Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [92]
The worst of it, the nightmare-recurrent image that took away my breath and drained the blood from my face, was that he had no eyes. Empty, blood-seared sockets that stared accusingly, unblinking, at me as he crashed downwards.
I heard myself screaming now. A sound mixed in with Simpson’s falling cadence, with Susan’s shrieks, with the Doctor’s shout for me to catch Simpson. Then the man’s body collided with me, knocking me off my feet. The impact took my breath away, leaving it in a misty cloud above me as I fell. Simpson was across me, his dead weight pinning me to the frost-encrusted ground. I had no idea whether it was his desperate gasps I could hear and feel or my own. I didn’t really care. I was on my back, staring up at the window, at the image framed there.
The broken, blackened face of Richard Harries stared unevenly down at us from the window, his own single remaining eye catching the moonlight and blazing as if it were again burning, melting, dripping like its twin from its socket. I thought at first that Susan was frantically slipping down the makeshift rope simply out of terror at the obscene picture above her framed by the open window. I did her an injustice: she might well have been terrified – I certainly was – but her hurry was for far more practical reasons.
Harries’s skeletal and stripped hands were not clutching and working out of instinct or reflex. Susan was still some thirty feet above the ground. Above the unyielding, frozen gravel. Simpson was dead or dying I was sure. I knew what fate awaited Susan. Unless we could help her.
With sudden frantic strength I heaved Simpson’s body off and dragged myself, gasping, to my feet. I staggered towards the Doctor and Kreiner, both of whom stood transfixed by the drama unfolding, unknotting, above them. From where I was, from the angled view I had, I could see that they were in the wrong place. The way the rope was swinging, the way she was leaning in her frantic scramble to safety. If – when – Susan fell, she would land perhaps ten feet from where the Doctor and Kreiner were standing.
I have heard it postulated that everyone has dreams that involve their trying – and failing – to run through what seems to be treacle or thick mud. I was not dreaming, but my progress did indeed seem so hampered. Harries had finished untying the sheets long before I was close to the point where I knew Susan must hit the ground.
Then she fell.
And as she fell I realised that I was running fast – faster than ever before. Running for her life. And she was falling as slowly as I seemed to be moving. An illusion, a speed relative to the adrenaline-enhanced working of my brain.
I reached the point below the window almost as Susan did. Harries watched, impassive, as she tumbled heavily into my outstretched arms, slowed – mercifully – by the sheets and her skirts. She was not heavy, but I was off balance and Susan was falling quickly. In short, I broke her fall but I failed to catch her and she collapsed, winded, on the edge of the lawn. I fell beside her, my ankle turning over and catching awkwardly on the stone-edged verge, unsoftened by the snow.
We lay there for a second, recovering the best we could. Kreiner and the Doctor were there at once, reaching out to help us. As Susan stood, I saw the pain in her face.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked
‘Ankle,’ she gasped. ‘Can’t seem to… When I put weight on it.’ She took a few hesitant steps, limping badly.
‘Let me see.’ The Doctor knelt down beside her and she used his shoulder to support herself as he felt round the ankle. ‘Not broken,’ he said. ‘But there’s some swelling. A sprain, I would say.’
‘A sprain?’ Kreiner’s concern seemed to me to be disproportionate to this immediate problem. I reckoned she was lucky to be alive. ‘Doctor,’ he went on urgently, ‘if she can be hurt –’
The Doctor waved him to silence. ‘I know, I know, Fitz.’ He stood up,