The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [52]
After he’d managed to convince Maggie Pulacki that he wasn’t the butler, he told them everything that the Doctor 183
had said about Max. They both were rather taken aback and he couldn’t help noticing that she went a trifle green about the gills.
Not surprising, really. If she was shacking up with the fellow, which seemed pretty obvious, it must be something of a shock to find out that he was not so far off his five hundredth birthday. Like going to bed with your great great granddad.
‘Now look here, chaps,’ he said, having gathered them all together for a council of war, ‘I’ve no idea what the fellow’s after – something to do with all this ghostly mumbo-jumbo the Doctor’s been on about, I expect – best left alone, all that sort of thing, if you ask me.
‘Do you mind?’ he added to Roberto who was lightly strumming an accompaniment to Mario’s quavery attempt to mutate the ropey Elvis impression he’d been teaching him.
‘I read you, man. Like, shoot with the soldier-speak.
Okay?’
‘Right on,’ said Uncle Mario.
The Brigadier sighed. ‘Anyway, this place was built to withstand a siege. He’s not going to have enough men to attack us as they did in the old days, with battering rams and siege engines and such. He can’t shoot through the outer walls even with an armour-piercing rifle. So provided we 184
keep out of his line of fire, the only thing we have to worry about is his getting over the outer wall; and even then, he’d have a tough job getting into the house. The whole point of a Norman keep is that it’s impregnable.’
‘What about the dead guy’s little party tricks?’ said Maggie, who’d looked even sicker when she realized that her boyfriend’s right-hand man was more of a right-hand spook.
‘Ah, yes. The joker in the pack, this monk chap who can walk through walls. Well, I’ve got a gun.’
‘So have I,’ said Uncle Mario, waving his blunderbuss in the air. ‘Boom, boom.’
‘Please, Uncle,’ said the Brigadier, wincing.
‘So the first thing to do,’ he went on when the protesting Mario had been divested of his weapon, which he had already reloaded, ‘is to close the outer door or gate or whatever you call it.’
‘Can’t,’ said Mario, grumpily, with Umberto shaking his head synchronously behind him. ‘Is stuck. Like Jack Robinson’s thumb in his pie. Stuck for hundred, two hundred year.’ And the Brigadier felt that if he’d known the words, he’d have added ‘So there!’
As soon as the turmoil in the hall subsided, Sarah set off in search of the Doctor. It was almost certain, she decided, 185
that Maximilian had shot off to his alchemist’s lair, so off she went down the interminable corridors, tracing her way through the busy life of the castle. Nobody took much notice of her, except when she took the wrong turning and found herself in a room full of women busy sewing and had to retreat under a barrage of medieval cat-calls and lewd suggestions.
At last she recognized where she was: in the last long corridor leading to a vaulted lobby much like the others but with a spiral staircase in the corner which led to the family rooms and up to the new clock tower (for it must have been built quite recently, she realized). This was very near the walled courtyard with its colonnades where the alchemist hung out. As she approached however she became aware, as Jeremy had earlier (or should that be later?), that someone was following her. At this side of the building, far away from the servants’ quarters, there weren’t many people about.
Now what? she thought. People were always knocking each other off, weren’t they, round about now? Borgias and Medicis and people. One thing she could certainly do without was a stiletto in the back.
Almost without thinking, she repeated the strategy which had worked before, slipping into the gloom of one of the turnings