Doctor Who: The Zarbi (5 page)

Breathing heavily, Doctor Who climbed painfully around rocks and paused, seeking a new path back to where
Tardis
lay. He had made a circuit of the defile and ahead of him he recognized the circle of crags and the bare, dead surface on to which they had emerged to explore this planet.

He came hurrying and stumbling down towards it, puffing a little, peering this way and that around him.

He slithered down on to smoother ground, halted, came forward, and stared about.

At first he thought he was mistaken.

But the image of this place, which he had first seen through the inspection screen was etched unmistakably on his mind.

There was no doubt about it. This was the spot where they had first stepped out of
Tardis
.

He was standing almost on the actual site where the ship had been.

Doctor Who stared around him and passed a trembling hand over his brow.

‘The ship!’ he muttered. ‘It’s...
gone
!’

Barbara walked slowly onward as if in a trance. She seemed unconscious of the deafening hum which resounded echoingly all around her. Her eyes were fixed glassily ahead. She stumbled unseeingly, but rose and came on, her arm still outstretched before her as though it were pulling her forward.

She did not even see the peril ahead of her.

Right in her path glimmered an acid pool, giving off its slow, vaporous mist.

She came slowly but directly towards the pool, seemingly drawn by it. Her steps came nearer and nearer, yet still she did not look down, or appear aware of it.

Then a light shone from a near-by crag and the fore-quarters of one of the huge shiny creatures inhabiting this place reared its shape against the sky. Its luminous eyes glared downward and abruptly it raised a glistening foreclaw.

Barbara was now at the brink of the pool. It seemed certain that her next pace or so would carry her into its unseen depths. It shone sullen and still, seeming harmless except for the faint acid fumes drifting up from its murky surface.

She made as if to step forward, then halted abruptly.

The creature above moved its claw, describing a circle with it.

At that Barbara obediently turned. Slowly she skirted the pool, her bracelet arm still held before her, and walked on, wide-eyed but unseeing.

The prickly sting of the great web which held Ian fast was becoming unbearable. At length he could stand it no longer. He lunged forward in a desperate attempt to burst

free, but the web’s merciless strands only gripped him tighter and stung more deeply through his clothes and on his bare face and hands.

Above the noise of the humming around him he heard a slithering on rocks and Doctor Who scrambled into sight.

The Doctor picked himself up and came wearily forward, shaking his head.

He halted, opened his bare hands in a helpless gesture, and said simply, ‘The
Tardis
has gone!’

Ian stopped his tormented struggling.

‘What do you mean,
gone
?’

Doctor Who grunted testily and searched about him. He spied and picked up a slender spar of fallen silica rock.

‘I thought I said it plainly enough. It’s not there, Chesterton. Not where we left it. It’s vanished!’

The Doctor raised the thin spar of rock, gritted his teeth, swung and slashed at the great web around Ian with it. The strands parted under the impact.

‘Hold still, for goodness sake!’

Doctor Who swung at the air above Ian’s head, cleaving through more of the stinging strands, until Ian burst from its weakening grip – and broke free, rubbing his smarting face and hands.

Doctor Who had picked up a glistening thread of the web with the tip of the spar and was examining it gingerly.

‘Mm... no wonder it stung. Look – statically charged!’

Sure enough, though Doctor Who waved the spar about, the severed strand clung to it like steel to a magnet.

Ian leaned weakly against a rock, brushing off the remaining barbs of web which clung to him. The Doctor had become so absorbed in his find that he seemed to have forgotten all else.

‘This is no natural phenomenon,’ he murmured, mostly to himself. ‘It’s not a plant, nor a...’

Ian interrupted him, terse and impatient.

‘All right – so somebody put it there! But what about
Tardis
?’

Doctor Who now stood back and surveyed the remains of the great web with an air of profound interest.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something with a
brain
! It makes those sounds. And it made... that!’

‘Doctor, for heaven’s sake, we’ve got to get back to where the ship was! Find out what’s happened to it!’

Doctor Who roused himself. ‘Mm? Oh – yes...’

With a last pensive look at the web, Doctor Who followed Ian. This time they both kept a wary look-out, halting to listen now and then for the source of the hum that rose and faded among the crags, keeping an eye open to avoid blundering into any such trap as the web which had caught Ian.

As he hurried on, stumbling occasionally over loose rock, the thought came to Ian that the web he had run into had not been there on the journey outward. They had come this same way, through this same defile.

Something must have drawn it, or spun it, between those two crags, while they were examining the acid pool.

To bar their retreat?

They emerged from the defile into the familiar clearing between the crags. Ian waited for Doctor Who to join him.

The old man caught up, puffing and muttering at the pace the younger man had set.

They stared around.

Sure enough, the clearing was empty. The humming had receded to a point where they thought they could fix its direction.

Behind the stalagmite shapes of a cluster of distant crags there was a faint glow, low in the sky. Ian touched Doctor Who’s arm and pointed.

‘It’s coming from over there — isn’t it? Is that a light?’

Doctor Who studied the horizon. After a moment he shook his head.

‘No. Reflection of a satellite, I imagine. But I do agree, now that the echo has gone... it does seem to be coming from that quarter.’

Doctor Who returned to musing over the disappearance of the
Tardis
, stroking his chin and shaking his head.

‘There
must
be a simple answer, Chesterton! They couldn’t have got it working, let alone operate it...’

‘Who — the girls, you mean?’ Ian muttered. He was inspecting the ground closely all around them. A furrow in the glassy sand caught his eye. He stooped and walked, tracing it a way. He straightened.

‘Doctor? Over here...!’

Ian pointed downward and Doctor Who came up.

‘It’s been dragged away — look!’

At this point beyond the reaching shadows of the crags there was a wide furrow in the ground between the scattered rock.

‘And tracks... see? There... and there... good Lord, there are dozens of them!’

Doctor Who bent and peered. All around the furrow a multitude of strange imprints cast faint shadows in the dim, slanting light.

The tracks were single, narrow and deep. They pitted the ground on either side of the deeper furrow marks, and although the light was too pale to show where they ended they led away in an almost straight line, out of the clearing circled by the crags.

Ian was down on one knee, staring more closely at them.

‘What kind of thing could have made those?’

Doctor Who shrugged. ‘... Interesting, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Interesting! Doctor, the ship has
gone
-- and the girls with it!’

He straightened and faced the absent old man.

‘Doctor Who,
where are we
? What is this place? Have you no idea at all?’

Doctor Who was looking through and beyond him, staring into a remoteness of his own.

‘It can’t be,’ he murmured. ‘Yet it must be. These rock formations... silica... the planet... it’s Vortis, surely...’

‘Vortis? What’s that?’

‘But strangely... different from what one would expect.

And these creatures... they
could
be... Zarbi. I wonder...’

Doctor Who collected himself. ‘Forgive me — I’m only guessing, really.’

‘Then let’s get on! Whatever these things are, they’ve got the ship!’

‘M’yes... almost certainly...’

‘Let’s follow these tracks! Come on...!’

Stooping, peering to left and right, Ian led the way ahead, following the multitude of tracks.

‘Carefully, Chesterton. Keep your eyes open.’

Ian nodded impatiently. ‘This way... over here...’ They went on, tracking the numberless imprints in the glittering sand.

The crags closed around Barbara as she walked slowly on into a winding shadowy pass between them, where the humming and the echoes boomed and soared.

The glowing eyes of the creature on the crag which had guided her around the acid pools and onward, now turned to follow her progress as Barbara stepped further into the pass. The shadows from the peaks around it began to enclose her.

She blinked a little now, as if something within her was awakening and resisting the impulse to go on. She paused and looked about her, her eyes clearing faintly, and stepped more hesitantly forward.

As she rounded a tumble of rocks at the base of the silica cliffs a figure stepped out from the shadows behind her. It lunged and threw its winged arms around her throat.

Barbara gasped and struggled wildly but the enveloping arms choked off the terrified scream which rose in her throat...

Though it seemed like a nightmarish dream not happening to herself, she fought weakly to wrench herself free. Her resistance was leaden and without will. A shaft of pale light illuminated her attacker and its threshing, glistening wings, its strange ribbed body markings, its furry face with its small glittering eyes and its grim slash of a mouth.

The creature was lithe and quick. It clamped a leaf-shaped hand across her mouth and dragged her, writhing feebly, onwards towards an opening in the rock.

It was pulling her into a cave among the cliff-like crags.

It relaxed its hold on her mouth, and another winged shape swooped from the darkness to join them, seizing her arm, dragging her further inward.

In her strange half-awake state she knew only a dull helpless fear and could summon no will of her own to fight. Only the weird force which had drawn her forth from the ship and brought her this far still pulled her on –

against the attempts of these winged shadows wrenching at her, dragging her further into the cave under the towering rocks.

Dimly she saw the vile, misty pools that dotted the cave floor, and the small slender stalagmites which speared upward all around them towards the roof.

The faces of two more creatures, lurking in the cave shadows, loomed out of the darkness to peer at Barbara as she was pushed into a sitting position on a rock. One of the tall bat-like creatures held her there. The other three crowded closer, inspecting her, their small shiny eyes alive in furry faces, their leaf-shaped hands gripping brittle pointed sticks of stalagmite, like spears.

They stared at her wordlessly and looked towards the creature which held her. One reached out with the stalagmite stalk and stirred her hair curiously.

Gradually her captor released its grip. As it did so, Barbara, still dreamily obeying a magnet-like force which again lifted her braceleted arm, began to get up again.

At that one of the winged creatures acted swiftly. It snatched at Barbara’s arm. With its delicate leaf-shaped hand, it wrenched off the heavy Roman bracelet and, holding it delicately as though it were lethal, hastily hurled it across the cave towards one of the smoking pools.

The bracelet plopped into the pool. Immediately there was a hissing, a bubbling which rose turgidly from its depths, and the ripples on the pool smouldered thickly.

The sharp fumes caught at Barbara’s throat and she coughed.

Her face cleared. Her eyes opened as she came out of her trance-like state.

She looked wonderingly around and instinctively felt her bare wrist. Sleepily she muttered.

‘My bracelet... I... was...’

She looked up, around her, and it seemed that she saw for the first time. There was a tall sinister dignity about them – a beauty even, but with the sudden shock of their strange appearance and their glaring hostility, she felt the sickness of a real terror welling up inside her.

One of the creatures raised an arm, and with it, its wings unfolded, gaudy and shot with iridescent colours – green, lime yellow, streaks of brilliant scarlet – for all the world like a malignant butterfly.

Barbara shrank back and stammered wildly ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Foolishly, she realized they could not possibly understand her – even though there was something about those stares they turned on her that was almost human.

Then her panic overwhelmed her. She turned, and scrambled blindly to her feet, and dived for the cave exit.

A voice rang hollowly after her in the cave.

‘Stop! Stay where you are!’

One of the gaudy creatures lunged and barred her way, levelling a stalagmite spar like a sword at her.