Again there was no reply.
With mounting panic Barbara pressed on. Gradually her eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness and she discovered that there was a very faint glow from veins of some kind of fluorescent mineral in the rock which gave a faint light and enabled her to see just a little without being able to distinguish much detail. As far as she could tell, the chambers were circular and connected by short tunnels some of which were blocked by stone shutters. Several of the chambers seemed to have collapsed and were blocked by fallen rock, and treacherous cracks and chasms lay like deliberate traps along the way. Frequently she stopped and called out, torn between wanting to be heard by her friends and avoiding giving herself away to whatever monstrous horror might be lurking in wait in the darkness. But there came no reassuring answering shouts, nor even any cries for help or of warning. Ian and Vicki seemed to have disappeared without trace.
Eventually Barbara found herself standing on a kind of wide ramp sloping sharply downwards. She hesitated, unsure whether to venture on down the ramp or whether to turn round and gamble on being able to retrace her route to the terrace and then try another route altogether.
Something stirred in the darkness above and for a moment Barbara thought it was Ian and Vicki. She turned and was about to call out to them when something about the noise froze her jaw. She pressed herself back into the alcove leading to the last chamber she had passed through and listened. The slow dragging movements were repeated in short regular bursts, as if a heavy weight were being dragged down the slope. Barbara’s voice was a frozen lump in her throat. She forced herself backwards into the chamber.
But before she reached it she heard a sudden grating sliding noise and her back came up against a solid barrier of stone as a shutter droped down sealing off her escape.
Quaking with terror, she listened to the dry rasping approach of the invisible horror as it advanced relentlessly down the ramp towards her, rustling and crackling like the branches of a gigantic desiccated tree.
Ian’s spine was racked with painful spasms as he worked his way down the slightly funnel-shaped shaft bracing his feet and back against its almost vertical sides. He could hear Vicki’s pitiful moans rising out of the darkness below him and he scarcely dared imagine what he would find when he finally reached her.
He bitterly reproached himself for failing to catch her in time to save her from falling into the hole gaping in the ramp. He had not even considered the problem of how they were to get out of the shaft again. Suddenly the shaft narrowed until he could barely squash himself into it with his bent knees up against one side and his back against the other. Something soft touched his hand and he uttered a yelp of fright.
‘It’s all right. It’s me!’ said Vicki’s muffled voice from underneath him. ‘I’m completely stuck.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No... just a little dazed and rather shaken.’
Ian wiped the sweat out of his eyes, though the air was quite cold and he shivered.
‘There’s a hole in the bottom here,’ Vicki reported.
Ian did his best to raise his body a few centimetres to give her a little more room. ‘A sort of drainage thing perhaps,’ he suggested, wondering how on earth they were going to climb out.
‘And there are some bones.’
Ian swallowed the layer of sand and dust coating his parched throat. ‘Bones? What sort of bones?’ he croaked.
There was a brief rattling noise beneath him.
‘Animal bones... or human bones.’
Ian thought for a moment. ‘How big is the hole?’ he asked, an idea of loathsome horror occurring to him.
‘About forty centimetres across.’
Ian forced a cheerful laugh. ‘Oh good, no danger of slipping through then.’
‘The edge keeps crumbling away, Ian.’
There was a pause.
‘You mean the hole’s getting bigger?’
‘Perhaps this is some kind of trap,’ Vicki murmured faintly.
Ian felt around him. ‘Or a burrow,’ he said grimly.
‘A burrow? What for?’
‘I’m not stopping to find out!’ Ian tested the brittle sandstone sides of the funnel. ‘Can you reach your arms around my waist, Vicki?’
Vicki tried. ‘Yes, just about.’
‘Right. Then hold on tight and try to use your knees to help...’ Ian told her, starting to manoeuvre himself back up the conical shaft.
Vicki’s additional weight was crippling, but they made slow progress despite the constant crumbling of the shaft walls. At last after a hard struggle they managed to reach the wider section of the funnel and paused to rest a moment.
‘What about Barbara?’ Vicki panted.
‘I just hope she’s had the sense to stay put,’ Ian gasped, trying to massage his numb knee and ankle joints.
‘This is all my fault, Ian. I shouldn’t have panicked,’
Vicki confessed in an embarrassed voice.
‘We all panic sometimes,’ Ian said gallantly, though inside he was feeling frightened and angry.
The next section was much more difficult. Ian had to stretch his body almost horizontally across the chasm and lever himself upwards with his hands behind his back and his feet flat against the opposite side, gradually straightening his legs as the funnel widened out.
Vicki clasped her arms around his waist and did her best to ease the strain by using her own feet as best she could, but the weight on Ian’s back and legs was almost unbearable. Several times he lost his grip and they slipped back a little way down the treacherous shaft.
Eventually, after an agonising struggle, they reached the top. Ian was just able to span the gaping hole without his body buckling in half and sending them slithering to the bottom again. He told Vicki to pull herself along his legs until she could grab the edge of the hole by his feet and drag herself up onto the ramp. At last she managed to clamber out of the hole and she hurried round to kneel behind Ian’s head. Reaching down, she slipped her hands under his arms.
‘Whatever you do don’t let go!’ he warned, gripping her hands with the insides of his arms. ‘Now pull!’ While Vicki supported his body, Ian swung his legs down and dug his heels into the side of the shaft. With a furious back-pedalling movement he manoeuvred himself up onto the ramp. Vicki gave him a grateful hug and they sat side by side on the edge of the hole breathlessly marvelling at their amazing good luck.
Seconds later a piercing scream brought them scrambling to their feet.
‘Barbara!’ Ian gasped. He grabbed Vicki’s hand and led the way up the ramp in the direction of the anguished cry.
Suddenly Vicki stopped. ‘What is that noise?’ she whispered.
They listened. Something huge was approaching along the ramp, dragging itself in short spasmodic heaves. Ian put his hand over Vicki’s mouth and pulled her into a deep recess in the rock. They waited in silence, hardly daring to breathe. The massive thing came closer and closer and soon they could hear a sort of shrill snuffling sound. In the faint light from the veins of luminous rock, they saw a glistening spherical head looming towards them, tiny red eyes burning on either side of the slimy featureless ball.
Behind the head, a thick segmented body looped and curled and slid itself forward by bunching up and then expanding its elongated armoured rings. The gigantic worm was at least fifteen metres long.
‘What is it?’ Vicki eventually whispered once the monster had passed.
‘Some kind of arthropod I suppose,’ Ian replied, watching as the huge head suddenly disappeared into the ground. ‘And I think we’ve just been trespassing on its front doorstep.’
Vicki shuddered. ‘You mean we...’ It was too horrible to even think about.
‘Yes, Vicki. We’ve had a miraculous escape. I think that thing lives down the hole.’
‘But surely it couldn’t fit,’ Vicki objected.
Ian thought a moment. ‘Perhaps when it emerges it leaves a lot of debris behind like a sort of plug,’ he suggested vaguely.
They listed to the sound of furious burrowing from the hole.
‘That might explain the bones,’ Vicki murmured.
‘Bones?’
‘As you said, when it comes out of the hole it probably brings up... well, debris.’
Ian put his arm round Vicki’s shoulder as much to comfort himself as to reassure her. ‘Not a very hospitable planet to land on!’ he murmured wryly. ‘What with that thing and Sandy and Koquillion and silver robots. Come on, let’s go and find...’
‘Barbara!’ they chorused, turning to each other in dismay. In the horrifying encounter with the giant armoured worm they had temporarily forgotten all about the scream and their missing companion.
Barbara crouched in the alcove, pressed against the immovable shutter that had trapped her on the ramp. She was still shaking with terror and nausea after her close encounter with the hideous worm. She had been so scared that she had scarcely been able to bring herself to look as it slithered past her cramped refuge. It was a long time before she could bear to open her eyes and convince herself that it really had gone.
Very slowly she ventured out of the alcove and listened to the monster’s receding movements. When they had ceased altogether she thought she heard distant voices echoing faintly in the tunnel from the same direction. It took all her willpower to resist the temptation to call out Ian and Vicki’s names. As she crept tentatively down the slope she felt the sticky trail of the giant worm clutching at the soles of her shoes with a sound like spitting fat in a pan and it was all she could do to stop herself retching in disgust.
She paused again, listening for the ghostly voices. But there was nothing but menacing silence all around her.
Growing a little bolder, Barbara continued on down the ramp. She began to wonder what kind of function it might have had in the Didonian settlement which seemed to stretch right into the heart of the mountain.
A sudden scuffling behind her made her quicken her pace. The scuffling seemed to come closer and closer and she broke into a run, heedless of the hazardous darkness. A cry of panic burst from her lips as she put a foot into yawning empty space and found herself toppling forward.
At the same instant, both her arms were seized and she was yanked backwards so that she fell flat on her back screaming hysterically. Pale faces loomed over her.
‘Barbara! It’s all right! It’s only us!’ Ian’s voice hissed gently over her as friendly hands helped her to her feet again. ‘You nearly fell into the hole!’
A split second before Bennett’s murderous talons slashed into his throat the Doctor glimpsed the sonic laser device hanging at the side of the cumbersome Koquillion attire.
Grabbing it from its magnetic clasp, the Doctor flung the heavy instrument into his attacker’s face.
Bennett screamed with pain as the ring of hard crystal lenses cut into his flesh. Staggering back, he crashed into a display cabinet which cracked open like an egg showering him with fragments of glassy material. The Doctor dived forward to seize the sonic laser which had skidded across the polished stone floor under one of the neighbouring cabinets.
But he was not quite fast enough. Wrenching off the awkward talons, Bennett freed his hands and beat the Doctor to it. He raised the lethal device and aimed it at the Doctor at pointblank range, fiddling frenziedly with the small control buttons on its handle.
‘You haven’t a chance,’ Bennett gasped, wiping the blood out of his eyes. ‘This thing can pulverise your insides faster than a microwave beam.’
The Doctor racked his brain for some desperate evasive move while Bennett tried to activate the laser device which seemed to have been damaged by the Doctor’s throw.
‘You’ll just end up as a squashy skin bag full of jelly...’
Bennett laughed, managing to switch on the primer circuit with his big clumsy fingers.
Suddenly the Doctor remembered something. Fishing frantically in the voluminous cluttered pockets of his frock coat he unearthed a small brass-mounted concave mirror, a relic from an antique microscope he had once tried to restore. As Bennett pressed the trigger button the Doctor held up the mirror and directed it at the device. The air whined with a stream of high-pitched rapid pulses and a thin beam of bluish light shot out of each of the crystal lenses arranged around the disc at the end of the barrel of the mechanism. The Doctor’s thick mirror reflected the beams back again, focusing them into a single intense spot at the centre of the disc.
The Doctor struggled to stand his ground and steady the mirror as it violently throbbed and vibrated in his hands, almost forcing him over onto his back. With a shrill splitting sound the laser machine shook itself to pieces in Bennett’s numbed fingers, clattering to the floor in a shower of disintegrating components. Dumbfounded, Bennett stared at his empty tingling hands and at the fragments of his super-weapon scattered around him.
The Doctor grinned and flourished the hot mirror triumphantly. ‘I always think wet shaving is so much less hazardous, Mr Bennett!’ he quipped, blowing on his scorched fingers.
Bennett simply stared at him incredulously, shaking his head in silence as if he were in the presence of a legendary magician.
‘Like vampires, people who fire laser guns shouldn’t look in mirrors,’ the Doctor chuckled, pocketing the lucky talisman.
Slowly Bennett pulled himself together. Without taking his cold grey eyes off the Doctor for one second, he struggled out of the heavy Koquillion outfit and extracted his feet from the huge talons which had encumbered his movements so disastrously. Then he advanced on the Doctor, his thin lips frothing like the mouth of a crazed dog.
The Doctor quickly realised that in spite of his slight injury from the crashlanding of
Astra Nine
, Bennett was far more agile than he had pretended to be for the purpose of deceiving Vicki. As Bennett raised his huge hairy hands in a strangling gesture, the Doctor ran back around the altar looking anxiously for some means of escape or self defence.
Suddenly Bennett changed direction and almost caught the old man as he abruptly reversed his retreat and fled round the other way.