第 10 页

Pat slid the hatchway shut. 'You mean he's got the answers?'

Sergeant Lines turned the lights off. 'Yeah. He just hasn't got the questions.'

---

The Sandybeach Hotel was not exactly the height of luxury or haute cuisine, but the Doctor had already investigated the quality of the cheese and wine it stocked and, for an out-of-season seaside bed-and-breakfast, it stood up to his scrutiny remarkably well.

When he had checked in, a surly landlord had taken his crisp new notes - obtained from the UNIT accounts' office - and had offered him the 'customary welcoming glass of vino'. Despite the dingyness of the bar area, with flowered wallpaper and newspaper cuttings about local theatres pinned to a cork board, the two men were soon engaged in a long and hard discussion about the best wines, where to obtain them and how best to store them. The landlord had looked bewildered when the Doctor had described 'a pleasant little vinegar he'd picked up on Elbyon' but had chosen to ignore it, and pour another glass of the palatable house red instead.

The Doctor now stood outside the darkened hotel, staring up at the window of his room-with-a-view. He felt for the front-door key in one of his cape pockets and as his fingers felt the contours of it, something made him turn back towards the cliff-side. Further up the long cliff path, he could just make out the shape of the lonely cottage on the cliff-edge, where Barbara Redworth had obviously seen something. Whatever it was, it had caused her to start drawing pictures similar to the ones he had seen during the incident at Wenley Moor a few months earlier.

And the Doctor knew he could not wait until seven thirty in the morning to find out. As the town clock chimed midnight, he gathered his cape tightly around him to keep out the cold sea wind and walked up towards Bessie. It took him a few minutes to reach the car, which was parked in a small lay-by at the foot of the cliff road, and opened the boot to extract a powerful torch. He tested it, sending a strong beam of white light into the dark skies above. Without the glow from orange city lights to obscure them, the stars flickered back in their incalculable numbers.

Using the light of the torch to guide him, he made his way along the narrow road, out of the town and up towards the remote cottage. As soon as the penumbra of the last street-light had faded, he turned back and scanned the street behind him. The man who had been following him since he left the hotel was no longer in sight. Perhaps it had been someone out late, catching a last breath of sea air before retiring. But the man hadn't looked or dressed like a local, and something at the edge of the Doctor's mind told him he was still being watched.

Not that it mattered, he thought. With his impeccable taste in clothes, it wouldn't be the first time that he had been followed by someone overcome with sartorial curiosity and awe. Given the way the seventies seemed to be going, he expected it to happen a lot more often in the next few years. The important thing for him at this stage was to investigate the cottage. He turned and strode off up the slope.

As he approached the building, he saw the blue-and-white striped tape cordoning off the whole area. His torch picked out a crude sign attached to the tape, politely informing the public that this was a police investigation area, it was unsafe, and they should stay well away.

Ignoring the warning, he ducked underneath and walked to the front door. His sonic screwdriver made quick work of dismantling the simple padlock, and he pushed the door open.

Like WPC Redworth, the Doctor quickly noted the fabric of the sofa-covering which had been melted into the window frames. He ran a finger along the join. Definitely Silurian.

He made straight for the upstairs bathroom, but there was little to see there. Some of the bath-water had clearly evaporated. More material had been fused to the window, but a corner of it had been pulled away, revealing deep gouges in the plaster-work.

After a further ten minutes of searching, he had discovered very little. It was not until he was back downstairs, preparing to leave, that he saw the cellar entrance. It would have been easy to miss; a hatchway set into the stone floor of the ruined kitchenette, looking exactly like one of the flagstones except for two small recessed handles, made of rusted metal.

The Doctor slipped his fingers under the handles at either end and pulled up with a sharp tug. The trapdoor did not budge, but the corroded metal at one end gave way and be fell backwards, landing heavily on his backside, the cellar door unmoved.

He knelt over it, running his finger over the grooves around the edge. The police had clearly noticed it - there was fingerprint dust near the handles, revealing nothing -but, like him, they had failed to open it. Sergeant Lines would probably claim that as it had been unopened for so long, it would probably stay shut for ever.

The Doctor stared at it. The flagstone floor was much older than the rest of the cottage, so there must have been a building here long before the present one was built. A cellar in such an old building in a place like this would have been a passage or hideaway for smugglers or their wares, probably during the seventeenth century. In which case, there would be a bolt or lock on the underside, to foil the Customs men. Setting his sonic screwdriver to a pulse, he passed it around the four sides until there was a bleep, like sonar, registering something beneath. Resetting the device, he concentrated on that area over the bolt, a thin cutting beam quickly severing the unseen bolt in two.

Seconds later the hatch was up and the Doctor was descending the damp wooden steps. At the bottom, dry sand formed a path leading into the gloom. The Doctor suspected that it would eventually lead to a concealed cave on the beach, hidden from the sight of any observers on the cliff-top such as Customs men.

Checking his torch's power levels, he set off. Whatever had been in the house had clearly used this route. His suspicions were soon confirmed when he found two distinctive three-clawed footprints in the increasingly damp sand.

He was dealing with another colony of Silurians. Would they be hostile or relaxed? Would they allow him to mediate with the humans, as he'd tried to once before?

Before any of these questions could begin to be answered, he heard a cry, unmistakably a young boy or girl in trouble. He ran out of the tunnel and onto the blustery sea-shore.

The first thing he registered was the familiar sound from a three-note Silunan calling-box, carried on the wind. Flashing his torch in the right direction, he caught a glimpse of a Silurian talking to what appeared to be a half-naked human. A teenaged boy.

He switched his torch off. Something was stirring in the sea. He watched, fascinated, as another Silurian, also in a long mesh-like garment, rose from the waves. The Doctor noted that like the dry Silurian, this one had features slightly different from the ones he had encountered in Wenley, most notably two fins instead of ears, growing out and backwards.

'Hello?' he called. 'Hello, I want to help. I know who you are and -,'

The Silurian from the sea was the only one that heard him. With a shriek, it turned and pointed at him. Its third eye began to glow red, its head moving rhythmically from side to side.

The Doctor saw the first Silurian stop talking to the boy and begin to run towards him. A second later, as the full effect of the Silurian eye-blast hit, he fell gasping to his knees.

'I want to help you all,' he gasped and then, with a small choking gurgle, fell face-down into the wet sand.

The damp Silurian walked over and kicked at the Doctor's prostrate body.

'Ape vermin. You will all be wiped out.'

Again, the Silurian aimed its third eye. The Doctor, gasping in hard and shallow breaths, began to writhe under the onslaught.

Chapter Three

It was a tiny island, with a surface of rocks and lichen. A few low bushes and hardy flowers struggled to survive on its bleak surface, but most of the plants that tried to sprout rapidly died as the small amount of available earth was quickly used up, or washed away by the spray from the waves that crashed against and over the island's surface.

Once upon a time it had been attached to the continent that mankind referred to as Europe - southern France to be precise - but the movement of tectonic plates many millions of years ago had caused a cluster of rocky outcroppings to break away from the mainland. Violently dragged away by nature, and eroded by the lashings of the English Channel, they settled some way away and eventually became known as the Channel Islands by the French and British, who would spend centuries arguing over their ownership. The average Briton or Frenchman asked about the islands can name Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. The handful of smaller rocks that surround them are usually ignored. Most people are not even aware that they exist.

Of them all, the southernmost island, thirty-five minutes by motor-boat from its nearest neighbour, is the least known and least visited. Less than half a mile across, it is known to the locals as L'Ithe. A couple of ornithologists once stayed overnight, and in 1969, a small group of hippies wanting to explore free love further than the Isle of Wight pop festival would allow hired a boat and sailed to L'Ithe to set up a commune.

They returned home within a week, claiming the island was haunted. The few papers that mentioned the story put it down to experiments with LSD, but a popular medium called Psychic Shin travelled to the island with a reporter and photographer from the Daily Mirror to see if they could summon up any unearthly apparitions. They failed, and after a few weeks most interest in the island faded. This came as a relief to the inhabitants of the Channel Islands - it was one less potential attraction that would bring tourists to tramp all over their unspoiled countryside.

Only Tom Renault complained. Originally hailing from Rotherham (and christened Thomas Reynold), he considered himself the Channel Islands' only true entrepreneur and saw the potential of the 'Haunted Isle' as a tourist attraction. With his fake French accent and self-created heritage, Tom advertised his cheap holidays on the island as far away as the Winchester Gazette and Portsmouth Herald.

No one was interested. Worse, the other islanders began to shun him, notably after the Dame of Sark wrote to him personally and asked him to drop the idea. Writing back, he acknowledged her worries but explained that, as a businessman, he had every right to exploit whatever he could to make his livelihood. There had been no response. Having offended the islands' most revered figure, he was speedily ostracized.

Things became so bad that one day Tom announced he was leaving Jersey to build a house on 'his' island, where he would live. Deciding that being rid of Tom was preferable to trying to stop him, no one raised an eyebrow when he loaded up his rowing boat with wood and departed for L'Ithe.

Four days later, Tom's boat was found drifting near the Port of Guernsey. Sitting in it was Tom, or what was assumed to be Tom. The dead body was horrifically burnt, as was the bottom of the boat. It was suggested that he had knocked over an oil lamp, or that an ember from a cigarette had caught a leaking petrol can. The wood he was carrying must have combusted in seconds, and Tom would have been caught in the flames. No oil lamp or petrol can was found in the boat, but Tom might have knocked it overboard as he struggled.

A doctor from Southampton confirmed Tom's identity from his dental records and his remains were flown back to Rotherham, where two distant cousins and an old school friend witnessed his cheap burial in a local cemetery.

Only one fact of the case might have raised suspicion, but the Guernsey police never commented on it, although PC Stuart Halton had mentioned it in his report. PC Halton had been called to the scene when the boat was sighted; he was responsible for physically dragging the craft into the dock, and checking Tom's body. Later, he had the boat taken back to the station for safekeeping. Five months later, after an inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death, the boat was smashed up and used as firewood. What PC Halton had observed, and what everyone seemed to have ignored, was that the burning seemed to have continued underwater the keel of the boat was scorched and charred. Moreover, the tiny hole that was leaking water into the boat seemed to have been burnt through from underneath.

Halton's report was filed away when the case was closed and never seen again. After a few months, Tom Renault was almost forgotten, and not missed. As far as PC Halton and his colleagues were concerned, copies of the files were passed to the Police Records Department of the Central Office of Information. And forgotten.

Until they were read by a six-foot blonde Dutch woman called Jana Kristan, who had gained access to the Central Office of Information using her National Union of Journalists: Foreign Correspondents Chapel card.

She had photocopied PC Halton's report, ringed his comments about the direction of the burning in red, and returned the original file. As she had handed it back, and signed the COI waiver form stapled to the inside of the file, she had noted that three days previously, someone else had been reading it. Jana had tried to read the signature, turning it on its side and even upside down, but no matter what she did, there had been no way of deciphering the spider-like scrawl. Then she had gone to London Bridge station and caught a train to Tunbndge Wells, where she had changed for the local service via Hastings to Smallmarshes.

---

'I am an Earth Reptile. It is what I always have been. It is what I shall be until the day I die. And beyond. Any works left behind bearing my name, the name Baal D'jo, will acknowledge to the future that whilst I lived, I was an Earth Reptile.

'I am an Earth Reptile. My heritage is the Earth. Not to cower below it. Not to cast it aside. My heritage is to walk freely upon the surface of my world. This world I, and my forebears, shaped. It is a world that, I acknowledge, may have forgotten me, but a world which will soon remember. It is a world that shall welcome me back with open arms and I shall wallow in its glory.

'I am an Earth Reptile. My future belongs to Earth, to my forebears and my ascendants. My future, brothers and sisters, kith and kin, is your future. Together we shall unbind the chains that hold us in the past, the misdemeanours of the old, ignorant and afraid. Together we shall reclaim Earth for ourselves. If the Apes will not accept our supremacy, they will be eradicated.