Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [4]
He moved towards the window at which the light flickered and pressed his face to the glass. At first he saw nothing; his rasping breath produced a cloud of vapour which befogged the window. He rubbed at the glass with his good hand and looked again. In the light of several candles he saw the silhouette of a man with his arm raised behind his head. A second later the man brought his arm sweeping down, and Tom saw that he was holding an axe, which he thudded into an object on the long workbench.
Chopping wood, Tom thought, and then a number of details presented themselves, one after another, to his hunger-pain-exhaustion-befuddled mind, coiling slowly and lazily into his consciousness like pebbles sinking to the bed of a murky pond.
The first detail was this: the man chopping wood was his ex-employer, Nathaniel Seers. The second detail was Mr Seers's dishevelled state; he was in his shirtsleeves, sweating profusely, his dark hair hanging over his forehead in greasy strands. The third detail was more shocking: Mr Seers was wearing what Tom assumed was a butcher's or a mortician's apron, for it was spattered with blood and clots of tissue.The fourth and final detail was more than shocking, however; it was appalling, unbelievable...
On the workbench before Mr Seers was not a length of timber, but a partly dismembered human cadaver.
Tom couldn't help it. He let forth a thin, whooping scream. Instantly Nathaniel Seers's head snapped up, and now Tom saw something that was possibly even more unbelievable and horrifying than the axe and the blood-spattered apron and the riven corpse.What he saw, what he knew he saw even though his mind tried to deny it, was that Mr Seers's eyes were not even remotely human. They were pools of hideously glowing orange light, in the centre of which the pupils were no more than thin black slits.
They were the eyes of the very devil.
Too shocked to scream a second time,Tom stumbled back from the window, feeling the mark of those eyes on him, their burning poisonous glare.Though he felt what little strength he had ebbing away, almost as if his life force was being sucked from his body, he somehow managed to turn and stagger into the fog. Now it seemed that the fog itself had become a live thing: Tom imagined yellow vaporous hands reaching out to grasp him, bloated, leering, malodorous faces forming from the darkness ahead.
He flailed at the fog as he ran, with his bad arm as well as his good, barely noticing the pain. More by luck than judgement, he negotiated the route through the outbuildings without mishap, and within moments was plunging down the steps that led to the towpath. However, even as he careered along the towpath itself, he knew that his headlong flight was hopeless, that the instant he had looked through that window his life had become forfeit.
No mortal man could expect to gaze into the eyes of the devil and live to see another dawn.
***
In the equipment shed, dripping axe held limply in its right hand, the devil in the guise of Nathaniel Seers made no attempt to give chase. Instead it cocked its head to one side and adopted a look of quizzical concentration.
After a few moments its glowing eyes suddenly flared brighter. The axe dropped from its hand and hit the floor with a clunk. Beneath the dark mutton-chop whiskers that the factory owner favoured, the creature's lips began to move. It appeared to be communing with something.
***
'Oh no!' exclaimed the Doctor as several pages of the magazine he was holding came loose and zigzagged lazily to the floor. His melancholy blue eyes widened in alarm as one of the pages alighted on a candelabrum containing five lit candles. Dry and crisp as an autumn leaf, the page immediately and spectacularly whooshed into flame. The Doctor closed the ailing periodical with a rustle of dry paper and a puff of dust, and slid gymnastically down the ladder he