The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [73]
Now all the guns had been stopped bar those in the distance behind him, where Umberto was stationed.
Down the steps; along the top of the wall past the victorious Maggie at a rush; two at a time up the stairs to the summit of the east tower. He could see Umberto on the farther wall; he seemed to be belabouring the unlucky fellow at the top of his ladder with a rolling pin.
As the Brigadier had predicted, his comrades on the ground had stopped firing now, but he could still see them quite clearly, crouching in the undergrowth, guns at the ready. It was a simple matter to deal with them as effectively as the others.
This time he was near enough to appreciate the full effect of the stun-gun: the impact of the charge flung them to the ground, where they lay spreadeagled; and he knew from his previous experience of the guns that they would lie there unconscious for something like twenty-four hours.
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A movement caught his eye. Some way behind the two recumbent bodies a giant figure stood, almost invisible in the shadows.
It could only be Max. Here was an opportunity to finish the whole thing for good and all. The Brigadier raised the gun and lined up the sights on the very centre of the dark shape.
‘Brigadier!’
It was Maggie who was shrieking at him. He followed the direction of her frantically flapping hand.
As soon as he turned he realized the extent of his mistake. He should have known at once. The attack on the walls had only been a diversion.
Even as the thought flashed through his mind, he was raising the gun to blow away the flying figure of the monk, who had approached unnoticed from the supposedly unassailable north side of the castle.
But he was too late. Before he had time to pull the trigger, Nico was in the shelter of the gatehouse, safe behind the three-foot‐thick stone wall.
Already, the Brigadier could hear the great beam which held the gate being lifted from its cradle by the preternatural strength of the ghost.
Max Vilmio had won the battle.
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Twenty
The Brigadier had heard many a loud and frightening noise in his varied and active life. Probably the worst had been very near its beginning when, as a small boy in the public shelter in the middle of Eaton Square during the 1940 blitz on London, he had been woken by an explosion and a rumbling crash which felt as if the world was being tom apart; and had emerged with his mother the next morning to find that their home was nothing but a pile of rubble.
But even this noise was nothing but a squib compared with the noise which now brought his head whipping round towards the rear of the castle. A thunder-crack and a boom which shook the thick stone wall on which he stood as if it were lath and plaster; a whinnying shriek which at the same time was deeper than the roar of many lions; the impact of a gargantuan body landing on the trembling earth; all heralded the arrival of the largest and most fearsome of the fiends he had as yet beheld.
Covered in a flickering glow like flame, in form it was not unlike a horse, some thirty feet high at the shoulder –
ninety hands, an insane voice gabbled in the Brigadier’s mind – with flailing hooves the size of a dustbin lid. But its face, with one wild eye flaring scarlet in the middle of its brow, and the savage tearing teeth of a carnivore in a jaw as 257
long as a man’s body, was very far from those of the gentle creatures the Brigadier had so often known as friends.
As the sound of its cry echoed round the walls of the castello, the Brigadier heard another noise: the gate balk dropping back into its place, as a shriek of terror came from the gatehouse.
Again the creature sounded its fearful call and leaped forward in a spring which took it halfway down the bailey yard. Another leap and its head dived into the gatehouse.
Nico’s shrieks filled the air as the great beast pulled him from his useless sanctuary. Tossing him up high, like a killer whale playing with a baby seal, it caught him again in the clamp of its jaws and briefly chewed before tossing him up again to be caught and