Doctor Who: The Awakening (7 page)

Jane shook her head. ‘
You
might not, Ben. I’m not so sure about them.’

Sir George closed the subject. He brought the conversation to an abrupt end by marching to the table and snatching up his riding gloves. ‘The tradition must continue,’ he said, in a tone that was quiet, authoritative and brooked no opposition. It held something very like awe – even reverence – as he looked from one to the other of than and said, ‘Something is coming to our village.

Something very wonderful, and strange.’

Then he cleared a path for himself between Wolsey and Willow and left the room. They watched him go, Cavalier and Roundhead in an all too serious War Game. Sir George’s last remark hung cryptically in the air.

Wolsey, puzzled, said, ‘We must find Tegan,’ and made for the door.

‘You’re so gullible, Ben,’ Jane shouted. ‘You do anything he says!’ If she had hoped that would stop him, she was disappointed. Wolsey ignored her, and went out without a word.

Willow was left alone at last with this nuisance of a schoolteacher, who was using every possible opportunity to try to spoil the fun. Uneasily Jane saw how his lips tightened now, and the deliberate way he took off his gloves. As he looked at her, his irritation changed to fury.

Jane saw it happen. She saw the cloud move across his eyes and felt fear tingle the small of her back. Joseph Willow was a man on a short fuse, and the fuse was already burning. ‘Something is coming to our village,’ Sir George had said, but so far as Jane was concerned it was already here, and showing in Willow’s face – a kind of madness.

Suddenly she wanted to get away from him. ‘Right,’ she said, marching towards the door. ‘I’m going to the police.

I’ll soon put a stop to this.’

But Willow thrust himself between her and the door.

Roughly he pushed her away. ‘Shut up!’ he shouted as she staggered backwards. ‘Just be grateful it’s the stranger who is to he Queen of the May – it so easily could have been you!’

Jane recovered her balance and with all her strength slapped his face. Willow’s cheeks reddened. His eyes filled with hatred. For a moment Jane thought he was going to strike her back, but instead he smiled, a cold smile that was laden with threat. ‘It still might be you,’ he said, ‘if we don’t find her.’

And with a triumphant smirk Joseph Willow, iron-shirted Sergeant-at-arms to General Sir George Hutchinson, turned on his heel and left the room. He slammed the door shut behind him.

Before Jane could follow, she heard a bolt being drawn and a key turned in the lock. Willow had made her a prisoner.

‘There’s been a confusion in time. Somehow, 1984 has become linked with 1613.’

Sitting in a pew in the church, crouched forward eagerly with his feet on the back of the pew in front of him, the Doctor was thinking out loud. His mind raced as he focussed his thoughts on Will Chandler’s mysterious appearance and all the other strange events which had showered on them since their arrival in Little Hodcombe.

He was drawing on all his vast store of knowledge and experience -- and still coming up with blanks.

Tegan and Turlough, now recovered from their flight, sat in the pews too and waited for the Doctor to come up with some answers. Will Chandler lay flat out at the Doctor’s side; exhausted by his experience and bewildered by the Doctor’s theories, he had taken refuge in unconsciousness and sprawled on the unyielding seat, fast asleep.

Turlough looked at him, and considered the Doctor’s theory. A confusion in time? That left half the problems unanswered. ‘What about the apparitions?’ he asked.

The Doctor looked at him closely, watching for his reaction to the next part of his theory. ‘Psychic projections,’ he said.

Tegan drew in her breath. She wasn’t keen on that. It was a spooky idea and she preferred rational, practical explanations. But after her experience in the barn, and with twentieth-century men pretending they were in the seventeenth century, and seventeenth-century youths suddenly appearing in the twentieth century, it was no wonder the Doctor called time ‘confused’. It wasn’t the only one, she reflected. Yet she shuddered at the possibility which the Doctor was suggesting, and tried to find a hole in the argutncnt. ‘What about the man we saw when we arrived?’ she protested. ‘He was real enough.’

‘He was still a psychic projection,’ the Doctor insisted.

‘But with substance’

Tegan frowned. Talking of psychic things was getting close to talking about ghosts, and nothing in that line would really surprise her now, after what she had seen.

Turlough grew more enthusiastic the more he considered the idea. He got up and wandered about, trying to absorb the implications and corning to terms with them.

He rubbed his hands together and said suddenly, ‘Matter projected from the past? But that would require enormous energy.’

The Doctor nodded. He had an answer to that one too –

so simple and so outrageous that it took Tegan’s breath away: ‘An alien power source.’

In an English country village? Here, at the home of her grandfather? Every instinct Tegan possessed protested against this suggestion – and yet she felt in her heart that it might be correct. The Doctor was usually right about things like that.

‘What about Will?’ she asked, in a quieter tone. The Doctor leaned across to peer at the filthy face, torn clothes and battered hands of the peacefully sleeping youth. He smiled. ‘A projection, too. And at the moment, a benign one.’

Turlough, in his wanderings, had reached the crack in the wall. He stopped in front of it and pointed at the now gaping split. ‘This crack has got larger!’ he announced.

The Doctor had already noticed. ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘Ominous, isn’t it?’ He turned to Tegan, who was looking dismal, and slapped her shoulder encouragingly. ‘I know,’

he said, ‘so is the fact that your grandfather has disappeared. I think it’s time I sought some answers.’

As a first, peculiar step in that direction, he produced a coin and juggled it behind his back, slipping it with great speed from hand to hand. Watched curiously by Tegan, he then held out his two clenched fists in front of him and, with the most intense concentration, weighed one against the other.

‘Where will you look?’ Tegan asked.

Making a sudden decision, the Doctor flipped open the fingers of his left hand. It was empty. He gave a disappointed sigh and opened his right hand. There was the coin, nestling in his palm. The decision was made.

‘The village,’ he said.

‘You’re always so scientific,’ Tegan responded, in a voice edged with sarcasm.

Once his mind was made up the Doctor never wasted time, and now he jumped to his feet and tapped the sleeping Will on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Will,’ he said briskly, ‘you’re coming with me.’

‘What about us?’ Tegan stood up, ready to go with them.

The Doctor shook his head. ‘You’ll be safer in the TARDIS. And don’t argue,’ he commanded her, as she opened her mouth to protest. Shouting, ‘Will!’ over his shoulder, he set off down the nave at a smart pace. Will, still heavy with sleep, stumbled down the aisle and followed him out of the church, blearily rubbing his eyes.

Turlough watched them go, with a resigned smile. He could feel Tegan’s frustration, but their instructions had been too precise to misinterpret on purpose.

‘You heard the Doctor,’ he said, pointing the way to the TARDIS.

Tegan knew there was no alternative but to submit, and with a sigh she turned with Turlough towards the steps to the crypt.

When they had gone, a lump of masonry fell away from the edge of the crack in the wall. It made the gap a little wider still, but nothing could be seen in there – only a dark void which looked as black and deep as outer space.

Almost everything about the churchyard was green. Inside the green fringe of willow trees about the perimeter, the green grass was badly overgrown, tufted and choking the weatherbeaten old gravestones. Many of these were crumbling away, and others were themselves greened over with a growth of moss and lichen. The rest loomed grey-white above the crowding vegetation.

It was peaceful here as the Doctor led Will Chandler towards a row of, gravestones. They stood silent as a row of speechless old men, still and warm in the hot sunshine.

Yet around them the air was restlessly throbbing; there was an incessant cawing of rooks and a constant chattering of smaller birds, moving unseen among the flowering grasses and cow parsley and about their hiding places in the willow trees.

Will, too, felt restless. He didn’t like this place, and what he saw in it he didn’t understand. The implications terrified him. He wanted to run away but the Doctor wouldn’t allow it – even now he was pointing at another worn gravestone for Will to look at. The youth crouched obediently down in the grass and pushed a clump of red sorrel aside, so that he could look at the stone properly.

Some lettering was still visible beneath the clinging moss. There were figures – a number ... Will touched it with his fingers to convince himself that it was real, and the breath sobbed out of him. A date had been carved into the stone: ‘1850’ it said. Yet when Will had shut himself into the priest hole, to escape from the battle that had raged around the church – only hours ago, it seemed – the year was 1643!

‘This ain’t possible,’ he breathed. He was scared to think what it meant if it was true. His eyes misted over. The Doctor was walking along the other side of the row of gravestones. He watched Will’s reactions carefully. ‘Look at the others,’ he suggested in a gentle, sympathetic voice.

Will stood up. With a last glance at that unbelievable date he moved further down the row, observing the worn, ancient monuments – and every one, thrusting as silently out of the grass as if it was growing there, told a similar story. They were all from the nineteenth century. Will grew more and more agitated; he moved faster and faster until he was running, away from these gravestones and across the path around the church. His feet crunched the gravel. He found another memorial tablet, containing another awesome date, set low down into the wall of the church itself. He crouched down and pretended to examine it.

In reality he was hiding from the Doctor the tears in his eyes. Will wanted to blub like a baby.

Not far away from where he was crouching, the Doctor noticed a small door in the church wall. He tried the handle. The door gave a little. His fingers tightened around the latch, and he pushed harder. With a fall of dust and a creaking noise that echoed hollowly inside, the door opened.

At that moment there was a sound of hooves approaching. A mounted trooper rode around the corner of the church. As soon as the Doctor saw him he pushed the door wide open and hissed, ‘Will! Come in here!’

Instantly, as the Doctor disappeared inside, Will left the memorial tablet and ran towards the open door. A second trooper appeared close behind the first; they were walking their horses through the green churchyard. Will’s curiosity overcame his fear and he ducked down behind a buttress to watch their approach. This was a foolhardy thing to do, because already the troopers were almost upon him, and now he dared not move again. ,Just as he thought he must be discovered, the Doctor’s hand reached out of the open doorway and yanked him inside.

The Doctor closed the door without making a sound.

The horsemen rode on by, quite oblivious of the fact that their quarry was only inches away.

As the Doctor and Will Chandler were going through that side door, not far away from them Tegan and Turlough were entering the TARDIS.

Turlough was in front, and he hurried through the console room without looking around him; but as soon as she was inside the TARDIS Tegan held back, feeling instinctively that something was wrong. There was a noise in the console room, a deep, reverberating tone topped by scattered tinkling sounds which exactly repeated the noises which had afflicted her in the barn. Bracing herself, she entered the console room – and there, high upon the wall behind the door, she saw lights dancing.

They circled around each other, shimmering and constantly on the move, and the noise which accompanied them grew steadily stronger. Tegan stood rooted to the spot again.

Turlough had heard the noises too. Now he came slowly back into the console room, and stared up at this ghostly manifestation. ‘We’re too late,’ he murmured.

The sound of his voice brought Tegan back to her senses. ‘We must tell the Doctor!’ she shouted, and ran, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the horrors which lights like these brought with them.

Turlough, without Tegan’s experience, hesitated. As she had been earlier, he was held spellbound by these flickering, interweaving stars. Then discretion overcame curiosity and he followed Tegan – leaving the lights, and whatever might come out of them, in charge of the TARDIS.

As soon as they were sure that the horsemen were not coming back, the Doctor and Will Chandler began to explore their new surroundings. They had entered the church vestry, a small, bare chamber with stone walls and a flagged floor, which was flooded with light from two arched, latticed windows high up in the walls. Below one of these lay the recumbent stone effigy of a medieval knight.

Will bent over the statue, curious to see whether it was the same effigy which had lain here in 1643. The Doctor, meanwhile. had discovered a large tombstone set among the stone flags of the floor. Intrigued, he ran his fingers over the worn lettering and the outline of a figure which had been scratched into its surface.

‘Strange,’ be muttered to himself. Then he looked across at the lost lad he had found in the church. ‘Will!’ he called softly, ‘come and see.’

Will Chandler’s head was already buzzing fit to burst with inexplicable wonders. Now, as he shuffled across to the Doctor, his jacket flapping loose, and crouched down beside him, he was prepared for another surprise.

But this one stunned him. His expression changed in quick succession from one of frank, boyish curiosity to awe and then to craven terror. He backed off in a hurry, and whimpered.

‘Will?’ the Doctor said gently, watching him closely and measuring his reactions. ‘What’s the matter? Hmmm?’ He paused for a moment, and then with great deliberation and care asked him, ‘Will ... what happened in 1643?’