The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [24]
‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Er – shall I come? I mean, three heads better than two and all that.’
The Brigadier looked at him the way people always did when he made suggestions. ‘Thanks all the same, but it might be just as well if you stayed here and kept an eye on these two. All right?’ And off he’d gone.
Just like a blasted prefect ordering around a third-former. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been a prefect himself.
Well, nearly. A sixth-former, anyway; and if his father hadn’t taken him away after the A-level mocks, he’d have been a prefect for certain next term. A definite maybe, at the very least.
He hunched himself up into a grumpy bundle and hugged his knees with a fierce intensity.
He’d show them. One of these days.
84
To Sarah’s surprise, when they eventually arrived at their destination, it turned out to be the very castle they had left. But now it was whole.
‘What did you expect?’ said the Doctor, as he floated towards the clifftop. ‘That’s why we came; to trace any disturbance of the N-Space barrier in the past history of the castello. There seem to have been two. Whenever they turn out to be, they’re bound to be some way away.’
‘You mean, we’ve been flying back into the past?’
‘Not exactly. Time and space have a very different relationship here from what you’re used to.’
He raised the scope and pointed it at the wall, pulling the trigger. The strange glow appeared again, but this time it was more concentrated. There were no radiating lines of light at all. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘The crack is there, but it hasn’t developed to the point of catastrophe yet. Indeed it suffers from a certain amount of ambiguity.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s difficult to tell whether or not it has suffered the fatal shock as yet. Well, there’s only one way to find out.’
He moved forward and into the light. Sarah followed and found herself on the other side, in the courtyard. So that was what it felt like to float through a wall! Or rather, what it didn’t feel like. For there was no sensation at all, any more than there is in the unconscious blink of an eye.
85
To her surprise the wall was more than just a wall, having a substantial platform behind it which formed the roof of some sort of a store room, or outhouse, with steps by it going up to the top of the perimeter wall.
‘If we flew in the right direction, could we go into the future and all?’ said Sarah.
‘No, no, no. Of course not. Time in N-Space parallels the earth’s time. How could you have a ghost of somebody who hasn’t been born yet?’
They had passed through the door into the house and were sailing down the corridor which led into the main body of the building. Sarah suppressed a chuckle. Would he get lost again?
‘Yes, I was a bit hard on Lethbridge-Stewart, wasn’t I?’
said the Doctor, stopping and consulting the dial on his vectorscope. ‘Never mind, this will take us straight to the beginning of the perturbation in the psycho-spatial matrix that has brought us here.’
Off they went again, taking a short cut straight through the walls of the corridors; into an elegant little sitting room and straight out again through the striped wallpaper; through another passage wall; and out into the very kitchen where Jeremy didn’t get his marmalade; to be greeted by a shriek and a crash of broken pottery.
86
‘Damn,’ said the Doctor, as they watched the maid-servant fleeing in terror. ‘We’re ghosts ourselves, of course.
Of a sort. Stupid of me.’
‘Wait for me!’ cried Sarah as the Doctor swooped through the door after the woman. The last thing she needed was to find herself abandoned in the past (the early nineteenth century, judging by the maid’s high-waisted dress) with nothing to do but the occasional haunting.
She caught up with the Doctor as he slowed to a stop just outside the entrance to the great hall. She could see through the half-open door. The servant was jabbering out an incoherent account of what she’d seen to a fattish middle-aged gentleman who’d been sitting by the fire reading a newspaper.
‘Nonsense,