The others had seen it too, and were watching the screen closely. Suddenly the stone moved again and became an indistinct shadowy figure which rose up out of the dust and slipped away into the shadow of a pillar. It was bent nearly double, and it limped heavily, lurching over the rubble which littered the floor.
Another curtain of dust swept across the view.
‘He’s trapped,’ the Doctor said anxiously. If there’s another fall he’ll he killed.’ Before his companions realised what he was doing, he had reached across the console in front of Turlough, hit the slide control to open the main door of the TARDIS, and was on his way out.
Turlough gaped at the whirling dust tilling the screen and blanched. ‘We can’t go out there!’ he objected. A rescue mission would he suicidal - any fool could see that.
But the Doctor was not at all interested in what fools could see, and Tegan was close behind him.
‘Doctor!’ Turlough complained. With a last helpless glance at the monitor and the now immobile time rotor, he gave a resigned shrug and hurrled out after the others.
2
Outside the TARDIS, the Doctor shone his torch into the gloom. The wandering beam picked out columns and archways. It soon became clear that they were inside a church crypt – one which was largely ruined already and was being further devastated every moment. Plaster and masonry crumbled and crashed to the floor with a noise that sped away into shadows, where it was swallowed up in the accumulated dust of centuries.
Frowning and straining her eyes in the poor light, Tegan searched for the figure they had seen on the scanner.
To her right she distinguished two stone arches held up by decidedly rickety-looking pillars. If those went, the roof would cave in. Beyond the archways there ran a passage backed by a wall of tombs; these were rectangular holes in the wall blocked off with stones, on which crumbled, illegible lettering was just visible. There was no movement at all in that direction.
Ahead, across the crypt, two more arches on low columns led to a stone stairway. The steps veered up to the right and vanished out of sight; perhaps the man had gone up those. Or he might have lost himself among the black recesses to their left, where another decrepit archway gave on to deep, interminable shadow.
‘He’s gone,’ she whispered. She shivered: it was cold in here, with the damp chill of old stone hidden deep in the earth, where sunlight had never been. She realised, too, how quiet everything had become: the falls of rubble had ceased and their clattering had been replaced by a silence that was as heavy as had. Tegan began to think she had imagined the man.
But the Doctor had seen him too. ‘Hello!’ he called, stepping away from the TARDIS and picking his way among the litter of collapsed stone.
‘Hello!’
Now the recesses of the crypt soaked up his voice like a sponge, and the dusty darkness swallowed the thin beam of his torch. Turlough, at Tegan’s shoulder, could see nothing at all, until suddenly one of the shadows beside the wall of tombs separated itself from a pillar. Moving incredibly fast, it limped silendy up the side of the crypt and vanished again.
‘Wait, please!’ the Doctor shouted, setting off after it.
Tegan cried out with frustration: that brief glimpse had been enough to tell her that the man’s clothes were all wrong for the twentieth century. They were more or less rags, but they most certainly were not twentleth-century rags – some kind of breeches and a shapeless woollen garment like a smock, which went over the man’s head and shoulders, to be clutched around his throat.
She turned to Turlough in dismay. ‘Did you see his clothes?’ she wailed. ‘We’re in the wrong century!’
Turlough shook his head. ‘We’re not,’ he assured her. ‘I checked the time monitor. It
is
1984.’
The Doctor shone his torch into Tegan’s bewildered face. In a slightly mocking voice, sending up her disbelief, he said, ‘Let’s have a look around.’ Without waiting for an answer he turned away and hurried across the crypt and ran up the stone steps out of sight.
Warily and apprehensively, Tegan and Turlough peered through the encircling gloom. The figure was nowhere to be seen. There seemed nothing to be gained from hanging around here waiting for the roof to fall in; they each glanced at the other for confirmation of their thoughts, and ran after the Doctor as fast as they could.
When they, too, had vanished up the steps, the silence of centuries returned to the crypt. And noiselessly, as if he was part of that silence, the man appeared. Moving sideways like a ghostly crab, he slipped out of the cover of an archway and humped his aching body across the floor.
He reached the steps and craned his neck to look up the empty staircase. Although the dim light still did not reveal his features, it was strong enough to show that there was something wrong with his face.
Something terribly, sickeningly wrong.
The limping man would have fitted well into the parlour of Ben Wolsey’s farmhouse. It too was far from modern: in fact, by deliberate design and through the painstaking collection of antique furnishings over the whole of his adult life, the big farmer had turned it into a place fit for history to repeat itself.
Friends and acquaintances who walked into the parlour felt immediately disoriented and lost, as if they had stepped through a time warp into the seventeenth century.
Often the experience unnerved them, for every period detail was so exact that the room held the very smell and atmosphere of a bygone age.
When they had got over their initial surprise and looked for reasons for their superstitious reaction, some of Wolsey’s acquaintances decided it was the heavy oak furniture which weighed so profoundly upon their spirits –
the ornately carved chairs or the long table laden with maps and parchments and an ancient, forbidding, long-barrelled pistol. Others suspected the dark wood panelling on the walls, or the bulky drapes of curtains or the massive open stone fireplace.
For some, the silver candelabra on the mantelpiece and the pot of spills and the displays of pewter plates conjured up, like ghosts, images of the people who once used them.
And then there were those dark portraits of seventeenth-century country gentlefolk, and the huge hunting tapestry, and the collection of weapons from the English Civil War displayed ominously above the hearth. Perhaps it was those.
Whatever the reason, they all agreed that Wolsey had succeeded in creating something uncommonly exact – a room in which the dead days of long ago came back to life.
One way or another it affected every person who entered it.
Jane Hampden, a schoolteacher who prided herself on being down-to-earth and practical, still found it eerie and unsettling. She found it to be a room which made her imagine things: sometimes she waited for seventeenth-century men to walk in through the door.
Today it actually happened.
She sat at the long table in front of the window, with a quill feather in her hands which was over three hundred and fifty years old, and looked at a Cavalier of King Charles the First standing at the fire, and a Colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s army beside the door. It was uncanny.
Jane felt her sense of reality take a jolt: for a moment she almost felt that it was she, in her twentieth-century clothes, who was the odd one out, an intruder from another age.
She felt uncomfortable, and more than ever before she experienced the strange sensation that this room actually held more than it appeared to contain – that these ancient trappings had brought with them something from their own century: overtones, associations,
memories
. It was that, she decided, which made the atmosphere in here so compelling.
Jane tried to pull herself together. It was ridiculous that a modern young schoolteacher should allow herself to think like that.
Sir George Hutchinson thought so too, and was telling her so in crystal clear terms. He stood in front of the fireplace, working that spongy black ball with his fingers, and adopted his most persuasive manner.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘Every man, woman and child in this village is involved in the war game –
except you. Why?’ He tossed the ball and snatched it out of the air. ‘It’s great fun. An adventure.’
‘I understand that,’ Jane said. She tried to make her smile less mocking, but she still could not consider the prospect of an entire village raking up an old, unhappy, far-off war much fun.
Wolsey watched them both carefully, uncertain where he should stand in this difference of opinion. Neutrality seemed the safest option at the moment.
Sir George pursued his argument. ‘Join us,’ he invited Jane. ‘Your influence may temper the more high-spirited, prevent accidents.’
‘Look,’ Jane explained, as if to one of her schoolchildren who had missed the point entirely, ‘I don’t care if a few high-spirited kids get their heads banged together. It’s gone beyond that.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Suppose what happened to me out there happens to someone else--a stranger, an imiocent visitor to the village.’
Sir George leaned forward. ‘There will be no visitors to the village,’ he informed her. His voice was excited, his manner eager and intense – almost joyful – and his eyes shone. ‘It has been isolated from the outside world. No-one can enter, or leave.’
He glanced triumphantly at Wolsey. The big man looked defiantly at Jane, who stared at both of them, appalled by this bland proposal. ‘You can’t do that!’ she exploded.
Sir George stormed to the table, snatched up a map of the village and checked his lines of defence. ‘Can’t I?’ he demanded. His voice was sharp now and he snapped the words, brooking no argument. ‘It’s been done.’
Persuasion time was over.
Yet even as Sir George spoke, across some fields outside the village, three strangers were climbing damp stone steps out of the ruined crypt of Little Hodcombe Church.
They emerged into a small side chapel. This led through an archway to the nave of the church. The Doctor was in front, as always eager for exploration; Tegan and Turlough were close behind him. All three, however, were stopped in their tracks by the sight which greeted their eyes when they entered the nave.
It was still a church, but only just: sunlight slanted through windows high in the walls and illuminated a scene of devastation. The Doctor and his companions looked across the nave at what seemed like the aftermath of some unspeakable carnage: dust and rubble were spread everywhere; roof timbers lay askew where they had fallen, among great blocks of stone; smashed pews had been tossed like sticks into corners.
And yet it was still most definitely an English country church. Two rows of pews remained standing; they faced a single, beautiful stained glass window in the end wall of the sanctuary. The stone pillars looked to be reasonably intact, and across from where they stood the companions could see a carved timber pulpit, seemingly unharmed, which might have been waiting fire the village priest to enter and preach his sermon.
It was weird. The place was ruinous, silent and still, and it had obviously not been used for years ... and yet, shabby and neglected though it was, it could be used, even now – it seemed to be waiting to be used. There was a feeling of anticipation. The Doctor. ‘Tegan and Turlough all felt it.
They moved quickly forward, hoping to find the mysterious man from the crypt. The Doctor hurried across to the pulpit; Turlough marched down the nave, followed more slowly by Tegan, who looked around in wonder.
‘Where did he go?’ she asked.
‘If he can move that quickly, he can’t be hurt very badly,’ Turlough said, looking back at her over his shoulder. He was unwilling to be here, and wanted very much to get back into the TARDIS and far away from this place, which was all too obviously in a state of collapse. Yet he felt its fascination, too. His annoyance was beginning to turn into a desire to find some answers to the questions which had been multiplying ever since they got here.
The Doctor, too, was fascinated. He crouched down beside the pulpit and ran his fingers over the sculpted wood. ‘Interesting,’ he muttered in such an enthralled tone that Tegan left off searching for the limping man and hurried over to have a look for herself.
What she saw made her shudder. Images were carved into the wooden side of the pulpit with such skill and twisted imagination that they made medieval gargoyles, of the kind she had seen on stone buttresses of old churches, look like fairies. There was a man being pursued around a tree by something monstrous ... an inhuman, distorted and mask-like image that was utterly grotesque.
She shivered. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Then admire the craftsmanship,’ the Doctor suggested, probing the carved relief with his fingers. ‘It’s seventeenth-century ... probably on the theme of Man being chased by the Devil.’ His finger hesitated beside the Devil. ‘I must admit I’ve never seen one quite like that before.’
Turlough came over while the Doctor was speaking, but his attention was distracted by a crack in the church wall just below the pulpit - a horizontal split which suddenly veered upwards at its right extremity. The Doctor glanced across at it ton, then put away his torch and gazed up at the vaulted roof for signs of damage there.
‘It looks as though a bomb hit the place,’ Tegan said, voicing a thought which had occurred to her earlier when they had first seen the cascading masonry on the scanner screen.
‘Maybe it did,’ Turlough agreed.
Tegan was suddenly anxious. ‘Can we find my grandfather?’ she pleaded. The Doctor nodded. He turned away from the cracked wall and waved her down the nave.
With Turlough he followed Tegan between the dusty, rubble-laden pews. Then he heard the noise.
It was a single, short, hollow creak which whiplashed through the church like a gun going off. It was followed by complete silence.
‘What was that?’ Turlough shuddered.
‘A ghost?’ the Doctor suggested, He smiled at his joke but Tegan, far from being amused, was running. Suddenly she couldn’t wait a moment longer to leave this strange place and get out into the everyday light of a sane, normal day, in her grandfather’s village in twentieth-century England.