The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [79]
But worse was to come.
Opening both arms towards Maggie, as though he were offering to embrace her, he called in a loud voice, ‘In the name of Astaroth; in the name of Beelzebub; in the name and might of Lucifer: I command thee to come to me!’
Closing his eyes, he started to mutter in a tone too low for the Brigadier to catch what he was saying, though the occasional word sounded like Latin.
Maggie was standing as if mesmerized. Her head was thrown back as it had been when her incubus had first entered her, but there was no ecstasy; rather was she consumed with grief. Her face was pale, her mouth tight shut, as though to hold her sorrow to herself; a tear glinted from one cheek.
A serpentine flame extended from her towards the waiting Vilmio, weaving from side to side like a cobra tasting the air with its tongue. It reached his body and 275
steadied; and with a sound like the rush of a mighty wind, the fiend passed from her body into his. For a moment it was as if the furnace doors of Hell itself had opened; but then the light died and it seemed that night had come; the blackest night in all eternity.
As his eyes recovered from the glare, the Brigadier realized that, overtaken by the onrush of events in which he’d had no part, he was standing with the stun-gun hanging uselessly in his hand; and Max was in plain view, albeit masked to an extent by the gathering darkness.
Maggie had come awake to the appalling danger that she was in. Looking vainly from side to side, whimpering,
‘Help me! Help me!’, she stood against the castle wall, totally exposed to Max’s malevolence.
The Brigadier raised the gun and fired at the shadowy figure by the wrecked flying machine. For the first time, there was no effect whatsoever. He lowered the gun with a sickening feeling of despair. All he could do was watch helplessly.
Suddenly Maggie’s nerve went completely and she was rushing towards the gatehouse for an impossible refuge: the gate which was bolted against all comers with a beam which had taken three men to lift.
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But before she could even reach it, the inevitable happened. The darkness was lit up once more; a scream was cut short; and Maggie Pulacki’s life, that had so often been lived in violence, ended in the violence of total annihilation.
Sarah bent down to see if the key was in the lock. If it was, she could maybe do the old trick of… It wasn’t.
How could she have been such a dozy dim-wit as to let a kid like Louisa fool her like that? Well, let her get on with it, if that was what she wanted.
Then she remembered what the Doctor had said: the fate of the world could depend on her; and she felt even more angry.
Her? she thought. For Pete’s sake, when did she volunteer to be responsible for what was going on? It was like saying that she ought to pull down the Berlin wall single-handed or sort out apartheid or something.
But on the other hand, she was the one who’d stopped the clock and all – and she had begged the Doctor to let her do something about Louisa getting to be a ghost and….
Well, never mind the whys and the wherefores, she thought grumpily, what was she going to do now?
She gave an automatic glance at her bare left wrist and was rewarded by another flash of irritation. She didn’t even 277
know what time it was – but she’d better get a shift on because it must be well on the way to midnight.
The simplest course, and probably the most efficacious in the long run, was to get out somehow and tell the Doctor
– yes, and Louisa’s precious Powly. Together they’d soon put a stop to her nonsense, send the boy packing and generally sort things out; and Maximilian would stay definitively walled up for as long as the stones stood on top of one another; and that could be for another thousand years. It was too late for the softly softly approach.
As she started for the window with a vague idea of climbing out, her eye was caught by the letter Louisa had been writing. It was leaning against the candlestick on the writing table; and quite clearly, it was addressed to Sarah