The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [40]
‘What are you doing here, kid?’
Jeremy fought to keep his voice steady. ‘Oh, I just thought your boat looked a super sort of boat and I’ve always loved boats so I thought I’d have a sort of a look round and I went into the cupboard to sort of look round and 140
the door slammed on me and I – I think I’m going to throw up!
‘Ouch!’ he continued, as Vilmio took his nose between the joints of the first two fingers of his left hand and twisted.
‘Answer my question. What are you after?’
Jeremy’s answer was quite unintelligible. The girl gave a little grunt of protest. Max, with a surprised glance at her, gave his nose an extra tweak and let go.
Jeremy put up a gentle hand to explore the extent of the damage. ‘That hurt!’ he said indignantly.
Vilmio said, ‘Put him in the cable locker. And make sure he can’t do any more yelling. I’ll deal with the little pipsqueak later.’
As the protesting Jeremy was dragged off to his place of durance vile, he was puzzling over a curious fact: as he was dragged through the door, he could have sworn he saw the girl look at him with a silent message of sympathy in her eyes.
Maggie followed the broad back down the gangway at San Stefano Maggiore with a turmoil of emotions churning around inside. She couldn’t remember feeling like this since her father died.
141
Yeah, okay, so she preferred a man to be a man. She’d even admit that she found snuffing a creep who deserved it, like, a turn-on. But hurting a kid…
They said her mother died of a heart attack, ignoring the bruise on her cheek and the blood running down her face from the split lip, but Maggie knew that she’d at last given up the struggle, the struggle to keep the six children together, to feed and clothe them, to shield them from the worst brutalities of the drunken bum who was their father.
Then, after her pitifully skinny body had been carried from the too-small tenement apartment and they’d been to the gabbled funeral at Our Lady of Dolours and seen her dropped into the cold clay, he’d expected life to go on just as before, with Maggie taking her place; expecting her to take her place in every sense, it seemed, until a well-placed knee confounded his expectations and earned her a beating the like of which she’d never known. When she went to the store the next morning, her neighbours turned their faces away. That’s how bad it was.
He left her alone after that, but continued to beat up on the kids at the slightest excuse – or none at all if he was drunk enough; and she’d learnt what her mother had suffered, not being able to protect them; hearing them sobbing themselves into a tormented sleep and knowing she was powerless to stop him.
142
Maggie Pulacki followed Max Vilmio into the cool of the high-ceilinged drawing room. Standing quite still with his eyes closed, as if he’d been waiting all day, was Nico, his face a mask of pain.
Max turned to her. ‘Get lost,’ he said; and as she dosed the door behind her, she heard him say, ‘Well? Is it done?’
She leant against the door post, remembering the last day, one of those unbearably hot New York days when the people walk through the haze with a redness in their eyes and a rage in their bellies, when he’d downed a full bottle of rot-gut whisky on top of his usual, and he was threatening little Tommy – eight years old, for Christ’s sake – with the carving knife… Would he have used it? And if she hadn’t pushed him away from the kid would he still have fallen out of the window?
When the Doctor saw the old manuscript it seemed to sway him towards the idea that the real information they were seeking – how the crack in the barrier was first started
– did indeed lie in the earlier period.
‘This is almost certainly the document the alchemist was using to make his unsuccessful elixir,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite sure what the spell refers to, but it might turn out that we could use it ourselves.’
143
‘Oh, come on, Doctor! Magic spells? That’s not the way the world wags, now is it?’
‘Not the way your world wags – or mine