Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [24]
can we?’
The Doctor strolled on, careful to stay within the shelter of The Doctor mumbled an apology and found himself the walls, and soon came upon a rather forlorn-looking steered across the greenhouse threshold. Winstanley vegetable garden, dotted with cracked flower pots and plot slammed the door and sat the Doctor down in a striped markers which projected in some unfathomable pattern deckchair which was as old and disreputable as the building from the drenched soil. Like a graveyard for tongue-itself.
depressors, thought the Doctor idly.
Winstanley was a round-faced pudding of a man who At the top of the garden, jammed against a stone wall, cheerfully adhered to Friar Tuck clichés. His large shaved stood a decrepit greenhouse. Its elaborate roof and once-head was freckled and sunburnt and his grin split his face elegant doorway suggested more prosperous days. Now like a slice of overripe melon. The Doctor was struck, several panes were blacked out and the woodwork, soaked, however, by the Abbot’s watery blue eyes. Their stained and peeling, buckled away from the glass. Inside, a melancholy aspect seemed at odds with his massive personality.
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
‘Now then, my dear sir. Where were we? A doctor, are flat concrete hundreds of feet below. Saw himself falling, the you? Well, well, we’re all in good health here as far as I can world and his life rushing away from him.
recall.’ He let out another peal of unnecessary giggles. The He had come through that crisis, despite everything. Yet Doctor shrank back from the surfeit of good humour.
something of that fear and sense of doom seemed to hang
‘I’m not here on medical matters,’ he said soothingly, about him now as he stared across the grey moor.
glancing about at the ripening tomato plants. ‘I was Rubbing his hand against the nape of his neck, the Doctor wondering if you’d be willing to let me spend some time followed Abbot Winstanley through the alcove and was here. Away from it all. Time to think...’
soon lost in the shadows.
‘Sanctuary, eh?’ cried the Abbot, rubbing his hands together. ‘Capital idea. We often get people popping in.
Something cold pressed itself against Betty’s cheek and More often to get out of the rain, though, I must admit!’ His her eyelids flickered. In the confusion of light and colour capacious frame shook with laughter.
she picked out a dark shape bobbing about her face. Her With surprising deftness, the Abbot slipped into his eyes snapped open and she took in the terrible shape mackintosh and floppy hat, ushering the Doctor outside into towering above her. A snow-cold, wasted hand held her what looked like, at last, diminishing rain.
chin so tightly that she could feel the skeletal fingers
‘I’m Mervyn Winstanley, by the way.’ He grasped the pressing into her flesh. She cried out and felt a wave of Doctor’s hand with his own sunburnt flipper and pumped it revulsion rising as her eyes flicked from detail to detail of until the Doctor’s knuckles ached.
the apparition before her.
As they negotiated the Somme-like garden, Winstanley Alfred Beadle’s empty sockets gazed into Betty’s red-related in a high, enthusiastic voice something of the rimmed eyes, his forced grin of decay seeming to grow even monastery’s history. At one time, it seemed, there had been wider. He wagged a bony finger as if to admonish her and almost four hundred brothers there.
then let out a chuckle from between his teeth which blasted
‘No call for it now, of course. There’s just me and, oh, his sister full in the face. The vile head seemed to shudder forty others. We have to make honey and novelty mugs just its way towards her, black moisture and weed trickling to keep the wolf from the door.’ He disappeared through a from its hair.
low archway. The Doctor hopped over one last muddy There was a voice inside Betty’s head and she shook trench and then paused as he reached