Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [7]
‘Wait, please!’ the Doctor shouted, setting off after it.
Tegan cried out with frustration: that brief glimpse had been enough to tell her that the man’s clothes were all wrong for the twentieth century. They were more or less rags, but they most certainly were not twentleth-century rags – some kind of breeches and a shapeless woollen garment like a smock, which went over the man’s head and shoulders, to be clutched around his throat.
She turned to Turlough in dismay. ‘Did you see his clothes?’ she wailed. ‘We’re in the wrong century!’
Turlough shook his head. ‘We’re not,’ he assured her. ‘I checked the time monitor. It is 1984.’
The Doctor shone his torch into Tegan’s bewildered face. In a slightly mocking voice, sending up her disbelief, he said, ‘Let’s have a look around.’ Without waiting for an answer he turned away and hurried across the crypt and ran up the stone steps out of sight.
Warily and apprehensively, Tegan and Turlough peered through the encircling gloom. The figure was nowhere to be seen. There seemed nothing to be gained from hanging around here waiting for the roof to fall in; they each glanced at the other for confirmation of their thoughts, and ran after the Doctor as fast as they could.
When they, too, had vanished up the steps, the silence of centuries returned to the crypt. And noiselessly, as if he was part of that silence, the man appeared. Moving sideways like a ghostly crab, he slipped out of the cover of an archway and humped his aching body across the floor.
He reached the steps and craned his neck to look up the empty staircase. Although the dim light still did not reveal his features, it was strong enough to show that there was something wrong with his face.
Something terribly, sickeningly wrong.
The limping man would have fitted well into the parlour of Ben Wolsey’s farmhouse. It too was far from modern: in fact, by deliberate design and through the painstaking collection of antique furnishings over the whole of his adult life, the big farmer had turned it into a place fit for history to repeat itself.
Friends and acquaintances who walked into the parlour felt immediately disoriented and lost, as if they had stepped through a time warp into the seventeenth century.
Often the experience unnerved them, for every period detail was so exact that the room held the very smell and atmosphere of a bygone age.
When they had got over their initial surprise and looked for reasons for their superstitious reaction, some of Wolsey’s acquaintances decided it was the heavy oak furniture which weighed so profoundly upon their spirits –
the ornately carved chairs or the long table laden with maps and parchments and an ancient, forbidding, long-barrelled pistol. Others suspected the dark wood panelling on the walls, or the bulky drapes of curtains or the massive open stone fireplace.
For some, the silver candelabra on the mantelpiece and the pot of spills and the displays of pewter plates conjured up, like ghosts, images of the people who once used them.
And then there were those dark portraits of seventeenth-century country gentlefolk, and the huge hunting tapestry, and the collection of weapons from the English Civil War displayed ominously above the hearth. Perhaps it was those.
Whatever the reason, they all agreed that Wolsey had succeeded in creating something uncommonly exact – a room in which the dead days of long ago came back to life.
One way or another it affected every person who entered it.
Jane Hampden, a schoolteacher who prided herself on being down-to-earth and practical, still found it eerie and unsettling. She found it to be a room which made her imagine things: sometimes she waited for seventeenth-century men to walk in through the door.
Today it actually happened.
She sat at the long table in front of the window, with a quill feather in her hands which was over three hundred and fifty years old, and looked at a Cavalier of King Charles the First standing at the fire, and a Colonel of Oliver Cromwell