Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [3]
A red light appeared on the dashboard.
Mrs Castle tried to ignore it, tried to press on – even in this weather it would take less than ten minutes to drive the three miles to her house. She knew that her husband could sort out whatever was wrong with the car in the morning; it would be his problem, not hers. There was no other choice – she couldn’t see any phone boxes, and this was many years before anyone but a millionaire had a telephone in their car. Mrs Castle didn’t know if Adam Ant could drive, but if he could, and he had a car, she knew it would have a telephone in it. But no one in Greyfrith did, except perhaps the manager of the factory that made spark plugs, or Lord Wallis, who owned Wallis House.
Mrs Castle could hear every rattle her husband’s car made now. She was acutely aware of every change in engine note.
Nine minutes. Nine minutes away from home.
* * *
Not far away, a man called Arnold Knight lowered his binoculars, disappointed. Arnold Knight was a UFO spotter – or would have been, if he had ever seen one.
Snow falling from a thick grey sky. This was not at all what he wanted. On the hillside, as Arnold was, the clouds weren’t quite close enough to touch, but they looked it. For the last few days, with almost total cloud coverage, Arnold had convinced himself that the night’s sky might be full of strange lights, there could be fleets of saucers flying in formation, all tantalisingly just a couple of hundred feet above his head, all swerving to avoid the occasional break in the cloud.
Arnold wasn’t as fanatical as some of his fellow UFO spotters. Some of the men and women who’d congregated in Greyfrith after the initial reports of a flap thought they’d got it all worked out. They told stories about RAF planes chasing flying saucers, official cover-ups, a whole menagerie of plant men, robot men and spaghetti men from outer space, not forgetting the turtle men who lived under the sea. Arnold didn’t believe any of that. As the famous scientist Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof. Arnold hoped he could provide some extraordinary proof. There were some interesting things happening in the sky. That seemed beyond dispute – lights, glowing balls, crosses... They’d all been seen over the years, by all sorts of reliable people. He was a good photographer – he made some money from it, doing portraits and work for the local paper. So, get a few decent photos of UFOs, done by a professional, and people might start to investigate the phenomenon seriously. That was why he’d travelled halfway across the country; that was what he was here for.
But that wasn’t going to happen tonight, not with this weather.
It was dark, very cold, and it was still snowing, even though the weather forecast had said the cold spell was over. He knew how to stay warm, but the best way of all was not to go out on a winter’s night in the first place. He found a fallen tree, checked it wasn’t too wet and sat down.
It was very quiet tonight, and the low clouds were like a roof. It made everything seem unreal, somehow. It was calm. Civilisation wasn’t far away – the outskirts of Greyfrith were only over the next hill, but it felt wild out here, as though there were things that people didn’t know about. The hills themselves were dark. There were local legends that the hills and mountains were giants, curled up where they fell under some enchantment. Arnold could see where that had come from – the curves and undulations did make them look like fat people, fast asleep.
Arnold glanced over his shoulder and saw there was a giant standing behind him. Ten feet tall at least, and wearing angular armour. Two lights shone down, like the headlamps of a car, but they were the giant’s eyes.
It was a machine, or a very tall man in a suit of armour – there was no way of telling which. Sensible thoughts crossed Arnold’s mind: that this was a prank, a puppet or special effect of some kind. He’d spent enough time in the pubs of Greyfrith in the last week to know that the local