PERILS
Chapter Twelve
"What did you give me?"
"Oh, Doctor, what does that matter now? But to ease your mind, for the short time you can appreciate it, how do earthlings put this? It was a Michael… no, a Mickey Finn. Nothing fatal. Yet."
"Where are we?" The Doctor was trying to collect his thoughts, and they kept escaping.
"The proper line is 'where am I?' but never mind. Look around. Can you guess?"
Once the Doctor had glanced about it wasn't too difficult to determine that they were in a proper barn, quite long, with red and white spotted Ayrshire cows in stalls at one end and a big wooden barn door standing open at the other (and a farmhouse just visible through it, in the distance), and a loft just dripping with loose hay. Bales of the stuff were stacked by the wall. "Silver-penciled Wyandottes," he remarked, peering down from the loft at the elaborately marked chickens. Directly below, on the straw-covered floor, were some small, rusty implements, deteriorated beyond recognition but still recognizably harsh, serrated or just jagged, and dangerous.
"In case you were wondering," said the Master, holding up an impressive pair of handcuffs, "you're tied up instead of cuffed because rope burns faster than iron melts." He looked at the cuffs for a moment and then added, "Of course, the melting cuffs would provide a different kind of agony. I did consider that. On the original hand, you'd be dead before the cuffs gave you much grief, whereas when the ropes burned you would not be able to resist the temptation to run. Oh, to picture you running through the smoke and the fire, your hair aflame, your lungs blackening and burning too. We'll just keep you all trussed up, then."
The Doctor was silent. He was looking around. He could see that the ladder had been removed from the loft; the hinges in whose holes the ladder's hooks had hung were still attached to the wooden loft floor. The Doctor couldn't tell if those hinges had sharp edges or whether, if they existed, he would be able to make use of them, flush to the floor as the hinges were. As woozy as he still felt, he was well aware that his fate depended on the Master's lust for his suffering. If that lust was great enough, the Master would ignite the hay farthest from the loft, to watch or perhaps just envision the helpless Doctor's prolonged fear as the flames drew nearer and nearer. If the Master was more interested in the certainty of the Doctor's death – a certainly that would not be substantially reduced by the first tactic – he might just light the hay in the loft instead.
The Master was just standing there by the barn door, gazing upon the Doctor almost affectionately. Finally, he began to back out of the open door and said, "It's been fun, hasn't it? Goodbye, Doctor." He struck a match and casually tossed it onto the hay-strewn floor, then turned and left the barn, closing the door behind him.
The Doctor wriggled his way to the hinges that held no ladder and found that they were indeed uselessly flush to the floor, but there were some loose nails and bits of metal in the hay near those hinges. His hands were bound behind his back; he ignored the fierce pain in his right wrist and leaned back a little to pick up a nail. He managed to shred a tiny bit of the rope but then forsook the nail in favor of a screw, which worked better. By the time he got his hands free, and his arms loose, the eager flames were impossibly near. He sawed at the rope binding his ankles and then inserted the screw between the strands well enough that he could actually untie the rope, which he then threaded through one of the hinges. He burned his palms on the rope, lowering himself past the rusty implements in among the chickens, who had been shrieking but now were already dead. He tried not to think about that as he raced toward the other end of the barn, to find an ordinary door already blocked by a line of fire. Four and a half minutes had passed. Dizzy and choking on the smoke, he freed the cows from their stalls, then covered his face with his coat and plunged through the fire, kicked down what was left of the smoldering door and escaped from the burning barn.
He ran across a seemingly endless pasture and kept running without looking back until he had to stop and catch his breath, and then he looked back only long enough to see he was not being pursued. The Master was probably watching the burning barn from the other end, or perhaps, believing the Doctor dead, was already in his TARDIS and flying off to foment some chaos elsewhere in the universe. Nonetheless, the Doctor turned away again and resumed his flight. He ran until he reached a creek, waded across it and ran again, this time along the creek. He ran until he just couldn't run anymore, and then he walked, glad he'd crossed when he had, as the creek was widening now. Eventually even walking was difficult as the terrain became somewhat swampy. He had no idea where he was, although he was pretty sure he was still on Earth; where on Earth he could not guess. When on Earth was an even more troubling question.
It wasn't until he dropped, exhausted, at the edge of a large lake, that the Doctor thought to free himself from the rest of the rope that was still loosely wound about his body.
He tucked the rope into one of his bottomless pockets, and then thought to see if he still had any money on him. The Master had not robbed him but his funds were ridiculously low. If he were even moderately distant from Hoboken, finding his TARDIS was going to be a daunting task.
The Doctor looked out over the lake, then back at the stream he had followed, and thought it might be rather difficult to get to firm, dry land without backtracking, which he had no intention of doing. He had just about decided to angle away from both bodies of water when an alligator in the distance hastened his departure; "away" seemed like the best direction to follow, and he followed it.