Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [6]
aside the sharp branches and peered into the hollow beyond.
The moor. It stretched in front of him in the teeming rain; It was very dark now. Jack’s mind was reeling. Somehow a great, dismal expanse of purple. Billowing clouds, like she was back. The years had been rolled away. Perhaps they strokes of charcoal, lowered over the desolation.
had a chance to start all over again. Win was here. It didn’t Jack felt his Wellingtons sink into the sodden ground.
matter how. His beautiful young wife had come back to him.
Ahead of him, still discernible despite the darkness, the girl That was enough.
in the red dress was running. Almost skipping. Oblivious to
‘Win?’
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There was silence in the little hollow. Jack looked around, Trevithick dismissed it with a shake of his head, drew the bemused. Then, to his right, he heard a soft, soft rustling curtains and clicked off the bedside lamp. It was good to be sound. Something was emerging from the shadows.
inside and warm when there was such foul weather out Something huge.
there. He looked at the ceiling, his eyelids making a gentle Jack tried to say Win’s name but the sound died in his tick-tick as he blinked into the dark. It really was good to be throat as the vast darkness closed around him. No time to inside. Inside the Dalesview Residential Home and away turn and run. No time, even, to scream.
from all that uncertainty. Much as he railed and protested Out on the moor, in the darkness, there was only the and argued, there was a degree of comfort to be derived steady hiss of the rain.
from being an old man in such extraordinary times. Exciting times, to be sure, but frighteningly unstable. Surely it was Trevithick shut the door of his room. He rubbed his hands all going too fast? The certainties of his own young days, the together excitedly and looked at his face in the battered old ethics, the institutions - all seemed to be flooding away like shaving mirror he kept by the bed. ‘Not bad,’ he said precious wine from an unstoppered bottle. And it scared happily. ‘Not bad at all!’ Those roguish good looks had him.
stood him in good stead in the old Nightshade days. Why not There were wonders, of course. Hadn’t he cheered with again? And after those charming make-up girls had worked the rest when Apollo 7 returned to Earth only a couple of their magic he’d look twenty years younger. Perhaps they months before? Now they were saying man would be on the wanted to make a new series?
moon by next summer! Trevithick huffed to himself. All He undressed carefully, laying his tweed trousers over the well and good, but at what cost? Half the world starving to arm of the chair, and clambered into his soft blue pyjamas.
death. Brave lads pointlessly slaughtered in Southeast Asia.
The Dalesview Residential Home had been converted Bloody bolshy students tearing Paris to bits. Give ‘em a taste from an eighteenth-century farmhouse and still retained its of the birch. That’d teach ‘em. No, it was all going too fast...
deeply inset windows, although the leaded panes had been Much too... fast...
replaced by thick modern glass. Trevithick was always Trevithick felt himself sinking into sleep. Rain drummed reminded of prison-cell windows.
against the window in relentless, sweeping waves. Then He paused to draw the curtains and glanced outside.
there was another sound. Rustling. As if branches were The lashing rain was only visible in the weak yellow light scraping at the thick panes...
of a distant streetlamp. Trevithick started. Something moved through the pool of lamplight into the darkness. He
‘Wake up, Vijay. Vij? Come on, love.’
saw it only for a moment but it felt oddly familiar. A big, Vijay smiled to himself as he heard Holly’s voice but kept crooked, hunched figure. Scuttling like a crab.
his eyes shut all the same. It would be nice to tease her for a 20
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while. The smell of hot coffee tempted him to stir but the Morrison, plucking