Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [9]
They moved quickly forward, hoping to find the mysterious man from the crypt. The Doctor hurried across to the pulpit; Turlough marched down the nave, followed more slowly by Tegan, who looked around in wonder.
‘Where did he go?’ she asked.
‘If he can move that quickly, he can’t be hurt very badly,’ Turlough said, looking back at her over his shoulder. He was unwilling to be here, and wanted very much to get back into the TARDIS and far away from this place, which was all too obviously in a state of collapse. Yet he felt its fascination, too. His annoyance was beginning to turn into a desire to find some answers to the questions which had been multiplying ever since they got here.
The Doctor, too, was fascinated. He crouched down beside the pulpit and ran his fingers over the sculpted wood. ‘Interesting,’ he muttered in such an enthralled tone that Tegan left off searching for the limping man and hurried over to have a look for herself.
What she saw made her shudder. Images were carved into the wooden side of the pulpit with such skill and twisted imagination that they made medieval gargoyles, of the kind she had seen on stone buttresses of old churches, look like fairies. There was a man being pursued around a tree by something monstrous ... an inhuman, distorted and mask-like image that was utterly grotesque.
She shivered. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Then admire the craftsmanship,’ the Doctor suggested, probing the carved relief with his fingers. ‘It’s seventeenth-century ... probably on the theme of Man being chased by the Devil.’ His finger hesitated beside the Devil. ‘I must admit I’ve never seen one quite like that before.’
Turlough came over while the Doctor was speaking, but his attention was distracted by a crack in the church wall just below the pulpit - a horizontal split which suddenly veered upwards at its right extremity. The Doctor glanced across at it ton, then put away his torch and gazed up at the vaulted roof for signs of damage there.
‘It looks as though a bomb hit the place,’ Tegan said, voicing a thought which had occurred to her earlier when they had first seen the cascading masonry on the scanner screen.
‘Maybe it did,’ Turlough agreed.
Tegan was suddenly anxious. ‘Can we find my grandfather?’ she pleaded. The Doctor nodded. He turned away from the cracked wall and waved her down the nave.
With Turlough he followed Tegan between the dusty, rubble-laden pews. Then he heard the noise.
It was a single, short, hollow creak which whiplashed through the church like a gun going off. It was followed by complete silence.
‘What was that?’ Turlough shuddered.
‘A ghost?’ the Doctor suggested, He smiled at his joke but Tegan, far from being amused, was running. Suddenly she couldn’t wait a moment longer to leave this strange place and get out into the everyday light of a sane, normal day, in her grandfather’s village in twentieth-century England.
They left the church without turning back. If they had turned they might have seen that the creaking sound had been the audible sign of some kind of release, like a dam bursting inside the wall. Now a river of smoke was pouring down from the crack in the will and seeping like a fog across the floor. And the crack itself was wider.
The Doctor and his companions came out of the church into the warm sunshine of a summer day. The light was so bright after the gloom inside that it dazzled their eyes.
They were surrounded by the green grass of a churchyard.
This in turn was encircled by a darker green of hedgerows and dotted with yew trees, in which unseen birds were singing. There was no time for Tegan or Turlough to appreciate their new situation, however, because the Doctor was already striding along a gravel path towards an old-fashioned lych-gate, and they had to hurry to avoid being left behind. There was no sign of another building anywhere.
‘Why did they build the church so far from the village?’
Tegan wondered.
‘Perhaps they were refused