57 - The Crooked World

VIP免费

2024-12-08 0 0 654.87KB 202 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The people of the Crooked World lead an idyllic existence.

Take Streaky Bacon, for example. This jovial farmer wants nothing more

from life than a huge blunderbuss, with which he can blast away at his

crop-stealing nemesis. And then there’s Angel Falls, a racing driver with a

string of victories to her name. Sure, her trusted guardian might

occasionally put on a mask and menace her for her prize money, but that’s

just life, right? And for Jasper the cat, nothing could be more pleasant

than a nice, long nap in his kitchen – so long as that darn mouse doesn’t

jam his tail into the plug socket again.

But somebody is about to shatter all those lives. Somebody is about to

change everything – and it’s possible, that no one on the Crooked World

will ever be happy again.

The Doctor’s TARDIS is about to arrive. And when it does. . .

That’s all folks!

This is another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth Doctor.

The Crooked World

Steve Lyons

Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd

Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT

First published 2002

Steve Lyons 2002

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format c

BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

ISBN 0 563 53856 2

Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright c

BBC 2002

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of

Chatham

Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton

Contents

Prologue 4

Chapter One 8

Chapter Two 16

Chapter Three 25

Chapter Four 34

Chapter Five 42

Chapter Six 51

Chapter Seven 59

Chapter Eight 68

Chapter Nine 77

Chapter Ten 86

Chapter Eleven 95

Chapter Twelve 104

Chapter Thirteen 113

Chapter Fourteen 121

Chapter Fifteen 130

Chapter Sixteen 139

Chapter Seventeen 147

Chapter Eighteen 155

Chapter Nineteen 164

Chapter Twenty 173

Chapter Twenty-one 182

Chapter Twenty-two 191

About the Author 199

Prologue

The sun smiled down upon the Crooked World, but the pig farmer felt as

if it were laughing at him. He was hot, even in his light khaki jacket and

cap, and sweat made his skin prickle. But he wouldn’t let the discomfort

distract him.

He crept through the cornﬁeld, clutching his blunderbuss and keeping

his head low. The stalks whipped at his face and his bare legs, and he

pushed them aside with a grimace.

The enemy was only a few yards ahead of him now. He couldn’t see it

yet, but he knew where it was. It had foolishly stuck its head into view, a

few minutes earlier, over the ripe, yellow ears of corn. He was stealthily

approaching its last known position.

The enemy. It had become an obsession. But what else could he do,

when it threatened his livelihood? The insolent creature had attacked his

crops, causing untold damage. It had made him its target and had pestered

him for months. No, for years. No, for as long as the pig farmer could

remember. He had tried, untold times, to capture or shoot it, to put a halt

to its mischief. But the creature was too wily and it always outsmarted him.

He had begun to feel that he couldn’t rest, couldn’t enjoy life, couldn’t do

anything, until he had dealt with it, until he was rid of the enemy for good.

Sometimes, he wondered what he would do then. When it was gone.

But the pig farmer didn’t let such bleak thoughts worry him. He had a

purpose and he was close, so close, to achieving it.

He was almost upon the enemy. He could hear it pecking away, taking

what was his again. He brought up the blunderbuss and squinted along

its sights as he took the last few steps towards it and the ﬁnal cornstalks

between them parted.

At the ﬁrst sight of its distinctive purple plumage, he ﬁred.

The recoil blew him backwards. He landed on his fat hindquarters, but

he was too excited to worry about the indignity. Purple feathers ﬂuttered

around him, and he sneezed as one of them tickled his round nose. He

scrambled back up and brushed the stalks aside again, to inspect his victim.

A spindly, twisted ﬁgure stood before him, a few feathers clinging piti-

fully to its charred frame. With a cry of ‘Yaa-hoo!’ the pig farmer threw

himself into the air and sang: ‘I shot the Whatchamacallit, I shot the

Whatchamacallit!’ Then he ran up to the frazzled creature and reached

out to touch it, to ensure that this was all real, that it wasn’t a dream.

This would teach it, he thought. It wouldn’t dare to come back after

this.

But, even as he brushed against it, the Whatchamacallit collapsed. The

pig farmer wailed in fright, thinking that perhaps he’d done something

terrible – hurt the enemy far worse than he had ever intended – but the

fright mutated into anger as he realised the truth.

Lying before him now was a familiar shape: his own lovingly con-

structed scarecrow, with its battered old overcoat, to which somebody –

or something – had glued purple feathers haphazardly. Its leering pumpkin

head had rolled off its shoulders, and its empty eyes mocked him. Hang-

ing around the scarecrow’s neck, by a string, was a white cardboard sign,

which had been inscribed with thick black marker pen. It read: ‘Boo!’

The pig farmer threw his blunderbuss to the ground and jumped up and

down on top of it, waving his front prehensile trotters in fury.

The enemy chose that moment to stick its orange beak through the corn-

stalks beside him. It cocked its head, regarded him with an inquisitive smile

and blinked twice. The pig farmer performed an angry double take, eyes

bugging out of their sockets, and scrabbled to retrieve his weapon. The

Whatchamacallit turned and bolted through the ﬁeld in a ﬂurry of purple,

leaving the momentary imprint of itself upon the air.

The farmer, his pink face darkening, charged after it.

He had been right about the sun. It threw back its big yellow head, and

its mouth split into a huge, open grin as it vibrated with mirth.

It was very deﬁnitely laughing at him.

By the time the pig farmer had stumbled out of the cornﬁeld and into the

adjoining desert, the Whatchamacallit had disappeared again. But it would

be back. It would return to taunt him, as it always did. And the farmer

would be ready for it, as he always was.

It was the work of just seconds to dig a deep pit and to cover it over

with sand-coloured tarpaulin. Then the farmer took a bull’s-eye lantern,

unscrewed its clear bulb and replaced it with a pink one. He buried the

lantern in a mound of sand, carefully angling it so that its beam of light

shone upon the glass of an upright mirror, which he produced from his

pocket and placed at one end of the pit. It was a funhouse mirror, of course.

His plan was simple. Nobody knew what the Whatchamacallit was: it

deﬁed any sort of classiﬁcation, and was certainly unique. But, when it

spotted its reﬂection – compressed by the distorting glass and washed in

the lantern’s light so as to make it resemble a slender, pink-hued copy of

itself – it would doubtless mistake it for a hitherto-undiscovered female of

its species. It would rush towards it, made careless by desire, and fall into

the pit trap.

Chortling at his own ﬁendishness, the pig farmer hid behind a conve-

nient giant rock, to watch. Seconds later, the Whatchamacallit loped into

view on its long, springy legs.

It spotted its reﬂection, gaped for a moment and then ran towards the

mirror, as the farmer had intended. But as the creature bounded eagerly

across the tarpaulin, it failed to disturb it. The farmer rubbed his disbeliev-

ing eyes, and his jaw dropped open in astonishment.

When the Whatchamacallit’s pink reﬂection stepped out of the mirror

and the two bird-creatures began to smooch with their beaks, little hearts

popping into existence around their heads, the pig farmer went beyond as-

tonishment and into crimson-faced fury. He leapt out of hiding, discharging

his blunderbuss three times and blowing himself further backwards with

each detonation. The Whatchamacallit and its impossible mate ﬂed, their

splayed feet falling in unison, and the pig farmer raced after them.

He was halfway across the sand-coloured tarpaulin before he realised

what he had done.

He cornered the Whatchamacallit, at last, at the top of a deep canyon. He

stalked towards it, his blunderbuss raised, keeping it ﬁrmly in his sights.

With the cliff edge behind it, it had nowhere to run, and its knees produced

a most gratifying chattering sound as they knocked together. The creature

twisted its long neck around; from somewhere behind its back it plucked a

sign, which read: ‘D-D-Don’t Shoot!’ But the farmer had no desire to show

it mercy. It had taken him many minutes to climb out of his sand pit: he

was all hot and bothered, and just plain cross at his goldarn cheating foe.

His trotter tightened on the trigger.

And then the air was split by a sound like none he had ever heard before.

The air shimmered blue before his eyes, as something slowly took on

solid form. He realised that this was the source of the terrible groaning,

and he wondered just how the Whatchamacallit had managed to pull off

this latest trick.

By the time he had regained his composure and thought to return his at-

tention to the enemy, it was too late. An oblong, blue cabinet had appeared

between them. ‘Police Public Call Box’ read the sign above its doors, in un-

usually neat lettering, and the pig farmer wondered if the Sheriff himself

had intervened in their dispute.

He dismissed the question, as the Whatchamacallit poked its head

around the nearest corner of the box and blew a cheeky raspberry in his

direction.

The farmer pursued it, round and round the obstruction, round and

round – and even, at one point, craftily turning back on himself and run-

ning in the opposite direction – but he only tired himself out, unable to

clap eyes on the Whatchamacallit again. At least, not until a splayed foot

reached down from the top of the blue box and knocked his cap from his

bald, pink head. He jerked his gun up, but the enemy had already vanished

again.

He whirled around at the sound of movement, and leapt back in shock

at the sight of two human beings behind him.

The ﬁrst man was a tall, gangly ﬁgure, with a thin face and a pointed

nose, and untidy brown hair. He saw the pig farmer, and his grey eyes

widened. ‘Doctor. . . ?’

His companion stepped forward, easing the ﬁrst man aside to get a bet-

ter look. He had inquisitive eyes and an innocent expression, and he wore a

green velvet frock coat and a loosely-tied cravat, which made him look like

a cross between a dashing romantic hero and a vagabond in mismatched

clothing.

The pig farmer didn’t trust either of the new arrivals. At ﬁrst he thought

they must be strangers. But they couldn’t be, as he was positive that he

knew all the strangers on the Crooked World already. These people were

stranger still.

The second man grinned, his expressive eyebrows riding up his fore-

head. He stepped forward and extended a hand of friendship.

And the frightened pig ﬁred his blunderbuss, at point-blank range, and

pumped a cloud of buckshot into the man’s chest and stomach.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ThepeopleoftheCrookedWorldleadanidyllicexistence.TakeStreakyBacon,forexample.Thisjovialfarmerwantsnothingmorefromlifethanahugeblunderbuss,withwhichhecanblastawayathiscrop-stealingnemesis.Andthenthere'sAngelFalls,aracingdriverwithastringofvictoriestohername.Sure,hertrustedguardianmightoccasionallyput...

展开>> 收起<<

57 - The Crooked World.pdf

共202页,预览11页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

57 - The Crooked World

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: