Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [39]
‘He sounded a little husky to me.’
Ace was exhausted, but she couldn’t help grinning. ‘You mean he’s changing into one of those things in the cellar.’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘I expect he’ll shake it off by evening.’
Between them, they began to carry the heavy burden of Nimrod across the hall towards the drawing room. Seeing Gwendoline watching them through the banisters, the Doctor invited her down to join them. She glanced back up the stairs for a second and then descended to follow them into the Josiah’s deserted parlour.
They laid Nimrod on the couch and the Doctor busied himself giving the Neanderthal a thorough examination.
All that seemed to interest Gwendoline was how soon Nimrod could be woken. She asked the question repeatedly, which irritated Ace so much that she buried her head in the first book she could find. The Reverend Baden-Powell’s Essays on the Unity of Worlds looked a promising title, but she soon found herself spending longer in the glossary of terms than on the text.
‘Don’t rush me, Gwendoline,’ complained the Doctor as she enquired after Nimrod for the umpteenth time. ‘The sun has got its hat on and we have the whole day before Uncle Josiah dares show his face again.’
He was too involved in his examination to notice Gwendoline’s nervous reaction. She began to edge her way across the room towards the heavily draped curtain behind the piano.
Ace had at last found something relevant in her book.
‘Look, Professor,’ she interrupted, pointing to an entry in the glossary, ‘Josiah’s lucifugous.’
The Doctor smiled indulgently. ‘And he doesn’t like light either.’
Ace slumped down into an armchair and asked, ‘What about the spaceship? It’s knackered, isn’t it?’
‘I just turned off the power,’ he confessed. ‘Josiah knows about as much of its workings as a hamburger knows about the Amazon desert.’
‘Sounds like you and the TARDIS,’ she yawned.
Gwendoline had tentatively pushed aside the curtain.
Through the bars on the outside of the window, beyond the giant silhouettes of the cedars across the pitch black lawn, she saw the first glimmerings of dawn in the sky.
‘Light!’ she panicked, fluttering her hands at the glass like the toy bird in her room. She turned and ran from the room.
‘Let her go,’ said the Doctor, but Ace only grunted and made no attempt to move. ‘Come on, Ace, I’ve only just started,’ he said, beginning to pace the room. ‘There still one thing you haven’t told me. What frightened you so much when you first came to this house in a hundred years’ time?’
Feet first! In at the deep end again, he thought guiltily, but the flood of complaints and abuse never came. When he looked, Ace was already fast asleep in her chair.
‘Poor Ace,’ he said aloud, and he tucked her discarded dinner-jacket around her.
The gaslights throughout the house suddenly guttered and went out. It would soon be day and the Doctor had the run of the house. Either Josiah felt himself secure enough not to care what the Doctor did or he had overlooked the fact in the throes of his latest transformation. The Doctor suspected the former. He had not forgotten that the Reverend Ernest Matthews was no longer in evidence. He doubted that the sanctimonious dean had given Josiah his blessing and departed home for Oxford. More likely, he had already met some untimely fate of his enemy’s devising and earned a place in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
Perusing the house, the Doctor paused in the dining room to examine the contents of the cheese dish. He scraped off the film of blue mould that covered the fresh Cheddar and cut himself a slice. He wondered where he should start work: above stairs, below stairs or below the house altogether.
The Reverend Ernest Matthews of Mortarhouse College, Oxford, was slumbering like an ancient child. Seated in the upper observatory, he was oblivious to the dawn light seeping under the window blinds. Nor did he see the pistol that aimed at his head, a gloved finger slowly pressing the trigger. The barrel shifted sideways at the last moment, the gun fired and a bullet passed through