The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [94]
There were largish ones and smallish ones; fierce ones and disgusting ones; ones that could tear out a throat with the swipe of a claw and ones that would be content to gnaw at the guts of a half-dead victim. None was likely to improve the condition of the still bodies inside the wire framework.
Mario was still not worried. If anything he was bubbling inside with a sort of glee: the sort of glee which knew that these presumptuous beasts were about to get the surprise of their lives.
He slowly put out his hand and picked up his blunderbuss. None of the fiends seemed to notice, bar the 327
lupine creature that had woken him, which put its head on one side like a puzzled puppy and whimpered.
He raised the gun to his shoulder, aimed it at the crawling, snarling mass and pulled the trigger.
With a ferocious bang, the charge flew from the muzzle at point blank range – and went straight through the target and out the other side, clattering against the TARDIS
beyond and falling to the ground.
But the attack did have one effect. The Doctor and Sarah were quite forgotten. Every fiend in sight swung its head towards the sound; and every one started to move inexorably in Mario’s direction.
Up to this moment Mario had not been afraid of the piccoli diaboli, feeling rather affectionate towards them than otherwise. But now, as they advanced on him, he felt a tremor of fear.
He glanced over his shoulder. The man-wolf had taken up a position between him and the door. There was no escape; nowhere to run to.
The fear vanished. Quite an adventure this was. For several years now, every time he went to sleep at night, he’d expected that when the morning came he’d wake up dead. It would be interesting to be conscious.
The vanguard, the more nimble of the grotesque company, slowly moved nearer, while their awkward 328
brothers were still clambering off the wire cage. Would they eat him? Or was he about to be possessed?
He closed his eyes.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes.
He was surrounded by a ring of staring creatures, those with recognizable faces all having the puzzled expression he had already seen on the face of the wolf.
For a long moment they looked at him as if bemused by his appearance; and he looked at them with mild curiosity.
Then a cow-like creature (at the front end, its tail being more like a mammoth earthworm) shambled away on its only two legs, to be followed one by one by its fellows.
Feeling curiously cheated, Mario watched them all vanish round the comer, some floating, some laboriously mounting the heap of stones from the ruined wall. Should he run through and warn Alistair that they were on their way?
Perhaps he would in a little while.
He poured himself another glass of wine and picked up his book. Presently his eyes closed.
Alistair would find out for himself soon enough.
The difficulty with N-Space, Sarah was thinking, as the Doctor walked down the hillside, was that you never knew from one moment to the next what the rules were supposed 329
to be. Why was he walking, for Pete’s sake? They’d flown all the way here, hadn’t they? And how in Heaven’s name (and maybe that was right too), how was he going to fight a duel with Maximilian when he didn’t come up to his knee?
But even as she thought this, her mind did the same shimmer as before, and she realized that the Doctor, who had reached the foot of the hill, was just as tall as the great figure at the other end of the valley. It wasn’t that she watched him grow, or that he changed in the wink of an eye, rather that, once it had happened, it had always been so; and of course, that was rubbish.
And where were all the people in their N-Bodies? And all the fiends and such? And the cave of everlasting fire?
The whole bang shooting match had gone. Pffft! But not pffft! at all. They just weren’t there. Had they ever been