Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [5]
A broken body lay on the road.
Mrs Castle went over to it, knelt down. But before she had even touched the man’s face, she realised he was still alive. Unconscious, but it was cold enough to see the man’s breath coming from his mouth. Shallow breath.
He didn’t seem to be bleeding, although he was wearing a thick parka and waterproof trousers, so it was difficult to tell. Mrs Castle had been given some first-aid training, so knew that he could be bleeding internally, and that plenty of serious injuries didn’t lead to bleeding.
The man groaned, and tried to move.
Normally, she knew you weren’t meant to move someone if they’d been knocked down by a car – they may have broken their spine, and moving them could permanently damage it. Here she didn’t have a choice: the pedestrian was in the middle of the road, and if another car came past it would hit him. So, as gently as she could, Mrs Castle helped to move him to the verge at the side of the road. He couldn’t put any weight on his right leg – it looked like he may have broken it.
She asked him his name, he mumbled a reply, but she couldn’t hear. ‘Arnold Knight,’ he repeated, straining to get up.
‘Don’t move,’ she told him.
‘We’re in terrible danger!’ he cried suddenly. ‘It’s after me. If it sees you...’
A part of Mrs Castle’s brain, a small, primitive part at the back, right at the top of her spine, told her to get away from here.
She looked up into the darkness, up the hill in the direction this man had come from.
There was nothing there. Nothing she could see.
But whatever Arnold had seen, he’d preferred to run into the path of a moving car than to face it.
‘What is after you?’
‘A –’
‘Animal? A person?’
‘A monster,’ Arnold told her. ‘A giant metal monster.’
Mrs Castle smiled. ‘You had a bump on the head,’ she reassured him. Either that or he was drunk, or had been sniffing glue. He didn’t look dangerous, she decided.
‘I –’ Arnold winced, unable to speak.
‘Does it hurt?’ Mrs Castle asked, knowing it was a stupid question.
‘Can you get me away from here? If you can’t, then at least you can get away. Tell people.’
‘You shouldn’t try to move unless you have to.’
He clutched her sleeve. ‘We have to. It’s after me.’
A car was coming. She could see the headlights and hear the faint sound of the engine.
‘I’ll get them to phone for an ambulance,’ she suggested.
‘Wait!’ Arnold warned. ‘You’re in terrible danger!’ His voice was almost comical – he was terrified, but nothing could be as bad as that, could it?
‘It’s them,’ Arnold insisted.
The car was getting nearer, and so she began waving her arms. The circular headlights were getting bigger and brighter. At first she thought the driver hadn’t seen her, or that he wasn’t going to stop, or even that it was the monster that Arnold thought had been chasing him, but the car came to a halt alongside her.
Mrs Castle found herself sighing with relief. It was a perfectly ordinary Volkswagen Beetle. It was man black, almost invisible on such a dark night.
The window whirred down, smoothly – it must have been electric. Mr Castle was always talking about getting electric windows, but they were too expensive.
There were two people in the car. A man in the driving seat, a woman passenger nearer to the open window. They were in their early twenties, and they looked more like a twin brother and sister than husband and wife. They were both pale, with piercing blue eyes, and they wore identical plastic mackintoshes. They looked at her in a way that made Mrs Castle feel small.
‘Good evening,’ she said.
The two looked at each other.
‘Good evening to you,’ the woman said, her voice deeper than Mrs Castle had expected.
‘Good evening,’ the man echoed, with a voice that sounded almost like a woman’s.
‘There’s been an accident,’ she said. ‘Could you telephone for help? This man will die if you don’t.’
‘Die?’ the man said, peering over to