‘What’s this?’ he growled.
Without taking his eyes from the Doctor, Willow explained, ‘He tried to escape, sir.’
With a gesture of impatience Sir George pushed down Willow’s arm. ‘But he isn’t a prisoner, Sergeant Willow.’
He kept his voice mild and friendly, for the stranger’s benefit. ‘You must treat visitors with more respect.’
Surprised by his Commander’s attitude, Willow lowered the pistol. Sir George smiled placatingly at the Doctor, then turned away to glance at Wolsey and find somewhere to lay his hat. The Doctor, no longer under immediate threat, felt encouraged to speak to the new arrival: Sir George was only too obviously involved in these War Games, and he also seemed to be in control around here.
‘What is going on?’ he demanded, like Sir George keeping as civil a tone as he could manage.
Sir George spun round. His eyes glowed. ‘A celebration!’ he cried. His expression displayed pleasure and triumph and his voice an eager, tense excitement. He moved close to the Doctor, almost alight with anticipation, like a firework about to go off. ‘On the thirteenth of July, sixteen hundred and forty three,’ he exclaimed, ‘the English Civil War came to Little Hodcombe. A Parliamentary force and a regiment for the King destroyed each other– and the village.’
He made it sound like a party. ‘And you’re celebrating
that
?’ the Doctor asked, puzzled by this feverish excitement.
‘And why not?’ Sir George’s words were thrown down like a challenge; as he removed his riding gloves he watched the Doctor closely for a reaction. ‘It’s our heritage,’ he continued.
‘It’s a madness,’ Jane exclaimed, unable to contain her impatience with such talk any longer.
Hutchinson treated her to a sardonic, dismissive smile,
‘Miss Hampden disagrees with our activities.’
‘I can understand why,’ the Doctor said, looking at the sadistic enjoyment on Willow’s face.
Irritated by their opposition, Sir George held out a chair for Jane, inviting her to sit down and keep quiet. Then, moving around the table to approach the Doctor, he looked him up and down and demanded, in a voice clipped with anger, ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m known as the Doctor.’ The Doctor blandly endured Sir George’s examination, aware of his puzzlement at the frock coat, cricket pullover and sprig of celery in his buttonhole,
‘Are you a member of the theatrical profession?’ Sir George finally asked.
The Doctor smiled. ‘No more than you are.’
‘Aha!’ Sir George laughed at the joke, but his sideways glance at Wolsey was humourless, hinting that these intruders might turn out to be more of a nuisance than at first appeared. Then he glared sharply into the Doctor’s eyes. ‘How did you get to the village?’
‘Through the woods, via the church,’ the Doctor bluffed.
‘That’s where found him, sir,’ Willow confirmed. Sir George was silent for a moment. He studied his gloves, flicking then against his hand. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and deliberate, and contained more than a hint of threat. ‘I would avoid the church if I were you,’ he said. ‘It’s very dangerous. It could fall down at any minute.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘However,’ Sir George smiled, now deliberately lightening the tone of their conversation, ‘since you’re here you must join in our game. It’s our final battle.’
‘Do you know, I’d love to,’ the Doctor replied, equally amiably. His relaxed voice disguised a rapidly increasing nervous tension, for he was gearing himself for action. ‘But first I must find Tegan and Turlough. And Tegan’s grandfather – I gather he’s disappeared. Good day,’ he concluded, and with a single movement of his arm swept maps, papers and pistol from the table before turning on his heel and running for the door.
The lightness of his tone had fooled the others completely and this sudden explosion of activity took them all by surprise. All Sir George could do was shout, ‘Wait!
Wait!’ and by the time Willow had dived for the pistol and levelled it at the doorway, the Doctor had gone.
‘Wait!’ Sir George shouted for a third time. But he knew he was wasting his breath, and when Willow turned to him and told him that Tegan was Verney’s granddaughter, his face set into stone. All the affected bonhomie with which he had addressed the Doctor vanished completely.
‘Double the perimeter guard,’ he snapped. ‘He mustn’t get out of the village.’ Then a new thought struck him and his smile returned. ‘And help him find Verney’s granddaughter...’
‘Right! Willow snapped his heels together.
‘I’ve something rather special in mind for her,’ Sir George grinned. The look of eager anticipation on Willow’s face showed that he fully understood all the implications of that remark. Sir George turned to Jane. She had watched these proceding with increasing concern and now registered her disapproval again: ‘Detaining people against their will is illegal, Sir George. The Doctor and his friends included.’
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
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 glass, 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
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 pushing, 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 shimmering 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 grass 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 coarsely 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, diminishing 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 horsemen 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 grass 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.