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eponymous_roseTitle: Argumentum Ad Metam (3/6)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eponymous_rose
Word Count: 2714
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Mystery, Adventure
Spoilers: Set between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil.
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, UNIT
Previous Chapters
Summary: When a warehouse burns to the ground for no apparent reason - and the only living witness claims to have seen fire-breathing demons - the Doctor and Jo become embroiled in a deadly confrontation against an opponent who knows them only too well.
CHAPTER THREE
"Jo?"
It was the door creaking open that had really awakened her, and up until now she'd been making strides towards pretending it hadn't happened at all. Ignoring this voice, however, was proving to be much more difficult. She buried her face deeper into the pillow. "I'm sleeping," she stated, in case there was any debate on the subject.
There was a sigh, and the room flickered into brightness as a light switched on. "Come on, lazybones. Or shall I go alone?"
It took her a moment to process the statement, and when she did, she sat up so quickly she almost toppled right out of bed. "Doctor! I'm sorry; I'll be right out."
He nodded and strode back out the door; it took her a moment to realise that, quite apart from the fact that the bruise on his forehead and the cut on his cheek seemed to have all but disappeared overnight, he was already dressed, wearing a different jacket and cape. In fact, he looked rather like he'd already been out and about; there was even dirt smudged on his trouser knees.
Jo refused to let herself get upset over that - after all, even if he hadn't waited for her to begin his investigations for the day, at least he'd come back. She sighed and flexed her sore arm; the skin felt warm beneath the bandages, and she had a terrible urge to peel back the gauze, to see just how bad it looked. Her throat, at least, felt loads better; the night's sleep had done her a world of good, though she expected she'd be quite hoarse by the end of the day.
But best of all was the fact that the lingering dread, the feeling of anxiety, seemed to have dissolved away as she slept. She was beginning to feel halfway human again, more like herself than the exhausted, terrified girl she'd been the night before.
In fact, by the time she'd made herself presentable and discovered that the Doctor had signed all of her discharge forms, she felt rather good, and found herself humming some tune off the radio as she jogged out the main doors.
The Doctor was in his car, looking as though he were on the point of beeping the horn in irritation. "What kept you?" he said as she hopped in next to him, and all she could do was grin in reply. His mouth twitched at her enthusiasm, but he seemed determined not to smile. She wondered what had put him in such a sullen mood; surely he hadn't managed to incur the Brigadier's wrath this early in the morning?
It was a cool, clear morning, and Jo pulled her jacket tight about her shoulders. She wanted to ask him about where he'd been, but his jaw was set and she knew she wouldn't get anything out of him without a good deal of wheedling and persuading. She shivered as a particularly chill gust of wind whipped by. "Can't you put the top up, Doctor?"
He shot her a glance. "Probably," he said, and went back to watching the road.
Rolling her eyes, Jo occupied herself by watching for glimpses of the rising sun between the buildings they passed. The city seemed half-asleep, though they did gather a few odd looks as they passed a group of businessmen waiting at a traffic light.
"You'd think they'd never seen a proper car before," the Doctor murmured, and she carefully refrained from pointing out that they'd been more likely staring at the extravagantly dressed figure at the wheel.
They drove on in silence for some time, and finally Jo's curiosity got the better of her. "Doctor," she said.
"Hm?" As always, driving seemed to have cheered him somewhat, and, heartened by his response, she pressed on.
"Doctor, where did you go this morning?" He glanced down at her, and she shrugged. "I mean, it's not important," she said, "but if you found something out-"
He frowned. "How did you know I'd been out, Jo?"
"Ah!" she said, and grinned. "So you do admit to sneaking around!"
Adopting a wounded air, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change. "I said nothing of the sort. I asked what made you think I'd been out."
"If you say so, Doctor," she said, and added, before he could retort: "You've dirt on your trouser knees."
He glanced down, then looked back to the road in time to swerve and avoid a lamp-post. "So I have," he admitted. "Very observant, Jo."
"Thank you," Jo said automatically. He was smiling again, but she wasn't sure his sudden goodwill would last beyond her asking him if he wouldn't mind watching the road more carefully and perhaps driving at something approximating the limit.
"I went back to the warehouse," he said. "This morning, I mean."
She frowned, held on as they rounded a corner a bit too quickly. "Going back there alone was terribly dangerous, Doctor."
Again he glanced at her, and again she felt the urge to direct his attention back to the road. "Nonsense, Jo. The fires have long since been extinguished, and I didn't go too near the building itself."
"Right," said Jo, "but maybe whatever it was that-" She paused. "-that made us hallucinate, in the ambulance. Maybe it was still back there."
He shifted uncomfortably. "Well," he said, "it was a risk I had to take. I had to be sure that the corridor we saw, the one through the wall, was gone for good."
"And was it?"
"It was," he said, "not a trace left. Just as I thought."
Jo sighed. "Really, Doctor, you must be the most exasperating man I've ever met. Do you know what's going on here?" Before he could speak, she added: "What's really going on, I mean. What you're not telling the Brigadier."
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, steering nonchalantly through a maze of side-streets with the other. "I believe," he said, slowly and precisely, "that there is an alien intelligence at work here."
Jo had a sudden vision of the strange little plastic doll that had attacked her in the Doctor's lab. "Like the, uh, the nesting-"
"The Nestene Consciousness. Yes, Jo, something like that."
She straightened. "I see!"
"Do you?"
Frowning, she crossed her arms. "Well, you needn't sound so surprised! It seems perfectly straightforward."
"All right," the Doctor said, "enlighten me."
"The Nestenes could control plastic, right? Well, we saw that corridor in the warehouse, completely pristine in spite of the fire - but it got all wavy and turned right back into the wall it used to be, crumbling and falling apart." She paused, and he nodded for her to continue. "Well, isn't it obvious? Whatever this alien intelligence is, it controls stone, or concrete, or-or buildings like the Nestenes controlled plastic!"
To her disappointment, the Doctor showed little enthusiasm. "It's a thought, Jo, but it doesn't explain much at all. The fire, for one thing, why our Miss Hallborough wasn't so much as burned. And the-" He paused, shrugged. "Well, whatever it was we saw in the ambulance."
Jo deflated. "Oh," she said. "I suppose you're right." She was silent as he beeped his horn at a couple of slow-moving pedestrians.
"I think," the Doctor said once they were on their way again, "that the corridor was just an escape route. Someone had to get inside the warehouse, right into the office buildings, and that someone-"
"-or something," Jo added.
"It would have to be an intelligent life-form behind this, Jo," the Doctor said. "Hardly a 'something'."
"Sorry," said Jo, and knew that he was off on a train of thought that didn't accept much in the way of passengers. At least it was easier to listen, with occasional interjections at the appropriate moments, than to try and wheedle information from him.
"And that someone," the Doctor continued, as though she hadn't interrupted, "determined to enter this warehouse for whatever reason - to kill everyone except Miss Hallborough, apparently - needed a way out. Any old emergency stasis field generator would have done the trick."
"Oh, yes," said Jo. "Any old thing."
"It's common issue to shuttle crew members," he added, "in case of rockfall. It would have kept the walls from collapsing - we must have come across it shortly after the perpetrator fled the scene; it hadn't yet disintegrated."
"All right," said Jo - when the Doctor spoke so authoritatively, even if it was utter rubbish, it meant at least he was certain about what was going on, "and the ambulance? Why did we see something different than the Brigadier?"
"One thing at a time, Jo," said the Doctor, swerving round a slow-moving lorry. "Miss Hallborough could well be the key to all this - the very fact that she was unharmed makes her a bit of a suspicious person, if not just terribly lucky."
Jo pulled her jacket close around herself again. "I wouldn't exactly call watching her coworkers and friends die all around her 'lucky', Doctor."
"No," he said. "No, of course not." He was silent, subdued, and even his driving seemed to lose some of its energy.
"Where are we going?" she asked after a moment. "Surely they wouldn't have taken her to a hospital so far away!"
"They treated her burned hand and smoke inhalation, and sent her home the same day," the Doctor said, "I've arranged for us to visit her at home, which should be just-"
He turned the corner, to a pleasant-looking row of houses set just off the street, and pulled up before a well-kept old building with a sprawling garden in front. "Oh, it's lovely!" said Jo.
"Yes, but there's something of an eyesore a bit further up," the Doctor said with a groan. Jo followed his gaze and saw a police car parked unobtrusively at the end of the lane. "I'd hoped we'd be able to avoid all these detectives taking statements."
"Well," said Jo, hopping out of the car and feeling a little wobbly at not moving at quite such a dangerous speed, "it is awfully early on a Sunday morning. Perhaps he's just a friend, stopped in to say hello?"
The Doctor scowled. "Come on, Jo," he said, and stalked up to the front door.
Jo lingered beside a patch of garden along the main path; there was a large clump of marigolds, startlingly bright against the dull green of the dew-covered grass. On a whim, she reached out to touch the flowers, felt the tiny, delicate petals.
"Jo," called the Doctor again, and rang the bell. She straightened and jogged after him, prepared to smile and be polite no matter how grumpy the Doctor got.
The door swung open, and a tall, balding man glared out at them over a pair of half-moon spectacles. "Oh," he said. "You'll be from UNIT. I heard you were coming - and here I was hoping I'd miss you."
The Doctor bristled and straightened. "The feeling is entirely mutual, I'm sure."
"Look," said the man, "I can tell you right now you won't get much out of her. She's all walled off, inside like, won't so much as give you the time of day without-" He paused, seemed to see Jo for the first time, and looked faintly startled. "Hello, there."
Jo smiled and extended her hand. "Jo Grant, from UNIT. This is the Doctor."
"Right," said the man, casting a disparaging glance at the Doctor. "I'm sure he must be." But he smiled as he shook her hand. "I'm DCI Martin Snell. Marty, if you like."
Jo grinned. "Marty, then."
The Doctor rolled his eyes and pushed past them both, into the house. "Look here," said Marty, "you might give her a bit of rest!"
"I don't intend keeping her long," said the Doctor, peering up a flight of stairs. "I'd just like to hear her tell her story one more time." He glanced back at Marty. "You must be terribly dedicated, coming here on a Sunday."
"I'd say the same for you, but-" The detective waved a hand to encompass the Doctor's clothing. "-but you're obviously getting paid well enough to cover it!"
Jo grinned in spite of herself, but wiped the smile from her face when the Doctor turned around. "Look," he said, "I can conduct the interview myself. Why don't you stay down here with-" He scowled. "-Marty."
"I'd rather come with you," said Jo, "I can take notes if you like."
The Doctor stared down at her for a moment, and then his expression softened. "All right," he said. "Come on."
Jo glanced back at Marty, who had returned to clearing dishes off the kitchen table with a sort of furiously controlled energy. He seemed to know his way around the place, and she expected she'd been partly right; it looked like he knew this Miss Hallborough after all.
There was a rumbling from somewhere upstairs. She paused, turned around to see the Doctor staring up the staircase. "DCI Snell," he called, and the inspector looked up.
"What is it?"
The Doctor took a couple steps up the staircase; Jo followed, keeping one hand on the banister, which seemed to shiver in her grasp. The rumbling was getting louder. "Tell me," said the Doctor, "do the pipes rattle in this house?"
Marty strolled in from the kitchen, still drying a coffee mug. "Not that I've noticed," he said, and frowned. "No, wait. What is that?"
"It sounds-" said Jo, and moved around the Doctor to stand next to him on the step. The rumbling continued to increase in volume. "Like a river, almost," she said.
"A river?" The Doctor took another step up the stairs, and Jo snatched at his hand.
"Don't, Doctor."
He glanced back. "What is it, Jo? It's probably just a- a vacuum cleaner or something."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Marty, tromping up the stairs behind them. "Laura's in bed. She'd scarcely be up and about, doing housework."
The Doctor glanced back, raised an eyebrow. "Laura, is it?"
Marty stamped up the steps separating him and the Doctor. "Look, you, I don't know what exactly you're trying to insinuate, but I don't much appreciate-"
"Doctor!" Jo snapped. He spun round in time to see a few streams of water trickling round the corner of the corridor above them, winding down the stairs in intricate little waterfalls.
"Get down the stairs, Jo," he said, and his voice was dreadfully quiet against the roaring rumble upstairs.
"This is ridiculous," snapped Marty, "she's probably left the water on in the bath." The Doctor grabbed his arm, but he twisted away and jogged up the stairs, two at a time.
Jo ducked past the Doctor and followed. "Marty, wait," she said.
Above her, the corridor exploded.
Water, a great roaring surge of it, smashed into the wall, rebounded and came down the stairs in a wave. Jo felt the Doctor snatch at her sleeve, but the force was incredible; it swept her right off her feet, and she had a terrified notion that it was going to dash her against the wall, kill her on the spot-
She stretched out as though to swim against the terrible current, remembered too late her injured arm, and doubled over at the jolt of pain.
And then she was under the water, over it, under again, kicking frantically, trying to find the way out, the way-
A hand grabbed her collar, dragged her up and out of the water. She choked, and would have slipped below the waves again, but there was an arm around her shoulders, holding her up.
"Jo," called a voice over the roaring of the waves. "Jo, are you all right?"
She nodded, turned slightly to see the Doctor. He was smiling. "Thank goodness," he said.
The arm round her shoulder tightened its grip. "Doctor," she gasped. "I'm all right, really. You're hurting me."
"I'm sorry, Jo," he said, and she turned to face him, barely keeping afloat. "But you're safe now. Just rest."
And with the same benign smile, he tightened his hands round her throat and pushed her back under the water.
Author:
eponymous_roseWord Count: 2714
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Mystery, Adventure
Spoilers: Set between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil.
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, UNIT
Previous Chapters
Summary: When a warehouse burns to the ground for no apparent reason - and the only living witness claims to have seen fire-breathing demons - the Doctor and Jo become embroiled in a deadly confrontation against an opponent who knows them only too well.
CHAPTER THREE
"Jo?"
It was the door creaking open that had really awakened her, and up until now she'd been making strides towards pretending it hadn't happened at all. Ignoring this voice, however, was proving to be much more difficult. She buried her face deeper into the pillow. "I'm sleeping," she stated, in case there was any debate on the subject.
There was a sigh, and the room flickered into brightness as a light switched on. "Come on, lazybones. Or shall I go alone?"
It took her a moment to process the statement, and when she did, she sat up so quickly she almost toppled right out of bed. "Doctor! I'm sorry; I'll be right out."
He nodded and strode back out the door; it took her a moment to realise that, quite apart from the fact that the bruise on his forehead and the cut on his cheek seemed to have all but disappeared overnight, he was already dressed, wearing a different jacket and cape. In fact, he looked rather like he'd already been out and about; there was even dirt smudged on his trouser knees.
Jo refused to let herself get upset over that - after all, even if he hadn't waited for her to begin his investigations for the day, at least he'd come back. She sighed and flexed her sore arm; the skin felt warm beneath the bandages, and she had a terrible urge to peel back the gauze, to see just how bad it looked. Her throat, at least, felt loads better; the night's sleep had done her a world of good, though she expected she'd be quite hoarse by the end of the day.
But best of all was the fact that the lingering dread, the feeling of anxiety, seemed to have dissolved away as she slept. She was beginning to feel halfway human again, more like herself than the exhausted, terrified girl she'd been the night before.
In fact, by the time she'd made herself presentable and discovered that the Doctor had signed all of her discharge forms, she felt rather good, and found herself humming some tune off the radio as she jogged out the main doors.
The Doctor was in his car, looking as though he were on the point of beeping the horn in irritation. "What kept you?" he said as she hopped in next to him, and all she could do was grin in reply. His mouth twitched at her enthusiasm, but he seemed determined not to smile. She wondered what had put him in such a sullen mood; surely he hadn't managed to incur the Brigadier's wrath this early in the morning?
It was a cool, clear morning, and Jo pulled her jacket tight about her shoulders. She wanted to ask him about where he'd been, but his jaw was set and she knew she wouldn't get anything out of him without a good deal of wheedling and persuading. She shivered as a particularly chill gust of wind whipped by. "Can't you put the top up, Doctor?"
He shot her a glance. "Probably," he said, and went back to watching the road.
Rolling her eyes, Jo occupied herself by watching for glimpses of the rising sun between the buildings they passed. The city seemed half-asleep, though they did gather a few odd looks as they passed a group of businessmen waiting at a traffic light.
"You'd think they'd never seen a proper car before," the Doctor murmured, and she carefully refrained from pointing out that they'd been more likely staring at the extravagantly dressed figure at the wheel.
They drove on in silence for some time, and finally Jo's curiosity got the better of her. "Doctor," she said.
"Hm?" As always, driving seemed to have cheered him somewhat, and, heartened by his response, she pressed on.
"Doctor, where did you go this morning?" He glanced down at her, and she shrugged. "I mean, it's not important," she said, "but if you found something out-"
He frowned. "How did you know I'd been out, Jo?"
"Ah!" she said, and grinned. "So you do admit to sneaking around!"
Adopting a wounded air, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change. "I said nothing of the sort. I asked what made you think I'd been out."
"If you say so, Doctor," she said, and added, before he could retort: "You've dirt on your trouser knees."
He glanced down, then looked back to the road in time to swerve and avoid a lamp-post. "So I have," he admitted. "Very observant, Jo."
"Thank you," Jo said automatically. He was smiling again, but she wasn't sure his sudden goodwill would last beyond her asking him if he wouldn't mind watching the road more carefully and perhaps driving at something approximating the limit.
"I went back to the warehouse," he said. "This morning, I mean."
She frowned, held on as they rounded a corner a bit too quickly. "Going back there alone was terribly dangerous, Doctor."
Again he glanced at her, and again she felt the urge to direct his attention back to the road. "Nonsense, Jo. The fires have long since been extinguished, and I didn't go too near the building itself."
"Right," said Jo, "but maybe whatever it was that-" She paused. "-that made us hallucinate, in the ambulance. Maybe it was still back there."
He shifted uncomfortably. "Well," he said, "it was a risk I had to take. I had to be sure that the corridor we saw, the one through the wall, was gone for good."
"And was it?"
"It was," he said, "not a trace left. Just as I thought."
Jo sighed. "Really, Doctor, you must be the most exasperating man I've ever met. Do you know what's going on here?" Before he could speak, she added: "What's really going on, I mean. What you're not telling the Brigadier."
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, steering nonchalantly through a maze of side-streets with the other. "I believe," he said, slowly and precisely, "that there is an alien intelligence at work here."
Jo had a sudden vision of the strange little plastic doll that had attacked her in the Doctor's lab. "Like the, uh, the nesting-"
"The Nestene Consciousness. Yes, Jo, something like that."
She straightened. "I see!"
"Do you?"
Frowning, she crossed her arms. "Well, you needn't sound so surprised! It seems perfectly straightforward."
"All right," the Doctor said, "enlighten me."
"The Nestenes could control plastic, right? Well, we saw that corridor in the warehouse, completely pristine in spite of the fire - but it got all wavy and turned right back into the wall it used to be, crumbling and falling apart." She paused, and he nodded for her to continue. "Well, isn't it obvious? Whatever this alien intelligence is, it controls stone, or concrete, or-or buildings like the Nestenes controlled plastic!"
To her disappointment, the Doctor showed little enthusiasm. "It's a thought, Jo, but it doesn't explain much at all. The fire, for one thing, why our Miss Hallborough wasn't so much as burned. And the-" He paused, shrugged. "Well, whatever it was we saw in the ambulance."
Jo deflated. "Oh," she said. "I suppose you're right." She was silent as he beeped his horn at a couple of slow-moving pedestrians.
"I think," the Doctor said once they were on their way again, "that the corridor was just an escape route. Someone had to get inside the warehouse, right into the office buildings, and that someone-"
"-or something," Jo added.
"It would have to be an intelligent life-form behind this, Jo," the Doctor said. "Hardly a 'something'."
"Sorry," said Jo, and knew that he was off on a train of thought that didn't accept much in the way of passengers. At least it was easier to listen, with occasional interjections at the appropriate moments, than to try and wheedle information from him.
"And that someone," the Doctor continued, as though she hadn't interrupted, "determined to enter this warehouse for whatever reason - to kill everyone except Miss Hallborough, apparently - needed a way out. Any old emergency stasis field generator would have done the trick."
"Oh, yes," said Jo. "Any old thing."
"It's common issue to shuttle crew members," he added, "in case of rockfall. It would have kept the walls from collapsing - we must have come across it shortly after the perpetrator fled the scene; it hadn't yet disintegrated."
"All right," said Jo - when the Doctor spoke so authoritatively, even if it was utter rubbish, it meant at least he was certain about what was going on, "and the ambulance? Why did we see something different than the Brigadier?"
"One thing at a time, Jo," said the Doctor, swerving round a slow-moving lorry. "Miss Hallborough could well be the key to all this - the very fact that she was unharmed makes her a bit of a suspicious person, if not just terribly lucky."
Jo pulled her jacket close around herself again. "I wouldn't exactly call watching her coworkers and friends die all around her 'lucky', Doctor."
"No," he said. "No, of course not." He was silent, subdued, and even his driving seemed to lose some of its energy.
"Where are we going?" she asked after a moment. "Surely they wouldn't have taken her to a hospital so far away!"
"They treated her burned hand and smoke inhalation, and sent her home the same day," the Doctor said, "I've arranged for us to visit her at home, which should be just-"
He turned the corner, to a pleasant-looking row of houses set just off the street, and pulled up before a well-kept old building with a sprawling garden in front. "Oh, it's lovely!" said Jo.
"Yes, but there's something of an eyesore a bit further up," the Doctor said with a groan. Jo followed his gaze and saw a police car parked unobtrusively at the end of the lane. "I'd hoped we'd be able to avoid all these detectives taking statements."
"Well," said Jo, hopping out of the car and feeling a little wobbly at not moving at quite such a dangerous speed, "it is awfully early on a Sunday morning. Perhaps he's just a friend, stopped in to say hello?"
The Doctor scowled. "Come on, Jo," he said, and stalked up to the front door.
Jo lingered beside a patch of garden along the main path; there was a large clump of marigolds, startlingly bright against the dull green of the dew-covered grass. On a whim, she reached out to touch the flowers, felt the tiny, delicate petals.
"Jo," called the Doctor again, and rang the bell. She straightened and jogged after him, prepared to smile and be polite no matter how grumpy the Doctor got.
The door swung open, and a tall, balding man glared out at them over a pair of half-moon spectacles. "Oh," he said. "You'll be from UNIT. I heard you were coming - and here I was hoping I'd miss you."
The Doctor bristled and straightened. "The feeling is entirely mutual, I'm sure."
"Look," said the man, "I can tell you right now you won't get much out of her. She's all walled off, inside like, won't so much as give you the time of day without-" He paused, seemed to see Jo for the first time, and looked faintly startled. "Hello, there."
Jo smiled and extended her hand. "Jo Grant, from UNIT. This is the Doctor."
"Right," said the man, casting a disparaging glance at the Doctor. "I'm sure he must be." But he smiled as he shook her hand. "I'm DCI Martin Snell. Marty, if you like."
Jo grinned. "Marty, then."
The Doctor rolled his eyes and pushed past them both, into the house. "Look here," said Marty, "you might give her a bit of rest!"
"I don't intend keeping her long," said the Doctor, peering up a flight of stairs. "I'd just like to hear her tell her story one more time." He glanced back at Marty. "You must be terribly dedicated, coming here on a Sunday."
"I'd say the same for you, but-" The detective waved a hand to encompass the Doctor's clothing. "-but you're obviously getting paid well enough to cover it!"
Jo grinned in spite of herself, but wiped the smile from her face when the Doctor turned around. "Look," he said, "I can conduct the interview myself. Why don't you stay down here with-" He scowled. "-Marty."
"I'd rather come with you," said Jo, "I can take notes if you like."
The Doctor stared down at her for a moment, and then his expression softened. "All right," he said. "Come on."
Jo glanced back at Marty, who had returned to clearing dishes off the kitchen table with a sort of furiously controlled energy. He seemed to know his way around the place, and she expected she'd been partly right; it looked like he knew this Miss Hallborough after all.
There was a rumbling from somewhere upstairs. She paused, turned around to see the Doctor staring up the staircase. "DCI Snell," he called, and the inspector looked up.
"What is it?"
The Doctor took a couple steps up the staircase; Jo followed, keeping one hand on the banister, which seemed to shiver in her grasp. The rumbling was getting louder. "Tell me," said the Doctor, "do the pipes rattle in this house?"
Marty strolled in from the kitchen, still drying a coffee mug. "Not that I've noticed," he said, and frowned. "No, wait. What is that?"
"It sounds-" said Jo, and moved around the Doctor to stand next to him on the step. The rumbling continued to increase in volume. "Like a river, almost," she said.
"A river?" The Doctor took another step up the stairs, and Jo snatched at his hand.
"Don't, Doctor."
He glanced back. "What is it, Jo? It's probably just a- a vacuum cleaner or something."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Marty, tromping up the stairs behind them. "Laura's in bed. She'd scarcely be up and about, doing housework."
The Doctor glanced back, raised an eyebrow. "Laura, is it?"
Marty stamped up the steps separating him and the Doctor. "Look, you, I don't know what exactly you're trying to insinuate, but I don't much appreciate-"
"Doctor!" Jo snapped. He spun round in time to see a few streams of water trickling round the corner of the corridor above them, winding down the stairs in intricate little waterfalls.
"Get down the stairs, Jo," he said, and his voice was dreadfully quiet against the roaring rumble upstairs.
"This is ridiculous," snapped Marty, "she's probably left the water on in the bath." The Doctor grabbed his arm, but he twisted away and jogged up the stairs, two at a time.
Jo ducked past the Doctor and followed. "Marty, wait," she said.
Above her, the corridor exploded.
Water, a great roaring surge of it, smashed into the wall, rebounded and came down the stairs in a wave. Jo felt the Doctor snatch at her sleeve, but the force was incredible; it swept her right off her feet, and she had a terrified notion that it was going to dash her against the wall, kill her on the spot-
She stretched out as though to swim against the terrible current, remembered too late her injured arm, and doubled over at the jolt of pain.
And then she was under the water, over it, under again, kicking frantically, trying to find the way out, the way-
A hand grabbed her collar, dragged her up and out of the water. She choked, and would have slipped below the waves again, but there was an arm around her shoulders, holding her up.
"Jo," called a voice over the roaring of the waves. "Jo, are you all right?"
She nodded, turned slightly to see the Doctor. He was smiling. "Thank goodness," he said.
The arm round her shoulder tightened its grip. "Doctor," she gasped. "I'm all right, really. You're hurting me."
"I'm sorry, Jo," he said, and she turned to face him, barely keeping afloat. "But you're safe now. Just rest."
And with the same benign smile, he tightened his hands round her throat and pushed her back under the water.
