Doctor Who_ The Hollow Men - Keith Topping [28]
Ace scratched her head as she began to get dressed. That was some initiation ceremony.
Hatch rolled over in bed expecting to feel the warmth of Rebecca. Instead, he found a cold, empty space. He opened his eyes, and saw Rebecca standing in one of his mother‟s dressing gowns, looking out of the window, across the village.
„Morning,‟ said Hatch sleepily, flopping back on to the pillow.
„You hurt me last night,‟ said Rebecca, still looking out of the window.
„You didn‟t complain at the time,‟ noted Hatch, closing his eyes again.
Rebecca turned, her eyes puffy and red. „You treat everybody like something you scrape off your shoe, Matthew.‟
„Most people are,‟ said Hatch.
A momentary silence settled between them before Rebecca came back to the bed and sat on the corner, putting a hand on Hatch‟s bare arm. „Matthew,‟ she asked in a hushed whisper, „did you hear the screaming last night?‟
„Yes.‟ Hatch smiled, though his eyes were still shut. „That was you, wasn‟t it?‟
She ignored his remark. „It was the Chosen.‟
„Rubbish,‟ said Hatch with a dismissive grunt, turning away from her.
„No, it isn‟t,‟ said Rebecca, returning to the window. „I heard the Chosen screaming in the night when I was five. She screamed until I thought the devil himself would come and take us away. I‟ve hated the night ever since.‟
She turned back to Hatch again, but he was asleep, snoring soundly into his pillow.
Ace‟s trips to her local cemetery in Perivale had normally been at the dead of night, on a dare to do something outrageous like spray „Satan Lives!‟ on a gravestone. She‟d got out of that phase by the time she was thirteen, although Midge and Jay had carried on doing it for a while. Prats.
They were cool places, though, in every sense of the word.
And she stood beside one now, wondering what to do next.
She had got dressed as quickly as she could, but there had been no sign of the scarecrow by the time she came out of the Green Man. There were half-formed boot prints in the scuffed-up earth towards the centre of the green, but nothing more. She had returned to her room again, just in case the Doctor had magicked himself into existence with a puff of sulphur, but his room was as he had left it. So, he wasn‟t coming back in a hurry, and the only course of action was to do what he had wanted her to, and carry on looking... for something. But since she didn‟t have the faintest idea of what that something was, Rebecca Baber - clearly the only civilised and vaguely intelligent person in Hicksville - seemed a good place to start.
Ace stood, distracted by a large stone cross just outside the churchyard. It was a memorial for the thirteen men of the village killed while serving in Prince Albert‟s (Somerset Light Infantry) Regiment during the First World War.
Pte Daniel Burridge: Killed defending the lines, Ypres, 31st October 1914
Sgt Thomas Baber: Gassed, 24th April 1915
Major Nicholas Hatch: Died of shrapnel wounds, the Somme, 8th July 1916
Pte Walter Smith: Killed, saving his officer’s life, Passchendaele, 20th September 1917
L/Cpl Edward Luston: Shot, Marne, 19th March 1918
Ace felt a terrible prickling sensation behind her eyes and cursed openly. It was stupid. Why was she upset by the fate of men who‟d been dead for over fifty years by the time she was born? She hated that side of her nature, and had spent months on Iceworld trying to pummel her sentimentality out of her. There were times when she so wanted to be hardened to the cruelties of the universe, to just let the sickness wash over her.
She reached out and touched the memorial, and said something under her breath. Then, like a rabbit caught in the lights of oncoming traffic, she stepped back, bewildered and lost.
„Bye, lads,‟ she said, glancing around in case anyone was watching. Then she turned her back on the plain stone memorial and the ghosts of the past.
A black metal fence ran along the graveyard boundary, pointing the way to the vicarage.