Doctor Who: Paradise Towers (4 page)

‘Who are you?’ The speaker was without doubt the leader of the uniformed attackers. A pompous, literal-minded, unintelligent sort of fellow, the Doctor decided very quickly. But then the Doctor was not going to feel well-disposed towards anybody whose minions had dragged him ignominiously from the spot at the bottom of the stairs where he had fallen, head over heels, in the attempt to escape.

‘Well?’

The Doctor, brushing the dust from his coat and discovering to his relief that his umbrella was unharmed, decided to ignore the question. ‘Are you the Caretakers?’

‘Yes.’ The middle-aged Caretaker looked very pleased with himself. He had a very high opinion of his position, all too apparently. The leader of the Caretakers perhaps, the Doctor wondered. Probably not, he decided. The man had all the signs of being a good, unquestioning second-in-command. No leader he. Still, after the threats and the arrows, there was something solid and comforting about the Caretakers. Their grey uniforms, tattered now, with soiled gold braiding and epaulettes half hanging off, must once have been rather smart. Nothing very military about them, of course. More like the sort of uniforms that the Doctor had seen on commissionaires outside smart London hotels on one of his visits to twentieth-century Earth.

Maybe it was not such a bad thing to have been found by them.

‘And you Caretakers take care? Of people too?’ he enquired.

‘Maybe.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor decided. ‘You seem to be our safest bet for the moment. Don’t you think so, Mel?’

Mel was not there. Perhaps it was not very logical of the Doctor to expect her still to be there with him after all the frantic activity of the last few minutes but it did come as a surprise to realise she was nowhere in sight. He looked all about him but he could get no glimpse either of Mel or of a single Red Kang.

‘Mel? Mel? Where are you?’ The Doctor’s voice rang out across the square but the only reply was a faint echo. ‘I must find Mel.’ The Doctor started to move off in the most likely direction, the direction he had been making for himself when they were still together.

‘No, no, sunbeam,’ the Caretaker snapped. ‘You’re coming with us.’ The Doctor found himself lifted up almost bodily by two of the burlier Caretakers and pulled off in the opposite direction to the one he wanted to go.

‘Mel! Mel!’ The Doctor tried to glance back before he was dragged off on yet another enforced tour of Paradise Towers.

Mel can take care of herself, he consoled himself. She won’t come to any harm. I’ll be able to give these fellows the slip before too long and we’ll get together as arranged. It’s a good thing that I made Mel make that agreement about meeting up at the pool.

Even Time Lords sometimes take credit for things they didn’t think of themselves. The memory of the arrangement was enough to put him back in good spirits, anyway, as the Caretakers lead him away. It took him some time to remember that he had no idea what he was being led to.

3

‘Cooee! Would you care for a cup of tea?’

At first Mel thought she was hearing things. She was sitting dejectedly in a grimy ill-lit corridor in Paradise Towers and someone was offering her a cup of tea. It was so unlikely Mel thought her mind must be going.

‘I said, would you care for a cup of tea?’

But no, there was the voice again. Mel looked along the corridor to where the voice appeared to be coming from. And, sure enough, standing there by an open door was a tiny, sweet-looking old lady. Her dress was somewhat bizarre, it was true, made up of bits and pieces of clothing in bright colours which didn’t quite match, but she looked friendly and kind. And a cup of tea really would be very welcome.

‘Thank you.’ Mel got up, still rather dazed after her recent experiences, and moved towards the welcoming door. The old lady was carrying on a whispered conversation with someone inside and there were sounds of frenzied clearing-up. If Mel had been less tired, she might have wondered why the old lady prevented her from entering immediately. Over her hostess’s shoulder, she did catch a glimpse of a capacious female figure disposing of the remnants of some meal or other. And her activity was followed by the whirr of something which sounded very much like a waste disposal unit. That was all.

‘My friend, Tabby, is just tidying up,’ explained the little old lady. ‘We’re both very house-proud, you see. Particularly when we have guests.’ The whirring sounds inside stopped abruptly and the lady smiled encouragingly. ‘I think it’s all right to go in now.’ She took Mel by the arm and led her over the threshold.

‘I’m Tilda, by the way, what’s your name?’

‘Mel.’

‘Mel,’ repeated Tilda with relish. ‘What a sweet name.’

There was something about the way she said the words that didn’t ring quite right even to Mel’s tired ears. But the appeal of peace and quiet and tea was too strong for her.

The flat Mel was shown into was unlike anything she had yet seen in Paradise Towers. For a start, it was all sparkling clean and bright, with its cooker, its work surfaces and its waste disposal unit all gleaming white and its carpets free from stain or grime. And then there were the decorations. The flat was cluttered with them. Ducks on the wall. Huge garish flower vases. A glass topped table. Onyx ashtrays everywhere. There was even a bird cage with a budgerigar chirping away in it. The owners of the flat were undoubtedly great nestbuilders. Mel wondered how they could have survived amidst the squalor outside.

‘Mel, this is Tabby.’ Mel recognised the figure who had been scurrying about previously. Another old lady, dressed in a similar multi-coloured way, but this one was much larger, and, Mel couldn’t help thinking, slightly more alarming. It was the front teeth, Mel decided, as she was introduced. They were unusually prominent, unusually strong-looking and very sharp.

Rat’s teeth, Mel thought, but then decided that was a very rude thing to think, especially as Tabby seemed every bit as friendly and welcoming as Tilda.

‘Come in and make yourself comfortable.’ the larger of the two ladies cooed, gesturing towards the shiny leatherette three-piece suite. And then she saw that Mel’s hands were still tied.

‘We can’t allow that, can we, Tilda?’

‘Certainly not,’ Tilda concurred. ‘Sit down, my dear, and let Tabby untie you. And I’ll put the kettle on.’ She skipped over to the kitchen section of the flat with surprising agility for one of her years.

‘You must have been having a horrid time, you poor girl,’

remarked Tabby while she was dexterously freeing the hands of the seated Mel. ‘Who did this to you?’

‘The Kangs,’ Mel answered. ‘The Red Kangs.’

‘Tut, tut,’ Tabby said, shaking her head. ‘Those Kangs are naughty girls.’ A suspicion suddenly entered her head. ‘You’re not a Kang, are you?’

Mel denied it hotly.

‘We didn’t think you were somehow,’ Tilda put in as she bustled around getting the tea things ready. ‘They’re nasty, untrusting girls who would never take a cup of tea from harmless old folk like us, would they, Tabby?’

‘No,’ Tabby agreed, as she finished untying Mel. ‘Mel’s not at all like a Kang. She’s a nice, polite, clean, well-spoken girl. Just the sort we like.’

‘Excuse me –’ Mel began, but before she could go on, Tabby had turned to Tilda and said, ‘There you are, what did I say, lovely manners. Saying “Excuse me” before she asks a question.’

Tabby turned back and fixed Mel with her large attentive eyes.

‘What was it, dear?’

‘I was going to ask who you were,’ Mel explained.

‘We’re Tilda and Tabby, dear,’ replied a puzzled Tilda.

‘We’ve already told you.’

‘No, no,’ Mel persisted. ‘I mean, like the Kangs are the Kangs and the Caretakers are the –’

The penny finally dropped. ‘Oh, I see. Silly us,’ Tabby giggled. ‘We’re the Rezzies. Short for Residents. Well, some of the Rezzies anyway. We’ve quite a few like-minded friends here and there in the Towers.’

Now she had taken in her surroundings and her strange hostesses, Mel was starting to wonder more about where they fitted in. ‘Have you always lived here?’

‘We’ve been here for ever such a long time if that’s what you mean. How about you?’

‘Oh, I’m just visiting,’ Mel answered swiftly.

‘A visitor?’ Tabby’s sharp eyes examined her wonderingly.

‘Well, well, it must be a long time since the Towers saw any of those, eh, Tilda?’

‘It takes you back, doesn’t it?’ sighed Tilda as she transferred some very odd-looking cakes onto doily-covered plates.

‘Does it?’ Mel’s curiosity was returning by leaps and bounds now she was feeling more relaxed. ‘What was it like before?’

‘Never mind about that now,’ Tilda chided. She brought over the tea things from the kitchen area and placed them on the glass-topped table in front of Mel. ‘Have some tea and cakes.’

The cakes looked very rich and very fattening. They were also of shapes and colours that Mel had never seen before. But that didn’t stop her mouth from watering. She realised how hungry she was feeling. Maybe questions could wait.

‘You’re a thin little thing, aren’t you?’ Tabby remarked, pushing a plate of the cakes towards her. ‘Don’t worry, dear, Tilda and I will feed you up.’

Mel selected a gooey confectionary monstrosity from the pile and bit into it. It tasted delicious. She would really have been very content if only she had been sure that the Doctor was safe.

Tilda smiled as she tucked in. Tabby smiled too. Rat’s teeth she thought again. And then forgot about it.

The Doctor meanwhile was being frog-marched through the corridors of the Towers at a tremendous pace by the over-zealous Caretakers. They had untied his hands but that was small consolation when he was being pulled along so fast that he was becoming quite breathless from the rush. He very quickly gathered that the leading Caretaker did everything by a well-thumbed rule book he carried in the inside pocket of his tattered uniform. The one word not found in this book was ‘initiative’.

The Caretaker would not have sneezed without checking on whether the rule book allowed it. And the Doctor’s first impressions were confirmed from the scraps of conversation between his captors. This was no Chief Caretaker. This was the Deputy Chief Caretaker. The trusty right-hand man to somebody far cleverer and more powerful.

Every time the Doctor tried to stop and examine something, he was unceremoniously hauled away from it. It annoyed him having his natural curiosity frustrated and, as he became more and more breathless, he decided the time had come to put in for a rest.

‘Surely the rules will allow us to slow down just for a moment,’ he protested to the Deputy Chief. ‘You may have been down this corridor hundreds of times but I haven’t and I’d appreciate a moment to get my breath back and take in my surroundings. Will the rules run to that?’

But the inevitable rule book was already out of the Deputy Chief’s pocket and he was thumbing through it laboriously. The Doctor waited impatiently. ‘Well?’

‘You’re allowed to stop for one and a half minutes for every three thousand footsteps walked,’ the Deputy Chief eventually concluded. ‘That means you can stand still for a while.’ The exact calculations for how long were clearly beyond him.

‘Very generous of you,’ the Doctor returned sarcastically.

He took in the filthy and gloomy street in which they were standing. ‘It must be a job keeping all these corridors clean and tidy.’

The irony was wasted on the Deputy Chief. ‘Indeed,’ he agreed. ‘Especially the wallscrawl.’ He indicated the brightly coloured paintings that covered every available wall space. The Doctor recognised the work of the Kangs. ‘That’s what you call them, isn’t it? Wallscrawlers?’

The Deputy nodded. ‘Dirty little pests.’ He pointed to one wall in particular. And what the Doctor saw there quite took his breath away. The scrawl showed a girl dressed in yellow being threatened by two large white mechanical claws.

‘It looks like a Kang and something attacking her. Some sort of machine? With a claw?’ The Doctor knew instinctively that this was important.

‘The Wallscrawlers make up a lot of silly pictures,’ the Deputy put in swiftly, obviously hoping to close the conversation.

‘Let’s hope they are just silly pictures,’ the Doctor returned, unconvinced. And then as he bent to examine the Kang wallscrawl more closely, the Doctor heard a sound, low at first, growing in volume. A soft mechanical whirring, regular but somehow menacing.

‘What’s that?’ He turned questioningly to the Deputy.

‘What’s what?’ The Deputy was suddenly very shifty, trying to pretend that there was no sound there at all. Then as the sound grew louder, he started to bluster. ‘Look, sunshine, if there was anything wrong, there’d be instructions about how to deal with it in here, wouldn’t there?’

But the Doctor was no longer paying attention. Down the corridor moving swiftly towards them was a large, gleaming white, wheeled robot, with headlights and blades swishing away at its sides. The Doctor was immediately fascinated as he was by all new encounters.

‘Ah, I see,’ he said, his eyes taking in the robot’s contours.

‘Some sort of robotic cleaner. With oltrimotive bi-curval scraping blades. Impressive workmanship.’

‘You don’t understand –’ the Deputy Chief began, anxious now the Cleaner was approaching, to leave as soon as possible.

Even his slow-moving brain sensed something was very wrong and he began to recall all the scaremongering that had been going the rounds of the Caretakers’ Headquarters. But, unfortunately for him, his words had no effect on the Doctor who was heading straight towards the robotic cleaner.

‘Now let’s have a look at this oltrimotive blade, shall we?’ the Doctor urged, edging closer and closer in his curiosity. The Deputy and the other Caretakers stood in a state of shock, unable either to help or hinder him. But they did see something the Doctor didn’t. As he tried to look at the flashing steel blades protruding from its sides, the Cleaner had released from its top a large mechanical claw. Not unlike the one in the Wallscrawl.