Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [78]
The road was hardly more than a wide cart track, and he soon left it. Running on the springy heath wasn’t difficult, and the moonlight showed up patches of gorse or bracken in time for him to avoid them. But he didn’t know how long he could continue at this speed. He wished he had a horse. Perhaps he should have tried to take one, but he suspected the dog would have been guarding the stables. He’d been keeping one ear open for the sound of the dog baying on his track, but so far there seemed to be no pursuit. He stopped, panting, at the top of a rise and turned to look back. The house was distant and dark. But there was something rising behind it he didn’t like: clouds. The wind picked up, whipping his hair back. A storm was coming.
He took off again, down into a dell, where the shadows were longer and he began to stumble into patches of wet bracken that dragged soggily at his legs. All he needed now was to find himself in a mire. But he was going uphill again, towards dryer ground. The wind bore a sweet, wild smell; a patch of heather must be nearby. As he crested the hill, the Doctor saw the lights of the village again, brighter now. He stopped, panting, catching his breath, and looked back. The storm clouds covered half the sky. As he watched, lightning glowed inside them, and in a few seconds he heard a muted rumble of thunder.
And then, in the silence that followed, another sound.
‘Oh no,’ he breathed. He turned and started down the hill, slipping and sliding in his haste. The sound echoed across the moor, deep and savage. Mr Holmes, it was the baying of a gigantic hound. No, that wasn’t exactly the quote. He reached flat ground and began to run. The exact quote was... what was it now? The howling of a gigantic hound? No. The – He splashed suddenly into a cold stream. Uck! Wait – yes! A stream! He hopped out, yanked off his shoes, and plunged back into the water. Upstream or down? Up was towards the village, the way he’d be expected to go. The dog would be directed that way first. So downstream it was. He could only hope he’d gain enough time to be able to double back.
The stream wasn’t deep but it was stony and hard to move through quickly. The Doctor slipped continually, bruising his feet. When he came to a little tributary, he cut up it. This was steep, almost like a water stairway, and the stones were mossy. He climbed carefully, concentrating on each step and foothold, and was surprised when, pausing for breath, he straightened and brushed his head against a cluster of leaves.
He was at the edge of a grove of tiny oaks, growing twisted among a nest of boulders. Deformed by their stony ground and the fierce moor winds, the trees were bent, misshapen, dwarfed – a fairy-tale forest. The Doctor climbed up among them, pulling himself along by the low-hanging branches. It was dark in the grove, but looking up he could see the paler sky beyond the black leaves and guessed that none of the trees topped ten feet.
He was still walking in the stream. With the aid of a particularly low branch, he climbed directly from the water into a tree. There. Now he had left no scent on the ground for at least half a mile. He could make his way through the treetops to the other end of the grove and start off again from there. With luck, he’d throw the dog off entirely.
He sat for a moment, feet dangling, breathing hard. Suddenly, something rustled at his side. The Doctor froze. Slowly he slid his eyes sideways – to find that he was being stared at by a large owl. He grinned, almost laughed with relief. As if affronted, the owl blinked at him solemnly, puffing its feathers out. It was a solid, dignified-looking animal. A tawny owl, the Doctor thought, admiring it shyly – the bird that cried in Shakespeare’s plays. ‘I’m not you tonight,’ he said. ‘Tonight, I’m prey.’ The owl remained indifferent. Rightly so, thought the Doctor. We all have our problems. His revolve around mice, mine around dogs. Where, indeed, is the common ground?