Willow lost his balance completely and fell sprawling from the cart. He lay winded on the ground.
While this was going on the Doctor had trled to take advantage of the confusion to slip away from his captors.
Unfortunately for him, the soldiers had grown even more terrified of their leader in his manic condition than they had been before, and they were making doubly sure that his fury was not increased by the loss of his prisoner. So instead of their grip on the Doctor slackening it increased, and his chances of escape were less than ever.
Then he saw Will Chandler.
Will had watched the events on the Green with an overwhelming joy when he saw that by some miracle the sacrificial burning of the May Queen had been avoided. He had breathed a big sigh of relief and edged forward to see if he could help his friends; now he saw the Doctor"s predicament at the moment the Doctor saw him.
"Over here, Will!" the Doctor shouted.
Will ran.
What happened then occurred so quickly that afterwards Will was unable to separate one event from another. When he started to run towards the Doctor he had not the vaguest notion of how he was going to help him.
But as he crossed over to the Green he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the trooper carrying the burning torch.
Almost without thinking, he changed direction and dived at him. Although the trooper was twice Will"s size the charge took him completely by surprise, and he staggered backwards and dropped the torch It rolled across the gra.s.s.
Will picked it up. The heat scorched his fingers, but he gritted his teeth and holding the torch firmly with both hands, began to whirl it around his head. The swinging flames made a peculiar roaring noise, like water tumbling over a weir. Will was a fearsome sight as he advanced on the soldiers holding the Doctor, with sweat running down his forehead, a look of stubborn determination on his face, and the torch flying and roaring in his hands. The soldiers scattered in fright as it flared towards them and the Doctor was free.
But now Sir George Hutchinson was galloping across, yelling with fury. Without thinking Will turned to face him, too. He was still whirling the burning torch about his head. With sparks flying in all directions, the flames swept round towards Sir George"s horse. It panicked and pulled its head away from the heat, rearing high in the air and throwing Sir George out of the saddle. He fill head first to the ground, and lay very still.
Will hoped he had broken his neck. But there was no time to find out, because troopers and soldiers were running towards them on every side.
Ben Wolsey, whipping the cart to a great speed, reached them first. The Doctor jumped up beside him and shouted to Will, who hurled the torch at the approaching soldiers and pulled himself up into the cart too. And they were off.
"Back to the church!" the Doctor shouted to Wolsey.
Then, with a sincere "Thank you" to the farmer and the youth, he picked up the straw May Queen and tossed it at their pursuers.
The Green was in turmoil. There was much shouting and swearing and everywhere people were running aimlessly about. Holding on tightly to the sides of the wildly swinging cart, Will watched them receding into the distance. He was disappointed to see both Sir George and Sergeant Willow climbing groggily to their feet, and he heard the screaming hysteria in Sir George Hutchinson"s voice as he shook his fist at the cart and yelled, "After them! After them!"
Willow began to run.
Inside the church, the Malus fell silent the moment Sir George toppled from his horse. Up to that moment it had surged and pulsated with the energy produced by the excitement of the procession, lurching and pushing itself ever more free of its restraints; evidence of its success lay all around in the piles of shattered masonry, and in the wisps of smoke which still hung about the roof of the nave.
But now the Malus was still. It brooded in silence, working out its next move ...
Across the village, the door of the hut in the quiet, isolated courtyard was splintering. It bulged outwards. It heaved against the drawn bolt as it was hammered and pattered from inside.
All at once a panel gave way under the constant pounding. Then another split open, and another, until with a ragged cracking noise the whole door broke away from its hinges, the bolt flew off and Turlough and Andrew Verney tumbled out into the bright sunshine.
Carried forward by the impetus of the final charge, they staggered across the yard, and then stood swaying and blinking in the dazzling light, nursing their bruised shoulders. Verney clutched his baggy tweed hat. "We must get to the church," he said. "We have to destroy the Malus before it becomes too powerful."
Turlough frowned. As an idea, that seemed to him to be a little on the bold side, not to say foolhardy. "Let"s find the Doctor first," he suggested.
The old man was adamant. "We haven"t got the time," he insisted. "We could spend the whole day looking for him.
Come on ..."
To prevent further argument he set off running, at an old man"s stately trot leaving Turlough no option but to follow him.
Wolsey drove the cart like a man possessed. The Doctor and Will had to hold on grimly to prevent themselves being thrown out as the horse kicked its heels and the cart jerked and shook, jolted and rattled along a rutted track through the fields which, the farmer swore, was a short cut to the church. Now and then they could hear shouting behind them; in the distance soldiers were running, and hors.e.m.e.n galloped along the skyline.
They arrived at the lych-gate just in time. Wolsey reined in his valiant horse, stopped the cart and they jumped down. Will staggered and had some difficulty keeping his balance, and he felt that something inside him had shaken loose, but there was no time for self-examination and he had to run his fastest to keep up with the Doctor and Ben Wolsey. They were heading around the side of the church and making for the vestry; Will dreaded going back inside.
The Doctor pushed open the vestry door with a crash and burst in, giving a big fright to Tegan and Jane, who had just emerged from the underground pa.s.sage. Jane was closing the tombstone entrance to the tunnel. Tegan, happy to be wearing her old dress again, was warily opening the door to the nave.
The Doctor was delighted to see them. He nodded with satisfaction but had no time to spare for congratulations.
"Come along, we"ve a lot to do," he said, hustling them as he rushed through to the nave, followed by Ben Wolsey and Will Chandler.
Jane watched them go, and shrugged. Given time, she thought, she could get used to most things, but she doubted if she could ever get used to the Doctor.
The nave hummed and vibrated with a low, buzzing sound. It was like the noise of a furnace the sound flames make as they rush up a chimney when it is on fire.
The Malus"s brooding silence had ended; the fury now erupting through the village had urged it into life again and it was steadily ingesting the power it needed to make its final bid for freedom. Those great nostrils flared with a wild anger; the eyes glinted and flashed; the mouth gaped a vast, shark-like maw that looked as if it would swallow the world.
As he ran through the church the Doctor glanced at the disappearing wall, and saw that time was running out on them. "Hurry!" he shouted.
They kept close together, running one after the other up the nave and through the archway, then down the steps to the rubble-strewn crypt.
The Malus watched them go by. Soon very soon now the time would come when no one would ever he able to pa.s.s it again. Soon no life would he able to survive in its vicinity. The green, phosph.o.r.escent eyes pulsed with the light of its coming triumph.
The Doctor ran down the steps to the crypt three at a time.
At the bottom he paused to take the torch from his pocket; he switched it on and set off towards the TARDIS, only to stop again suddenly. He turned to Tegan. "You didn"t close the door," he snapped.
"There was no point," she protested. "Something was already inside." What was the point in trying to explain now that they had been looking for the Doctor to tell him about this when she had been abducted and Turlough had disappeared? He was too angry to listen.
"This is all we need," he scowled. He paused for a moment, then made up his mind and marched inside.
Tegan and Will hurried in close behind him.
Will had given up being surprised. When he had been bobbing and swinging about in the cart and feeling sure that his tomes were splintering inside him, he had made up his mind that if he survived he would take everything in his stride from now on. He had discovered that when absolutely everything is extraordinary, nothing is astonishing any more. Running into a blue box, therefore, was simply another wonder to be accepted without demur, and he shrugged as he ran in through its door, as though this sort of thing happened to him every day.
It was not so with .Jane Hampden and Ben Wolsey, however. They looked at the TARDIS in wonder, approached it warily, gazed at each other with a wild surmise - then they, too, shrugged and went inside it.
Once inside they - and Will Chandler, despite his newly-trade resolution - were more overwhelmed than ever. For a moment they were struck dumb by the sheer size and technology of the TARDiS"s interior. But, as Tegan had found out so many times before, there was no time for discussing trivial matters like the feeling that they had just walked into Aladdin"s cave, for Aladdin himself was already fuily occupied at a large illuminated console, pounding switches as fast. as his fingers would move.
The Doctor was looking for instantaneous results and, when they didn"t come, he threw up his hands in disgust.
He pressed more b.u.t.tons - and a low, steady hum of machinery was heard. Then, without turning round he pointed backwards and upwards to the wall above the door.
"Quietly now," he whispered. "Don"t alarm it."
Startled, they looked up and saw the lights which had alarmed Tegan and Turlough earlier. They were still shimmering, still moving in a seemingly random pattern, but there was something else now: inside the lights, clinging to the wall, was the obese, bloated, spider-like shape of another rapidly-forming Malus clone.
It was like the one which had invaded Wolsey"s house, except that if possible it was even uglier. its head, much too large for its body, possessed hair like cl.u.s.tering snakes, bulging eyes, a misshapen chin and vicious, shark-like teeth. Its arms and legs were thin and over-long, and the lingers and toes were attenuated and spindly like the bones of a deformed skeleton. There was a ribbed, scaly tail which helped it to cling to the wall like a stone monkey.
And it was coming to life.
They were too amazed to speak. The heavy atmosphere of the console room seemed doom-laden and full of threat - an impression which was strengthened by the urgency with which the Doctor was flying from one bank of instruments to another.
It was Tegan who dared to speak first. "What are you doing?" she asked him.
Stopping his frantic activity for a moment, the Doctor surveyed his handiwork, and frowned. "if I can lock the signal conversion unit on to the frequency of the psychic energy feeding it, I might be able to direct the Malus."
Wolsey looked at him sharply. "Is that possible?"
"Well, there"s a remote chance." The Doctor did not sound very optimistic. As an afterthought, he operated the scanner screen mechanism; the shield lifted silently and showed Joseph Willow and a trooper creeping across the crypt towards them.
"Doctor!" Tegan shouted.
The Doctor had already seen them. "Ah," he said quietly, "perhaps you should close the door."
Wolsey gazed at the screen. "They didn"t waste much time," he said, frowning. He was very disappointed that, his adversary had caught up with them so quickly.
Jane, intrigued, watched Tegan run to the console to operate the door lever. The door slid shut. Tegan breathed a sigh of relief: they were sae her the moment. Except, of course, for that thing on the wall ... She looked at it and shuddered. It was growing more lively by the second.
Joseph Willow and the trooper moved quietly through the rubble of the crypt towards a strange blue shape which loomed out of the shadows ahead of them. They picked their way slowly and warily, taking great care to make no sound.
When they reached it they stood and gaped in disbelief.
"A police box?" Willow grunted. How could they all have crowded into a police box? He looked around uneasily, to make sure his quarry was not hiding somewhere else in the crypt. Then he drew his sword; holding it in readiness, he nodded to the trooper to open the door.
Obediently the man approached the TARDIS and tried unsuccessfully to make the door move so much as a fraction of an inch. He rattled the handle helplessly, then turned to his Sergeant. "It"s locked," he said.
This was the last straw for Willow, the final frustration which snapped his patience. With a head near to bursting because of the humiliations and disappointments of the afternoon, he screamed furiously at the trooper: "Well, don"t just stand there! Break it open!"
The man looked uncertainly at him, then removed his helmet, tossed it down among the fallen masonry and searched for a door-breaking implement. Soon he found a heavy piece of timber to use as a battering ram. He staggered with it to the TARDIS, held it in front of him and charged against the door.
9.
Servant of the Malus
Inside the TARDIS, that noise became a dull, monotonous, ceaseless thudding. The reverberations were ominous and hypnotic, and with the exception of the Doctor all the occupants stared at the scanner screen, watching with bated breath the progress of their enemies outside.
The Doctor was puzzling over monitors and switches and levers. He moved from one set of controls and dials to another, making adjustments and corrections, setting up sequences in a complicated and ingenious program which only he could understand.
All at once there came a weird elephantine trumpeting noise. It vibrated through the console room, and seemed to Tegan to be like the roaring of the Mains heard through a long tunnel. Instinctively she glanced away from the scanner screen and up at the image clinging to the wall beside the door, and gasped at what she saw.
"Doctor!" she cried, "the Malus!"
They all looked and shuddered. The image had not only grown suddenly; it was lifting itself off the wall now, as if making itself ready to leap at them. Its head jerked sideways and half turned towards them. Energy surged through the flickering lights, which crackled and pumped strength into its ugly body. Soon it would be strong enough to support independent movement, the Doctor saw and then what? The prospect was unwholesome, and frightening.
The Doctor took in the situation at a glance. His movements at the console, already hurried, became feverish. He pulled a lever, hammered a switch with his fist and waited, tapping his fingers with frustration at the delayed reaction. He was hopping about on his toes like a runner dying to launch himself into a race. Every split second counted now.
Wolsey, who had been watching him closely, felt the Doctor"s increasing anxiety. "Won"t it work?" he asked.
The Doctor fairly shouted at him. "It takes time!" he cried. "Excuse me, Colonel." He pushed the farmer aside in his eagerness to reach another set of switches at the far end of the console. He"d forgotten those; no wonder there was a delay. He glared at Jane; she was in his way, although she moved out of it quickly when she saw that impatient look on his face.
The trumpeting increased in volume and rose in pitch.
It transferred their attention away from the Doctor, leaving him free to get on with his complex programming, to the hypnotically ugly growth above their heads. It was moving constantly now, shaking its head, lilting itself from the wall. It was nursing its energy for the moment when, with its parent in the church, it would truly be born again, and they could he released to take over the TARDIS and the village, and cause the wholesale destruction which had been the sole purpose behind their creation.
And meanwhile, the ceaseless hammering on the door continued unabated, as the Doctor"s pursuers tried to batter their way in.
Inside the church, the Malus was also building itself up for the final, all-conquering effort that would ensure its release. The nave shook with its increasingly powerful vibrations, and echoed with the noise as it reared and spat smoke from the deep, dark cavern of its mouth.
It was into this h.e.l.lish din that Turlough and Andrew Verney ran unawares, when they opened the door of the church and came hurrying through the pews.
"Oh, no!" Verney groaned. The sight of the gigantic Males taking over the church and springing to life in his beloved village overwhelmed him. He held an arm over his eyes and staggered away from it; he would have fallen if Turlough had not steadied him.
"Let"s find the Doctor," Turlough suggested. "There"s nothing we can do."
He guided the trembling, shocked old man back towards the main door. Then he stopped, and listened carefully. Through the roaring of the Malus they heard another, deeper noise, repeated over and over; it echoed up to them from the crypt.
"What"s that?" Verney whispered.
Turlough looked at him. He was listening hard, trying to extract meaning from the, sound. His face was drawn and worried-looking, and the old man felt his body go rigid with anxiety. "The TARDIS is in the crypt," Turlough said quietly. "I think we should take a look."
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor, working frantically at the console, was in the closing stages of establishing a program which might success was by no means certain give them some defence against the growing power of the Malus. But he was losing the race, as the gasps and moans of his companions warned him.
The image, like the mythical spider which invented its own existence, was spinning itself out of those tinkling, whirling lights. And it had almost accomplished its task: it moved its head freely now, craning further and further round to glare at the Doctor, as if it sensed that he was the real enemy, the one person it needed to fear.
The trumpeting sounds hardened and the lights spun with greater gusto. Tegan, who had more experience of these manifestations than any of the others, detected a note of triumph creeping in; and then suddenly the head jerked, broke free of all restraint and swung round to face the console.
"Doctor!" she shouted in warning.
The image watched the Doctor closely now; it seemed tense and drawn back, ready to spring. It looked to Tegan for all the world like some hideously deformed grey bat up there on the wall, waiting for the right moment to launch itself into flight.
The Doctor glanced upwards. "I know," he breathed quietly. He was very tense too, aware always that the image was only part of their problems. The heavy battering outside was still continuing, and it was just a matter of time before the door collapsed and let their enemies in.
The Malus image shifted threateningly. The Doctor held up his hands for them to be patient and stop distracting him. "It senses what I"m about!" he cried anxiously. Now everybody stay perfectly calm and still!"