That was the opportunity Ben Wolsey had been waiting for. He raised his dagger and moved forward for the kill.
‘No!’ the Doctor shouted. He dived at the big man and grasped his arm to hold him back. At the same moment Willow made his move, charging the group from behind.
He took them by surprise and broke through easily, then he too, knife in hand, launched himself at Wolsey.
Although Wolsey was stronger than Willow he was hampered by the Doctor, so the two men were evenly balanced and for long moments grappled for supremacy.
They gripped each other’s knife arm at the wrist and the knives hung poised in the air; their arms strained and their faces trembled with effort. The Mattes roared, Jane screamed, Tegan shouted; the Doctor tried to drag the struggling men away from Sir George, who was moaning and pushing himself to his feet.
It was Turlough who ended the impasse. He leaped on Willow from behind and dragged him backwards. Taking his chance, the Doctor finally overpowered Ben Wolsey and pulled him away too.
All the time they had been fighting, Will Chandler had taken no notice of them. Instead, he had been staring at Sir George, watching his struggle as he groped to his feet, watching him now as he stood dazed and swaying just in front of the gaping mouth of the Malus. In his mind, Will was seeing not Sir George but his ancestor of centuries ago, the evil man who had pressed Will into service and forced him into the battle of the church and the worst moments of his life. Will hated him for that.
And now, when Turlough dragged Willow unexpectedly in one direction and the Doctor pushed Wolsey in another, Will saw a clear pathway between them to Sir George, and something snapped inside him.
The Malus, screaming at the frustration of its plans, belched clouds of smoke and set the whole nave shaking with its noise. The roof timbers started to quiver. Pieces of plaster, shaken from their anchorage by the rumbling vibration, fell to the floor with a clattering sound. And Will, freed from the anchorage of his fear, shot out of the group like an arrow released from a bow and scuttled into the smoke billowing around the Malus and Sir George.
Verney and Jane saw him run and sensed instantly what he was about. ‘No!’ Verney cried. Jane shouted, ‘Will, don’t!’ But Will did not hear them. He was running blind, possessed by a single idea -- to destroy the man who had destroyed him.
Sir George could offer no resistance. His mind had been blown and he was totally confused and disoriented. Will grabbed hold of him, and as he looked up into the mad face there were tears in his eyes. ‘You gonna be dead!’ he yelled
– and pushed him backwards with all his strength.
Sir George cried out as he stumbled, tripped and full back into the wide open mouth of the roaring Malus. He disappeared from sight. There was a momentary silence and then a long, gurgling scream, suddenly cut off. Black smoke belched from the Malus, and then it fell silent, and still.
Sweating and breathing heavily, Will leaned wildeyed against the pulpit for support. Wolsey and Willow ceased struggling; stunned by this latest event, they all looked on quietly as the Doctor approached him.
Will’s fear had returned. He was appalled by what he had done. Yet he knew it was justified, and to forestall the Doctor before he could speak he looked him in the eye and shouted, ‘It is better he be dead!’
The Doctor held out his hands to placate him. ‘It’s all right, Will,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s all right.’
The church was heavy with smoke. Wreaths of it hung like fog around the silent pews. The Malus looked like a dead thing, as hideously ugly in death as it had been in life.
Jane Hampden ran to the Doctor. ‘We must seal up the church,’ she said.
Following her, Andrew Verney added, ‘And we must inform the authorities. That thing has to be destroyed.’
But the Malus was not dead, or defeated yet. At Verney’s words it opened its eyes wide and glared at them. And then, from deep inside its being, from far back in the wall and centuries back in time, a new noise began.
It moved rapidly towards the surface. They could hear if rolling forward and upward, gathering momentum and increasing in volume as it came, building and rushing like a wind, like a hurricane, like a banshee shrieking and wailing, like the end of the world ... And still the noise came on. They were transfixed by the overwhelming power of it, struck dumb and frozen to the spot as the tumult grew deafening and rolled on and on, and the church began to shake before its coming like a tree bending before a great wind.
Suddenly a massive beam was dislodged from the roof timbers and crashed into the nave behind them. Blocks of stone tumbled down in clouds of dust.
That broke the spell. Their silence became uproar as the women screamed and the men cried out in fear. ‘Now what?’ Turlough yelled, watching the eyes of the Malus flash and roll, seeing that great head shudder. Smoke billowed from it and filled the nave with a pungent fog, so that they could scarcely see the rubble and stones and beams which toppled down around them.
And the noise was still coming.
‘The Malus knows it has lost!’ the Doctor shouted at the top of his voice. ‘It’s going to fulfil its programming and clear the ground, destroy everything it can! Come on!’
He started to run for the crypt. One by one they followed him, each dodging an avalanche of falling masonry as the Malus shook the church to its foundations.
It bellowed in its death agony, writhing and twisting about as if, like Sir George, it had turned insane.
It shook and shivered, tearing itself out of the wall at last.
With the others hard on his heels the Doctor careered down the steps and across the crypt to the TARDIS. The crypt itself was shaking like the church above and pieces of the roof were breaking away.
The Doctor waited at the door of the TARDIS to count them through. One by one they ran past him – Will Chandler, Joseph Willow, Jane Hampden, Ben Wolsey, Tegan and old Andrew Verney. Turlough stayed back with the Doctor for a moment. ‘Does the Malus still have the power?’ he asked.
‘Enough to keep Will here and level the church,’ the Doctor shouted through the turmoil. ‘Come along!’
Now they too ran inside the TARDIS and followed the others into the console room. The Doctor raced to the console and immediately began to hit switches, set coordinates and adjust slide controls. The TARDIS was shaking too, with the church and the crypt; at any moment they could all go up together.
‘Close the door, would you?’ the Doctor asked Jane. As she obeyed he slammed the master power control. Motors roared into life, the time rotor began to oscillate, and the TARDIS dematerialised, just as the roof of the crypt began to cave in. Tons of stone and timber crashed down on the spot where it had been.
Inside the church whole sections of the roof were falling down. The noise was beyond human belief as the Malus choked and pulsed and screamed, bent on the destruction of everything around it. Pillars cracked across. Now the walls of the church tower split asunder, and the tower collapsed with a roaring of its own.
The walls of the nave caved in. The wall containing the Malus crashed down upon it and in a dry, nameless explosion the Malus blew up, shooting whole sections of the church high into the air and scattering debris far and wide, even into the streets of the village.
When the last piece of rubble had clattered to the ground, when the dust had settled, when the final echo had died away – then, at last, there was silence in Little Hodcombe.
Inside the TARDIS, the motors hummed quietly.
The Doctor put his hands into his pockets and announced: ‘The Malus has destroyed itself.’ His voice was quiet, exhausted.
There was a general sigh of relief, although each of them was too shattered to he visibly excited by the news. A softly spoken ‘Thank goodness’ from Ben Wolsey summed up all their feelings.
Jane, though, still had the strength to be curious. ‘Well, now that it’s gone, was it a beast or a machine?’ she asked.
The Doctor was moving rapidly around the console, checking that all was in order. ‘It was a living thing,’ he said, ‘re-engineered as an instrument of war and sent here to clear the way for an invasion.’
‘What went wrong?’ Turlough wanted to know. ‘Why didn’t they invade?’
‘I don’t honestly know,’ the Doctor confessed. ‘I must check to see if there’s anything in the computer about it.’
Turlough wasn’t satisfied with that. Frowning, he indicated the now very subdued Will Chandler standing beside him. ‘If the Malus is destroyed, why is Will still here? You did say he was only a psychic projection.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘Ah ... yes,’ he hedged. ‘It seems I was mistaken. The Malus was able to intermingle the two time zones for a living man to pass through. It must have had incredible power.’
That’s putting it mildly, Tegan thought, as she moved to her grandfather’s side. ‘This is the last time I pay an unexpected call on you,’ she smiled.
The tired old man shook his head. With a rueful expression he took her hands in his. ‘As a rule,’ he said,
‘the village and I are much more welcoming.’
It was a time for making peace, Ben Wolsey realised. He turned to Joseph Willow and held out his hand. ‘There’ll be a lot of clearing up to do, in more ways than one,’ he said. ‘We’ll need all the help we can get.’
Willow took his proffered hand and shook it willingly.
‘And with no recriminations?’ he asked.
‘None,’ Wolsey said. ‘Not on my part.’
‘Nor mine,’ Jane Hampden added, and shook hands too.
The Doctor, well pleased with developments, rubbed his hands with satisfaction. ‘Well, that seems to be it,’ he said.
‘We’ll drop you all off and then we can be on our way.’
‘Er...’ Turlough dropped his head to one side and indicated the quiet Will again. ‘What about our friend here?’
‘Ah, yes,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘Well, him too. 1613 isn’t all that far away.’
Will’s mouth dropped open. Hope sprang back into his heart.
But Tegan had something to say before the Doctor started his jaunts through time and space again. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she asked him.
The Doctor stared at her, unable to think what it could be and unwilling, for the time being, to make the effort.
He’d just begun to relax. ‘Probably,’ he admitted. ‘It isn’t unusual. I’ve had a very hard day.’
‘We came here – correction,
I
came here to visit my grandfather,’ Tegan reminded him. ‘It would he nice to spend a little time with him.’
Turlough spoke up immediately in her support. ‘I must admit that I wouldn’t mind staying for a while.’
Jane smiled at the dumbfounded Doctor. ‘You’re outnumbered, seven to one,’ she laughed.
The Doctor stared at them, lined up in opposition to his plan. ‘I’m being bullied, coerced, forced against my will,’
he complained. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’
Verney grinned. ‘Even if you have, agree, man,’ he pleaded.
‘Oh, all right,’ the Doctor gave in. ‘But just for a little while. We’ve a great deal to do.’
‘Good.’ Now it was Turlough’s turn to rub his hands with satisfaction. ‘I quite miss that brown liquid they drink here.’
Will Chandler’s eyes widened in a second bout of optimism. Things really were looking up. ‘Ale?’ he asked hopefully.
‘No,’ Turlough smiled. ‘Tea.’
Will frowned. ‘What be tea?’
‘A noxious infusion of oriental leaves, containing a high percentage of toxic acid,’ the Doctor explained.
Will turned up his nose and looked at Tegan. ‘Sounds an evil brew, don’t it?’ he grimaced.
‘True,’ the Doctor said. Then he smiled and added;
‘Personally, I rather like it.’
And with that he flicked the last switch which would bring the TARDIS and its passengers back to the village of Little Holcombe, and a holiday deep in the peaceful English countryside, where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens.