Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [16]
So why was Garcia suddenly back in sight?
Miquel couldn’t resist: he grabbed his Leica from the table top and started after the fleeting figure. ‘Perdoni, comrades,’ he called hurriedly over his shoulder. ‘Eleana, I will meet you back at home!’
‘Miquel!’
He turned around to face his sister, who had stood to shout at him, but kept trotting up the street backwards. ‘What?’
As if he didn’t know. His older sister always had to send him off with a warning or imprecation, as if to reassert her position as head of the family. She seemed to take especial delight in pretending he was still a boy, with reminders about wearing a coat or minding his ankle on the cobbles. Although when he had fallen during the storming of the Sagrada Família, she had also been the first helping him up and pulling him onwards.
‘Don’t use up all the film! I don’t know when more will arrive!’ she yelled at him.
He grinned and mockingly saluted her, before turning back to face the direction he was trotting in. He turned into the street just as Garcia ducked off it into a narrower side passageway. It was definitely him – no one else was so capable of drawing attention to themselves whilst acting furtive.
They were moving deeper into the narrow backstreets of the Barri Gótic, narrow lanes that were cool, untouched by sunlight all day, and where not a single straight line was in evidence. Serrano Domínguez wasn’t an expert at navigating these lanes, there were always little passageways yet to be explored, but he realised that the general direction Garcia was taking was towards a main PSUC building. Miquel checked the camera’s strap was firmly across his shoulder before lifting it, checking the number of exposures used. If he was lucky, if there was an incident, he would get a good photograph for the paper. Photographic evidence was worth hundreds of Eleana’s moral words.
He was halfway between looking at the Leica and looking up to check Garcia’s movements when he felt like all the blood had drained from his head in a rush. His hurrying feet faltered, jerked out of the unthinking rhythm of running, and he crashed to the cobbled pavement.
Something had hold of him.
He rolled on to his back in the gutter, looking up to see his assailant, to find out what he had to fight. There was nothing there, yet the pain in his head was increasing. He curled into a ball, lying on his side now, hands clasped at the nape of his neck as if he could stop the incessant tugging. It was clutching at him, pulling at him. One foot kicked and pushed against the kerb, futilely trying to move him, to get help from somewhere. Look at me, he wanted to scream – thought maybe he was screaming – Look at me! Help me!
He squeezed his eyes tighter against the pain, tried to close it out. Lights were exploding red against his eyelids, pulsing blues and swirling green blobs that drifted across diagonally, again and again, tracing and retracing the same agonising path across his eyeballs. And arching white, strobing horizontally.
He could see something: a dark fuzzy blob, spinning and writhing on a pale background. The drenching stench of hopeless fear. Sounds, deafeningly loud. Harsh deep groans, painful and unpleasant. One booted foot suddenly protruded from the blob, flailing and grating. Then Miquel could see something else: blobs of grey, tinged with the faintest blood red. Flowers, they were flowers. The same basic shape as the ones he had unconsciously noticed as he fell. He got another fleeting glimpse of the dark shape and recognised it now.
Every nerve screamed that he mustn’t, but he tried to open his eyes. Briefly, he saw the curious amber eye of an alley cat on him, before it backed away and fled. The screaming agony in his mind increased and he closed his eyes in resignation. As he begged for the pain to end, he recognised with horror the words running through his mind, perhaps even mumbled aloud.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God...’
No, he had to