The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [88]
While this was happening, the noise of the sea and the wind and even the sound of Vilmio’s voice was drowned by an angry whooping such as one might expect from a distressed whale.
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It was just as well that Jeremy drew back against the wall, for on the very spot where a moment before he had been teetering with fear, not knowing which way was best to run for it, the TARDIS appeared, and moments later the Doctor emerged with Sarah.
At this, the derisive laughter died away, but the contemptuous amusement could still be heard in Vilmio’s voice. ‘Welcome back, Doctor. What a pity that you have arrived too late.’
He turned to the Brigadier. ‘Why don’t you pull the trigger, Mr Lethbridge-Stewart?’
The Brigadier, who up to this moment had kept the absurd old weapon trained on Vilmio, lowered it until it was pointing to the ground. ‘I am no murderer,’ he said.
‘Spoken like a true Brit,’ said Vilmio.
The clock in the castle tower began to strike. At the first chime, the expression on Max Vilmio’s face changed. The sardonic sneer disappeared and was replaced by an inhuman blankness that yet was alive and ultimately malevolent.
To Jeremy, who’d woken up screaming the night after his first visit to the Zoo, it was like nothing so much as the gleam in the eye of the alligator, as it slips into the water to seize its unsuspecting prey.
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Vilmio turned and walked towards the edge of the cliff, into the air and through the archway of light. As it started to fade, the Doctor spoke at last.
‘This is not the end, Maximilian Vilmius,’ he cried in a ringing voice; and as the luminous bow melted into the night sky, the watchers saw a hand raised as if in mocking acceptance of the Doctor’s challenge; but when they looked to see how he was taking it, they saw that he had already turned away and was gazing at the stars above the castle tower.
‘Orobouros,’ he murmured.
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Twenty-Four
‘Who would you say was in all probability the biggest nincompoop on San Stefano Minore?’ asked the Doctor, twirling up a handsome bundle of spaghetti. ‘Certainly the biggest at this table.’
Sarah could see that Jeremy was trying to make out whether they were all looking at him, while apparently keeping his eyes firmly fixed on his plate. Poor old Jeremy.
‘If it was an open race,’ said the Brigadier, ‘I dare say we’d all stand a chance of a place. Why do you ask?’
It had taken quite a while for things to get back to a sort of normal. It was only the Doctor’s insistence that there was no immediate danger (‘He’s just come into his kingdom.
He’ll want to enjoy it for a while.’), together with the opportune arrival of Roberto’s announcement of ‘Chow, folks’ (which caused a certain amount of misunderstanding as at least half the company was under the impression that he was saying goodbye), that caused them at last to simmer down. Even Umberto, shocked to find that his kitchen had been invaded, was prevailed upon to partake of a plate of the pasta (with olive oil, garlic and parmesan, quite Sarah’s favourite), though insisting that he would eat it in the kitchen.
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‘Clancy’s comet,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s been in the papers, on the box, interviews with the Astronomer Royal and all that sort of thing, for at least a week. And I failed to make the – ah – the connection.’ As he said the word, he lifted an eyebrow at Sarah.
‘In 1661,’ he went on, ‘Theodore Clancy was going through the records, and he realized that a comet was due that year. It had shown up every one hundred and fifty-seven years since there’d been any sort of records at all; and yet nobody had realized that it was the same one. It was the famous “Star in the West”, for instance (going round the wrong way, you see), which was supposed to signify the end of the world in 1033 – a thousand years after the crucifixion was thought to have taken place.
‘And I missed it! Even with all the clues – “under the wing of the dragon” – “the flight of