Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [14]
‘Can we go now, Professor? This whole place gives me the creeps.’
‘I thought it might,’ he mused.
Ace nodded in the direction of the explorer. ‘That one’s a headcase. And the house is like a morgue - everything dead.’
The drums in the explorer’s head suddenly exploded into a pounding rhythm. He grasped a breech-loader by the barrel, trawled a couple of bullets from his pocket and slotted them into place. Clicking the gun shut, he turned and aimed straight at the Doctor’s head.
The Doctor stared up the shaking gun barrel which was barely two feet away. Too close to palm the bullets, he thought. Really, people in as deranged a state as this should never be allowed near guns. The barrel started to waver back and forth between himself and Ace, who was pressing in at his side.
‘Stop him, Doctor,’ she suggested, her voice quavering.
‘Tell me what else you found in the house,’ he said as conversationally as he could muster, even though it effectively concentrated the line of fire on himself.
‘He...’ stuttered the explorer feverishly as he stared down the barrel. ‘Redvers had some stories. The pygmies of the Oluti Forest led him blindford for three days through uncharted jungle. They took him to a swamp full of giant lizards like living dinosaurs.’ He started to lower the gun, adding dismissively, ‘Do you know young Conan Doyle just laughed at him. Ha! Well, that’s doctors for you!’
The Doctor nodded in grim agreement, swiftly scanning his memory for anything to do with Victorian firearms.
‘That wouldn’t be a Chinese fowling piece, would it?’ he said, reaching forward to take the weapon.
The barrel came smartly back up and the explorer began to advance, forcing the Doctor and Ace to retreat slowly around a workbench and across the room.
‘We’re two weeks out from Zanzibar,’ he cried in despair. ‘I must find Redvers!’ Through the head-splitting pounding of drums he heard from somewhere the wild, urgent piping of a native flute.
‘What else did you find?’ urged the Doctor. Ace noticed the first hints of desperation in his voice.
‘Nothing,’ came the reply.
The Doctor could only persist. ‘Describe it. It’s all right.
I’m a doctor.’
The slow advance did not relent and neither did the pounding in the explorer’s head. ‘Yes. There was light.’
‘Bright light?’
‘Burning bright! In the heart of the interior.’
‘Tell me,’ insisted the Doctor.
Ace slipped out of the line of fire, aware that in a moment she would be able to take this loony sideways on.
The explorer never let the Doctor out of his sights, but the haunting sounds of the drums and the flute filled his eyes with the full horror of his vision. ‘It burnt through my eyes into my mind. It had blazing, radiant wings!’
Ace saw the hunter’s trigger finger tighten and flung herself at him. She was caught squarely by his shoulder and tumbled across the room into a stunned heap.
The explorer hardly lost his aim; his target was now backed up against a long curtain.
Only inches from the muzzle, the Doctor began to fumble for something to distract his assailant, but all he grasped was the length of drape.
Jubilantly, the explorer began a new tale. ‘Once, when Redvers was in the Congo, he faced a herd of stampeding buffalo head on. He raised his gun and with a single bullet...’
The Doctor suddenly launched himself sideways, dragging the curtain after him. The movement was so unexpected that the intrepid explorer was left staring directly at his own reflection, palely illuminated in the window against the darkness outside. The gun sagged and emotion drained the fierceness from his voice.
‘There... there he is,’ he whispered like a lost schoolboy.
‘Redvers... I’ve found you at last, old chap. What have they done to you? You look like a ghost.’
Ace gathered herself up. She joined the Doctor beside the forlorn figure that gazed unmoving into the glass. ‘Is it really him?’ she asked, half afraid to intrude.
The Doctor gently removed the gun from Redvers’
unresisting grasp and laid it aside. ‘He’s seen something his mind can’t take in.