Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [28]
‘Colonel Wolsey’s house.’
Curiously Jane watched the Doctor leave the safety of their cover to explore the room. He poked about with his torch, examining the walls, the roof, the floor. He had evidently decided they were safe for the time bring. He was a strange man, Jane thought, with a remarkable authority; she realised that she trusted his judgment implicity, and with only a passing hesitation at why she should put her life in the hands of a complete stranger, she followed him out of hiding.
Will had come out too, and was watching the Doctor scrabbling around on the floor, dreading what he would come up with next.
Jane peered myopically at their surroundings. ‘This must be the passage Andrew Verney discovered,’ she said, and explained, ‘He’s our local historian.’
‘Yes, Tegan told me.’ The Doctor’s response was of the vaguest sort, for he had found something on the floor. He crouched on his heels fingering a lump of black, spongy stuff which gave offa metallic sheen in the torchlight. Jane watched him closely, sensing his extreme puzzlement.
Then the Doctor drew in his breath sharply. ‘Just a minute,’ he exclaimed in a whisper. He stood up and offered the substance to Jane for her to examine. She held it gingerly. Her overwhelming reaction was one of surprise
– and uncertainty. The stuff filled her with doubts, for although it was as light as a feather, there was a solidity and weight about it too, and despite its squidginess -- she could mould its shape like plasticise – it had a hard, abrasive resilience.
Jane recognised it as the substance Sir George was always fiddling with. This was the first time she had seen it at close quarters, but the closer acquaintance resolved nothing. It only raised questions. The thing was an impossibility – and yet it was here in her hand.
The only thing Jane was sure of was that she had seen nothing like it before. In the absence of clues from the Doctor, all she felt was an overwhelming apprehension – it was like being thrust into a locked, absolutely dark room and wondering what was in there with you. Giving up, she looked at the Doctor and saw from his eager expression that he had some interesting theories which he was dying to expound.
‘What is it?’ she asked, to please him.
‘It’s metal.’
Impossible. Jane looked at the substance again and moulded it in her fingers.
‘It can’t be,’ she argued. ‘It’s all squashy.’
‘It’s Tinclavic,’ the Doctor announced, as if that should settle everything. Jane stared at him, feeling stupid.
‘Tinclavic?’ she echoed. ‘What is that? Where does it come from?’
The Doctor took a deep breath and plunged in at the deep end. ‘The planet Raaga,’ he said quickly, and watched her mouth fall open. ‘Let’s go back to the church,’ he suggested, and before she could explode he was away, with Will at his heels.
Jane stood rooted to the spot. She stared at the Doctor’s retreating back, and gave a frightened glance at the glinting black substance in her hand as if it had just come to life and bitten her.
Feeling strangely alien in the May Queen costume, Tegan stood in front of the latticed window and looked sadly out at the countryside and the yellow-thatched and red-tiled roofs of the village.
Everything was wrong, she thought. Out there somewhere was her grandfather, but he might as well have been on another planet. He was missing, and probably in trouble, if not worse. Heaven alone knew where the Doctor and Turlough were, and the TARDIS was probably buried under tons of collapsed stone. On top of that, a youth had crashed out of a wall and another century, everybody was going stark staring mad trying to pretend it was that other century and that its horrific war was still going on – and she herself was a prisoner. She had been compelled to wear the clothes of a country girl of the seventeenth century, and so was being forced back in time herself. It was enough to make anybody depressed.
Footsteps approached quickly along the corridor outside. Tegan stiffened with anxiety,