Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [51]
The Doctor, already racing towards the steps to the church while the others were still tumbling out of the TARDIS, cut short their reunion embrace. ‘Save your greetings until later,’ he called.
Ben Wolsey ran past them. Tegan looked at her grandfather. ‘Never a dull moment,’ she shrugged. They smiled at each other, and ran after the Doctor and Wolsey.
Jane Hampden was close behind them. Will Chandler, sticking to his resolution of not trying to understand anything at all and letting himself be carried along from one crisis to another, ran at her heels. Turlough, with a last glance of satisfaction at his fallen foes, hrought up the rear.
Although they hurried to follow the Doctor, they were all afraid of what they were going to have to face in the church. As they walked warily into the small chapel at the top of the steps, the roaring of the Malus, the clouds of smoke and the acrid stench of destruction hit them; they had to force themselves to go further, and steel their nerves to turn through the archway and into the nave.
The wall beyond the pulpit was now all Malus. The gigantic head turned its eyes and loured at them as they came in. It trembled and shook with rage and lurched forward, still trying desperately to break fire. Every effort, though, used up energy, and the Doctor had cut of’its power source in the village. With eyes narrowed to slits it watched their every move.
Wolsey, who was keeping close to the Doctor’s shoulder, blanched at the sight. ‘Now what?’ he asked. The Doctor, searching for inspiration, was looking at the Mattis as intently as it was at him. ‘I don’t know, yet,’ he admitted.
‘Doctor...’ Turlough pointed towards the top of the nave The Doctor turned away from the Malus to look, and stiffened with surprise.
Three troopers had appeared, and were moving slowly down the nave towards them. They were no ordinary soldiers, though -- and they were certainly not twentieth-century villagers in disguise. Everything about them was drained of colour. The helmets, breastplates and tunics of Parliamentarian soldiers, which they all were, showed an identical shade of lifeless, greyish white; their stern, bloodless faces were the faces of men roused from their graves in the service of the Malus.
Verney shuddered. ‘Where did they come from?’
‘The Malus,’ the Doctor whispered. He watched the ghostly troopers’ relentless progress: they marched down the nave in eerie, silent unison. He felt the tension of his companions, their growing suspense as they started to move backwards.
Now the troopers’ slow, marching motion was propelled and echoed by the hollow heating of a drum.
Jane looked doubtfully at the Doctor. ‘They’re psychic projections?’ He nodded.
‘I’d feel happier with a gun,’ Wolsey announced. He was a true man of the soil, forthright and practical, to whom the possession of the right tool for the job always gave a sense of comfort and well-being. But there was no tool for this job. ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ Tegan told him.
‘They’re not real.’
‘They look solid enough to me,’ Wolsey muttered.
‘This is the Malus’s last line of defence,’ the Doctor explained. ‘And they’ll kill just as effectively as any living thing.’
The unseen drum throbbed, and the troopers marched on in absolute unison. Their austere and forbidding faces stared at the Doctor and his companions. There was no hatred in them, but nor was there any compassion; they were dead faces, with no expression at all. The little, frightened group retreated before them. moving closer and closer to the broken altar.
In the crypt below them, another trooper was stirring. The man Andrew Verney had tilled with his stone had begun to groan and murmur to himself. Now, with much grunting and pulling, he pushed himself up to his knees.
He was still only half conscious. He knelt for a while, swaying groggily and holding his aching shoulder; gradually his head cleared a little - enough for him to notice Willow’s body lying on the floor beside him. He bent over it and pulled it up to look at the Sergeant’s face.