"Are you OK?"
"Tip top." He didn't look round. "And you?"
They strode on wordlessly for a few more seconds before with a blink of irritation at her continued presence he spoke again.
"Did you want something? Aren't you supposed to be heading to the Tardis?"
"Jenny's going to do it."
"Lucky her. And what are you doing?"
His refusal to acknowledge her with so much as a look stoked up the indignation inside her, and she answered more harshly than she had meant:
"Look, this is no good. Normally when this happens, when something reminds you of she-who-must-not-be-named, you just stomp off to a private room somewhere and we steer clear of you for a couple of hours. But we're in the middle of something here. You can't fight vampires in this mood, you've got to pull yourself together."
"Have I?" was his tight-lipped response.
"What's the matter anyway? I thought you were getting better, you hardly ever go off like this any more."
"Alison, what have I said about trying to make me share my feelings?"
She frowned her annoyance.
"You've never said anything about..."
"Exactly."
He lengthened his stride, pulling away ahead of her and with a scowl she sucked in a deep breath and hurried after him.
"If you think you're going to get rid of me by being rude to me..."
"Quiet."
He held up a hand for silence and in her fury she was on the point of storming off back to the house. But he had halted abruptly and was eyeing the detector in his palm.
"It's stopped."
"Already?" Grudgingly she looked over his elbow at the device's readout. "You think it's reached the nest?"
"Yes." He leaned forward, trying to pierce the darkness ahead with narrowed eyes. "I wouldn't have expected it to be very far. That's why it's the mansion house that's been attacked and not the village or the surrounding farms." He took a step onward, then halted with a disgruntled sigh and looked round at Alison. "Well, come on if you're coming. Don't worry, I may be a little out of sorts but I'm quite capable of taking care of a handful of oversized mosquitos."
--------------------
He led the way to a jutting outcrop of rocks, their massive shapes black against the night sky. The two of them circled around the great bulk of granite and he lifted his lantern to unveil the gleaming silver form of a bulbous sixty foot disc, half buried where it had driven itelf into the earth, the hatch in its centre still hanging open and the ladder visible leading down into the darkened interior.
"Huh." The Doctor nodded sagely. "And everyone who had their money on crashed alien spacecraft is a winner."
Alison followed cautiously as he led the way towards the hatch.
"But the little creatures are more like animals, you said. So they can't have flown it here themselves, right?"
"Well, it's not as if they've exhibited a great deal of skill," the Doctor replied, indicating the grounded ship with a wave of his hand and giving her a twist of a smile. "But no, you're right. My guess is they're suffering from the same affliction as young Carstairs, and the answer to that, I suspect, lies somewhere down here."
They stood over the hatch and the Doctor lowered the lantern down into its unwelcoming depths. A metallic floor was visible at the bottom of the entrance shaft, dulled by grime, crisscrossed with hundreds of muddy, inhuman footprints. He looked up at Alison's unenthusiastic expression.
"Do you want to stay up here and keep watch for me?"
A flurry of thoughts piled up behind one another. The first, instinctive acceptance of the assigned task, the second, relief that it meant she wouldn't have to go down there, the third, realisation that she was being offered a way out of having to go down there, the fourth, indignation at his patronising assumption that she was scared to go with him.
"Stop trying to get rid of me," she returned with bravado. "Out of my way."
Before she could change her mind she swung herself onto the ladder and clattered down into the unlit confines of the dead spacecraft. The swaying yellow light of the Doctor's lantern followed her down and illuminated a dark tunnel of a corridor. Something hissed in the murk ahead and scuttled noisily away.
"Well, go on then," came his quiet voice at her ear. "You're so keen, why don't you pick a direction?"
With a deep breath she led the way, through a string of cramped passageways, the glow of the lantern always stretching just a few yards ahead of her, pushing back the wall of blackness in their path. The one time she was unwise enough to look back the way they had come, it was to see the dark closing up behind them like a living thing, as if to cut off their escape.
At last she found the way to a sliding door which stood half open, and with a wrench shoved it back into its wall cavity to clear the way into a spreading circular room, a cylindrical sheath of black steel stretching from floor to ceiling at its centre, spreading banks of switches taking up the entire wallspace. A ghostly haze of blue light flickered on the instrument panels.
Alison took a step forward and with a freezing shock hurled herself back into the Doctor's arms, recoiling from the frenzied, spitting creature that leaped at her from the shadows. Its flailing, clawlike hand barely missed raking her face and it rattled away along the corridor, emitting a noise that rose and gained body till it ceased to be a hiss and became a high-pitched, ululating scream, fading into the dark.
The Doctor lifted her shivering form upright and set her on her feet.
"You will insist on going first, won't you?"
With a pat on her shoulder he moved past, carrying the light with him into the circular chamber.
"This is interesting," he said, heedless of her still standing motionless in the doorway. "I thought the ship was dead but the power core's still active. In fact..."
He tapped out an intricate sequence on the switches, and with a deep hum of energy the black sheath at the centre of the room went gliding upwards into the ceilng, unveiling a column of blue glass that spread a dazzling brighter-than-day light to every corner of the room. Alison blinked, feeling herself come out of her daze with a sense of relief at this banishment of the dark, and stepped forward, starting to take notice.
"That thing's still screaming out there," she said. "Never heard one make that noise before."
It was true. It was far away now, but its shrill voice was still audible, making her ears ring, its tone just on the edge of hearing.
"Yes." The Doctor was barely listening, conjuring a fast moving array of twisting orange light and scrolling data on a viewscreen. "Probably a distress call. I don't think it appreciated our disturbing its safe little den."
"A distress..." She looked wildly around at the doorway. "It's calling the others?"
"Yes, so the best thing for you to do now would be to keep interrupting me so that it'll be a good long time before I've finished work here and we can leave." Like a concert pianist he played his fingers across the controls almost too fast for the eye to follow. "Now just try to be patient and... ah. Oh."
Alison was mustering a retort to the insult, but it was put out of her head by the sight of him suddenly still, staring at the screen. His hand rose slowly to his mouth.
"What's the... ack!"
Without warning he had leapt from his seat and grasping her hand dragged her stumbling after him through the door and out into the corridor.
"Time we were going," he announced, striding at speed for the exit and almost pulling her off her feet. She tugged her hand free in annoyance and hurried to keep up.
"What's the problem all of a sudden?" she demanded. "I thought you were being all cool and brave!"
"Well, that was before I realised that the power core is leaking a bizarrely configured form of omicron radiation that was steadily distorting our genetic structure. Now I'm being all flustered and scared."
Alison gasped at the chill of realisation stabbing her insides.
"You're saying it was turning us into those bloodsucking things?"
"Precisely. At least now we know what happened to the crew of this ship. Now I propose we put it at least a quarter of a mile behind us before we plan our next move."
He reached the foot of the ladder up to the hatch and with a firmness that brooked no argument grasped her upper arm and propelled her up ahead of him. She scrambled out into the night air and waited while the light of his lantern rose up to join her.
"Right, let's head for the..."
They stood on the silver hull of the spacecraft, picked out in the misty halo of the lamplight, and from the grass ahead and the rocks all around there arose a hate-filled chorus of vindictive, serpentine hissing. There were dozens of the creatures, surrounding them, squatting on the ground, perching on the boulders, creeping forward onto the metal of the ship's surface. Their black eyes and spitting mouths were soulless and empty, and their thin nostrils twitched at the scent of blood.