Free Doctor Who: Paradise Towers by Stephen Wyatt

door with smoke belching out of it. What was being burnt behind that door? The drawings raised as many questions as they answered but were certainly worth recording.
    The Doctor started to trace a copy of the wallscrawl into his pocket book, with the intention of studying them more fully later.
    The approach of a Cleaner was very quiet and smooth. The Doctor ought to have known that by now but once again he was taken by surprise. The Cleaner was almost upon him before he looked up from his drawing. The Doctor was not alarmed this time, merely peeved. He had a lot to do and the robot needn’t think it was going to fool him with its oltrimotive bi-curval scraping blades.
    ‘You don’t catch me the same way twice,’ he informed the Megapodic Cleaner as it neared him. ‘I know what you’re going to do next.’
    He waited smugly for the familiar claw to appear. It didn’t.
    Instead the Cleaner started to spray from its front an evil-smelling smoke. Its taste was acrid. The effect practically lethal.
    The Doctor started to choke and splutter. He had to move or he would suffocate. No doubt of that. He turned and started to run as fast as his wheezing lungs would allow him. Pride comes before a fall, the Doctor told himself. Will I never learn?
    The Cleaner followed, billowing its noxious smoke as it went. The Doctor had gained some ground by the time he turned into the next street. But not enough. He would tire and the Cleaner would not.
    He started to look round for some aid in his plight. And his eye caught a metal notice nailed to one of the walls. ‘For Emergencies’ it read. That was surprising enough. But, even more surprising, underneath the notice was what looked remarkably like an emergency telephone.
    ‘Nothing ventured,’ the Doctor told himself, running to the phone. He picked up the receiver, but, of course, the phone was dead. He realised he should have known better than to expect anything to work in Paradise Towers. And so, with the Cleaner approaching nearer by the moment, it was also nothing gained.
    He sighed and slumped back against the wall to recover his breath before continuing his frantic flight. In leaning back, he must somehow or other have touched a button or gadget on the side of the phone. For, suddenly, without warning, coin tokens started pouring out of the machine. They poured in a clatter onto the floor, hundreds of them, and lay there gleaming amidst the garbage.
    The Doctor stooped and picked up some of them. They were all identical, shiny and embossed. And all carried the same inscription. The Doctor brought one even closer to see what it said. ‘Issued by the Great Architect, Kroagnon’ ran the inscription.
    Kroagnon. The name rang a bell but infuriatingly the Doctor couldn’t remember why. There were so many puzzles and he desperately needed time to think. But how he was going to get even a minute to think with a Cleaner spraying noxious fumes in pursuit was an even bigger puzzle. It was so infuriating not to have time even to place a name.
    ‘You really aren’t helping, you know,’ he called out angrily down the street to the Cleaner. ‘What do you want anyway?’
    And then, from behind him, he thought he heard the soft mechanical whirring of a different machine. He glanced over his back. Yes, another Cleaner was coming towards him from the other direction, spraying smoke as it came. He was trapped between them and, if there had been any doubt, it was now absolutely clear what the Cleaners wanted. His death.
    ‘Think calmly.’ The smoke was billowing around him and the Cleaners were practically upon him. Smoke, claws, blades. It soon wouldn’t matter which way they chose to dispose of him.
    His hands scrabbled blindly along the wall by the telephone.
    His coughing was violent now and his breathing irregular and painful. Something told him there was a door there. A door perhaps just to a cupboard but still a door. His fingertips could trace part of its outline. If only there