Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [21]
looking like that, are you?’
Betty shook her head, defeated.
Betty took off her clothes with careful deliberation, as if
‘Now go on. Have a nap. You’ll feel better for it.’
she were engaged in some sort of ritual. The towelling In truth, Betty was glad to leave the smoky bar and be bathrobe which she put on had been a present from alone with her thoughts. Robin wouldn’t be back from work Lawrence’s sister Margie. It was a little too big but the for a couple of hours and the upstairs of the pub was freshly laundered, fluffy material made her feel warm and pleasantly quiet and warm. Betty glanced around the corner secure.
of Robin’s bedroom and smiled at the devastated jumble of She still couldn’t keep her mind off Alf. His image seemed clothes and bedsheets. Not a stickler for neatness like his to hover before her eyes like a projected film. She walked to dad or his Uncle Alf.
the bathroom and stopped dead.
Alf. Betty thought of her brother again and tears pricked Under the frothy foam, seemingly deep, deep down in the her eyes. She fondled the silver photo frame which she kept water, something was moving.
on her dressing table. Auntie Jean and her mum, grinning Panic and a scream began to rise in her throat. A hand falsely at a camera on some faraway summer holiday. Black was fumbling its way out of the water: a vile, filthy hand, its and white seagulls circled in a black and white sky.
flesh sunburnt and blistered, black scum and mould under Why couldn’t she stop thinking about Alf? He’d been its fingernails. And as it grasped the side of the bath, and an dead for over twenty years. Guilt hung about her neck like equally appalling body hauled itself out, Betty let go of her an albatross.
senses and slipped gratefully into a dead faint.
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Chapter Three
The Doctor held his umbrella like a shield before him as a fresh squall of rain tore across the moor. His feet squelched into the deep tracks which already pocked the moor path, The thing in the bath hauled itself to its feet, sending their muddy outlines pooling with glutinous brown water.
water cascading on to the floor. It was a man, or the remains He paused briefly and fumbled in his pockets as the wind of a man, wearing a dark blue uniform and a filthy white flapped his coat against him. Pushing the umbrella under sweater. The hair was lank and hung in a great wet slap one arm he pulled on a pair of thick woollen gloves and over the mottled, fish-flesh white forehead. The lips were wrapped his paisley scarf tightly around his neck.
pulled back in a ghastly grin of decay beneath two empty, It was terribly, bitingly cold and the Doctor could feel an empty sockets, speckled and rimmed with black blood. In aching numbness spreading across his exposed cheeks. He her shock, Betty could have been forgiven for not screwed up his eyes and peered at the gaunt tower of the recognising the creature. But, in point of fact, over twenty monastery, now less than half a mile away, silhouetted years late, her brother Alf had come home to stay...
against the gun-metal sky. Sniffing as a drew-drop formed on the end of his nose, the Doctor clapped a hand on his hat to prevent the wind from whipping it away.
His mind buzzed with a million conflicting thoughts but, in a cocoon of coats, the Doctor resolved to think only of his pressing need for warmth, comfort and a strong cup of tea.
He marched on, unwittingly ghosting the large, Wellington-indented tracks of Jack Prudhoe.
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Ace looked into her empty cup and then at her watch. It
‘Who?’
was past eleven and she was still Mrs Crithin’s only
‘That Sharon Tate,’ trilled Mrs Crithin. ‘I think she’s ever customer of the day. The woman herself