The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [10]
33
‘Well, I don’t know why you didn’t waste the lot of them,’ said Maggie, squinting into the dressing-table mirror as she repaired a ravaged set of eyelashes. She could see Max stretched out behind her, eyeing her naked back. ‘The great bum,’ she thought with a sort of contemptuous admiration and leaned forward for her lipstick to give him a better view.
‘You want I should send his Family a telegram? They’ll have got the message quicker this way.’
‘Message? You didn’t give that consigliere guy any message to take back.’
Max smiled unpleasantly. ‘I didn’t?’
‘What was it then?’
‘Unconditional surrender, that’s what. Like Ike and the Krauts. I’ve got more important things to do than play footsy with a bunch of peasants.
‘And that’s for sure,’ he added, almost to himself.
Maggie frowned. His face had taken on the hardness she had grown to fear, an evil determination chilling to see.
When he was like this, nobody was safe.
‘Ike? Ike who?’ she said. ‘Ike from the deli?’
It worked. His face resumed its normal sneer. ‘Yeah, Ike from the deli. Face it, honey, you’re just an ignorant broad from Brooklyn.’
34
‘Sure,’ she said, in relief. She sucked a smear of lipstick from a front tooth. ‘Great tits, though.’
It was only a long time later, when Sarah was safely tucked up in an enormous bed, watching the homely firelight flickering on the high ceiling, that she came to the conclusion that to come out of a faint saying ‘Where am I?’
was probably the oldest cliché in the book.
‘But I never faint. I’ve never passed out in my life,’
she’d said, feebly indignant, to the three anxious faces peering down at her as she struggled out of the mists; and it was then that all such thoughts were swept from her mind by the abrupt remembrance of the reason for her so recently acquired weakness; and she had started shaking anew and allowed the Brigadier to carry her to the warmth of the great hall – for assuredly her legs would not have carried her there.
‘What was it? The thingy in the archway?’
Jeremy, who had been shaking almost as hard as Sarah, had only been allowed to talk about what had happened once Sarah was comfortably ensconced in the big chair opposite Mario’s (in which the nonagenarian was napping, as if he’d seen it all before), clutching a mug of hot sugared milk with a slug of grappa in it which Umberto had brought.
35
‘I mean, it wasn’t a real monster, like the ones on Parakon. It just sort of melted away.’
‘It was real enough, Jeremy,’ said the Doctor. ‘The fact that it vanished before it could do Sarah any harm only means that there isn’t enough power coming through yet.
And that means that I may still be in time.’
‘In time for what?’ said the Brigadier. ‘What exactly is going on, for Pete’s sake?’
‘On the other hand,’ continued the Doctor to Jeremy, quite ignoring the irritated Brigadier, ‘in a sense it’s no more real than an image in a dream. But then that applies to all of us, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Er, yes. I mean, no. That is, to be honest, I –’
‘Well, it certainly doesn’t apply to me,’ said the Brigadier, ‘and frankly I can’t see that it applies to any of us.
Sarah took a sip of her milk. It was no good feeling cross with the Doctor when he talked in that elliptical fashion. It was just the way he was. No doubt he would tell them what he meant in his own good time.
‘And yet you were quite prepared to believe that Miss Smith was a product of your own overheated brain, when you met her this morning.’
‘Yes, well…’ said the Brigadier, his voice trailing away. Sarah could have sworn that he blushed. ‘You must 36
admit,’ he went on, ‘that it is the most impossible coincidence that we should have bumped into each other.’
‘Impossible? Evidently not, since it happened. In any case, you’re leaving out the likelihood of its being a simple case of synchronicity.’
Here we go again, thought Sarah.
‘Synchronicity?’ said the Brigadier.
‘The principle that a coincidence may happen without any causal link, and yet still be of significance.