Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [103]
Stratford had just managed to raise himself and was just pushing himself to his feet with his good arm when the windows finally gave way. Caught between our combined efforts to close them and Harries’s inhuman attempt to force his way in, the inner frames finally caved inwards at us, glass exploding across the room as if fired from a cannon as the wood bowed and splintered. And through the shower of crystal shards stepped Harries, driving a path through the furniture and shattered wood, his snow-crusted feet crushing the fragments of glass as he trod.
We saw him enter through the snowstorm of glass as it crashed on past us, whipping at our clothes and cutting our skin. Susan covered her face with her hands and Baker stepped back under the impact, his cheek ripped open by a flying sliver of ice. Kreiner ducked. Only the Doctor stood his ground, erect and purposeful – defiant – as the glass crashed round him but seemed not to touch him. The glass was ice-cold as it hit me, lashed at me, as if gloating over Harries’s arrival, and instinctively I covered my eyes and turned away. In a second the blizzard was over.
But Harries was inside the room and the only other escape was past his sister.
Harries stopped in front of the remains of the windows. Waiting, cutting off our escape. The Doctor slowly, carefully, pulled several of the sticks of dynamite from his jacket pocket and passed them over to Baker beside him. The back of Baker’s hand was pressed to his torn cheek with the blood squeezing out from behind it.
‘Where in buggery did you get that?’ Kreiner demanded.
‘Never underestimate the local village shop,’ the Doctor said.
Baker’s comment was more practical. ‘We’d have to position it before we could set it off,’ he pointed out in a husky whisper. Stratford joined us, a defiant group dwarfed by our own fear rather than by the figure standing motionless between us and escape. Between us and life.
‘If we use the fuse, he’ll have as much time as us to get out of the way.’ At least his wound had not clouded Stratford’s precise mind.
‘Unless we tie it on to him,’ Kreiner offered
‘I doubt we can count on his co-operation,’ the Doctor said.
Suddenly Harries was moving again, as if switched on, or woken by our low voices, knocking the Chippendale chair beside him across the room. He had not been a large man, but the chair crashed into the wall and splintered with a crack.
At the same moment there was a far louder crack from behind us and we whirled round as the lock on the door exploded and the wounded wood swung open to allow Catherine Harries, her revolver still smoking, to step into the room opposite her brother. Twin mirrors – with us trapped between the glass.
‘So, what happens now?’ the Doctor asked Catherine, and again I was surprised at the calmness and ease of his voice.
‘What are you going to do with us?’ I asked, as much to dispel the deathly silence that had followed the storm of noise as because I wanted an answer.
She turned her pale wide eyes from her brother and fixed them on me. ‘I am not going to do anything with you,’ she said quietly.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Kreiner.
She turned quickly on him: ‘It’s Richard you’ve harmed. He will take our revenge. We’ll kill you, won’t we, Richard?’ And Richard Harries stepped towards us as if in answer.
‘We?’ Susan’s voice shook, her bottom lip trembling against her teeth.
‘Oh yes. We are one now. Our minds, our bodies have the same thought – the same instinct. To kill you.’
‘All of us?’ The Doctor remained the calmest of us.
I could see the perspiration on Stratford’s brow, though Sergeant Baker seemed to have found depths of character and strength that eluded the rest of us. ‘Even Miss Seymour?’ he asked levelly.
‘Especially Miss Seymour.’
‘Oh bugger,’ breathed Kreiner beside me. I appreciated the sentiment, though not the vocabulary.
Catherine turned to her brother, her brow creased, and