Doctor Who_ The Awakening Part 3

Hutchinson leaned down over the table towards her. 'I shouldn't let that bother you, Miss Hampden,' he sneered.

'As the local magistrate, I shall find myself quite innocent.'

There was something so abnormal about the intense brilliance in his eyes, and so sardonic in his complacent half-smile, that Jane shuddered. For a moment she felt physically sick. This man held all the aces. There was no stopping him.

The barn door was immovable. Tegan pushed and pulled and grunted; she kicked it and bruised her toes, and stretched up to wrench at a padlock high on the door until her nails split, but it would not open. When it had slammed shut, it had jammed tight.

Panting with the effort, she gave up the struggle. She needed to rest for a moment, and toppled forward to lean her head against the door, The wood smelled of old age and creosote and pitch. She gasped for breath, thankful at least that the thief who had stolen her handbag was not shut in here with her, in the darkness. He had simply disappeared - it was probably he who had slammed the door shut on her, on his way out.

But even as she breathed that sigh of relief she felt that there was something something in here. Something odd. in here. Something odd.

As she leaned with her forehead pressed against the musty wood, she heard a strange, unidentifiable sound. It was not a single note, but a continuing long, low hum which grew louder and stronger and gradually became a pressure which hurt her ears She stiffened. There was a tingling sensation in her spine and she felt a sudden apprehension that something weird was building up in the gloom behind her.

She hardly dared to look round. But when she did she breathed another sigh of relief, for there was nothing to he seen. There was just the whirring sound in the darkness.

But then -- she stiffened again -- she saw something in the gloom up above her, where she had supposed the gallery to be. She strained her eyes to see, and suddenly discovered a light dancing around up there in the dark.

Now the noise in Tegan's ears began to change in pitch.

It rose and crescendoed and abruptly shattered like gla.s.s, breaking into tinkling fragments of sound that sparkled like droplets in the still air of the barn. At the same time the light became more and more brilliant, and then it too broke, dividing and dividing over and over until there was a constantly changing kaleidoscope of points of light up there. They whirled below the invisible rafters, now spreading, now contracting, accompanied always by the tinkling noise.

Backed up against the door, Tegan stared upwards at these flickering movements that were both light and sound together. They fascinated and frightened her at the same time, and she felt her body begin to tremble so violently that she had to press into the rough timber to steady herself Then she gasped: something was happening inside inside the lights. the lights.

Between the pinpoints of brilliance ceaselessly dancing and vibrating a glow began to emerge - still, solid and white, it was spreading and forming into a kind of shape ...

Tegan felt a scream rise in her throat as the glow steadied into the distinct shape of the torso of a man - a pale, grey-white, headless body suspended up there in the darkness under the roof. Ribs protruded from its gaunt, naked chest; two arms hung bare and limp at the sides and folds of sacking were loosely draped about its waist. Its skin was as pallid as the skin of a corpse.

The noise had changed once more, dropping again to a deep roar that seemed to surround the glowing torso like a force holding it together. The lights which still played about it moved less violently now. But suddenly everything activated again: the lights whirled and leaped about and the droplets of sound sparkled. The torso laded from sight.

It was replaced by a disembodied head.

'Oh no,' Tegan whimpered. She pressed back against the door, as if she was trying to burrow down inside it.

It was the head of a very old man, and it stared down at her with cold, dead eyes. Long white hair drooped lankly about a pallid, sad, tired-looking face, whose skin seemed all wrinkled up, folded and waxen and dead as paper.

The face looked down at her. Tegan was sure it was looking at her. 'Oh, no!' she shrieked, for this was more than real flesh and blood could stand. She hammered on the heavy door. 'Come on!' she yelled at it as the lights flashed above her and the humming sound returned and swelled loud enough to burst her ears.

Desperately she looked back. The face was growing larger by the second. And it was moving ... forward and down, swooping towards her and looming now just above her head. She shrieked again and pushed and pounded the door, and suddenly it moved.

But it moved the wrong way. It was moving an impossible way, inwards, against the force of her pus.h.i.+ng, thrust by an outside agency that was stronger than she was.

Her breath gagged in her throat; the door jerked and swung inwards and swept her off her feet.

Tegan rolled across the floor among rotting vegetables and sacking and straw, and saw the door swing wide open.

Sunlight flooded through, and then a shadow fell across her and a hand gripped her shoulder; she screamed again as a figure leaned down and another face swooped and loomed down low above hers.

'Oh! It's you!' It was Turlough's face. Relief surged through Tegan as he took her arm and helped her to her feet.

'What's happening?' Turlough asked. puzzled to see her so distraught.

Tegan could not stop trembling. Nervously she looked around the barn and up towards the gallery. She saw nothing there was nothing there to see now. There were no lights, no sounds, no torso or dead, staring face. How could she possibly explain to Turlough?

'Later,' she muttered. 'Let's get away from here first.'

And to Turlough's astonishment she ran from the barn as though a ghost was after her.

It was blazing hot in the streets of the village. The sun flared out of a hard blue sky as the Doctor hurried about the roads and lanes in search of Tegan and Turlough. He was surprised at the lack of human life anywhere. The place seemed deserted; there was neither movement nor any noise, other than the constant barrage of birdsong which seemed to surround the village like an invisible sound barrier.

It felt as though the s.h.i.+mmering heat had taken all living things into suspension and the whole village was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. The Doctor felt this atmosphere of suspense keenly, and he was getting worrled. He had looked everywhere in the village: up and down side streets and alleyways, running across gardens bright with flowers and past scattered, white-painted cottages, some of them thatched, and barns with red-tiled roofs and stone walls.

Every building cast a hard black shadow across the gra.s.s verges that had burned brown during weeks of drought.

The Doctor had searched among the shadows and in the sunlight, and had found no sign at all of his companions.

Now, crossing another deserted street, he turned to look back the way he had come. 'Turlough! Tegan!' he called again. A moment later he was lying in the road.

The beggarman had seemed to come from nowhere. He was just there, suddenly looming out of a roadside shadow straight at the Doctor and catching him off balance with a shoulder charge that sent him sprawling. As he fell, the Doctor saw him lurch away up the street with the rolling, limping gait of the figure they had seen in the crypt; the man clutched some sort of coa.r.s.ely woven cloth about his head and shoulders, and there was something terribly wrong with his face. The Doctor winced: it looked like a stricken landscape in the aftermath of an explosion.

But what made the Doctor really catch his breath was the sight of Tegan's handbag held tightly against the man's chest as he ran. He pulled himself to his feet and shouted, 'Wait! Come back!'

The man turned sideways, out of the street into a lane.

Sprinting his fastest, the Doctor was at the spot within seconds, yet what he saw was an empty lane, stretching away between high walls. It led far into the distance, green and deserted except for a tiny, black, diminis.h.i.+ng figure almost at the horizon. The figure was going like the wind.

For a moment the Doctor doubted the evidence of his own eyes. 'How could he get so far?' he muttered, and set off running again.

While the Doctor was chasing the half-blind, limping beggar, another part of Little Hodcombe was stirring from its lethargy.

Four hors.e.m.e.n were approaching the village Cross, a worn stone Celtic monument set upon a hexagonal plinth at a spot where four roadways converged. Here, village and countryside met together in a conglomeration of thatched houses, orchards, and a telephone box, stone and asphalt and trees and gra.s.s all wilting under the unyielding sun.

Ben Wolsey, Joseph Willow and the two troopers who cantered behind them sweated inside their Civil War battledress. They too were searching for Tegan and, like the Doctor, they were having no success at all.

When they arrived at the telephone box Wolsey reined his big grey horse to a halt and looked about him in frustration. 'We'll never find her,' he exclaimed. 'She could be anywhere.'

Willow cantered back. 'We should ask for more men,' he said.

'Hutchinson won't allow it. He's got everyone guarding the perimeter.'

Willow frowned. In a voice hard-edged with anger he shouted, 'We're wasting our time with only four of us searching. If he wants her so badly, he's got to find more men!'

Wolsey pointed to the telephone box. The paint gleamed as scarlet as blood in the glaring light. 'Ring him,'

he suggested.

Willow shook his head and wheeled his horse around, ready to set off again. 'We're not allowed. I'll have to go back to the house.'

'All right,' Wolsey agreed. He turned to the two troopers, who had also stopped and were patiently waiting for instructions. 'Carry on searching, you two,' he ordered them. 'Try Verney's cottage again. She might be there.'

With a noisy clatter of sparking hooves on the hard surface of the roadway, the troopers galloped away. Wolsey turned back to Willow. 'I'll come with you,' he said.

Wearily they set off again, in the direction of Wolsey's farmhouse.

Very warily, the Doctor entered the church. He was still in pursuit of the limping man and was sure he had run into the church -- although somehow being sure no longer seemed suflicient reason to believe things in Little Hodcombe, because hardly anything was as it appeared to be at first sight.

That had happened again now: although he would have sworn that the man was in here, there was no sign of him.

The Doctor came straight into the nave through a door in the back wall, behind the rubble-strewn pews; the nave stretched out before him, quiet and still and empty.

'Hallo!' he called. The sound echoed among the pillared archways and sped to the sanctuary and the high, stained gla.s.s window at the other end of the church, facing him. 'I saw you enter,' he called again, but he might as well have been talking to himself.

Something in here tickled his throat and made him want to cough. He looked around, and sniffed. There was a strangely acrid smell which hadn't been here earlier. It mingled with the scents of rubble and damp and centuries of dust. He sniffed again, trying to identify it.

'All I want is Tegan's bag!' he shouted. 'What have you done with her? I know you can hear me!' Again his voice echoed and died, and the place was silent as a grave once more.

No, it wasn't.

For a moment the Doctor thought his ears were deceiving him, as out of the silence there grew, softly at first, a strange amalgamation of sounds without apparent cause. There was a trumpet, he decided ... no, there was more than one, there were several trumpets calling, and there were drums beating softly, and other noises, all of them low and far away.

Curious to identify their source, the Doctor walked carefully up the nave. The sounds seemed to be louder here, and they were growing louder by the moment as if they were coming closer. Now he could hear harness jingling, and horses neighing and whinnying, and the heat of their galloping hooves; and men were shouting and cursing. He sniffed .. that smell was stronger now - and suddenly he knew what it was.

'Gunpowder!' he hissed. Worried, he looked for traces of smoke, and noticed a thin white trail warming out of the crack in the wall, which seemed to be larger now than before. Whether that was the cause or not, gunpowder spoke to the Doctor of violence, and so did the noises.

These were becoming very violent indeed: guns fired, cannon pounded, swords clashed. The nave reverberated with the uproar, and it began to vibrate inside the Doctor's head.

Trumpets, guns, harness, drums, shouting the yelling and screaming of men in mortal agony all the clamour of a desperate battle a.s.sailed the Doctors ears. They raced around the church and echoed back and beat his senses like physical blows, and became a hurricane of noise that roared around and blew down across him until he buckled under the weight of it, his knees bending and his face twisting with pain.

The Doctor jammed his hands over his cars. The pressure made him cry out, and his cry was added to the rest and it too distorted and echoed and swelled and boomeranged back at him. The plunging sounds destroyed his balance, and he could no longer stand upright. He reeled, and spun round and round in the severest pain.

Finally he managed to stagger into a pew beside the pulpit. He half sat, half lay there, holding his ears. And the wall next to the pulpit, beside his head, split asunder.

The noise was like a pistol shot. It cracked through the Doctor's inner ear and killed every other sound. Not far from his face, the plaster on the wall bucked outwards. In astonishment the Doctor watched it widen to a hole, watched masonry come tumbling and dust fly as the wall was punched wand harried and pulverised by something forcing its way out from the inside.

Suddenly the Doctor realised that the other racket had stopped altogether; the reverberations of battle had died away as mysteriously as they had risen. Everything in the church was still and silent again, and there was a tense atmosphere, as if all attention was focussed on this bulging and breaking of the wall. The Doctor gasped as something probed jerkily through the spreading gap towards hirn.

Fingers.

Fingers pus.h.i.+ng and sc.r.a.ping and bleeding, yanking at the wall and tearing out the plaster with Feverish, desperate movements. Suddenly the fingers became a hand, and then the hand was clear of the hole and an arm followed, and then a shoulder was through, and all at once the wall gave way with a clatter, and a body burst out of it in a shower of plaster and dust.

4.

Of Psychic Things.

Utterly perplexed by this development, the Doctor simply gaped as the limbs bursting out of the wall finally became still. A youth stood beside him, coughing and spluttering and beating dust. out of his clothes.

These were genuine seventeenth-century garments a loose leather jerkin that had seen much better days, a s.h.i.+rt of coa.r.s.e grey homespun cloth, ragged trousers and heavy buckled shoes. The body inside them was short and stocky, topped by a round moon face wearing a truculent expression. He was filthy dirty. His fingers bled from their efforts at battwring masonry and the light dazzled his eyes.

He rocked on his heels, spitting grime from his mouth, and looked belligerently about him.

When his eyes focussed on the astonished Doctor, they opened wide in surprise. 'What took 'ee zo long?' he demanded, in a thick, antiquated burr. 'I bin in thur for ages!' Then he noticed the Doctor's clothes, and his voice trailed away in awe.

Now the Doctor found his voice. 'Who are you?' he asked, giving what he hoped was a rea.s.suring smile.

Evidently it wasn't, because the youth retreated with a worried and uncertain look on his face. The Doctor offered him an even more confident smile, and held out his hand.

'I'm the Doctor,' he said.

The youth withdrew some more. He backed right away from the Doctor's hand. 'Doctor?' he asked. 'Doctor bain't a proper name.' Then he c.o.c.ked his head on one side and said in a proud voice, 'Will Chandler be a proper name.'

Encouraged, the Doctor moved towards him. The effect was an immediate return to belligerence: startled and aggressive, the youth stooped and picked up a stone to defend himself. He had his back against the wall, and could go no further.

'Get 'ee off me,' he demanded.

'I won't hurt you.'

'I won't let 'ee.'

The Doctor paused. He regarded this Will Chandler very carefully, and with some uncertainty. After all, he reflected, it isn't every day that you see somebody come out of a wall. His mind raced, forming theories and as readily discarding them. There was one idea, however, which would not go away; it steadily gained conviction in the Doctor's mind, even though he knew it was impossible.

Suddenly Will Chandler's aggression left him; he winced and held his right hand tenderly. 'My hand's hurtin',' he muttered, all at once feeling sorry for himself.

The Doctor held out his left hand. 'Show me,' he said firmly.

Tentatively, Will raised his arm. The Doctor took hold of it gently and felt it all over, not just for breaks or other injuries but to confirm for himself that this youth was actually real real. The arm was solid enough, and warm, and the flesh yielded under his fingers. Apart from grazing and bruising, it was intact.

The Doctor nodded towards the shattered wall. 'What were you doing in there?'

'It's a priest hole, ain't it?' Will said truculently. 'I hid from fightin'.'

The Doctor frowned. 'What fighting?'

The question revealed ignorance of large proportions, seemingly, or even stupidity, for Will's face puckered up into a disbelieving smile and he withdrew his arm from the Doctor's hand.

'What fightin'? Ho, wur you been, then?' There was genuine puzzlement in his voice.