Rose Tyler
It was the smell she noticed first.
It was a curious thing, certainly unpleasant, yet vaguely likable somehow, and somewhat familiar. It was the smell of a farmyard. That high and sultry whiff of animal dung, and hay and all manner of bad hygiene and potential disease...though the odour itself was foul, it stirred happy memories within her, recollections of days long past. Once a year, every year, her mother would save enough money to take them both out of London for a weekend. Never did they ever have enough to go abroad; neither Jackie's benefits or minimum wage could stretch to overseas travel, however hard she tried to make it work.
Rose never minded. Those annual weekends, in remote and rural Essex, Norfolk or Dorset, were some of the happiest times of her childhood, and it was from those times that she'd smelled this aroma before, whilst admiring the pigs, or feeding the goats, perhaps trying to bat away the fat summer flies from the faces of the donkeys.
That such a smell should be coming from behind a door, in the turret chamber of a Tudor castle, made no sense. She and Jack were stood outside that door, with the staircase behind them, and the winter's chill biting their ankles as it crept along the flagstones.
But there was more than the smell at play; from beyond that door, could be heard a faint scurrying and clicking noise.
"Something's in there," Jack drawled, "wanna go in?"
Rose bit her lip and shuddered. "I'm not sure. D'you think we should?"
He nodded. "We agreed to keep an eye on Znya, and look for anything odd, right? Strikes me that keeping living creatures locked in a tower ain't too normal."
"S'pose so," Rose admitted, resting her left hand on the icy black latch of the door. "Ready, then?"
He nodded, and Rose took a breath, before wrenching the door open and tumbling into the room with Jack.
She took it for snow, at first, and was suitably puzzled. It was true that it was snowing a blizzard outside, of course, yet how could such snow have found it's way into this turret, bypassing both solid roof and shuttered window?
Before she could voice her confusions to Jack, however, she realized that it wasn't snow at all.
It was white enough to be snow, but the texture was entirely wrong. The entire chamber, walls, floors and ceiling, was coated in the stuff. It was rather like cotton, or wool perhaps, and the smell of farm was gaggingly overwhelming. Jack gingerly rested his foot in the stuff, and groaned as it sank several inches into the stuff, which clung onto it's boot and lower leg like expanding foam.
"What is it?" Rose hissed, feeling sick.
"It's..." the colour drained from Jack's face and he wrenched his foot free with enormous difficulty. The substance was reluctant to let go, and gave off a scrunching noise as Jack disturbed it.
"It's a web!" he exclaimed, through gritted teeth.
"A web..." Rose repeated, bile stirring in her gut, as her legs gave way to jelly.
Above them, charging down it's web at speed, was an unspeakable spider of bright red, with poisonous white spots on it's fat back, the markings identical to a toadstool. There was nasty lizard frills around it's inky eyes, and the joints of it's powerful legs. It's body was as large as a horse, and it's legs spanned about eight feet. Two venomous pincers clicked menacingly as it hurried towards them.
But for Jack being there, Rose might well have stayed rooted to the spot, allowing it to tear her apart. She was too scared to move, or even scream, so terrified that she thought surely her heart was to give out, letting her fell down dead immediately, and good, for to be dead was to be away from this monster bearing down on her, a sight worse even than her deepest nightmare, more horrific than anything she'd ever seen before in all her travels...
Jack grabbed her by the hand and wrenched her back through the door and out of the spider's chamber. He tried to slam that door shut behind them, but the spider was having none of it, and smashed itself into the open frame, trying to squeeze itself through, it's legs scrabbling desparatley at the door-frame, it's pincers smashing into each other, eight eyes ablaze with furious hunger, unblinking.
Rose jumped a foot in the air as a gunshot sounded, a bullet slamming into the face of the spider, and drawing noxious black goo that was it's blood. The spider recoiled slightly, and Jack fired again, hitting it just below one of it's eyes. The spider knew when it was beaten; it turned and scurried away from the door, gliding over it's webbed chamber with that same rustling noise that Rose had heard earlier. Jack slammed the door closed and rested his hands against the wood, panting. Slowly, he turned on Rose.
"We gotta tell the Doc."