Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [50]
exploded in the room.
Billy snorted and coughed loudly in a hacking spasm, There was a man sitting on the end of her bed, dressed in what his dad always called ‘the workhouse cough’. Too a sports jacket and tapered trousers. He had short, blond many Woodbines and draughty bus shelters, some doctor hair, finely chiselled features and his broad hands were had once told him. But never mind that, he’d had some folded neatly across his lap. He was smiling.
good times on the road. No responsibilities, nobody trying Holly drew back with a startled cry, her mind spinning in to tie him down. It hadn’t been so bad...
disbelief. She tried to form words. But the man just put his That morning, he had run down into Crook Marsham full finger to his lips and smiled benignly.
of tales about a funny police box - tales that had been It may have been the shadowy light, but there was a greeted with the usual mixture of scepticism and disquieting blankness in the man’s gaze; his eyes were black amusement. Somewhat forlornly, he had wandered over to and opaque like unpolished jet. He reached out and took the monastery where he knew he was guaranteed a bed and Holly’s hand in his, the palm warm and reassuring. Then he a free meal once or twice a month, sometimes more if he giggled.
pushed his luck.
The Abbot always treated him kindly but didn’t like to see him hanging around. Not very Christian of him in Billy’s 140
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opinion. No, his true friend there was Brother Alec, a former In the village, however, he was relegated to the position of soldier who had spent a good while sleeping rough in his local idiot: someone with whom to pass the time of day, buy time.
a drink for at Christmas and use as a bogeyman to frighten He understood Billy’s way of life, letting him stay in the errant children. Get to bed now, or Billy will come and get monastery and doling out some of the monks’ leftovers.
you!
‘As long as you don’t make a habit of it,’ he would always He was happy, though, happy enough. If it wasn’t for the say, laughing at his feeble joke.
headaches.
Tonight, Alec couldn’t really turn him down. It was They’d first appeared some months previously: sick, dull, freezing cold (Billy had chuckled at the conspicuous thumping pains at the base of his skull, sometimes corduroys showing beneath Alec’s robes) and looked like it accompanied by blinding lights.
might snow. He could hear the wind from the moor now as He was seeing things too. Nothing he could get a grip on.
he drifted in and out of sleep, the thin, arrow-slit window Colours and places, lit up like Christmas trees, that swam rattling in its frame.
and shuddered in his mind.
There had been a time when his opinion counted for After the attacks he would feel hollow and utterly something in Crook Marsham and the surrounding districts.
miserable, a profound, stomach-deep depression which took Right up until the War he had been a bit of a local celebrity, days to lift. It was all very worrying. He would talk to consulted on all manner of things from the possibility of a Brother Alec about it in the morning.
dry summer to the sex of unborn children. After all, he was Abbot Winstanley heard it first, a low, low moan, drifting the seventh son of a seventh son. More or less.
down the corridors of the monastery. He opened his eyes Well, he had the ‘gift’ certainly, even though it was a bit and listened intently. The sound came again, haltingly - a erratic at times. His weather forecasts in particular brought desperate, shuddering wail like the cry of a lost soul or the down the wrath of local farmers and, after predicting a mild mournful song of a whale.
winter in ‘63, his services had been spurned in favour of the Winstanley remembered childhood stories about - what BBC’s.
were they called? - yes, the Gabriel Ratchets.