Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [4]
But Arnold could tell that this wasn’t some lashed-together farm machinery. It was dark, but he could see that it was elegantly designed, that its movements were fluid.
It was coming towards him.
Arnold screamed, and started to run.
* * *
Mrs Castle wasn’t far away, and she heard the scream over the sound of the car radio.
It startled her for a moment, but only for a moment. She quickly told herself that it was nothing to worry about, just a noise like you often hear in the middle of the night. A sound like the cry of a fierce animal, or a strange aircraft. Perhaps just a bang or a thud.
Maybe you’ve heard a scream. When children play, it often sounds as if they are screaming. From a little way off, a playground can sound like a battleground. If children playing sounds like screaming, then, Mrs Castle thought, perhaps a field full of screaming children will sound as if they are playing.
It was a fox, she told herself. Or some sort of bird – a hawk or an owl. Or perhaps just something on the Kate Bush record that was playing now on the radio. Mrs Castle turned the radio up and tried to think of other things.
She concentrated on what was waiting for her at home. At first she thought of the nasty things. The washing-up, the hoovering, the mouldy grouting in the bathroom. Barry, Mr Castle, would be there, sitting in front of the television, telling her the commentators on Rugby Special were useless, and that he also had a low opinion of Paul Daniels, and that the licence fee was a waste of good money. But there would be nice things at home, too: a bath, a hot, soapy bath. A book – Sense and Sensibility, about a young woman who was out in the rain and was rescued by a handsome man on horseback. A fairy story. There was a Paul Newman film on later, and Mrs Castle knew not even Barry could spoil that for her.
There were now three red lights on the dashboard. Mrs Castle knew she wouldn’t get home. Now she was looking for a phone box. She’d driven down this road hundreds of times, but because she’d never needed a phone box, she didn’t know if there was one or not. And if there wasn’t, then she’d have to hope that another car came by.
She could hear hissing. The engine was making a noise like a kettle. She pictured it, bubbling and churning. She imagined her husband shouting at her, telling her she only needed to stop to put some oil and water in it, but instead she left it running, she’d damaged the engine, it was going to take him all weekend to fix and it would cost them hundreds of pounds. She knew she had to stop the car as soon as she could.
And because she was looking at the dashboard, she didn’t see the man run out in front of her: she saw only his terrified expression, bleached by the headlights, as he turned to face her.
She slammed down hard on the brakes, without needing to think that she had to, but already knowing it would do no good. The road had been gritted, but it was still very wet, and the tyres barely gripped it.
The car hardly slowed before it hit him, sending him tumbling over the bonnet, rolling up the windscreen and over the roof. As the car stopped, he fell back on to the road.
For a moment, Mrs Castle just sat, clutching the steering wheel. Everything outside the car seemed so much slower – the snow, her windscreen wipers.
After a moment, her mind and the world outside it caught up with each other. Mrs Castle turned the ignition key, which shut off the engine and silenced the radio. The warm air from the heater died away, the boiling from the engine settled down. She took a deep breath and got out of the car.
She locked the car door without thinking what she was doing.
It was so quiet. It wasn’t as cold as she thought it would be, despite the snow. There was nothing else moving here, of course, and it was too cold for animals and their predators to be out. The streams and brooks were frozen silent, the earth was solid as metal underfoot. The cold, snow-filled air seemed to dampen out any other sounds there may have been. There