So now she was bored, and she seemed to be able to move her head without setting the room spinning around her like some demented fairground ride. Still moving carefully, she pushed back the sheets and swung herself out of bed, finding the rug tentatively with her toes as if it were a tricky foothold while climbing down from a tree. Thankfully someone had left her own clothes ready for her on a chair.
--------------------
Descending the stairs with one hand resting carefully on the banister, it wasn't hard to track the Doctor down. His sharp, authoritative voice was holding forth from the direction of the study:
"And you never thought of trying anything like this in the last three weeks?"
"I haven't been trying to catch the things," came Carstairs' response, unusually forceful. "I've been trying to kill them."
"Sloppy thinking," was the Doctor's comment. "When you don't know anything about them or even how many there are. What have you been doing anyway?"
"They attack livestock sometimes, so we've been leaving poisoned sheep carcasses out in the fields. They haven't been taking them, though."
"'Course they haven't. These things don't want a dead body, they're looking for rich, warm, tasty, thick pumping..."
"Must you?" protested Alison dryly, leaning against the doorpost. Sitting side by side at a chunky black wood desk, the two men looked up.
"Princess!" Carstairs frowned at her in a stern yet fatherly way. "What are you doing up? You should be resting."
Alison looked past him at the Doctor.
"Look, I know all that, but I'm going mad up there. Can't I help with something? I'm feeling a lot better now, honest, and I promise just to sit quietly and not over-exert myself. Don't make me go back upstairs and lie there staring at the ceiling."
The Doctor favoured her with a trace of a smile.
"Actually I was just about to go and see if you felt up to running an errand for me." He ripped a sheet of paper from a notepad and brought it over to her. "I need a few bits and bobs from the Tardis. Get the Master to help you."
Alison grimaced. Suddenly spending the rest of the afternoon in bed didn't seem like such a bad deal after all.
"Do I have to?"
He pressed the paper into her hand.
"Some of it's a bit technical. You'll never find it without him."
"It's just that it means going down into that... that dungeon of his."
"It is not a dungeon," the Doctor said patiently. "It's just a private space to call his own, such as everyone deserves to have. I admit his taste in interior design is a bit, well..."
"Dungeony?"
"Exactly."
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Despite the nagging fact that she'd volunteered for this, it didn't take long for Alison to start feeling resentful at the Doctor for having asked it of her, in her condition. The Tardis was fully a mile and a half from the house and she had to stop repeatedly along the way, light headed and weak limbed, before she found her way to its familiar blue rectangular form, hidden away discretely in a grove of trees.
The familiar roundels, the bright lights, the quiet hum of power. It was always with a sense of relief that she came back to this place, knowing that whatever might happen in the outside world here, at least, she was safe. Except that there was just one little corner where that wasn't quite true, and here she was, standing above a circular steel hatchway in the floor which led the way to that very place.
She took a deep breath.
"Come on, pull yourself together. Nothing to worry about. Like the ghost train. Boo, scary, but nothing's going to happen."
She tapped a control set into the wall and the hatch slid aside to unveil the dark pit below. Glinting lights were visible here and there, the grey outlines of the furniture hazing into the gloom like ghosts.
"Hello?" She knelt and poked her head down through the hole. "Hello, are you down there?"
No response. The murk beneath her feet was still and silent as a tomb. With a sigh, Alison conceded to the inevitable and began the climb down the chunky cast iron ladder into the gloomy depths.
"Hello?" she called again. Her feet clanged down resoundingly onto the metal floor in the Master's den. As her eyes adjusted to the half light she could make out an array of tables and workbenches, all neatly lined up in military fashion with tools and parts stored away in plastic racks, a sharp contrast to the cheerful chaos of the Doctor's own workshop. Monitor screens glimmered palely in the dark, obscure data scrolling past by the second, and she found herself giving way to her curiosity. Just what did he get up to down here all day? She leaned closer to the nearest screen and at that instant every light in the place snapped out.
Total blackness. Alison clenched her teeth to steady herself and felt the blood pumping hard through her veins. A low chuckle echoed around the chamber.
"Nosy."
"Very funny," she managed, her voice steady but husky from her suddenly parched throat. A single light clicked on.
The Master was sitting not five feet away, leaning back with his legs casually crossed and his hands still upon the arms of his chair. The glow of the desk lamp at his elbow caught the right side of his face, turning it a bleached white, while the left side remained lost in shadow. He blended so easily into the dark. Surely he hadn't been sitting there all along?
"You must forgive me my small amusements, Miss Cheney," came his rich, polished tone. "My current limited horizons allow for little else."
She straightened defiantly, this reminder of his reduced status lending her some confidence.
"Doctor wants these things," she said, holding up the crumpled sheet of notepaper.
He eyed the paper for a moment, his eyes glinting like needles in the lamplight. Then with an elegant turn of the wrist he lifted only his hand from the arm of his chair, and held it out, palm up, by way of acceptance. Annoyed with herself for playing his game though she knew she had no choice, Alison edged close enough that she could stretch out an arm and slip the sheet between his fingers. He glanced at it with aloof disinterest.
"Mm. I can see things are getting entertaining out there."
"What is all that stuff?" she asked grudgingly. "The Doctor didn't have time to explain."
"Somehow he never does, does he? Well, the chemicals suggest he's proposing to mix up a tranquillising drug of some sort. The gadgetry is mostly scanning and transmission equipment. Ah, how I wish I could be out there with you, facing all those unknown perils in the name of what's right."
"Yeah, it's a real blow for all of us," muttered Alison. The Master's reptilian grin flashed white.
"You do me an injustice, Miss Cheney. I am, as you would say, totally on board for the whole fighting evil thing. It's really not that different from what I used to get up to in the old days, just with a few extra rules to make it a bit more challenging."
In an oily smooth motion he rose to his feet, and Alison found herself taking a step back from his suddenly towering height. A slender remote control in his left hand pointed, and a door in the far wall swung open to admit a dazzling white light from the corridor beyond.
"You've put a door in," said Alison accusingly.
"Yes. That ladder down from the hole in the ceiling wasn't really very practical, was it? What was I thinking?"