They left the church without turning back. If they had turned they might have seen that the creaking sound had been the audible sign of some kind of release, like a dam bursting inside the wall. Now a river of smoke was pouring down from the crack in the will and seeping like a fog across the floor. And the crack itself was wider.
The Doctor and his companions came out of the church into the warm sunshine of a summer day. The light was so bright after the gloom inside that it dazzled their eyes.
They were surrounded by the green grass of a churchyard.
This in turn was encircled by a darker green of hedgerows and dotted with yew trees, in which unseen birds were singing. There was no time for Tegan or Turlough to appreciate their new situation, however, because the Doctor was already striding along a gravel path towards an old-fashioned lych-gate, and they had to hurry to avoid being left behind. There was no sign of another building anywhere.
‘Why did they build the church so far from the village?’
Tegan wondered.
‘Perhaps they were refused planning permission,’
Turlough joked.
Everybody was trying to be funny today. But Tegan wasn’t in the mood.
They caught up with the Doctor ooutside the lych gate, and found themselves on the threshold of a broad, undulating meadow. The Dotor had stopped, and was looking up a green hillside which stretched away to their left. He raised an arm to bring them to a halt.
‘Behave yourselers,’ he ordered. ‘We have company.’
They followed his gaze and suns, etched sharply against the skyline where green hilltop met hard blue firmament, the dark, statuesque outline of a horseman. As they watched, he urged his horse into a canter and rode down the hillside in a line calculated to cut them off if they tried to cross the meadow.
Then they heard hooves beating behind them, too, and the harsh voices of men goading their horses. They turned and saw three more horsemen break cover behind the tree-fringed churchyard and come galloping through the grass towards them.
Tegant’s eyebrows shot up in surprise: the horsemen wore the steel pointed helmets and the breastplates of troopers of the English Civil War. She was going to point out the absurdity of this, but Turlough sensed danger and shouted, ‘We should go back!’
But before they could retreat, armed foot soldiers in full battledress appeared around a corner of the church and came running; towards them from behind.
They were trapped. The Doctor spun round, frantically searching for an escape route, but all ways were denied them, by mounted troopers looming close and now forcing them back against a hedge, and foot soldiers racing up the path to the lych gate. ‘Too late,’ he muttered. They could only face their attackers like cornered animals.
‘Sergeant’ Joseph Willow glared down at them through the steel bars of his visor, from the safe height of his big grey horse. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he snarled.
He had the rasping, ill-tempered voice of a natural bully.
‘This is Sir George Hutchinson’s land.’
The Doctor looked up at him. Instinctively aware of the man’s short temper, he took a deep breath. This was a moment for patience and sweet reason, not anger. ‘If we are trespassing,’ he said mildly, ‘I apologise.’
It was an apology which Willow refused to accept.
‘Little Hodcombe,’ he persisted, ‘is a closed area, for your own safety. We’re in the middle of a war game.’
Now Tegan understood their armour and weapons.
These were grown men playing at historical soldiers – but even so, surely they were being too aggressive? The threat in their drawn swords was very real. ‘We’re here to visit my
.grandfather,’ she explained, anxious like the Doctor to calm things down.
Willow didn’t want her explanations either. ‘You’d better see Sir George,’ he said curtly. ‘He’ll sort it out.’ He urged his horse forward, moving between them and the hedge. ‘Move out!’ he shouted.
At his command, the troopers and the foot soldiers closed in around the Doctor and his companions, forming a bizarre prisoners’ escort. Then, led by Sergeant Willow, the party moved across the meadow towards Little Hodcombe village and Sir George Hutchinson.
As they went, there peered around a crumbling, mossy gravestone in the churchyard the head of the limping, beggar-like figure they had glimpsed briefly in the crypt.
As he watched the strangers being led away, the sun illuminated his devastated face.
His left eye was gone. Where it should have been, wrinkled skin collapsed into a shrivelled, empty socket.
The man’s mouth twisted awkwardly towards this, and the entire left side of his lace was dead. It looked as if it had been burned once, long ago, as if the skin had been blasted by fire and transformed into a hard, waxen shell which now could feel no pain – or any other sensation.
Holding the coarse woollen cloth around his throat, so that it hooded his head, he knelt behind a gravestone and stared, with his one unblinking eye, at the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough being herded away through the grass.
After an undignified forced march, at first among fields and then between the scattered cottages and farmsteads of Little Hodcombe, the Doctor and his companions were escorted to a big, rambling farmhouse next to an almost enclosed yard. Here Willow and the troopers dismounted and at sword and pistol point forced the trio inside, then pushed them into a room that was straight out of another century.
The Doctor, who was first to enter, could not disguise his surprise at the sight of this antique room and the burly, red-faced man in Parliamentary battle uniform who sat on a carved oak settle, facing him. For a second he wondered, as Tegan had done, whether somehow all their instruments had gone wrong and they had turned up hundreds of years awry, but then he saw Jane Hampden sitting at a table by the window in casual, twentieth-century clothes. Reassured by that, he tried to relax, yet still he felt uncertain; all these efforts to make the twentieth century seern like the seventeenth were unsettling.
The sight of three strangers being thrust unceremoniously into his parlour caused Ben Wolsey to jump out of his seat in surprise. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.
Willow followed them inside and closed the door. His hand hovered on the hilt of his sword. ‘They’re trespassers, Colonel,’ he answered curtly. ‘I’ve arrested them.’
Willow’s final shove had sent Tegan and Turlough staggering across the room towards a small woman, who sat at a long oak table with outrage and astonishment spreading across her face. ‘I don’t believe this!’ she exploded, and jumped to her feet.
Wolsey’s face, too, was a picture of surprise and embarrassment. ‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’
he challenged Willow.
The Sergeant casually removed his riding gloves. ‘Sir George has been informed,’ was all he would say in reply.
Wolsey turned to the Doctor with an apologetic smile.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘Some of the men get a bit carried away. We’ll soon have this business sorted out and you safely on your way.’
The Doctor, who had been giving the room a close examination, now turned to Wolsey. He leaned forward and treated the farmer to his most courteous smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with only the slightest hint of sarcasm.
Indicating the furnishings, he added, ‘This is a very impressive room, Colonel.’
Ben Wolsey smiled proudly. His head nodded with pleasure at approval from a stranger. ‘It’s my pride and joy,’ he confided.
‘Seventeenth century?’
‘Yes,’ Wolsey nodded again. ‘And its perfect in every detail.’
Tegan felt exasperated: chatting about antiques wasn’t going to get them very far. Beginning to think they had entered a lunatic asylum, she glared at the woman who, because she was wearing normal clothes, seemed to Tegan to be the only sane person around here. ‘What is going on?’
she asked her.
Jane smiled and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I think everyone’s gone mad.’
That made two of them. ‘Look,’ Tegan tried to sound more reasonable than she felt, ‘we don’t want to interfere.
We’re just here to visit my grandfather.’
‘Oh yes, so you said,’ the Sergeant snapped, banging into their conversation as he had barged into their lives.
‘And who might he be?’
‘His name is Andrew Verney.’
Just two simple words – a name – but their effect was enormous. A stunned silence foollowed, and the atmosphere became electric. Tegan felt almost physically the shock her words had inflicted upon these villagers. She saw their hasty glances at each other and noticed Joseph Willow look for instructions from the big Roundhead soldier he called Colonel.
‘Verney?’ he prodded, but the red-faced man said nothing; he appeared to be embarrassed, and not to know what to say. Tegan felt suddenly apprehensive.
‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded.
Jane Hampden was also looking to Ben Wolsey for some explanation, but he remained stolidly silent and eventually she herself turned to Tegan. As gently as she could, she said, ‘He disappeared a few days ago.’
Tegan’s apprehension became chilling anxiety. ‘Has anything been done to find him?’
‘Ben?’ Again Jane turned to Ben Wolsey, and again the former refused to answer, dropping his eyes and turning away.
‘Well?’ Tegan shouted.
It was time for the Doctor to act: he knew the signs and was only too well aware of Tegan’s talent for jumping to conclusions and diving in at the deep end of things. He walked quickly towards her and held up his hands for restraint. ‘Now calm down, Tegan,’ he warned. ‘I’m sure we can sort this out.’
But Tegan was in the grip of her anxiety and in no mood for more talk. With a frustrated cry of ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ at the prevaricating fools around her, she made a dash for the door and was through it before anyone else even moved.
The Doctor was the first to react. He called, ‘Now Tegan, come back!’ – but even as the words rang out he knew it was useless, and in the same instant he turned to his other companion and shouted, ‘Turlough! Fetch her, would you? Please?’
Turlough reacted quickly this time. He was fast on his feet and had hurled himself through the door before Willow’s hand reached the pistol on the table.
But now Willow snatched it up and pointed the barrel right between the Doctor’s eyes, in case he should have any thought of following his young friends. ‘You!’ he screamed, ‘Stay where you are!’ He was furious with himself for allowing the escape; anger twitched the skin of his cheek, and his finger hovered dangerously over the trigger.
The Doctor looked into the round, ominous tube of the barrel, and raised his hands in surrender.
3
Tegan ran blindly out of the farmhouse into dazzling sunlight. Propelled by fear for her grandfather’s safety, and bewildered that such events could be happening in a supposedly peaceful English village, she didn’t care where she was going so long as she got away from Willow and the troopers. She could make some firm plans later. So now, clutching her scarlet handbag, she stumbled over the uneven farmyard and raced towards the shelter of some buildings on the other side, hoping to reach them before anyone came out of the house to see which way she had gone.
She dived around the corner of a barn, and stopped. She was gasping for breath and leaned against the barn wall for support, beside its open doorway. The bricks, warmed by the sun, burned against her back.
Tegan pressed the handbag against her forehead to feel its coolness, but no sooner had she done so him it was roughly snatched out of her fingers, and with a shock she saw a hand disappear with it into the barn.
She thrust herself off the wall and into the doorway, but the deep shadow inside made her pause. It looked solid as a wall, black and still – she could see nothing in there ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted. The shadows soaked up her voice like blotting paper. ‘Give me that back!’ she called again.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward into the velvet darkness. It wrapped itself around her like a cloak.
After the glare outside it took a moment or two for Tegan’s eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. Then she saw a floor stretching away into even deeper shadow, littered with farm produce, implements, sacks and bales of hay. A rope hung from a hook on the wall and a rickety wooden staircase led up to a dark gallery above.
Everything was still. There was no sound, and no sign of the person who had snatched her handbag. He had simply disappeared. Unless... Tegan approached the stairs. The thief might be above her head at this moment, crouching up there in the dark gallery, waiting quietly for her to give up. But Tegan was not about to give up – she decided she had been pushed around enough for one day.
It was a basic fact of Tegan’s nature that her emotions sometimes drove her to take risks. That was part of her courage. Now her frustration and anger were coming to a dangerous head and she was quite prepared to venture where others would fear to tread: with a glance at the inky blackness above, and knowing full well that there was probably something nasty up there waiting fine her, she began to climb the steps.
But when she was only part way up the staircase the big door of the barn slammed shut with a bang like a cannon going off. Now she was enclosed in total darkness. The noise set her nerves tingling, and now that the light from the doorway had been cut off she felt a sensation of claustrophobia so choking that she was forced to turn and hurry back down the steps towards the door.
She felt as if the barn, like those great dark beasts in nightmares, had opened its arms to envelop her. She had to get out fast, or be swallowed up.
In his Cavalier clothes Sir George Hutchinson looked like a brilliantly plumed bird as he swept into Ben Wolsey’s parlour. What he saw – his Sergeant pointing a pistol into the eyes of a stranger – displeased him, for it implied unlooked-for complications when there were already enough matters of overwhelming importance to be dealt with.