Doctor Who - 04 - On a Pale Horse

.15. The Serum and the Wave

The dungeon was damp and very dark. The torchlight barely tickled the shadows. There were scuttling and squeaking sounds on the floor, so Donna wouldn't even dare to look down. She needed all her bravery to face the darkness, she had nothing to spare for mice and rats. Her heart was racing. The hand squeezing the candlestick was sweaty and cold.

An abbey's dungeon at night. It was a little bit too 'Most Haunted' for her liking. She marched down the long passage, trying to come up with some reasonable plan, but all she had was a stubborn thought 'a bomb!' There was the plague, there was the X-Factor, there was the Doctor's illness, there was Cuthbert's madness, there was Allan dying in the dormitory, and now there was a bomb.

She passed some shelves and barrels. You could fill a king-size duvet with all the cobwebs hanging from the arched ceiling. She hated spiders, especially after a close encounter with an empress of the arachnids she had had in the past.

She shouldn't even be there. It wasn't her job; her job was providing common sense comments, and gasping at wonders, and keeping the Doctor as sane and polite as possible. She was a tourist, for God's sake, not a hero! Oh, right, it was her who had dreamed of meeting knights and dames. It was her who had insisted on staying in the Middle Ages. But she had never bargained for that!

She turned another corner and saw the light.

With a quiet gasp she switched off her own torch. She had no plan yet, but there was no chance she would ever come up with one anyway. "Make it up as you go," she thought. "If it works for him..." Her fingers gripped the iron bar of the candlestick so tightly, it was a wonder the metal didn't bend like a spoon in some psychic's hands. She inched slowly towards a small door at the end of the tunnel.

***

Now there was music in the air.

The Doctor shook his head and squinted at the fusion microscope's screen, full of lovely, furry halloed killers. There was no music; it was just a fever. He wasn't used to fevers. Whenever he would be sick, or wounded, or poisoned, his body would regenerate, either completely or partially, and it wouldn't take ages. Three days at best. Or at worst. Or whatever.

But there was music in the air now.

He knew it; it was... it was... so familiar...

His mobile phone!

He reached into his pocked and searched for the mobile in between dozens of extremely important items, such as a harmonica, a packet of jelly babies, an old photograph and a handful of dog biscuits.

"Donna?"

"It's a bloody maze!" Donna's voice breathed angrily from the speaker. "I'm bloody lost! And... the reception is amazing, I mean, I'm deep underground. Plus, there's no network here, right, so how does it even work? I'm in the Middle Ages, and I'm on my mobile!"

"Did you find Cuthbert?" the Doctor asked, a bit flustered.

"He's not here. But I've found the bomb," Donna answered. "I think. It looks like a bomb. And... I probably shouldn't have used my mobile just now, 'cause mobiles, like, disrupt the functioning of medical equipment, yeah; so they would set off the bomb as well; oh my God, oh my God, oh my...!"

"Apparently you didn't set it off just yet," the Doctor said curtly. "So there is a bomb?"

"Yeah," Donna confirmed. "Well, there is something."

"How does it look?"

"Small. Square. Metal."

"Can you open it?"