Doctor Who: The Awakening (6 page)

‘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 glass 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 assailed 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 pushing and scraping 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

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 shirt of coarse 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 reassuring 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 cocked 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
. 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.

The Doctor felt that his idea was gaining ground, and credulity. Casually he put his hands into his pockets, then leaned down towards Will’s face. ‘What year is it?’ he asked him.

Will reacted with a broad grin. ‘I knows that un,’ he said in a pleased voice, as if he was answering a teacher’s question in school. But despite his confidence he hesitated, walking around the Doctor and getting his brain into gear, making sure he got this right. ‘Year’s ... zixteen hunnerd an’ forty ... three!’ He finished with a triumphant flourish, but his hand was hurting again and he sat down in a pew and nursed it, grunting with the pain.

‘Sixteen hundred and forty three, eh?’ The Doctor looked at Will Chandler with much sympathy but, as yet, not a lot of understanding. His idea had been valid, after all. He was not really surprised, for each of the events which had piled one on top of the other since they arrived in Little Hodcombe seemed stranger and more inexplicable than the last. This one, though, was a real puzzle; what was happening in little Hodcombe was arning our to be much more complex and intriguing than the Doctor had first surmised.

Struck by a sudden thought, Will gave the Doctor an apprehensive look. ‘Is battle done?’ he asked. His voice shaking; he sat back and waited for the answer, terrified of what it might be.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor answered gently, reassuring him and wiping away his dread. ‘Yes, Will. Battle’s done.’

But the calming effect of his words was shattered by the door being thrown open wide with a bang that echoed the length and breadth of the church. Whimpering with fright, Will dived behind a pew as Tegan and Turlough came tumbling up the nave.

They were so out of breath with running that when they reached the Doctor they could hardly speak. The Doctor, delighted to see them both safe and well, looked, at Will Chandler out of the corner of his eye and said cryptically,

‘You’re just in time.’

Misunderstanding him, Tegan cried out in frustration,

‘Just in time? We almost didn’t make it!’

‘We have to get out of here!’ Turlough’s chest was heaving for breath, and his voice betrayed the stress he was suffering.

Recalling the incident in the barn made Tegan shudder: how could she put that into words? ‘There’s something very strange going on,’ she said simply.

The Doctor, however, seemed to understand without the need for words. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said sympathetically.

At that moment, out of the corner of his eye Turlough saw Will peeping at them over the top of a pew. ‘Who is that?’ he asked, in a tone which betrayed extreme distaste at the sight of that grubby urchin face.

Tegan looked, saw Will’s clothes and drew in her breath sharply, but refrained from comment. The Doctor merely smiled at Will. ‘Will Chandler?’ he asked, for confirmation. Will nodded, without taking his eyes off Tegan and Turlough.

‘Where did he come from?’ Tegan asked.

‘Ah, well.’ the Doctor said laconically. He smiled and shrugged. ‘That’s something we’re going to have to talk about ...’

In the seventeenth-century parlour of Ben Wolsey’s farmhouse, Sir George Hutchinson, country squire and, while the War Game lasted, Cavalier General Extraordinary, stood in front of the fire and casually played with the spongy, black, metallically-shining ball. He kept kneading it in his fingers and examining it with neverending fascination.

From her position beside the window, Jane watched him with growing anger. She was about to have another go at his complacent arrogance when raised voices and heavy footsteps in the next room announced the arrival of Ben Wolsey and Joseph Willow.

As soon as the door opened and they marched in, Sir George turned to them eagerly. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded.

Wolsey raised his visor.

‘We can’t find her,’ he

admitted. ‘We’ll need more men.’

Sir George was furious. With reddening face and narrowed eyes, his manner was suddenly extremely threatening, even towards the big farmer. He snapped, ‘I want Tegan, not excuses, Wolsey.’

Ben Wolsey, taken aback, frowned with surprise at his tone. Jane was incensed. ‘Don’t listen to him, Ben,’ she cried.

Sir George turned to her now. His eyes blazed and it was Jane’s turn to be shocked by the vehemence of his manner and the anger behind his words. ‘Miss Hampden! You’re beginning to bore me with your constant bleating!’ His attitude was contemptuous in the extreme. He stood there in his finery and glared at her, his hand ceaselessly working at the silver-sheered substance; for a moment Jane thought he was going to throw it at her.

The Sergeant intervened to support his General. ‘She doesn’t understand,’ Willow leered. ‘We must have our Queen of the May.’

Queen of the May! Jane winced. Andrew Verney had told her once how Little Hodcomhe used to treat its May Queen. The story came back to her, and the picture his words had conjured up in her imagination returned with it.

It had made her feel sick then, and it made her tremble now. As if to reinforce her fears, Sir George fairly shouted,

‘Precisely!’ He looked at her with a gleaming smile and said, ‘Think of it as a resurrection of an old tradition.’

Jane felt sick again. ‘I know the way you plan to celebrate it,’ she cried. ‘I know the custom of this village. I know what happens to a May Queen at the end of her reign!’

Ben Wolsey looked genuinely surprised. His gentle, ruddy, farmer’s face was as innocent as a baby’s. ‘We’re not going to harm her,’ he protested.