The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [11]
Clever fellow, Carl.’
‘You mean, we were destined to meet?’
‘Fatalism might be considered a cruder version of a similar viewpoint, certainly.’
Sarah felt her eyelids drooping. She carefully placed the nearly empty mug on the little table by her elbow and tried to concentrate on the grown-ups’ words. The grown-ups?
She grinned at herself and listened.
‘I’ll be in a better position to explain when I’ve carried out a few investigations,’ the Doctor was saying. ‘Certainly I have a hypothesis, but to speculate without facts is a waste of valuable time, unless you have no other option.’
37
His voice had the hollow sound of her parents’ voices that she remembered from her childhood – in the car –
waking up late in the night on their way to the caravan they used to hire on the Gower coast; and she remembered the time they’d arrived just before the mother and father of all thunderstorms – standing on the clifftop watching the network of lightning over the sea; and she felt again her Dad’s hand resting comfortably on her shoulder as they marvelled at the delicate tracery of the flashes. She put up her hand to touch the warm dry skin she knew so well – and felt a scaly sliminess that brought a scream to her throat which couldn’t escape; and as the claws dug deep into her flesh, her muscles convulsed into a spasm of terror; and she woke up.
Four pairs of eyes were turned on her. She must have cried out. ‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ she managed to gasp. She started to shake again.
Maggie was only pretending to be asleep, as she often did. But even so she didn’t hear Nico come into the room.
‘Well?’ she heard Max ask.
‘You were right,’ the thin sad voice replied. ‘The top men of the four Families.’
‘How many?’
‘Nineteen.’
38
‘All in the same building?’
‘In the same room.’
‘And?’
‘War.’
She heard Max heave himself out of bed.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Then you know what to do.’
There was quite a long pause before Nico answered.
‘Please, Signore,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me. I beg you.’
Maggie peeped at the tortured face from beneath her eyelids. Max was enjoying himself.
‘Poor Nico,’ he said. ‘How you do suffer. But then, if you don’t fry them…’
Fry them? Maggie’s eyes nearly popped wide open.
Was Max asking him to torch the nineteen top men from the local Mafia?
Max went on, ‘It’s like – damned if you do and damned if you don’t, isn’t it?’ Nico winced at the repetition of the word.
‘You refuse my command?’
Nico shuddered. ‘No, master, no! But if you want –’
‘What I want is rid of the lot of them. I want the stink of their burning flesh to be history. Got it?’
So it was true. Maggie hugged herself as a delicious tremor ran through her body. Even if she hated his guts sometimes, Max Vilmio was a real man!
39
He turned to climb back into bed and Maggie closed her eyes tight again; and this was why, when she eagerly opened them a moment later at a demanding caress from the object of her approbation, she was too late to see that Nico (his face a mask of anguish) had set off on his murderous errand by floating through the wall.
40
Four
The clock in the tower struck seven, Sarah’s usual getting up time if she was going for a run on Hampstead Heath (which was its old self again now they’d pulled down Space World); or one hour before her getting up time if she wasn’t, but was on an efficiency jag; or two hours before her time if she’d gone to bed late or didn’t give a damn for any reason.
She opened her eyes, wide awake in an instant, to find a world washed clean; all things made new just for Sarah Jane Smith.
Looking out of the window to savour the sun and the sea and the Sicilian sky she found that she was at the back of the house, overlooking the cloistered courtyard of the night before. Like the part of the house her room was in, it looked as if it had been added at the back of the keep at about the same time as the clock tower.