'What do we do?' asked Peri. 'Toss a coin?'
'Nope,' replied Kevin with an unexplained note of satisfaction in his voice.
'You're not thinking of stopping and fighting it out, are you?' queried Peri with a great deal of apprehension.
'Don't be daft,' replied Kevin with a chuckle. 'I wouldn't know what to do with this thing,' he hefted the gun in his hand.
'There are quicker and easier ways of becoming a collander,' agreed Peri.
Kevin turned and knocked the gun barrel against another of the solid iron flood doors, set this time into the side of the tunnel. It gave a deep but hollow thud. 'Well,' he offered, 'we know what lies down there —' he gestured back the way they had come — 'and by now they will have organised something to come down there —' he gestured at the way they had to go if they stayed with either of the tunnels in front of them. 'So why not take a chance?'
'I can think of a hundred good reasons,' shivered Peri, wondering what on earth would be behind the great metal door. The voices behind them grew louder, and she gripped Kevin's arm tighter, nodding down the tunnels in front of them, to where the gloom was now broken by advancing torch beams.
Kevin swung the big cantilevered bolt-action mechanism on the door, which opened smoothly and easily on well oiled hinges and, after a moment's look for reassurance at each other, they went through. The door closed behind them with a surprisingly heavy, and definitely final, thud...
Chapter Four
Whilst the Doctor's pose might have resembled that of an Egyptian mummy, nothing else about the Doctor did. Tousled mop of hair, multi-coloured coat, old and much-loved boots, none of these belonged in the depths of a pyramid, though that's just where they might as well be, he mused. He had set himself down to the third level of banji-rana, one heart slowed almost to a standstill, body temperature almost three degrees down, respiration normal, and allowed the twenty per cent of brain function left to him to wander as freely as it wished. The theory was absolutely sound, and the resulting washing of impurities from his several subconscious levels should have done wonders for his powers of concentration, but it wasn't working out that way and the present state of sublimity he had achieved was driving him potty. Well, all things are relative, he was forced to concede. He had missed out a couple of stages somewhere, he knew, and the end result was nowhere near as relaxing as it should be. Probably something to do with that infernal pipe rattling, he thought irritably. Disturbing my concentration, rubbing my aura up the wrong way. The fact that banji-rana was designed to overcome exactly such things as rattling pipes, he found deliciously perverse, which was another sign the trance was not effective, and another very good reason why, with all the temptations it otherwise offered, he had never become a transcendentalist.
Curse that infernal pipe! With the money invested in this tunnel complex, you'd think they could have got a decent plumber... His eyes snapped open and the second heart tripped in full pelt. This is not the recommended method of coming out of a banji-rana trance, in fact for anyone with a normal human physique it was guaranteed one hundred per cent fatal, but by jove it was fast...
Not a plumber born could have cured that pipe. No water that ever fell from heaven ever produced that rhythmic tone. The Doctor listened for a few seconds longer.
'Ask not for whom the pipe clangs,' he muttered, with only a pitiful gesture of an apology to Mr Donne, as he frantically searched through his pockets for something to communicate with. He uttered a small cry of triumph as he pulled forth an ancient pair of nutcrackers.
'The right tool for the right job,' he crowed as he jumped up on the bed. Hesitantly, he tapped out a short staccato beat of his own devising on the pipe. Silence. He tried another variation, slightly less mathematical. Silence. He thought for a moment and tried a bongo beat he'd picked up with Livingstone. Nothing. At last, reduced to childish basics he tried a straightforward, no-mucking-about, this-one's-for-you-baby, one-two-three. Not a peep.
'Not the Abbe Faria then,' he concluded, glumly. Determined to put on at least as good a show as the Count of.Monte Cristo, he started tapping again.
Kevin was in the process of discovering several salient facts about the design parameters of throw-away gas lighters. They gave off a very poor level of ambient illumination; they promised not to last for long if kept on continuously; and after a remarkably short time, however carefully they were handled, they started to singe whichever finger was holding the gas trigger down. With a muttered curse, he was forced to release the button and blow on his slightly toasted fingers.
'Maybe this wasn't such a good idea,' ventured Peri, as they waited patiently for the umpteenth time for Kevin's fingers to resume normal body heat.
At last Kevin summed up in a few short words his feelings of the past twenty minutes: 'Better than being shot.'
'Marginally,' replied Peri, rubbing one of half a dozen bumps she'd picked up since they'd started down this tunnel. Unlike the others, faced as they had been in brick or metal, this tunnel was carved out of the bare rock, with a very uneven floor and walls that seemed to have been constructed with an obstacle course in mind. Worst of all, this one had no light at all, and what would happen if they ran out of gas before they ran out of tunnel, Peri shuddered to think. Lost in the dark, hundreds of feet underground. It had to be one of her least favourite nightmares. 'How are your fingers?' she asked, more out of fear of the dark than any genuine concern for her companion's well-being.
'Medium-rare,' he replied, glumly. 'Give us another minute.'
Which Peri would have quite willingly done had not at that moment a slow, grinding, whirring sound a foot from her right elbow made her jump a yard and a half to her right. Which sent her crashing into Kevin, taking him somewhat by surprise, and flinging the lighter, unbidden, from his already suffering fingers.
'What's that?' she cried.
'The lighter!' he swore, at just the same moment.
His fear became hers as they both scrambled around with their hands on the rough floor of the tunnel.
The grinding was joined by another, not far behind from the sound of it, and Peri spun her head to try and make out something of the threat. Another whirring and another, a smashing sound, a hit, a rasping sound. They were surrounded. She caught her breath, not knowing which way to turn next. The grind became a whirr and the rasp became a crackle and as though a shaft of light had broken through the darkness, the strains of 'My Darling Clementine' came on at full belt. So did the lights, as something, or someone, threw a master switch.
Pen and Kevin looked around them in absolute amazement. They were in what appeared to be the main gallery of an old mine, dozens of feet high, scores of feet long and, below them, a drop to the floor that had 'broken neck' written all over it. Literally. 'Broken Neck Gap' was written roughly on a board. Off in the middle distance they could see a brazier, glowing and smoking in front of a workman's hut, and, on the other side of the gallery, a metal truck, open-topped, was trundling past on its rails. From where they stood they could see twenty or so miners, half life-size, working the mother lode.
'It's the gold mine ride,' exclaimed Kevin. 'We're right in the middle of the new gold mine ride!'
They both burst out laughing, more out of relief than anything particularly humorous. The old Forty-Niner a couple of feet away from Peri, whose stirring into life had caused her such panic, had a distinct twinkle painted into his eye, but for all that he looked as tough as old boots, and not given to much casual humour: he raised and lowered the pickaxe he was wielding with a grim determination that was gold fever through and through.
'Which way now?' gasped Peri as the laughter died away.
'Ask him,' suggested Kevin with a grin, gesturing at the old-timer. Peri bent to speak in the figure's ear.
'Er — 'scuse me, sir. Which way to the nearest Police Station?' She bent to hear his answer, then straightened up, a triumphant grin on her face.
'Well?' asked Kevin.
'Follow the Yellow Brick
Road, of course,' replied Peri cheerfully.
'Come on then,' said Kevin, 'it can't be far now, and at least we can see where we're going without cooking ourselves.' They set off down what they had thought was a tunnel, but which had for a hundred yards or more been the bed on which the ride cars would come when the place was open, judging from the rails.
As they went, the old miner stopped his work with the pick-axe and turned his head to follow them...
The Doctor's eyes blinked in rapid unison with the return tapping on the pipe.
'At last,' he breathed. The tapping stopped and he started his own, a logarithmic variation of 'Three Blind Mice' with base two as its starting point. Anyone should be able to get that, he surmised, and once they'd established a rapport, they could exchange information, compare notes, and devise some way of getting out of this wretched place, but first they had to start communicating. The pipe was overwhelmed by a rapid peppering of taps. The Doctor stopped and listened. He could detect no pattern-recognition code at all.
'Just my luck,' he complained bitterly, 'banged up with a fellow prisoner who doesn't even know "Three Blind Mice"...'
Kevin was showing signs of strain. He was starting to talk. After all this time, it was something to have someone to talk to, particularly after the events of the past few hours, and he had filled Peri in on most of his conversation with the Police, most of his life before that, and the complete story of his family and their funny ways. He was just going back over the highlights of the past couple of weeks.
'... and everything seemed to be happening near that video arcade place. The lights, the Mandarin, that red thing whatever it was, and me brother Geoff. The time I spotted him, and I swear it was him, he was with this fellah dressed all in black. Just my idea of a Mafia hit man, he was. Tall and threatenin' and — you know, dressed all in black...'
Peri had long ago learned from the Doctor not to go entirely on how a person dressed — an essential freedom of the intellect whenever undertaking intergalactic or transdimensional travel — but she wasn't about to tell Kevin that. She was, in any case, too busy looking around her to take much notice of what the boy was rattling on about. She was convinced they were being followed. Or watched. Or led into a trap. Something. Anything. It just felt wrong.
'It all leads back to that arcade,' pronounced Kevin, sagely.
'Well this doesn't lead back to that arcade,' pointed out Peri, somewhat sniffily. 'And the Doctor didn't vanish in the arcade and we didn't get shot at in the arcade...' In the cause of rebuttal, this seemed overkill, even to her. She changed tack. 'Say, how come they switched this thing on —' she made a gesture to take in the whole elaborate edifice of the model gold mine — 'just when we walked into it?'
'Oh come on,' protested Kevin, 'I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid.'
'I always get paranoid when people are hunting me,' admitted Peri, glumly.
'They didn't switch it on just when we came in — it just got switched on, that's all.'
'Well come on then,' snapped Peri, 'I just want to get out of here and into some nice friendly Police Station before someone decides to switch it all off again...' And with that she strode off down the track.
Kevin, with a sigh, followed her.
The three miners far below them, in a tableau round a camp fire, turned and craned their necks to watch them go...
The Doctor was still trying to conduct the ferrous conversation with his distant friend, but since conversation is by definition a two-way process, he was not meeting with much success. In fact, he still hadn't got to first base, and, as far as he could tell, neither had his friend. In desperation, and sacrificing every jot of his intellectual pride, which was very considerable, he had even gone over to bashing out standard Morse Code. No effect whatsoever. His friend obviously wasn't a military type either, nor a radio ham, but that still left an awful lot of possibilities...
The tapping from the other end suddenly took on an urgent, then a frantic rhythm.
'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,' said the Doctor bitterly, remembering a rather neat turn of phrase he'd once given away in a London pub for nothing more than a jug of ale.
The tapping, suddenly and decisively, stopped.
'Well, my friend, I wonder what interrupted your transmission?' speculated the Doctor, softly. There was no reply.
The Great Gallery of the mine had narrowed to a tiny passage, through which the ride train would trundle, they supposed, giving a sense of claustrophobia where the Gallery had done the opposite. Niches let into the rock displayed other scenes of mining life — a couple of bunk beds in one, a table and four miners carousing in another, and the lighting to match had become much more directional and atmospheric. Peri tried to take that into account when she shivered, and failed miserably. There was still something very wrong...
She stopped, suddenly, tugging Kevin's arm as she did so.
'What's up?'
'Sssh!'
They froze for a moment.
'What is it?' he insisted.
'I heard someone following us.' She stood very still, listening intently. Kevin studied her carefully for a moment. He turned his head to look back the way they had come. The sounds from the Gallery and the rest of the goldmine were more distant now. There were three distinct crunches, like heavy boots on gravel, and then... nothing.
'Come on, you're beginning to spook me now,' Kevin complained nervously. 'It's just the ride — the workings — whatever — ' The attempt to shrug it off did not work, largely because of the way he hefted the gun in his hand and pulled off the safety catch. He took her hand, and led off, at a rather faster pace now.
They left behind a grizzled old miner, pan in hand, swishing gravel in and out of a thin stream of water. A moment after they had gone, he put the pan down and reached for a geologist's hammer by his side, a flat end to one side of the head and a wicked looking curved spike on the other. He swung the hammer expertly and then, moving very carefully, the three-foot high figure moved off after them.
The Doctor sighed and leaned his shoulder disconsolately against the wall. He raised his nutcrackers and gave a despondent couple of bangs on the pipe. There was still no reply. He turned sharply as he heard the approach of several measured footsteps in the corridor outside. The pipe started to clang again, the same frantic cacophony that had been interrupted before. The footsteps became more measured, more military as they drew nearer, then came to a sudden and precise stop right outside his cell door.
All pretence of cool had been cast aside now as Peri and Kevin hurried through the dim tunnels. The noise of the rest of the mine was far off now, just the strains of 'Darling Clementine' echoing tauntingly around them. There had been no side shows for some distance, just the rough rock of the walls and roof, lit occasionally by the flickering light of an artificial oil lamp. Ahead of them, the tracks stretched away through the narrow tunnel, a gloomy bend hiding the next section from them. They looked around as a creaking sound echoed over their heads, then a rumbling began which grew, louder and louder. Distinctly alarmed, they tried to see where the sound was coming from, but as it grew, it seemed to come from every direction at once, creaking, shifting, groaning until, with a gigantic crash, a huge section of the roof in front of them caved in.
Peri gave a shriek and ducked away from it instinctively. Kevin nobly tried to shield her from the worst of it as they waited for the crushing force of the roof-fall to bury them.
The rumbling died away. They looked up. The roof timbers had come to a stop a foot or so above their heads, criss-crossing the top half of the tunnel, held back as if by magic. By more magic, as they watched, the timbers gently and smoothly creaked back to their original position. Peri nearly laughed out loud. It was a fake fall, meant as an added thrill to the punters as they passed through on the train. With one breath she sighed relief, and with another cursed the ingenuity of the ride's designers in achieving so realistic an effect. They hurried on, looking up at the trick timb
ers still with some apprehension as they passed underneath. They rounded the bend in the tunnel.
Past the fake fall the stunted shadows passed, one, two, three, four and then two more behind, treading softly, walking just on the railway sleepers between the lines, none of them talking, nor even whispering. Grim and purposeful they marched on, none of the figures over three feet tail...
Instinctively, the Doctor stepped back, then back again, until he was pressing against the cell wall and could retreat no further. The door was disappearing. From the top down, it was simply being erased in a process that by the looks of it wasn't going to take above half a minute to complete. The corridor behind seemed substantial enough, as did the first of the half-dozen tall figures standing there, then the process seemed to speed up exponentially until, with a rush, the opening was clear.
'You!' exclaimed the Doctor as the full figure of the tall man was revealed. He started to go through the door but was immediately stopped by a hard, painful, invisible barrier. He recoiled from it to see the Mandarin smile gently.
'My dear Doctor... Forgive these tedious formalities, but I feared your impetuous nature might bring us both to regrettable harm without some form of restraint..
'Brevity is the soul of wit,' the Doctor pointed out, ruefully rubbing the ends of his fingers. He'd had his arms in front of him as he'd walked forward, otherwise he'd be rubbing his nose, he supposed.
'I agree entirely,' conceded the Mandarin, 'but this is no time for wit, surely? And, after all,' he continued in a reasonable and persuasive tone of voice, 'I've waited so long for this meeting that I've had plenty of time to make up five words where one would do.'
'So this is another of your absurd games?'
'Not absurd, no. I still have plenty of those, more than I know what to do with, in fact,' and he almost chuckled. 'No, this one is in deadly earnest..
DOCTOR WHO - THE NIGHTMARE FAIR Page 5
