The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [91]
In scattered groups spread across the ground, there were fiends of every conceivable sort milling about uncertainly, like a herd of cattle waiting to be led to the slaughter-house, with a sizeable number pushing and shoving as if to force their way through the crack of light which had been their own gateway to N-Space.
The Doctor seized her by the hand and drew her up above them. ‘They won’t bother us this time,’ he said.
‘They’ve got other concerns.’
As he led the way through the heavy air, the miasma of decay which rose from below made Sarah feel quite sick; but she made herself look down to see what she could of the fiends.
There were large ones like, but horribly unlike, the ones they’d met before, yet almost benevolent to the eye in spite of their unnaturally distorted features, so far were they from the most evil of their fellows. Of these, from which Sarah 317
turned away her face in disgust and horror, the nastiest was undoubtedly the rotting carcase of a diseased beast with the face of a crazed hyena, half eaten away by grubs as thick as a thumb, which yet contrived to crawl inexorably forward chewing its suppurating way through anything it found in its path.
But perhaps the most disturbing of all were the small ones, the creepy-crawlies some six inches long which squirmed and slid and chewed unspeakable things in foetid heaps of slime, yet without the blind anonymity of the maggot or the slug, for each one had a pair or more of unwinking eyes somewhere along its body.
‘This is the result of the takeover by our friend Maximilian,’ said the Doctor, dropping back to fly companionably alongside her.
Suddenly Sarah wanted to giggle. She was irresistibly reminded of the bike rides she used to take into the uplands behind the suburb where she’d been brought up; the two of them, Jenny and her, chatting away as they rode along side by side, revelling in the freedom of the country lanes and the intensity of their thirteen-year‐old friendship. Maybe they could stop off for a Coke later. She must suggest it to the Doctor.
But suddenly she didn’t feel like giggling any more.
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The thought of Jenny, dear Jenny with her absurd enthusiasms and escapades (like the time she turned up on Speech Day dressed impeccably in full school uniform but with a mini-skirt shorter than Mary Quant’s), reminded her so much of Louisa that all her grief came back.
She thrust it away and forced herself to listen.
‘The N-Forms are gathering to be ready for the grand breakthrough into our world. He’s started to establish his power in N-Space, clearly, but at the moment it would seem that there’s more confusion than anything.’
How could he be so calm about it?
‘Where are we going?’ said Sarah.
‘If I’m not very much mistaken, we’re going to visit a king,’ the Doctor replied.
‘A king?’ This wasn’t what she’d expected at all.
‘You’ve got to remember, he’s fundamentally from the middle ages, our Max. He’s steeped in the attitudes of the period. He wants power – and who had the most power back then?’
‘A rhetorical question is one that expects no answer,’
said Sarah, noticing that the herds of creatures below them seemed to be thinning out a bit.
The Doctor laughed. ‘I’d lay odds that he wasn’t even christened Maximilian. He named himself, after the Emperor. And it’s no accident that he ended up in the world 319
of the Mafia, where the Godfather is nothing more nor less than the king of his Family, with all the trappings of the feudal monarch except his robes and his crown.’
Sarah was hardly listening. For the landscape was changing. The featureless plain was becoming more craggy and broken. Right ahead she could see mountain ranges and rocky valleys, mighty waterfalls and cascading torrents. No trees graced the slopes, no meadows the bottoms of the chasms; all was as lifeless as the flatland they were leaving and twice as threatening. Even the sky was darkening to