The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [85]
‘Plungbolls?’ said Sarah faintly.
‘Of course, you don’t have them here, do you? Little furry creatures, about the size of your thumbnail. They live up in the snow country, but if they sense any warmth they just attach themselves to it. Mountaineers have been found literally smothered by thousands of them. Anyway –’
‘How do you get rid of them?’
‘You used to be able to get an anti-plungboll spray. If you remembered to use it, they couldn’t attach themselves.
They just fell off, squeaking a bit.’
‘I think that’s sad,’ said Sarah.
‘Anyway,’ the Doctor continued, ‘in one of the high valleys, we came to a river that had burst its banks. The 296
water seemed more like a lake. You could just see the other shore if you looked really hard.
‘My teacher took one look, dropped his bag, pulled off his robes and plunged in. He was obviously going to swim over.
‘Then he realized that I wasn’t following him. He turned and called out, “What are you waiting for?” But I just stood there, with my backpack and my climbing irons and my ice axe and my sleeping-bag and my foodsack – the lot. “Just leave it all,” he said. “But what about the other side?” I asked. “Trust me,” he said.
‘So I stripped to the buff and followed him. It was great.
Like having a cold beer after a game of squatchtin –’
Sarah opened her mouth; and closed it again.
‘– or like coming home after you’ve been away for months and months.’ The Doctor started to laugh.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘The old rogue knew all the time. He lived just the other side. We landed in his front garden.’
Sarah was laughing now.
‘Louisa won’t be a ghost forever,’ said the Doctor.
‘Is only poor old cadger, after all,’ murmured Mario behind his hand to the Brigadier, when he discovered that Umberto, so far from having gone to the kitchen to get some 297
food as the council of war had assumed (and hoped), was lying on the floor under the big dining table, fast asleep.
Roberto having volunteered to go on a food recce (‘Ain’t no one gonna keep this baby from the chuck-wagon, man’), the desultory discussion on the best way to deal with Max continued.
Although the moon was by now quite high in the sky –
it was well past eleven o’clock – he was still sitting by the pump with his hands over his eyes as immobile as a statue.
Mario felt that the game was over. ‘Is blind man buffer, now,’ he said. The Brigadier was not so sure. He had instituted a strict rota to keep an eye on him from the big window, and had restricted the inside lighting to one lamp.
Jeremy, the present watch-keeper, was busy trying to revivify the glorious and rare feelings he had experienced as the crack shot of the castello, overlaid as they were by his memory of being the filling in a sandwich of gun-toting thugs and a monster from Hell (or something of the sort; the Doctor didn’t seem to believe in Hell as such).
Then again, everybody was so effusive in their praise of the old man – you didn’t even have to aim a blunderbuss, for Pete’s sake! – that they seemed to have completely forgotten their earlier hero.
Anybody with any nous would take cover when dozens of machine-guns opened fire, he thought once more; it was 298
only common sense. And a blunderbuss! Hardly state of the art, was it? And as for the fiend thingy, look what happened to Maggie.
He was so lost in the circling thoughts of his self-pity, with a tinge of regret for what might have been if there’d been time to get to know Maggie better, and a soupçon of guilt for remembering somebody who’d been vaporized in the way he was remembering her, that he didn’t notice that Max was moving until he was actually on his feet.
At his urgent call, he was joined by the Brigadier and his uncle. The three of them watched while the big man stretched his arms high, as though he’d awoken from a profound sleep, turned, and walked slowly towards the keep.
‘I get gun,’ said Mario.
‘Wait,’ said the Brigadier.
Vilmio had stopped well short of the door.