The adjudicator struck Ruth with the gun. But Patrick looked over
his shoulder and saw the fantom, and with only a moment’s dithering
jumped over the rail into the upper circle. it wasn’t much of a drop
and he was quickly on his feet and running. Looking up, her head
ringing from the adjudicator’s blow, she saw him disappear out of the
door, only to reappear a moment later, followed by the adjudicator’s
human guards. Again he jumped over the rail to the dress circle below.
Managing to dodging past the fantom there, he disappeared through a
door.
She saw him appear in a box, right at the top of the theatre. He
slammed the door and tried to wedge something against it, but it would
only stop the fantom for a few seconds. He scrambled up onto one of the
seats and looked round wildly for an escape route. Ruth, from her
vantage point on the stage, saw the other fantom in the gallery just the
other side of the wall to the box, waiting, in case he tried to swing
round. She saw him look down. It was a sheer drop below him, all the
way to the orchestra pit.
Patrick looked behind him. The fantom was already smashing through
the door. He climbed onto the padded edge of the box and, balancing
there precariously, looked down at the stage.
Ruth was standing again on the wall, looking down, down, into the
deep narrow dale behind Peveril Castle. Behind her a fantom was
lumbering towards her. She felt the cold breeze and the drizzle in her
face as she decided that a world where the adjudicator was in charge was
not worth living in. She gulped-
And was back on the stage, looking up at Patrick. The scream had
frozen in her throat. Behind him the fantom smashed through the door
and reached out towards him. He jumped-
He just caught the chandelier.
The fantoms, blindly following, both jumped after him. They collided
in mid-air- Ruth would never forget the sound of clashing stone- and
fell, smashing the seats and floor in their ruin.
Patrick swung high above, clinging on for dear life. Ruth remembered
the strain in her arms as she had hung from the tree, hearing the
fantom crack into a thousand pieces on the valley floor below her. She
knew he would not be able to hold on long. She could see him struggling
to get a foothold.
And then, as if his wriggling had dislodged something, Ruth saw to
her horror the whole thing begin to swing from side to side, it’s arc
increasing. As it reached the end of one long swing towards the stage
something gave, and it began to fall, carried by the momentum of the
swing. Again she wanted to scream, but nothing came out. She just saw
Patrick’s terrified face as the chandelier plummeted towards the stage.
She pulled away from the adjudicator as it smashed into a thousand
pieces around them. Pushing bits of metal and glass out of the way, she
knelt beside Patrick. One leg was at an angle no leg should be at, and
he was not moving.
“Patrick?” she said. There was no response, no movement.
He must be dead, Ruth thought heavily. Her heart, that should have
been rejoicing at the destruction of the fantoms, was as heavy as lead.
Patrick couldn’t have survived that. And- that’s how these stories had
to end: with a death. The fantoms didn’t count, they were just
minions. It had to be her, or one of us. It’s the only way it could
end.
“It should have been me that died here, not you,” she whispered,
bending over him and taking his limp hand in hers. “I was her chosen
sacrifice, her Iolanthe. I’m sorry, Patrick, so sorry.”
A quiet, hesitant and somehow fuzzy voice spoke from the tangled mass
of human and metal wreckage. “The Lord Chancellor loved Iolanthe. I
reckon he’d have taken her place, if he could.”
Ruth’s heart leapt. “Patrick!” she said. His eyes opened, and he looked at her.
“You always said I always bounced,” he said. Then his eyes closed
again with a little sigh. Ruth’s heart almost stopped. She felt for a
pulse, and was relieved to find it. And he was breathing. He was
unconscious, but alive!
For now at least.
Ruth heard a the click of shoes behind her, and turned round. The
adjudicator was behind her. “All of you,” she said, looking around at
the others, frozen where they stood, “and I’m the only one who is
armed.”
She aimed her gun past Ruth, at Patrick.
Tom had reappeared on the stage. He tried to move stealthily towards her.
“Before they reach me, I would have time to kill each of you,” the
adjudicator said calmly. “So I suggest you keep still.” Tom looked an
apology at Ruth.
By Ruth’s feet, covered in debris from the shattered chandelier, was
the sword that the Fairy Queen had been going to kill Iolanthe with.
She picked it up and moved between the woman and the unconscious boy.
Deliberately but shaking just a little, she pointed the sword towards
the adjudicator. For a moment the woman looked taken aback, then she
laughed.
“Oh, come now,” the woman said. “You know I’ll use this, and I won’t
miss. You don’t stand a chance, even if you could use that thing, and
you never would.”
“What, never?” Ruth said, trying to keep her voice steady. She met the woman’s eyes.
“I could put a bullet in your brain before you'd even touched me.”
“But it might distract you long enough for it to be the last thing you do.”
“You’d never dare,” the adjudicator hissed. She swung the pistol so
that it was aimed directly at Ruth’s head. Almost without thinking,
Ruth raised the sword, and it met the pistol with a dull clang of metal
meeting metal, and scraped along it until it met resistance. The
adjudicator staggered backwards, anger and surprise mingled in her
expression. The gun dropped from her bloodstained hand with a cry as
her foot found nothing behind it and she fell backwards into the
orchestra pit.
Ruth pulled the sword back, dazedly noticing the blood on the blade.
She walked, slowly and carefully, towards the edge of the stage and
looked down into the pit. It seemed a long way down. Amid the ruin of
the fantoms, chandelier and various bits of furniture, the body of the
adjudicator lay, a somehow small heap of twisted cloth. It was not
moving.
“Hardly ever,” Ruth whispered.
Epilogue
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