Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [14]
The lightness of his tone had fooled the others completely and this sudden explosion of activity took them all by surprise. All Sir George could do was shout, ‘Wait!
Wait!’ and by the time Willow had dived for the pistol and levelled it at the doorway, the Doctor had gone.
‘Wait!’ Sir George shouted for a third time. But he knew he was wasting his breath, and when Willow turned to him and told him that Tegan was Verney’s granddaughter, his face set into stone. All the affected bonhomie with which he had addressed the Doctor vanished completely.
‘Double the perimeter guard,’ he snapped. ‘He mustn’t get out of the village.’ Then a new thought struck him and his smile returned. ‘And help him find Verney’s granddaughter...’
‘Right! Willow snapped his heels together.
‘I’ve something rather special in mind for her,’ Sir George grinned. The look of eager anticipation on Willow’s face showed that he fully understood all the implications of that remark. Sir George turned to Jane. She had watched these proceding with increasing concern and now registered her disapproval again: ‘Detaining people against their will is illegal, Sir George. The Doctor and his friends included.’
Hutchinson leaned down over the table towards her. ‘I shouldn’t let that bother you, Miss Hampden,’ he sneered.
‘As the local magistrate, I shall find myself quite innocent.’
There was something so abnormal about the intense brilliance in his eyes, and so sardonic in his complacent half-smile, that Jane shuddered. For a moment she felt physically sick. This man held all the aces. There was no stopping him.
The barn door was immovable. Tegan pushed and pulled and grunted; she kicked it and bruised her toes, and stretched up to wrench at a padlock high on the door until her nails split, but it would not open. When it had slammed shut, it had jammed tight.
Panting with the effort, she gave up the struggle. She needed to rest for a moment, and toppled forward to lean her head against the door, The wood smelled of old age and creosote and pitch. She gasped for breath, thankful at least that the thief who had stolen her handbag was not shut in here with her, in the darkness. He had simply disappeared
- it was probably he who had slammed the door shut on her, on his way out.
But even as she breathed that sigh of relief she felt that there was something in here. Something odd.
As she leaned with her forehead pressed against the musty wood, she heard a strange, unidentifiable sound. It was not a single note, but a continuing long, low hum which grew louder and stronger and gradually became a pressure which hurt her ears She stiffened. There was a tingling sensation in her spine and she felt a sudden apprehension that something weird was building up in the gloom behind her.
She hardly dared to look round. But when she did she breathed another sigh of relief, for there was nothing to he seen. There was just the whirring sound in the darkness.
But then -- she stiffened again -- she saw something in the gloom up above her, where she had supposed the gallery to be. She strained her eyes to see, and suddenly discovered a light dancing around up there in the dark.
Now the noise in Tegan’s ears began to change in pitch.
It rose and crescendoed and abruptly shattered like glass, breaking into tinkling fragments of sound that sparkled like droplets in the still air of the barn. At the same time the light became more and more brilliant, and then it too broke, dividing and dividing over and over until there was a constantly changing kaleidoscope of points of light up there. They whirled below the invisible rafters, now spreading, now contracting, accompanied always by the