Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [16]
Every building cast a hard black shadow across the grass verges that had burned brown during weeks of drought.
The Doctor had searched among the shadows and in the sunlight, and had found no sign at all of his companions.
Now, crossing another deserted street, he turned to look back the way he had come. ‘Turlough! Tegan!’ he called again. A moment later he was lying in the road.
The beggarman had seemed to come from nowhere. He was just there, suddenly looming out of a roadside shadow straight at the Doctor and catching him off balance with a shoulder charge that sent him sprawling. As he fell, the Doctor saw him lurch away up the street with the rolling, limping gait of the figure they had seen in the crypt; the man clutched some sort of coarsely woven cloth about his head and shoulders, and there was something terribly wrong with his face. The Doctor winced: it looked like a stricken landscape in the aftermath of an explosion.
But what made the Doctor really catch his breath was the sight of Tegan’s handbag held tightly against the man’s chest as he ran. He pulled himself to his feet and shouted,
‘Wait! Come back!’
The man turned sideways, out of the street into a lane.
Sprinting his fastest, the Doctor was at the spot within seconds, yet what he saw was an empty lane, stretching away between high walls. It led far into the distance, green and deserted except for a tiny, black, diminishing figure almost at the horizon. The figure was going like the wind.
For a moment the Doctor doubted the evidence of his own eyes. ‘How could he get so far?’ he muttered, and set off running again.
While the Doctor was chasing the half-blind, limping beggar, another part of Little Hodcombe was stirring from its lethargy.
Four horsemen were approaching the village Cross, a worn stone Celtic monument set upon a hexagonal plinth at a spot where four roadways converged. Here, village and countryside met together in a conglomeration of thatched houses, orchards, and a telephone box, stone and asphalt and trees and grass all wilting under the unyielding sun.
Ben Wolsey, Joseph Willow and the two troopers who cantered behind them sweated inside their Civil War battledress. They too were searching for Tegan and, like the Doctor, they were having no success at all.
When they arrived at the telephone box Wolsey reined his big grey horse to a halt and looked about him in frustration. ‘We’ll never find her,’ he exclaimed. ‘She could be anywhere.’
Willow cantered back. ‘We should ask for more men,’ he said.
‘Hutchinson won’t allow it. He’s got everyone guarding the perimeter.’
Willow frowned. In a voice hard-edged with anger he shouted, ‘We’re wasting our time with only four of us searching. If he wants her so badly, he’s got to find more men!’
Wolsey pointed to the telephone box. The paint gleamed as scarlet as blood in the glaring light. ‘Ring him,’
he suggested.
Willow shook his head and wheeled his horse around, ready to set off again. ‘We’re not allowed. I’ll have to go back to the house.’
‘All right,’ Wolsey agreed. He turned to the two troopers, who had also stopped and were patiently waiting for instructions. ‘Carry on searching, you two,’ he ordered them. ‘Try Verney’s cottage again. She might be there.’
With a noisy clatter of sparking hooves on the hard surface of the roadway, the troopers galloped away. Wolsey turned back to Willow. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
Wearily they set off again, in the direction of Wolsey’s farmhouse.
Very warily, the Doctor entered the church. He was still in pursuit of the limping man and was sure he had run into the church -- although somehow being sure no longer seemed suflicient reason to believe things in Little Hodcombe, because hardly anything was as it appeared to be at first sight.
That had happened again now: although he would have sworn that the man was in here, there was no sign of him.
The Doctor came straight into