The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [15]
‘Jeremy, be quiet,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Jolly unfair,’ he muttered and subsided into a sulky silence.
51
‘An action replay. That’s right. Bear that in mind. It’s not happening now. If you see a figure, it’s not even a ghost.
It’s just an image; a meta-spectre. A memory of a memory.’
Saying this, the Doctor raised the probe and pointed it at the crumbling pile of stones on the edge of the cliff: He pulled a sort of trigger. The machine started to hum.
At first, nothing else happened. The hum grew louder –
and louder – and Sarah was afraid that this was going to be one of those occasions when the Doctor’s efforts literally blew up in his hands.
But then she noticed that one of the stones in the ruined wall was starting to glow with a strange pearly light, which spread in a zigzag path across the heap, which it enveloped in a flickering aura; and then – oh, then she appeared, the girl in the white dress, clasping her hands in an ecstasy of despair and mouthing an unheard cry. Unsure and unsteady to the eye, like an image glimpsed through the swirling wreaths of a sea-mist, the slight figure ran towards the edge of the cliff and briefly stood, her arms outstretched to the heavens as if appealing for an impossible succour.
Sarah felt again the rush of pity which had filled her heart the night before and she started forward, only to be held back by the firm hand of the Brigadier on her arm.
52
There was nothing she could do; nothing but stand and helplessly watch as the girl deliberately stepped forward and pitched headlong over the cliff.
But then, as Sarah openly wiped away the tear which had fallen onto her cheek, her attention was caught by a startled exclamation from Jeremy. She looked back at the ruined wall.
The shimmering light had extended itself in a series of crazed patterns like frozen lightning; and scattered nearby, spider-legged centres of cold fire were growing like shoots from a self-sown plant; and through the new-born light were appearing glimmerings of phantasms far more fearful than the unhappy wraith they had been watching.
Sarah saw again a flash of the chimera of her living nightmare. She saw glimpses of creatures even more horrific: inside out creatures gnawing at their own entrails; gaping heads, all mouth and fangs, with a maw large enough to swallow a full-grown pig – or a human; monstrous jellyfish with a hundred human eyes, staring, staring, staring; and more; and more; a menagerie of evil.
‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ came the Doctor’s quiet voice. As he switched off his device, the creatures vanished.
The light faded and all was quiet. Quiet? thought Sarah. The lack of sound from the Doctor’s induced images was somehow even more scary than a cacophony of squeals 53
would have been. The noise was in her mind, in her head; and she felt herself shaking it gently, as if to clear it of the detritus left by the sights she had seen.
‘Well?’ said the Brigadier.
‘Not at all well,’ replied the Doctor. ‘It’s as I feared. At some time in the past a massive psycho-physical shock has ruptured the barrier at this point and weakened it drastically
– possibly irreparably.’
‘Irreparably? You mean you can’t do anything about it?’
‘If I can find out what caused it in the first place, there might be a chance. I just pray that I have enough time before the moment of catastrophe.’
‘Catastrophe?’
‘I use the word in its strict scientific sense,’ he went on.
‘If a dam is breached, the water comes through in a relative trickle at first; but then small cracks appear around the fracture; the trickle becomes a stream, augmented by even more new trickles; the dam is weakened even further; until
– catastrophe: the structure of the dam can’t contain the pressure of the water any longer. It bursts. The countryside is flooded.’
He stopped speaking for a moment. He sighed. He bent his head and pinched the top of his nose between his finger and thumb, massaging it gently.
54
Sometimes, thought Sarah, it wasn’t difficult