Doctor Who: The Awakening Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 planning permission,’
    Turlough joked.
    Everybody was trying to be funny today. But Tegan wasn’t in the mood.
    They caught up with the Doctor ooutside the lych gate, and found themselves on the threshold of a broad, undulating meadow. The Dotor had stopped, and was looking up a green hillside which stretched away to their left. He raised an arm to bring them to a halt.
    ‘Behave yourselers,’ he ordered. ‘We have company.’
     
    They followed his gaze and suns, etched sharply against the skyline where green hilltop met hard blue firmament, the dark, statuesque outline of a horseman. As they watched, he urged his horse into a canter and rode down the hillside in a line calculated to cut them off if they tried to cross the meadow.
    Then they heard hooves beating behind them, too, and the harsh voices of men goading their horses. They turned and saw three more horsemen break cover behind the tree-fringed churchyard and come galloping through the grass towards them.
    Tegant’s eyebrows shot up in surprise: the horsemen wore the steel pointed helmets and the breastplates of troopers of the English Civil War. She was going to point out the absurdity of this, but Turlough sensed danger and shouted, ‘We should go back!’
    But before they could retreat, armed foot soldiers in full battledress appeared around a corner of the church and came running; towards them from behind.
    They were trapped. The Doctor spun round, frantically searching for an escape route, but all ways were denied them, by mounted troopers looming close and now forcing them back against a hedge, and foot soldiers racing up the path to the lych gate. ‘Too late,’ he muttered. They could only face their attackers like cornered animals.
    ‘Sergeant’ Joseph Willow glared down at them through the steel bars of his visor, from the safe height of his big grey horse. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he snarled.
    He had the rasping, ill-tempered voice of a natural bully.
    ‘This is Sir George Hutchinson’s land.’
    The Doctor looked up at him. Instinctively aware of the man’s short temper, he took a deep breath. This was a moment for patience and sweet reason, not anger. ‘If we are trespassing,’ he said mildly, ‘I apologise.’
    It was an apology which Willow refused to accept.
    ‘Little Hodcombe,’ he persisted, ‘is a closed area, for your own safety. We’re in the middle of a war game.’
     
    Now Tegan understood their armour and weapons.
    These were grown men playing at historical soldiers –