Doctor Who_ The Awakening.
by Eric Pringle.
1.
An Unexpected Aura
Somewhere, horses" hooves were drumming the ground.
The woman"s name was Jane Hampden, and that noise worried her. She was a schoolteacher, but just now her village school and its unwilling pupils were far from her thoughts: her mind raced with problems and uncertainties, making her head ache; she felt that if she did not share them with someone soon, she would go mad.
Jane was looking for farmer Ben Wolsey, but she could not find him anywhere. That was another problem, because time was short, and there were horses coming.
It was Jane"s belief that the village of Little Hodcombe was being torn apart. She felt instinctively that those horses had something to do with it, like the recent bursts of violence and the cries and shouts which so frequently disturbed the peaceful countryside. She was sure, too, that the mysterious disappearance of her old friend Andrew Verney was connected in some way.
And there was another thing which bothered her, which she found more difficult to put into words. In a quiet, remote place like Little Hodcombe, tucked away as it was deep in the lush Dorset hinterland, far away from cities or politics or any sort of world-shattering event, it was as normal as daylight that everybody should know pretty well everything about everybody else: you didn"t mind your own business here so much as you minded other people"s.
Jane was no different from the rest in this respect, and yet suddenly she felt that she didn"t know anything any more.
All at once, the place and its people seemed somehow strange, as if that normal, everyday life of thatched houses and quiet corners and fields and streams which composed Little Hodcombe was slipping away and being replaced by a new, nameless void, which contained only premonitions, and fears, and noises like this distant jingle of harness and the beating of those hooves on the baked earth.
Jane hurried through Ben Wolsey"s farmyard, searching for him and pondering on these things. She knew it must be nonsense that perhaps she really was going mad - yet it seemed to her that the simple rules which governed daily living, basic things like the fact that today is reliably today and not tomorrow or yesterday, and that what is past and dead and gone really is so, no longer applied so firmly as they used to do. The behaviour of ordinary people was becoming extraordinary, and unpredictable, and strange.
n.o.body believed her when she told them her fears.
They thought she was just being silly; that she was a nuisance and a killjoy. And it was equally useless for Jane to tell herself that she was deluded, and that these were fantasies quite unfit for a forward-looking young schoolteacher in 1984. She pretended twenty times a day that everything was as it should be. She looked out at Little Hodcombe and it was manifestly the same as it had always been. it smelt the same as it always had, and when she touched its buildings for rea.s.surance they felt as they must have felt for centuries.
And yet she knew knew that it wasn"t the same How, though, could she possibly make anyone believe her when she was uncertain what had happened and couldn"t find the words to describe how she felt? But she was determined to make this one last attempt. She would get Ben Wolsey, who had always been a staunch friend, on to her side surely Ben, the burly down-to-earth farmer that he was, would listen to her, and try to understand. that it wasn"t the same How, though, could she possibly make anyone believe her when she was uncertain what had happened and couldn"t find the words to describe how she felt? But she was determined to make this one last attempt. She would get Ben Wolsey, who had always been a staunch friend, on to her side surely Ben, the burly down-to-earth farmer that he was, would listen to her, and try to understand.
Unless, of course, the sickness had got to him too. He was not to be found, and those horses were coming closer by the second. Jane felt the vibrations of their hooves under her feet, trembling through the clay of the farmyard which had dried hard as brown concrete over weeks of unusually but sun and cloudless blue skies. This constant sunlight was abnormal in England. It made her dizzy. It dazzled her now with its harsh bright glare on the weathered red brick and blue paint-work of the farm buildings which enclosed the yard. It warmed her head as she hurried from one building to another, calling for the absent farmer, moving from barn to byre to implement shed, looking into doorways where the glare ended in a sharp black line of shadow.
"Ben?" she shouted.
She stood on tiptoe and looked over a stable door into the inky blackness of a shed, but the darkness was like a wall and she could see nothing. There was no reply.
Listening for sounds of movement, she heard insects murmuring in the heat, vibrating the air. And nothing else.
Jane brought her head back out into the sunlight. The air out here was vibrating too, with the chatter of unseen birds. Suddenly she felt uneasy. She hummed quietly to cheer herself up and hurried on to the next building.
She was a small, attractive woman, neat in white shirt and grey waistcoat, green corduroy jeans and boots. She wore her hair tied up in a bun, to make her look taller than she really was; wisps of it hung loosely about her forehead.
She carried a green knitted jacket slung casually over her shoulder in case the breeze which now and then fanned the farmyard should grow into something stronger: with the English climate, even in the middle of a drought you could never be sure.
She was no longer sure of anything.
Again Jane stood on tiptoe to peer over another stable door into another black hole. "Ben!" she asked of the murky interior. Again it swallowed up her voice, and returned nothing except the whine and whirr of swarming flies.
But the horses were coming. In the yard the noise of their hooves was stronger and the vibrations were more distinct. Jane was sure she could hear harness jingling; the breeze which flipped the loose strands of hair on her forehead brought rhythmic clashing sounds to her ears.
Worried, she pushed her hair back into place, thrust her hands into her pockets and ran to another doorway.
"Are you there, Ben?" she demanded. There was no response here either; she was alone with the disembodied sounds of unseen insects, birds and horses. It was uncanny.
And then, suddenly it was more than sounds. They were corning very fast big heavy horses making the earth throb with the hammer blows of their feet, and they seemed to take over the world. Jane could no longer hear insects or birds, she was aware only of this one stream of noise bearing down on her.
And now there were voices too, rising above the hooves, men"s shouts encouraging the horses and spurring them to even greater speed. Startled, Jane moved across the farmyard to look out between the buildings at the surrounding countryside.
Like everything else, it seemed that the usually placid green landscape of fields and trees and hedgerows had altered its character. Instead of a gently pastoral scene it had become a page from her school history hooks: the seventeenth century was moving towards her across a field, thundering out of the misty past in the shape of three horses two chestnuts flanking a grey and riders flushed with the excitement and danger of the English Civil War.
They came abreast of one another. The horseman on the left had the broad, plumed hat and extravagantly embroidered clothing of a Cavalier of King Charles the First; the other two wore battledress the steel breastplates and helmets of mounted troopers. The middle rider, on the big grey horse, carried a brightly coloured banner.
They were an awe-inspiring sight. With her hands on her hips and her mouth open in amazement, .Jane watched them approach the farm. When they neared the buildings the rider on the left spurred his horse and galloped ahead of the others. He came through the gap between the farm buildings; as he entered the farmyard and approached Jane he slowed to a canter. She had a clear view of a sharp-featured face, with waxed moustache, pointed heard and shoulder-length wig under the great nodding peac.o.c.k feather which adorned his hat. He was the perfect image of a seventeenth-century Cavalier.
Jane was speechless. The Cavaller cantered past her with a supercilious stare. Now the troopers were in the farmyard too; their horses" hooves clattered on the baked clay earth. They also pa.s.sed by, paying her no heed at all.
Then something odd happened, as frightening as it was unexpected. The troopers wheeled their horses around to face Jane. The rider on the grey horse lowered his banner and pointed it straight at her, like a lance. And suddenly without warning he shouted and urged his horse into action. The point of the banner swept forward. They gathered speed, looming at Jane out of the shimmering heat of the enclosed farmyard.
Jane felt her stomach muscles contract with fear. Her open-mouthed wonder turned to disbelief at the sight of the lunging horse and its rider thundering towards her. All her senses concentrated on the banner; her whole attention narrowed to that single point of steel which held firm and steady, and pointed at her body like a skewer.
This can"t be happening, she thought, it"s impossible.
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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ping of horses"
hooves, which meant that her a.s.sailants 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 a.s.sumed 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 peac.o.c.k, 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 pa.s.sing 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.