Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones (9 page)

“I mean,” said Earl, “even if he’d wanted to, how could he have found his way across there and into one of them tunnels in pitch darkness?”

“He’d have gone for the manhole. Waited for help if he was in trouble. Or even risked pushing the cover off. But he didn’t.”

Derek flashed his torch around the walls again. Nothing apart from the occasional blob of fat.

Arek had vanished.

As they moved out into the pool, the traffic noise died slightly, then there was a grating noise and a shaft of light angled into the space, striking the pool almost dead centre.

And that’s when they saw one of Arek’s boots.

As a team of three firemen descended the ladder from the manhole, bringing more lights to bear, Earl and Derek saw that they were surrounded by pieces of their missing colleague’s clothing.

In one corner, there was a greyish-green blob that could be mistaken for fat. It was content to remain there, digesting its latest meal – bones and all.

Doctor How sat at his desk in the basement, with Where’s Spectrel in the form of a small black London cab behind him. The autistic When had clearly found the companionship too much and had gone home, which he knew wasn’t as bad as Where’s near-derelict house in Dagenham. He couldn’t ever understand what was wrong with his cousins; taking the path of least resistance to live lives of mediocrity.

How’s mood was black that Saturday morning. The algorithm on his systems had thrown up the news story about the sewer worker who had disappeared the previous afternoon, and it was now a major news item. Dolt had been in contact, railing about his failure to have enforced the invasive species rules when he’d found the Plenscas breaching them for their holy week. Never mind the possibility of reimbursement for the cleaning fees, there was now a move by the Rindan consulate to sue him over the death of their consul and her husband. He couldn’t believe the gall of these beings; there were hundreds of deaths from this sort of incident every holy week in the Rindan diaspora. The Rindans might be a gentle and – if he was honest – rather wimpish-looking species, but they were notorious for their fault-finding litigiousness as the Dolts were for their bureaucracy. Whilst he rejoiced in the differences of the various species in the Pleasant universe, he couldn’t understand how some hadn’t wiped themselves out through their own idiocy.

There was no credible way he could think of to cover up the death of this sewer worker. His inside sources – he had an intelligent program feeding him a streamed précis of all the Metropolitan Police’s communications on the subject – told him that only shreds of the man’s clothing had been found, along with his spade and his emergency radio. The latter item had been found after a second thorough search of the area, and had been corroded by acid. Official speculation had turned to the possibility of some kind of chemical leak, but tests on the effluent showed no abnormality in its pH.

The confused humans couldn’t put two and two together, and no plausible hypothesis could match the basic clues: shredded clothes, no remains, and a lump of corroded metal. The explanation was so laughably clear when one changed the term
corroded by acid
to
partly digested and then regurgitated
that he felt like calling the senior officers on the case and shouting it at them. He wondered whether any of them had seen the original
Jaws
movie. For the fact that the polyps didn’t have teeth, he was grateful. Their stinging tentacles and powerful, crushing gizzards were lethal, but at least they didn’t leave bits of enamel and dentine lying around.

The rumour mill of the conspiracy theorists had gone into overdrive. The theory that had gained the most credence was that an alligator had escaped from London Zoo, and was now roaming the sewers. Quite how the warm-water reptile had managed to navigate its way from the bitterly cold waters of the canal, across the cold and fast-flowing Thames and then into the stinking and unappetising sewers of South London was a question which wasn’t addressed.

However, once the idea had taken root, there was suddenly no end of hitherto unreported sightings over the previous few weeks, and several images of gnarled pieces of half-submerged wood in Camden Lock on the Regent’s Canal were touted as being photographs of the beast. The human mind’s gullibility and imagination never ceased to amaze him – there was a stream of eye-witness accounts of wildfowl and dogs having been pulled under and consumed by the monster over the past decade.

The Doctor wasn’t sure whether this kind of speculation helped or hindered him. All it would take was another death and a score of dim-witted politicians would jump on the bandwagon and declare an emergency. He had no problem with receiving help from the human authorities, but he couldn’t possibly let them discover a species so obviously alien living under their noses. The polyps had to be destroyed. Their remains could never fall into the hands of human scientists.

To Tim’s great credit, they’d been halfway to the intersection in question when the incident had happened, and they’d probably be there in the next few hours. The emergency services were still all over the area, but Tim’s great advantage was that they could play the same game as the polyp was presumably doing – lie there and pretend to be something else. Indeed, Tim was quite capable of moving themselves without being seen to move at all. They could stick to a surface and slowly move some of themselves from one end of the colony to the other without the movement being at all apparent. Even someone observing stop-motion footage of Tim would simply assume that they were a creeping slime mould, which he was – albeit a highly ordered and sentient one with a vote on the Galactic Council, no matter whether anyone would welcome them into their homes to meet their families, or accept their hospitality.

Trinity was enjoying herself. She’d not had that much difficulty persuading the Doctor that she should leave in the early hours of the morning. She knew how much pressure he was under to resolve the problem of the rogue polyps, and her argument had been simple: they only had a fix on one of them, and there were probably two more. He’d not been at all happy because the humans were still all over the scene of the disappearance, and spreading outwards. That hadn’t bothered her in the least: she’d impressed him with an excellent brickwork pattern, then made herself look like a blob of yellowish fat. Her final point was that – in the absence of his Spectrel – he wasn’t able to let her out for any nocturnal hunting expeditions for the foreseeable future. This one was close to home, and Tim needed another predator to help them.

She’d slunk out of the house in the earliest hours of the morning in her feline form, looking more like a small puma than a large black domestic cat, and trotted a couple of miles down to Clapham. The Doctor had directed her towards a manhole in a quiet residential street, and she’d hidden under a car whilst she’d changed back into her arachnid form. She felt at ease with herself as she changed her fur to match the tarmac of the road and stepped out to the manhole cover. She stood with her eight legs around the side for a few moments, feeling the faint background vibrations of the sleeping city as a human would hear the hiss of white noise from an untuned radio. The biggest noise coming from underneath was from some overnight works on the Northern Line near Clapham North station, which didn’t concern her at all. Her eight eyes could detect nothing untoward in any of the windows of the surrounding houses. The rear of her abdomen dipped as she dabbed her spinner onto the middle of the cover. She lifted her abdomen up and a fine strand of silk thread now connected her rear end with the heavy metal plate.

She had a final check with all her senses and then retracted the silk with her spinner, slowly lifting the plate up a touch, and pulling it to the rear. There was only the slightest of grating noises. When it was halfway out, she dabbed her spinner again and removed the silk thread. She crept into the manhole head-first and then slowly slid the cover back into place using her two rear legs. There was no audience to show off to; she did this because she was always practicing, always bettering herself.

With the cover in place, she stood silently in the darkness for a couple of minutes. Few humans appreciated the value of stillness, in her view. She’d heard about the spiritual ones who sought an inner stillness, and had wondered at their inverted and egocentric view of the world. Didn’t they understand that the origins of this lay in the
external
oneness, and that was why they wanted to feel oneness with the universe? There were decreasing numbers of them who understood the external connectedness of the effective predator – the feeling of oneness with the environment which allowed the hunter not to have to ask where their prey was, but to be told.

Now that she had the blank vibration template of the sewers in the Clapham area anything else would stand out and reveal itself. She could move swiftly now, and she did. The tunnels were an ideal shape for her – a vertical ovoid along which she could scurry silently with her legs planted on either side, a couple of feet above the fetid water. As she made her way towards the area where the disappearance had taken place she tuned in to Tim. They were almost there, and coming from the south-west. She was coming from the north. It had been a long time ago, and in a faraway place that she’d last hunted with Tim. They would both enjoy it, she was sure.

She stopped every twenty or thirty yards to tune in for a couple of seconds. The overnight work on the Tube continued on a different tunnel system entirely. Behind that she could make out a fainter but closer hub of activity. This was what interested her. She crept forward until she reached an area of recent human activity. Even above the stench of their waste she could smell them – their sweat, their deodorants, their synthetic materials and their fear.

Behind the human activity she could smell the polyps. Specifically, she could smell that single polyp trapped in the system up ahead. Her mandibles twitched with anticipation at the kill, and the taste of fresh prey.

She crept forward and then stopped at the end of the tunnel, just before it connected to a larger one, spread her legs out and stood for a couple more minutes. Against her expectations, the police, aided by sewer workers, had decided to work through the night. There were about a dozen of them, and they were being loud. She knew this loudness: it was the noise of fear. The volume of the activity was there to ward off predators. Of course, the humans didn’t know that’s what they were doing because it was pure instinct on their part, driven by a primeval fear they could never conquer. She twitched with slight annoyance at them. If only they’d go away for a minute – just one minute – she and Tim could take care of this mess for them. Now she understood better why the Doctor could become so frustrated with human activity when it impinged on his own. They never understood that they just got in the way of things when they didn’t understand them.

Still, she had plenty of time and little better to do. She checked in again with Tim. They, too, were similarly frustrated, having reached a position some twenty yards to the south of the human activity. Tim and Trinity had a little mental bitching session about the apparently constant need for humans to be seen to be doing something, even if it was completely the wrong thing. Tim hadn’t picked up any scent of polyps to the south. The chances were that this one was the straggler of the group. In times of scarce resources all animals across the universe did this – predator and prey alike – they spread out and foraged individually. The two stronger polyps had headed north.

Tim and Trinity mulled it over. Tim could creep slowly forward as the human activity kept the polyp stuck in that position. The alien was probably not in a position to move a great distance anyway, given that it was digesting the largest meal it had had in its short life. Even if the humans remained for a couple of days, Tim might well be able to send out a thin sliver of themselves to deal with it.

There was no sense in a highly mobile hunter like Trinity standing guard when a couple of polyps were on the loose. With that decision made, she informed the Doctor and headed north on her own, relishing the prospect of a two-to-one hunt. She tracked back a hundred yards and found the scent of the other two polyps.

The polyp slid and lolloped its way down a smooth section of sewer on its single foot, fell out of the end of the tunnel and splashed down into a pool four feet below. It hadn’t intended to splash down into the pool; it was a brainless polyp. But it would be true to say that falling into the pool was not a good outcome.

Its simple neural circuits flashed briefly and made another connection. This was the third time it had taken such a tumble in the recent past. Now it knew that a certain kind of vibration in the air caused by falling water indicated a precipice up ahead. Or, rather than knowing, it associated the proximate sound as a possible warning of an impending fall. It would proceed more cautiously next time it heard the noise because being out of contact with a surface was not something that felt good to it.

It instinctively spread out its tentacles on the surface and stretched its body downwards, searching for a stable surface. Its foot touched the bottom, around three feet below, but it chose not to grip it. So long as part of it was touching a surface it felt more secure. In contrast, it had felt bad to be close to its siblings, and it had been moving as fast as it could in the opposite direction to the faint pheromones it could sense from them in the water.

It spun slowly, its tentacles splayed like a star in the pool, as the eddy currents played with it. Spread out like this it was about eight feet in diameter, having grown substantially after feasting on the Rindan ambassador and her husband. The need to feed was now expressing itself in its simple neural circuits. It had learnt to ignore the objects in the water that bumped into its tentacles; they were inanimate waste. On a few occasions there had been warm-blooded furry objects that squirmed and bit, and raked at it with claws when it grasped them with its tentacles. Through trial and error it had learnt to squeeze the life out of them immediately, rather than waste poison from its stinging cells. They had sufficed only as appetisers, barely covering the calorific cost of its swift progress.

It sensed that there were three flows into the pool, and one out – towards which it was slowly being dragged. It planted its foot onto the bottom of the pool and tensed the muscles in the middle upwards whilst tensing the ones at the side in a ring. The foot became a powerful suction pad, so it was going nowhere for now.

The outflow was the wrong way to go. Its entrance was below the water, and bacterial digestion of the sewage meant that there would be diminishing levels of oxygen in the pipe. There was another option, which the tip of one its tentacles explored. The brick changed to cold metal, and there was a crack, through which a breeze with the slightest hint of salt in the air flowed. Salt meant death.

Two of the three inflows had no traces of polyp pheromones, which made them more attractive than the way it had come in. Food would be more plentiful where it was not competing with its siblings. One of the inlets had fresher water. Pungent chemicals had been a constant irritant. Occasionally on its journey it had been hit from the side by bursts of water with objects in them, and the water had sometimes stung slightly.

Its tentacles converged in the direction of the inlet with fresher water and planted themselves on the bottom of the pool. It let go with its foot, swung it over its body and planted it closer to the inlet. After going head over foot a couple of times it was beneath the inlet, planted to the wall. Now it could sense not only that the water was slightly fresher, but that there was a hint of meat and blood in it too.

It sensed a splash in the pool behind it, and froze, its senses on high alert.

The pheromones from one of its siblings filled the pool. One of them was here with it. That made leaving all the more urgent, as it could claim the hunting territory beyond this inlet as its own. It heaved itself up into the lip of the tunnel, momentarily disrupting the flow, and then was gone.

The second polyp had sensed the relatively high concentration of pheromones in the pool as it had spread its tentacles out, and knew that a sibling was there. The disruption to the flow from one of the inlets caused it to freeze, until pheromone sensors on the tentacle nearest confirmed that it was where its sibling had just gone.

Its journey had been less fruitful than its sibling’s, which had cut a swathe through the rat population, leaving just a couple of the animals to slake its hunger. To say that feeding was top of its priorities was an understatement. Just like the first polyp, it sensed that the outlet was too dangerous, and that the other exit risked exposure to salt. It lashed out its tentacles for the only inlet without polyp pheromones and hauled itself up and inside.

It sensed a rat scurrying upstream but was a fraction of a second too late to grab it. Moving slowly to conserve energy, it took an hour to get two hundred yards upstream. Its neural system slowly processed its needs, energy levels and possible actions. After a further half hour, its conclusion was that a different path needed to be taken; the side tunnels from which waste occasionally flowed needed to be explored. It was out of something like this that it and its siblings had emerged after feasting on the Rindans. Thus, there was an association with an abundant supply of food. However, there had been an association with danger too. Now, its urgent need to feed outweighed the potential risk.

Instinct drew it towards a relatively large side tunnel with a flow that was more constant than the other ones. It squeezed its way upwards against the sporadic flow for what seemed a very long way, using valuable reserves of energy to prevent itself from slipping backwards. Its most forward tentacle detected a pipe going off to the side. There was barely a trickle of water coming from it, and it felt different somehow. It needed to conserve energy, and to eat, so it moved into this narrower pipe. After a couple of yards it felt smaller pipes going up overhead off the main pipe, which came to an abrupt end.

There was a certain amount of security in only having one large hole to guard. It settled into place and sent its tentacles out to explore more thoroughly its new position. There were four smaller pipes going up, and there were only three feet between each. It settled down to feel the vibrations in the environment around it. There were distinct patterns of thuds, with around half a second between each. One of the patterns of thuds came close to the pipe system and stopped. The polyp slipped a tentacle into the pipe nearest to where the vibration had stopped. There was a set of vibrations as something dropped into water within the pipe system, then a delay. Suddenly water and waste objects cascaded over the tentacle that was underneath the pipe. The vibrations moved away again.

The polyp lay still as its primitive neural system processed the information for a few minutes. Its hunger ratcheted up a notch.

Then it heard another set of regular thuds move near to one of the pipes. It moved itself directly underneath the pipe and squeezed three of its tentacles up to explore. The tube twisted around and into some water. They broke through the surface of the water and were hit by some objects which were still warm – a final confirmation.

All three tentacles thrust upwards and found warm flesh. Stinging glands on the tentacles injected venom. The flesh moved, but two of the tentacles were already wrapping themselves around two thick limbs. It had a tactile memory of these from the Rindans. Two things like the claws of the rats, but bigger, tried to remove its tentacles. It tensed its tentacles around the limbs, its foot suckered itself securely in position and its other tentacles braced themselves against the pipework. The fleshy thing was unable to move. Through its tentacles it could feel the pulse of blood quicken. It felt a high-frequency vibration through the pipe just as its third tentacle found an orifice. The high-frequency vibration stopped a second later as the venom took its effect, paralysing its victim.

The polyp kept the victim locked in place with two tentacles, and began to gorge using the third to tear out flesh and pass it back to its mouth. The Rindans’ flesh had had little muscle and fat. This flesh had more calories – the muscle was meaty, and there was plenty of fat on the internal organs and under the skin. It was just what a polyp needed for healthy growth.

Roddy and Steve were web designers during the week and urban explorers at the weekends – though they preferred the term ‘place hackers’ to describe themselves. They’d met as architecture students, and started with the occasional foray onto rooftops in central London. After the terrorist alerts early in the century security had tightened. Roddy had been caught and received a caution for trespassing. Although they styled themselves as hip and edgy, a criminal conviction could exclude them from some contracts so they’d decided to have a look around for something else.

They’d found a website about the capital’s secret underground world – unused Tube stations, sewers and lost rivers. The stations had been interesting but security was always being tightened. After a court appearance and a fine, they’d decided to concentrate on the lost rivers. The equipment was inexpensive – boots, waterproof trousers, flashlights and caving helmets. The advice on the website had been for a minimum of three in a party, but Roddy and Steve had always believed in keeping the numbers down because it made for more agility. That, and the fact that they didn’t know anyone else who was into this sort of thing.

South London had been perfect because of the more extensive river systems within the network, and for the fact that it was, well, South London; the authorities cared little for anything on that side of the Thames. The lower population density also meant less sewage and, if you followed the rivers, it was a relatively clean experience. There was no pressure down there – not even the light of day – and they’d often taken up to twelve hours carefully mapping out the labyrinth of tunnels. If you knew your way you could pop out under cover of darkness at the end of your street. It was the most extraordinary feeling to be able to disappear in one part of the city and emerge at an exact location a few hours later.

They would stare in wonder at the fine Victorian brickwork and appreciate the sleek intersections with modern upgrades, documenting it with digital SLR cameras and video. But the book on the secret architecture of London’s sewers had been put on the back-burner after first Roddy, then Steve, had settled down and started families.

Steve had called Roddy and shown him how the sewers were trending on social media that weekend. It was big news. They could have one last foray for old times’ sake, post fresh videos and rank big. What wasn’t to like?

They’d entered the system near Herne Hill station late on Saturday afternoon, at the southern edge of the Victorian sewers laid out by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Steve’s wife had insisted on seeing them off, asking them to check in every couple of hours. She’d even insisted on knowing a route plan, reminding him of his responsibilities towards his offspring. On the plus side, she’d acted as lookout as they disappeared down the manhole on the quiet suburban street. Good for his word, Steve had texted his wife after a couple of hours, and had to admit to himself that it added to the thrill knowing that someone outside the system knew where you were and what you were doing.

Heading north, they’d soon come to the tributary coming down from Tulse Hill and Brockwell Park on their left, bringing completely fresh water into the system. They’d trudged downstream to the north for another hour, sensing the occasional vibration of an overground train. Now there was a different thunder. It was deeper and more encompassing than the passing of an overground train.

“Victoria line, train pulling into Brixton,” said Roddy.

“Gotta be,” said Steve. He sniffed the air and shone his flashlight around. “Smell the market?” They both sniffed the air. Under the stench of the sewage there was the unmistakable smell of Caribbean spices and rotting meat from the myriad food outlets in Brixton Village, and the halal butchers’ shops on Electric Avenue. Steve’s flashlight found a couple of fat rats feeding on some offal. The rats ignored them and continued to eat. Next to them was a child’s doll, its dirty clothes in tatters.

“Monster rats!” said Roddy with a grin, stowing his flashlight and taking out his SLR.

“Wasn’t there a
Doctor Who
story about giant rats in the London sewers?”

“Yeah, was it Tom Baker’s Doctor?” Roddy chose his angle carefully and took a couple of shots with a diffuser over his flash. Still the rats were unperturbed. “Protecting some crackpot professor’s underground laboratory.” He tilted the LCD screen of the camera towards Steve. They had to turn off the lights on their helmets to see the images properly. From the angle he’d taken the pictures, it looked like one of the rats was feeding off the body of the doll. They had a chuckle and turned their helmet lights back on.