Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [99]
Closer.
The Doctor slipped and fell, dragging me down with him into a sudden soft snow bank. We floundered for a moment and lost each other. A hand lifted me and I smiled a thank-you – I could not have risen without help. Then the Doctor surfaced in front of me, his sodden hair clung with snow, and his face filled with anxiety and warning. With sudden energy I lunged forward, towards him, feeling the corpse’s dead hand tearing at my shoulder as I moved, dragged.
Harries too stumbled at the edge of the path, into the deceptive white pool, almost pulling me with him as he fell, tearing my tattered jacket from my back and ripping the muscle in my left shoulder. I ran, or rather staggered, waded, stumbled through the deep snow, hurling myself back up on to the path, catching up with the Doctor. I turned to see Richard Harries pull his carcass towards us out of the snow, the bone protruding from the broken ends of his fingers where the dead, rotting flesh had torn away as I pulled free. His speed was unimpaired.
He would catch us again. Soon…
Suddenly it was much harder to stand up, and for a second I could not discern why.
‘We’re here!’ shouted the Doctor with something akin to triumph. I peered into the gloom, against the snow being blown from the ground into my face.
Ahead of us – thirty yards (twenty?) – stood a small building, a shed. For a moment I was puzzled, then I realised where we were – the increased wind meant it was a clearing, and the wooden structure in front of us told us where.
‘Come on,’ he called into the wind, and we battled towards the small building, the sound of our pursuer’s approach reaching us above the howl of the wind… ‘Just a small wooden shed full of tools and so on,’ a voice whispered in my ear – and I realised that it was an echo of my own. I also realised that this had been where the Doctor had been aiming for all along. The scene, bizarrely, of his own earlier ‘death’.
The near side had no door, just a small window set at eye level – my eye level – in the wooden planking. The Doctor shouted to me to find a stone or a piece of wood to break the window, then he peered through, wiping away the snow and ice. I joined him, but of course I could see nothing save a reflection of myself – and Richard Harries lumbering into the glassy clearing behind us.
‘A stone, quickly!’ the Doctor repeated, shouting into the wind.
I turned sharply as the wind rocked the horror thirty (twenty?) yards away. The torn flesh of his shattered face seemed to peel away under the pressure and his insane, dead smile widened as he lurched onward again, barely slowed by the gale.
Protruding from the snow a few feet away was a pile of stones. Materials for constructing the grotto, I realised. I snatched one up, staggering under its weight. I raised it in both hands and battered at the window, smashing it at once and, predictably, slicing open the back of my hand with the falling glass. The blood froze along the cut – from fear as much as from the cold. I reached inside the dark hole of the window, framed with glittering triangles which tore at my right arm and shoulder, and for a moment I felt I was reaching into the blackened pit that was Harries’s eye socket – the remains of the splintered iris reflecting and distorting my intrusion.
Harries was halfway to us now.
The Doctor was beside me as I reached in, hopping from one foot to the other in impatience. At last, my hand closed around a wooden stave, and I pulled upwards and out. A pickaxe. Now at least we had some chance.
Ten yards.
The handle was through the opening.
Eight yards.
But the head of the pickaxe smashed into the frame. It was too wide to fit through the window.
Seven yards.
I pulled again and twisted, hoping to wrench the iron head through the diagonal and at an angle to the sill.
It jammed halfway, preventing me from reaching inside again,