Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [121]
The door to the school hall swung open as Amy and Mr Retour held it for him. It was odd for a couple of teachers to hold a door open for a kid, but Ricky hardly noticed as he stepped into the big hall.
Every kid in the school was there, sitting in chairs on either side of the narrow aisle. Ricky was walking up that aisle. He wanted to turn back. Turn and run. But Retour and Amy were walking behind him. Walking close together. He couldn’t break past them. On either side of him were the kids, row after row of them, all looking at him. Every eye on him as he was escorted towards the front of the big hall.
Towards the stage.
There was a single microphone hovering over a small lectern at the centre of the stage, facing the audience.
Normally the principal stood there and addressed the assembled school after the national anthem was played in holographic stereo over concealed speakers.
The principal wouldn’t be addressing them today.
Ricky had reached the steps at the side of the stage. The Whole school was watching him. A wave of surprise had spread across the room when the kids first saw him. They knew that something odd was happening. A kid standing up to address the whole school? What had happened to Mr Pangbourne?
Now the first shock of seeing Ricky had passed; it had been replaced with a greedy, hungry mood. The kids were expectant, eager for spectacle.
At any moment impatience would begin to set in, with throat-clearing and foot-shuffling. But now they were full of attention, spellbound.
Waiting for a show.
As Ricky began to walk up the staircase on to the stage he suddenly realized what he had to do. There was a trick he could use, the same trick that had worked for years.
Stumble. Stumble as he walked up the steps. If he could make himself trip, fumble, look clumsy, then he would be free. The kids would laugh at him and dismiss him. They’d start to talk among themselves. Their attention, all focused on one point — on Ricky — would fragment. And the horrible weight of that attention would be lifted from him.
Ricky willed himself to stumble on the stairs.
Instead he floated up them gracefully in a lithe continuous motion. He moved like a man who had something important to do. A man with a mission.
Instead of easing, the attention of the crowd grew more intense. You could have heard a pin drop as Ricky crossed the stage.
He went and stood at the lectern, staring into the hundreds of faces, all lost in the common identity of the crowd. He was clutching the papers Retour had given him, a short speech to read to the school.
Ricky knew this was his last chance. He could still shatter the attention of the crowd. He could do it by using his voice. He could stutter, or clear his throat loudly into the microphone, or just dry up completely and lose his nerve.
Soon the crowd would begin to giggle and stir, waking from the spell he held them in.
Once again he would become someone to laugh at or ignore. Someone harmless. And then their attention would move on to something else and he would be safely anonymous again. All he had to do was screw up now.
It was his last chance. Dry up. Clear your throat. Stutter.
With a final flutter of despair, Ricky realized that he wasn’t capable of doing any of these things. He looked at the crowd, opened his mouth and began to speak.
The weight of his words was such that they seemed to pronounce themselves. There was no way he could diminish the importance of what he had to say. So he spoke in a clear serious voice and instead of destroying the attention of the crowd, he increased it.
‘Mr Pangbourne is dead,’ said Ricky.
It didn’t matter what he said after that. He read aloud the short prepared statement about how the doctors had done everything possible but Mr Pangbourne had died in the hospital last night.
But it didn’t matter what he said. It was all over for Ricky.
There might have been some chance of escape earlier, but once he’d hooked their attention with the shocking news there was no way out for him.
The crowd watched him as if hypnotized. No one even coughed as