Doctor Who: The Sea-Devils (2 page)

The Doctor jumped on to the quayside, and Robbins threw him a line. The Doctor made fast the rope to the metal ring, then reached out to help Jo from the boat. Glad to be on firm land again, she looked across the murky water of the little harbour towards the open sea. A couple of miles off-shore was a huge metal construction standing out of the water. Pointing it out she said, ‘What’s that?’

‘English Channel oil,’ replied Robbins, as he too now came up onto the quayside. ‘That’s if they ever find it.’

The Doctor asked, ‘How long have they been drilling?’

‘Last two years,’ said Robbins. ‘Ever since they really got North Sea oil going, there’s been no stopping them.’

Jo had heard a lot about the possibility of English Channel oil. North Sea oil had started gushing in 1977, making Britain the envy of every other European country. Now the geologists promised even greater reserves of crude oil deep beneath the sea-bed of the English Channel, and oil derricks were becoming a familiar sight all along the South Coast.

The Doctor asked, ‘How do we get to the château?’

Robbins looked at the Doctor in the way country people do when a stranger asks a silly question. ‘You walks,’ he said. ‘Shanks’s pony. You go that way,’ and he pointed along a road that kept to the sea for a few hundred yards, then turned inland.

‘As you so rightly put it,’ said the Doctor, ‘we walks. Come along, Jo.’

The Doctor strode off, and Jo hurried to keep up with him. On glancing back, she saw that Robbins had gone into the one and only café.

‘You didn’t ask how far it is,’ she said.

‘Not more than a mile,’ said the Doctor, striding along on his long legs, ‘Well, maybe two... Lovely day, don’t you think?’

There was a sharp nip in the ozone-laden air blowing in from the sea, and Jo was cold. Not only that, she hadn’t put on walking shoes, because she hadn’t expected to have to walk two miles to the château and then, presumably, two miles back. ‘Marvellous,’ she replied, ‘as long as I don’t get pneumonia.’

‘Pneumonia isn’t all that serious,’ observed the Doctor, taking Jo as seriously as Robbins had taken him about the size of the château. ‘There was a time when if you humans developed pneumonia it was often fatal. But nowadays, what with all your new medicines, you’d be over it in no time!’

He strode on, then suddenly stopped. By the side of the road there was an ancient moss-covered stone construction with a single water-tap in the middle. ‘That’s very interesting,’ said the Doctor. ‘Most interesting, indeed.’

‘You often see them,’ said Jo. ‘They were built before people had water laid on in their houses.’

‘I mean the inscription,’ the Doctor said. He reached into the capacious pockets of his long frock coat, and produced a little wire brush. It always astounded Jo how many things he could produce from those enormous pockets. He used the little brush to remove some of the moss, revealing words carefully chipped into the stone-work. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘read it.’

Two hundred years of wind had worn away the original surface of the stone, making the inscription very difficult to read. Jo had to run her eyes over it more than once before she could make out all the words:

For you who tread this land

Beware the justice hand

Little boats like men

in days of yore,

They come by stealth at night

They come in broad daylight.

Little boats like men—

Beware the shore.

Jo was not impressed. ‘It’s a poem,’ she said. ‘Not a very good one either.’

‘What does “justice hand” mean?’ said the Doctor, more to himself than to Jo.

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Jo. ‘Can we keep walking?’

‘What? Oh, yes.’ The Doctor strode off again, Jo racing to keep up. ‘I’ve heard of the long arm of justice, but not the hand of justice.’

‘It didn’t say “the hand of justice”,’ said Jo, feeling a bit warmer now that they were walking again, ‘it said “justice hand”. Maybe it’s Anglo-Saxon or something.’ The wind was blowing up more fiercely now, stinging Jo’s cheek with grains of sand whipped up from the near-by shore. She turned up her coat collar.

‘Anglo-Saxons,’ corrected the Doctor, ‘did not build water walls, at least not like that one.’ He walked on, head down, obviously thinking hard.

‘Does it really matter?’ Jo said, spitting grains of sand out of her mouth.

‘Of course it matters, my dear,’ boomed the Doctor. ‘Physical exercise without mental exercise is a bore.’ He strode on for a full minute without a word. Then his good-looking face lit up with an idea: ‘Is it some ghastly pun on “the scales of justice”?’

‘How do you mean?’ said Jo, trying to seem interested.

‘It’s clearly a warning,’ said the Doctor, ‘but of what we know not. But a warning means that something bad happens to you if you do the wrong thing. That suggests justice of some sort.’

‘Where do scales come into it?’ said Jo.

The Doctor laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Fish have scales. So do reptiles. Just a stupid thought.’

By now they were well away from the quayside with its little café and couple of fishermen’s cottages. The château was well in sight, and Jo could see that it was set in its extensive grounds, the road turned a little away from the sea at this point, but the remnants of a track forked off here seeming to run straight to the shore. At the fork there was an old-fashioned milestone sunk deep into the grassy edge. The Doctor stopped and looked at it.

‘Fascinating,’ he said, staring at the ancient marker. ‘What’s fascinating,’ said Jo, ‘about an unused old track that leads straight down to the sea?’

‘It means,’ said the Doctor patiently, ‘that this is a bit of shoreline that is receding before the waves.’ He produced his little wire brush again and started to clear moss away from the surface of the milestone. ‘Did you know that Henry VIII used to stand on the ramparts of Sandown Castle and, as he wrote, “look out across the fields to the sea beyond”?’

‘No,’ said Jo apologetically, ‘I hadn’t heard that. I suppose you knew Henry VIII personally when you travelled back through Time?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said the Doctor, ‘no. I’ve never met him. But the significance of all that is that not only have those fields disappeared beneath the sea, but Sandown Castle has as well. There!’ He had finished his moss-removing work, and now stood back to regard the result.

Jo could now clearly read a name inscribed in the stone. ‘So once upon a time,’ she said, ‘down that track, before the land sank and let in more of the sea, there was a place called’—she screwed up her eyes to read the name—‘Belial Village. So what?’

‘“So what?”’ exclaimed the Doctor, pretending to be shocked. ‘That’s an out-dated Americanism.’

‘I picked it up watching old movies on television,’ said Jo. ‘So what?’

‘Well,’ said the Doctor, pocketing his little wire brush, ‘it just strikes me as interesting.’

‘Everything,’ said Jo, ‘strikes you as interesting—and I am cold, rather hungry, and there are grains of sand in my eyes, nostrils, mouth, and now leaking down my neck. What is interesting about a village which must have been washed away by the sea hundreds of years ago?’

‘Belial is a name for the Devil, don’t you see?’ he said. ‘But even more, it was the name used by your poet Milton for one of the fallen angels.’

Jo got the point. The coincidence made her forget all her physical discomforts. ‘The Master is a sort of fallen Time Lord!’

‘Exactly,’ affirmed the Doctor. ‘Now, shall we go and pay him a visit?’

After another twenty minutes of hard trudge along the country road, the Doctor and Jo arrived at the gates to the grounds of the château. It was easy to see that big changes had taken place on account of the Master. A wall about four feet tall ran along the entire perimeter of the vast grounds, as far as the eye could see. Little nubs of metal stood up from the wall at regular intervals evidence that in earlier times it had been surmounted by wrought-iron railings. Jo remembered being told that during the Second World War almost all fences and railings in Britain were taken by the Government because of the desperate need for all types of metal to make guns, ships, and bombs. Many old buildings had never had their railings replaced; here, however, a brand new electrified fence had been built on the inside of the old wall. The actual gates, however, were clearly the originals; indeed, some metal gates of supposedly excellent workmanship were spared during the war. They stood about twelve feet high, set between huge stone uprights. But now one of the gates had had a big notice screwed to it, the warning you see outside any of Her Majesty’s prisons: in rather stilted English it solemnly warned the visitor of the punishments they might receive if they helped, assisted, or encouraged any prisoner in an attempt to escape. Almost hidden among the nightmare of Victorian iron-work was a small push-button for a bell.

The Doctor put his finger to it, and pushed.

A gatekeeper’s cottage stood just to one side of the drive on the other side of the gates. Jo saw a uniformed prison officer come from the cottage towards them..

‘What is it?’ The prison officer stood a few feet from the gates and made no attempt to open them.

‘We’ve called to visit the prisoner,’ the Doctor shouted back.

The prison officer remained where he was. ‘Got your VO’s?’

‘Got our what?’ said the Doctor.

Jo quickly fished in a pocket and produced their two special visitor’s papers issued to the Doctor by the Ministry of the Interior. She held them through the gates. ‘We haven’t got Visitors’ Orders,’ Jo explained, ‘but these were issued by the Minister himself.’

Now the prison officer came forward and carefully examined the two passes. ‘Got anything to identify yourselves?’

Jo handed in their two UNIT passes. ‘The Doctor actually helped to catch the prisoner,’ she said, pointedly.

‘Really?’ said the prison officer and continued mildly, ‘and I’m the Lord Mayor of London.’ He produced a key from his extraordinarily long key chain and unlocked the gates. The moment Jo and the Doctor had stepped inside, the prison officer locked the gates behind them. ‘Keep within two paces of me,’ he ordered, and started walking towards the gatekeeper’s cottage. Just outside it, on the driveway itself, was a wooden sentry-box. Within was a telephone which the prison officer now lifted. He dialled two digits and waited for an answer. ‘Gatehouse here, sir,’ he said. ‘Two visitors for the prisoner, sir. They have identified themselves as UNIT personnel, and they have authority to make the visit from the Minister.’ He listened for a moment. ‘Yes, sir. Right away, sir.’ He put down the ’phone, put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. Like a jack-in-the-box another prison officer came hurrying out of the cottage.

‘These two for the château,’ said the first prison officer. ‘Jump to it.’

The other officer wheeled about, and disappeared round the side of the cottage. A moment later he came back, driving a Minimoke.

‘Show him your passes,’ said the first prison officer, ‘and he’ll drive you up there.’

‘But we’ve already shown
you
our passes,’ the Doctor protested.

‘How is he to know,’ said the first prison officer, ‘that you and I aren’t in a conspiracy to free the prisoner?’

For a second Jo thought the man must be joking, then realised he was deadly serious. She saw that the Doctor was about to explode in wrath against bureaucracy, so to save that she quickly showed their passes to the Minimoke driver.

‘Two being passed over to you, Mr. Snellgrove,’ announced the first prison officer.

‘Am receiving two from you, Mr. Crawley,’ said the second prison officer seated at the driving wheel of the Minimoke.

‘All right,’ said the prison officer called Crawley, ‘hop in quick, you two.’

‘Well, jump to it,’ barked the Doctor, and climbed on board the Minimoke. He talked in the same sergeant-majorish way as the prison officers. ‘Am now sitting in Minimoke.’

Prison Officer Crawley crossed over to the Doctor and looked at him with the disdain he normally reserved for criminals in his care. ‘All right, sonny. You may think we’re a big laugh here. But let me tell you this: the way I look at it, the world’s divided into three groups of people—those who have been in prison, those who
are
in prison, and those who will be going to prison. Got it?’

Jo quickly got into the back of the Minimoke next to the Doctor. ‘I’m sure we understand perfectly,’ she said, ‘and thank you for being so kind. Can we go now?’

Prison Officer Crawley turned and went back into the gatekeeper’s cottage without a word. Prison Officer Snellgrove put the Minimoke into gear and drove it, at not more than ten miles per hour, all the way up the drive to the vast Victorian front door of the château.

The door was not opened until Prison Officer Snellgrove had given the right number of knocks. It was then opened by two more prison officers, who immediately wished to see Jo’s and the Doctor’s passes and UNIT identity cards. The prison officer who had brought them said, ‘Two being passed over to you, Mr. Sharp,’ and

Prison Officer Sharp, who guarded the front door, replied, ‘Am receiving two from you, Mr. Snellgrove.’

As soon as the Doctor and Jo were inside the vast hallway, the front door was closed and locked. Prison Officer Sharp barked at the visitors, ‘Keep two paces behind me,’ and promptly marched off down a stone corridor, followed by the Doctor and Jo. Sharp eventually stopped at a small door of ornately carved wood with huge wrought-iron hinges. He knocked, entered, and held open the door, and stood to attention.

‘Visitors—two,’ announced Sharp, staring straight ahead of himself, as though on a parade ground, ‘being handed over to you, Mr. Trenchard—sir!’

The Doctor and Jo followed Sharp into the governor’s office. It was a big gloomy room with cathedral-like windows, all with bars, and a lot of heavy, brown wood-panelling. The furniture was old-fashioned—a couple of enormous leather armchairs, and a huge old desk. George Trenchard, a retired army officer, was seated at the desk, writing a memorandum. He was a big-built man with a bull neck, middle-aged, dressed in conventional country-gentleman tweed suit and an Old School tie. He remained where he was, writing away, without looking up. Jo and the Doctor waited patiently. Jo was reminded of a rather stupid headmistress she had once known who had always used this technique when girls went in to see her; it was a trick to make visitors feel unsure of themselves. After a while the Doctor cleared his throat, very noisily.