Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [17]
‘Hallo!’ he called. The sound echoed among the pillared archways and sped to the sanctuary and the high, stained glass window at the other end of the church, facing him. ‘I saw you enter,’ he called again, but he might as well have been talking to himself.
Something in here tickled his throat and made him want to cough. He looked around, and sniffed. There was a strangely acrid smell which hadn’t been here earlier. It mingled with the scents of rubble and damp and centuries of dust. He sniffed again, trying to identify it.
‘All I want is Tegan’s bag!’ he shouted. ‘What have you done with her? I know you can hear me!’ Again his voice echoed and died, and the place was silent as a grave once more.
No, it wasn’t.
For a moment the Doctor thought his ears were deceiving him, as out of the silence there grew, softly at first, a strange amalgamation of sounds without apparent cause. There was a trumpet, he decided ... no, there was more than one, there were several trumpets calling, and there were drums beating softly, and other noises, all of them low and far away.
Curious to identify their source, the Doctor walked carefully up the nave. The sounds seemed to be louder here, and they were growing louder by the moment as if they were coming closer. Now he could hear harness jingling, and horses neighing and whinnying, and the heat of their galloping hooves; and men were shouting and cursing. He sniffed .. that smell was stronger now - and suddenly he knew what it was.
‘Gunpowder!’ he hissed. Worried, he looked for traces of smoke, and noticed a thin white trail warming out of the crack in the wall, which seemed to be larger now than before. Whether that was the cause or not, gunpowder spoke to the Doctor of violence, and so did the noises.
These were becoming very violent indeed: guns fired, cannon pounded, swords clashed. The nave reverberated with the uproar, and it began to vibrate inside the Doctor’s head.
Trumpets, guns, harness, drums, shouting – the yelling and screaming of men in mortal agony – all the clamour of a desperate battle assailed the Doctors ears. They raced around the church and echoed back and beat his senses like physical blows, and became a hurricane of noise that roared around and blew down across him until he buckled under the weight of it, his knees bending and his face twisting with pain.
The Doctor jammed his hands over his cars. The pressure made him cry out, and his cry was added to the rest and it too distorted and echoed and swelled and boomeranged back at him. The plunging sounds destroyed his balance, and he could no longer stand upright. He reeled, and spun round and round in the severest pain.
Finally he managed to stagger into a pew beside the pulpit. He half sat, half lay there, holding his ears. And the wall next to the pulpit, beside his head, split asunder.
The noise was like a pistol shot. It cracked through the Doctor’s inner ear and killed every other sound. Not far from his face, the plaster on the wall bucked outwards. In astonishment the Doctor watched it widen to a hole, watched masonry come tumbling and dust fly as the wall was punched wand harried and pulverised by something forcing its way out from the inside.
Suddenly the Doctor realised that the other racket had stopped altogether; the reverberations of battle had died away as mysteriously as they had risen. Everything in the church was still and silent again, and there was a tense atmosphere, as if all attention was focussed on this bulging and breaking of the wall. The Doctor gasped as something probed jerkily through the spreading gap towards hirn.
Fingers.
Fingers pushing and scraping and bleeding, yanking at the wall and tearing out the plaster with Feverish, desperate movements. Suddenly the fingers became a hand, and then the hand was clear of the hole and an arm followed, and then a shoulder was through, and all at once the wall gave way with a clatter, and a body burst