Doctor Who: The Awakening (2 page)

Yet the point came on, propelled by horses’ hooves and rider’s shouts. She began to run.

‘Aaargh!’ the trooper screamed. His horse tossed its head; its nostrils flared and its hooves bit into the ground and brought up clouds of dust. ‘There’s no sense in this,’

the logical side of, Jane’s mind was protesting, but at the same time her instinct for self-preservation was working flat out, and with only a split second to spare she threw herself against a wall, pressing her hody into its rough stone.

The lance swept harmlessly past her and the hooves pounded by. She was momentarily aware of a stern, steel-helmeted face glaring at her, and then it, too, passed on.

‘Don’t be so stupid!’ she screamed after the rider. ‘You’ll kill somebody!’

Her chest heaving, Jane moved away from the wall to look for the other riders. She tried to control her temper and the trembling which had suddenly afflicted her frame.

As her eyes searched the yard the sunlight dazzled them, the heat shimmered at her from sky and earth and walls, and everything seemed unread Everything, that is, except the sharp glistening steel point of the lance, which, unbelievably, was coming back at her.

The trooper, after he had passed her by the first time, had raised the lance and turned it back into a banner, and galloped to the far side of the farmyard. Roughly he wheeled his horse around and steadied it, and himself.

Then he yelled, lowered the banner and charged again.

The bewilderment and distress Jane was feeling chilled suddenly to the realisation that this man really was trying to harm her. The hooves thundered and once more the fiercely pointed lance thrust through the air of the farmyard towards her. Drawing in her breath sharply, Jane ran again. This time she threw herself into the open doorway of a barn. She dived inside just as lance, horse and rider swept over the spot where she had been standing.

It was cool in the barn. It was dark, too, after the brilliant sunshine outside, although there were shafts of light where the sun pierced through cracks in roof and wall. It smelt cool and musty, with that peculiar sour-sweet smell that old barns have, where animals have lain and produce has been stored for hundreds of years.

It was indeed a very old barn, so old it was beginning to crumble The interior was ramshackle in the extreme: the stone-flagged floor was strewn with barrels, fodder, oddments of machinery, bales of hay, drums of oil, cabbages, turnips and potatoes and all the bits and pieces of tackle that a farmer had found useful once and might do so again one day. Jane had often thought that Ben Wolsey knew less than half of what was stored in this barn, either strewn across the broad, dark floor or stacked on the upper level, an unsafe gallery reached by a set of open, rickety wooden steps.

Now, as the trooper charged past the door and she tumbled inside, that thick, musty smell made her nose itch and the instant darkness blinded her eyes. Bewildered and trembling, she staggered over to a spot where some sacks were strewn on the floor beside at heap of vegetables. She sat down on the sacks, in a narrow pool of sunlight. Here she propped her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands and tried to gather her senses together. Outside she could hear the heavy prancing and scraping of horses’

hooves, which meant that her assailants were still around.

They world come in here at any moment. She tried to think what to do, but before any constructive idea occurred to her a black shadow reached out of the darkness and swooped over her body. Startled again, Jane looked up –

and gasped at the sight of a huge man striding across the barn towards her. This man, too, was equipped for war, dressed in a Roundhead uniform which had turned him into one of Oliver Cromwell’s dreaded Ironshirts. An orange sash lent it vivid splash of colour to the predominantly grey appearance of his leather doublet, steel breastplate and great knee boots; his head was enclosed in a heavy steel helmet and his face obscured by the frame of his visor. He reached Jane before she could move, an armoured giant stooping over her out of the darkness of the barn.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she gasped.

Her body tensed. She tried to back away from those long arms, but there was no escaping their reach and she felt herself being lifted into the air as effortlessly as if she had been made of thistledown.

‘Get off me!’ she shouted.

To her surprise, the man put her down lightly on her feet, stepped back, removed his helmet and tucked it under his arrn. A red, burly lace smiled benignly at her. ‘It’s only me,’ he said.

His voice was gentle, his eyes were mild, and a smile creased his face. Jane had found Ben Wolsey at last.

‘Ben!’ She almost sobbed with relief But the sight of his uniform shocked her. It meant that he too had joined the general insanity, and it was hard for her to reconcile the soft-mannered, pleasant farmer she thought she knew, with this seventeenth-century killer. There was no sense in it.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘you’re mad.’

The farmer smiled that good-humoured, slighty mocking smile of his. ‘Nonsense, my dear, he said. ‘It’s just a bit of fun.’

Of course he woldn’t listen. He was just like the rest of them, Jane thought; it was worse than driving knowledge into her unwilling pupils.

‘Fun!’ she shouted at him. The memory of her experience in the farmyard was still searingly fresh: where was the fun in being skewered against a wall? What full was it watching grown, twentieth-century men dressing up to recreate an old war and tearing a village to pieces in the process?

But before she could protest the barn door flew open and two men were momentarily silhouetted against the light - two of the three men who had just given her the fright of her life. They marched inside.

The leader was the Cavalier who had glared at Jane from his horse, and then blandly watched his trooper having his

‘fun’. Sir George Hutchinson, Lord of the Manor of Little Hodcombe, owned half of the village and never allowed his tenants to forget it. He was a throwback to the old-fashioned arrogant squire, a dapper, military man with a brisk, authoritative manner that brooked no opposition.

His assumed role of Royalist General now gave him unbounded opportunities for power and display, and Jane could see he was in his element. He strutted across the barn like a gaudy peacock, looking almost foppish with his long gloves and broad white lace collar, which overlaid a steel shield around his throat, and his bright red Royalist sash.

Stalking along behind Sir George was the predominantly dark figure of his land agent and general henchman, Joseph Willow. He was the trooper with the banner who had very nearly speared Jane – a man for whom these opportunities for violence were too tempting to ignore. He, too, wore the red Royalist sash. Florid and quick-tempered, he made an uncertain friend and a cruel enemy. Now he looked at Jane with a smug, triumphant expression.

With a single dramatic gesture Sir George removed his feathered hat and swept it through the air in a grandiose bow. It was a movement of supreme arrogance. Added to the complacent smirk on Willow’s face, it was too much for Jane’s shattered patience. Before the country squire could utter a word, she flew at him.

‘Sir George, you must stop these war games,’ she demanded.

‘Why?’ His Ewes dilated with mock surprise. ‘Miss Hampden, you of all people - our schoolteacher -- should appreciate the value of re-enacting actual events. It’s a living history!’ Behind the mildness of his manner his gleaming eyes were sharp as needles.

But Jane had been blessed with a forceful character of her own. She was not to be cowed by Sir George’s position

- civil or military - nor by those obsessive eyes. ‘It’s getting out of hand,’ she insisted. ‘The village is in turmoil.’

Sir George glanced sideways at his henchman, and laughed. ‘So there’s been a little damage,’ he smiled, dismissing it as a trifle. ‘Well, that’s the way people used to behave in those days.’ He marched past Jane and Wolsey and strode among the bales and fodder to sit on the steps to the gallery. There he looked like a judge passing sentence –

or, in this case, exoneration. ‘It’s a game,’ he explained.

‘You must expect high spirits.’

As if to emphasise this point he reached inside the folds of his tunic and produced a black, spongy substance rolled into a ball. He kneaded it in his fingers, and tossed it into the air and caught it again.

‘It’s not a game when people get hurt.’ Jane argued. ‘It must stop.’

‘And so it shall. We have but one last battle to fight.’ Sir George regarded her with eyes that glinted obsessively. He tossed the spongy hall and caught it, and when he spoke again he weighed his words very carefully, and used his most authoritative and deliberate manner. ‘Join us.’ he suggested. ‘See the merit of what we do.’

He fixed her now with a steely stare. There was an unnatural brightness about him which made Jane shiver; his eyes seemed, like the point of that lance, to be trying to pin her to the wall. She found his invitation easy to resist.

The steady hum of machinery in the console room of the TARDIS proclaimed than the time-machine’s advanced but often tired technology was for once in reasonable working order. Or appeared to be - its occupants were keenly aware that at any given moment any number of things might, unknown to them, be going wrong. For that reason constant checking and running repairs were matters of permanent priority.

That was why Turlough was now sprawled on his back, probing at an illuminated panel on the underside of the console. A red light flashed in his eyes and bleeps from the console whined in his ears. He prodded the panel again and looked out to where the Doctor was performing his own bit of maintenance on some circuit boards.

‘Is that any better?’ he asked.

The Doctor examined the monitor screen. He frowned, and flicked a bank of switches. Immediately the console screamed, making it high-pitched whining, warbling noise like an animal in pain.

‘No.’ he replied. He watched the time rotor jerk erratically up and down: things were definitely not any better. ‘There’s some time distortion,’ he added.

Tegan, who had been watching their efforts with amused curiosity, knew the TARDIS’s tricks of old, and references to distortions of any kind were enough to set alarm bells ringing in her heart. Fully attentive now, she eyed the twitching time rotor suspiciously, detected a suppressed anxiety in the Doctor’s manner and snapped,

‘Is there a problem? We are going to Earth?’

The Doctor gave her a pained look to show how much he deplored her lack of faith. ‘The place, date and time asked for,’ he confirmed, as he moved on to examine another set of instruments. ‘How else could you visit your grandfather?’

How else indeed, Tegan wondered. She marvelled at the Doctor’s ability to clear his mind of past mistakes and broken promises. His latest promise, to take her to visit her grandfather at his home in Little Hodcombe, England in the Earth year of 1984, demanded a precision of timing and placing which she sometimes believed to be quite beyond the TARDIS’s capacity.

Now, though, Turlough echoed the Doctor’s confidence.

He crawled out from his cramped working quarters to check the monitor dials. ‘We’re nearly there,’ he confirmed.

‘You see?’ The Doctor glared at her. But there was no time for him to enjoy his little triumph, because there was a sudden remarkable increase in the agitation of the time rotor. That in turn heralded an extreme turbulence which buffeted and shook the TARDIS like an earthquake.

Lights flashed, the rotor shuddered, the room swayed and jolted, and its occupants had to cling to the console to avoid being clashed to the floor. For a moment or two they were shaken about like puppets and then, as suddenly as it began, the disturbance ceased.

The time rotor slowed, sank and became still. Its lights dimmed and extinguished. Where all had been noise and violent quivering there was now stillness and peace.

Feeling their feet steady on the floor, they let go of the console.

‘Well.’ the Doctor gasped. ‘We’ve arrived!’

‘We hit an energy field.’ Turlough’s face was grim.

The Doctor nodded agreement. An unexpected aura for a quiet English village.’

Tegan was uncertain whether that remark was intended as a question, a suggestion or a hint that yet again plans had gone wrong. Despairing, she wanted to scream.

‘Goodbye Grandfather,’ she thought.

As if to confirm her suspicions the Doctor operated the scanner screen and the shield rose to reveal a scene outside of far more violent upheaval than the shaking the TARDIS had suffered.

They seemed to have landed inside some kind of wide cellar, or possibly a crypt: all was gloom and shadow.

Whatever it was, it was falling apart. They gained an impression of pillars and arches stretching away, and an earth floor heaped with rubble, but it was only a fleeting glimpse before everything was obscured by an avalanche of masonry which tumbled down and raised a plume of dust.

This had only just begun to settle when the place shook again; blocks of stone cascaded down and rolling clouds of dust blotted out the view.

It looked like an earthquake out there. It was nothing like the sequestered haven which Tegan’s grandfather had described to her in his letters. Everything about it was wrong. In her heart Tegan had known this would happen.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she cried.

Turlough agreed. One glance at the chaos out there had been enough to convince him that if they didn’t move fast they would become part of the general disintegration.

‘Quickly, Doctor,’ he shouted. ‘Relocate the TARDIS.’

But the Doctor had forestalled them. His arm was already moving towards the main control switch.

‘No, wait!’ As the dust cleared for a moment in the scanner frame Tegan saw something move. She couldn’t he sure, but it seemed to her that there was a shifting among the shadows out there, that the grey hulk of a block of stone edged sideways. Instinctively she raised an arm to restraint her companions. ‘Hold on, there’s somebody out there!’ she cried.