Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [1]
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.
Nobody 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 reassurance they felt as they must have felt for centuries.
And yet she 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.
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