The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [43]
So naturally, the Barone and the Doctor warmed to each other; and the Doctor was given carte blanche to pursue his investigations into the natural history of ghosts.
He had been using the probe to quantify the traces of N-Power remaining in the gap from which had fallen the stone which nearly killed him. He was about to return from 151
the gallery to the great hall below when Sarah ran in, calling for him.
‘I’m up here,’ he called back and started to descend the precipitous stone staircase.
This was why Sarah not only saw him fall headlong down the twenty-foot drop but saw quite clearly that he was pushed.
The fact that Sarah had once before seen the Doctor fall
– and a lot further than twenty feet – made no difference.
Time seemed to speed up and slow down at the same time.
In the instant of his fall she saw him spreadeagled at the bottom of the stairs, neck broken, limbs grotesquely awry; but the slow motion fact of it was that as he took off from the top step he curled into a forward somersault; it took him gracefully halfway down, to touch with the toe of one shoe; and so to repeat the pattern, landing in a run.
Lightly coming to a standstill by Sarah’s side, he immediately swung round to look up at the gallery. ‘I was pushed,’ he said.
‘You were! You were!’ she cried, starting forward. He put up a hand to stop her.
‘Don’t waste your time,’ he said. ‘He’s well away by now. We haven’t a hope of finding out who it was.’
152
‘I know who it was,’ she said passionately. ‘It was the person Jeremy said that Max Vilmio had sent to kill you.
But how could he be here? How could he have –’
But the Doctor was looking at her as if – and she couldn’t resist thinking it when she was remembering later –
as if he had seen a ghost. ‘What did you say his name was?’
he said.
‘What? Vilmio, do you mean?’
‘Did you call him Max Vilmio?’
‘Yes. That’s his name, apparently. Max.’
‘Of course. How stupid of me.’
The Doctor turned his back on her and walked straight up to the bottom of the stairs, where he seemed to be examining closely the carving of an unprepossessing bullock which was part of the decoration of the side wall which formed the banister.
Sarah walked over to him. ‘Doctor? What is it?’
He looked up and through her. It was nearly half a minute before his eyes came into focus. ‘Yes, it all fits,’ he said.
‘Doctor, please! What did I say?’
At last he looked her in the eye again. ‘Don’t you remember? When we were in the sixteenth century. What did the lady of the house say was the name of the sorcerer, as she called him?’
153
It seemed so long ago. She struggled to remember. ‘I don’t think she said – no, wait a minute! She said something about him having the same name as the Emperor, didn’t she?’
‘Indeed she did. A German name, she said. Well, do you know who was the only Emperor about at that time?
Maximilian the First of the Holy Roman Empire. That’s who. The alchemist’s name was Maximilian – Max!’
Now it was Sarah’s turn to go into a brown study. What was it the Doctor said the alchemist had been after? No, it was the man himself, when he made the potion that killed that poor man. He called it the elixir vitae – the elixir of life.
So he was searching for earthly immortality; and who was to say that he didn’t find it later and survive until the twentieth century? And what’s more…!
She looked up at the Doctor. ‘That’s why he sent the man to knock you off. When he saw you with the Brigadier, he recognized you from the time he saw you in the sixteenth century. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘And I’ll tell you another thing! The man who pushed you. It must have been that man he killed, the ghost he enslaved. The man I saw was wearing a monk’s robe just like him; and how could he have followed us here if he wasn’t a ghost or something?’
154
That seemed to settle it in the Doctor’s mind.