Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [32]
More insults were flung by the crowd. Chris glanced round and saw that Glospin was standing at the back. His eyes were fixed on Satthralope. A wicked smile was playing across his face.
Satthralope banged her staff for order. 'Silence! How much more shame will you pour on our House and on the Loom that bore us all? Hasn't there been enough?'
As if in answer, a shudder rumbled through the structure of the House. Arkhew yelped with fright. His grip on Chris's ankle tightened.
'Read the will!' shouted the Cousins. 'What about our inheritance!'
'Never!' Quences sat back down again. 'Not until all the Cousins are here.'
'Can't you guess who he means?' called Glospin. He began to push through the Cousins, swinging out at them with his stick. He reached the dais and turned to face his Family. 'Don't you know who he's waiting for? Isn't it obvious?'
And Chris knew too. The Cousin whose name was banned; who never turned up on time; who had been so reluctant to stay.
The shouting got worse.
'All right!' shouted Satthralope. 'If that's what you want. Then we can al wait as long as Quences sees fit!'
She struck her staff on the floor again. There was a whirring noise as the wheels and orbits of the clock above them began to turn. With a dul clang, the clock started to chime. The great doors to the hall slammed themselves shut. The House began to tremble.
The Cousins stared about them in alarm.
'No!' shouted Glospin. He lunged towards Quences, but faltered and stumbled. His face went white as he clutched at his chest in pain. He toppled to the shaking floor.
The Cousins panicked, running wildly for the doors, only to find their paths blocked by the towering Drudges.
Chris cried out as Arkhew twisted his ankle. The little man was pointing up at the clock on the gallery. A skinny figure was turning and spinning on the intersliding dials. It was Arkhew, his distant face contorted in a silent scream. 'It's my dream,' Arkhew was shouting. 'My dream!'
And somewhere, Chris realized, he was lying on an attic floor with web in his eyes. Not my dream at all, he thought. I'm being shown it, because someone wants me to know.
The tremor was deepening. The big tables suddenly stampeded across the hall, scattering food in their wake. One Cousin was trampled in the rush. Dust plumed down from the rafters. Bats, disturbed from their roosts, flittered over the terrified Cousins' heads.
As the rumbling grew to a roaring quake, a darkness, far blacker than the silvery twilight outside, rose inexorably up the full length of the tall windows.
46
Chapter Eight
Fragments
'What happens?' whispered Chris. 'What happens next?'
With the dark came a silence that was stifling. Arkhew clung to Chris, too shocked to speak.
The mirror of reality cracked and opened like a slowly exploding flower.
Snatches of time, trapped in shards of shattered mirror glass, came spinning, oh so slowly, past them. Different tableaux trapped in different fragments, reflecting back and forth, creating corridors of jangling light and echoes of the past: the nightmare memories that haunt the darkened House.
Chris and Arkhew stood together, timeless, as time itself danced and fragmented around them.
In the Hal , the terrified Cousins are trying to drag open the great doors. The huge Drudges are forcing them back.
Innocet stands on the dais. She is trying to calm the crowd of Cousins. Someone throws something. Innocet clutches at her face. She is bleeding where she has been hit.
In a wooden box-trap, a little creature like a shrew is screaming.
Glospin lies in bed, pale with a transfixed stare. Satthralope sits beside him, rocking herself slowly as she holds his hand. In a sudden spasm, he clutches tightly at her arm. Then he falls back, his fevered eyes close and his mouth drops open. After a moment, Satthralope takes a black rose from her bonnet and places it on his chest.
'Good riddance,' muttered Arkhew.