By the time they’d reached the Spa Section, they had all realised that they certainly did look in need of relaxation and therapy. At the very least. Putta was covered in sand, grass, mud, vapour stains, fissile backwash and a layer of anxiety. In places his suit looked as if something had recently tried to eat it, because something had. Bryony’s own business suit had several small rips in it, was grass-stained, her tights were ruined and her name badge was missing, along with her shoes, she now noticed – she’d taken them off when she had helped wrestle Putta out of the pit. Or bunker. And her hair was alarming. The Doctor – he looked like the Doctor, which was always vaguely alarming to people like the Spa Manageress (who habitually patronised Bryony, because of her poor skincare, obvious split ends and Junior status).

  ‘Can I help you?’ There was a blatant sneer in the question.

  The Doctor paced up to the Spa Welcome Desk like a jolly tiger in a maroon jacket. ‘Indeed you can. How splendid that you’re here. Just who we need.’ He fished a weirdly pristine piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it for the Manageress to inspect. Whatever she read on it made her immediately attentive and slightly flirtatious. She gladly showed the Doctor that day’s register and David Agnew’s signature – he’d definitely signed in and hadn’t signed out yet. He must be inside.

  The Manageress then insisted on giving each of them gift bags and free swimming costumes. It took all Bryony’s powers of persuasion to get them into the spa without having to accept a guided tour, free sauna and beating with twigs.

  *

  Far across the Fetch Estate, the golf cart had been parked neatly in its charging bay behind Julia Fetch’s cottage. The twins were standing near it. Slowly, Honor pressed the palms of her hands against Xavier’s and he pressed back.

  Honor asked Xavier, ‘Shall we go and speak to Grandmother?’

  And Xavier told Honor, ‘No. Let’s not. Not yet. Let’s do this instead.’

  So they stood and pressed their hands together while the birds sang and little breez
es pushed about amongst the rose bushes in Julia Fetch’s garden.

  *

  The Doctor and his companions rendezvoused in the Tranquillity Lounge, which instantly became less tranquil. In fact, its two occupants – sisters Sylvia and Rosemary Hindle from High Wycombe – decided they might just head off somewhere else. Right away.

  As several firmly worded signs said they must when in the Therapy Areas, Putta and Bryony wore their new, slightly ill-fitting, swimming costumes, Fetch Spa issue flip-flops and bathrobes. Putta was absolutely certain that he was never taking his bathrobe off, not even if it killed him. Bryony was never going to see him in swimming trunks. It was bad enough that his gingery-haired shins and monster-bitten ankles were so horribly visible.

  The Doctor had managed to pass through the changing rooms without changing a bit – apart from having folded his hat into his jacket pocket and having donned a gift-bag shower cap instead. His hair was fighting the shower cap. And winning.

  ‘Now stay with me.’ It was very hard to take him seriously in the cap. ‘I mean it. No good will come from our splitting up and I can’t be everywhere and…’ His sentence trailed off and he seemed to become unfocused for a few breaths. But then he stalked off with immense energy and they began their hunt for Agnew.

  The woody heat of the sauna, the foggy depths of the Turkish baths, the bad-tempered massage rooms, even the towel cupboard were searched before they all – staying together, just as the Doctor had said they must – walked along the corridor to the Hydro Room.