Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [6]
It looked like an earthquake out there. It was nothing like the sequestered haven which Tegan’s grandfather had described to her in his letters. Everything about it was wrong. In her heart Tegan had known this would happen.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she cried.
Turlough agreed. One glance at the chaos out there had been enough to convince him that if they didn’t move fast they would become part of the general disintegration.
‘Quickly, Doctor,’ he shouted. ‘Relocate the TARDIS.’
But the Doctor had forestalled them. His arm was already moving towards the main control switch.
‘No, wait!’ As the dust cleared for a moment in the scanner frame Tegan saw something move. She couldn’t he sure, but it seemed to her that there was a shifting among the shadows out there, that the grey hulk of a block of stone edged sideways. Instinctively she raised an arm to restraint her companions. ‘Hold on, there’s somebody out there!’ she cried.
The others had seen it too, and were watching the screen closely. Suddenly the stone moved again and became an indistinct shadowy figure which rose up out of the dust and slipped away into the shadow of a pillar. It was bent nearly double, and it limped heavily, lurching over the rubble which littered the floor.
Another curtain of dust swept across the view.
‘He’s trapped,’ the Doctor said anxiously. If there’s another fall he’ll he killed.’ Before his companions realised what he was doing, he had reached across the console in front of Turlough, hit the slide control to open the main door of the TARDIS, and was on his way out.
Turlough gaped at the whirling dust tilling the screen and blanched. ‘We can’t go out there!’ he objected. A rescue mission would he suicidal - any fool could see that.
But the Doctor was not at all interested in what fools could see, and Tegan was close behind him.
‘Doctor!’ Turlough complained. With a last helpless glance at the monitor and the now immobile time rotor, he gave a resigned shrug and hurrled out after the others.
2
The Devil in the Church
Outside the TARDIS, the Doctor shone his torch into the gloom. The wandering beam picked out columns and archways. It soon became clear that they were inside a church crypt – one which was largely ruined already and was being further devastated every moment. Plaster and masonry crumbled and crashed to the floor with a noise that sped away into shadows, where it was swallowed up in the accumulated dust of centuries.
Frowning and straining her eyes in the poor light, Tegan searched for the figure they had seen on the scanner.
To her right she distinguished two stone arches held up by decidedly rickety-looking pillars. If those went, the roof would cave in. Beyond the archways there ran a passage backed by a wall of tombs; these were rectangular holes in the wall blocked off with stones, on which crumbled, illegible lettering was just visible. There was no movement at all in that direction.
Ahead, across the crypt, two more arches on low columns led to a stone stairway. The steps veered up to the right and vanished out of sight; perhaps the man had gone up those. Or he might have lost himself among the black recesses to their left, where another decrepit archway gave on to deep, interminable shadow.
‘He’s gone,’ she whispered. She shivered: it was cold in here, with the damp chill of old stone hidden deep in the earth, where sunlight had never been. She realised, too, how quiet everything had become: the falls of rubble had ceased and their clattering had been replaced by a silence that was as heavy as had. Tegan began to think she had imagined the man.
But the Doctor had seen him too. ‘Hello!’ he called, stepping away from the TARDIS and picking his way among the litter of collapsed stone.
‘Hello!’
Now the recesses of the crypt soaked up his voice like a sponge, and the dusty darkness swallowed the thin beam of his torch. Turlough, at Tegan’s shoulder, could see nothing at all, until suddenly one of the shadows beside the wall of tombs separated itself from a pillar. Moving incredibly