Doctor Who: The Awakening Read Online Free PDF

but even so, surely they were being too aggressive? The threat in their drawn swords was very real. ‘We’re here to visit my
    .grandfather,’ she explained, anxious like the Doctor to calm things down.
    Willow didn’t want her explanations either. ‘You’d better see Sir George,’ he said curtly. ‘He’ll sort it out.’ He urged his horse forward, moving between them and the hedge. ‘Move out!’ he shouted.
    At his command, the troopers and the foot soldiers closed in around the Doctor and his companions, forming a bizarre prisoners’ escort. Then, led by Sergeant Willow, the party moved across the meadow towards Little Hodcombe village and Sir George Hutchinson.
    As they went, there peered around a crumbling, mossy gravestone in the churchyard the head of the limping, beggar-like figure they had glimpsed briefly in the crypt.
    As he watched the strangers being led away, the sun illuminated his devastated face.
    His left eye was gone. Where it should have been, wrinkled skin collapsed into a shrivelled, empty socket.
    The man’s mouth twisted awkwardly towards this, and the entire left side of his lace was dead. It looked as if it had been burned once, long ago, as if the skin had been blasted by fire and transformed into a hard, waxen shell which now could feel no pain – or any other sensation.
    Holding the coarse woollen cloth around his throat, so that it hooded his head, he knelt behind a gravestone and stared, with his one unblinking eye, at the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough being herded away through the grass.
    After an undignified forced march, at first among fields and then between the scattered cottages and farmsteads of Little Hodcombe, the Doctor and his companions were escorted to a big, rambling farmhouse next to an almost enclosed yard. Here Willow and the troopers dismounted and at sword and pistol point forced the trio inside, then pushed them into a room that was straight out of another century.
    The Doctor, who was first to enter, could not disguise his surprise at the sight of this antique room and the burly, red-faced man in Parliamentary battle uniform who sat on a carved oak settle, facing him. For a second he wondered, as Tegan had done, whether somehow all their instruments had gone wrong and they had turned up hundreds of years awry, but then he saw Jane Hampden sitting at a table by the window in casual, twentieth-century clothes. Reassured by that, he tried to relax, yet still he felt uncertain; all these efforts to make the twentieth century seern like the seventeenth were unsettling.
    The sight of three strangers being thrust unceremoniously into his parlour caused Ben Wolsey to jump out of his seat in surprise. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.
    Willow followed them inside and closed the door. His hand hovered on the hilt of his sword. ‘They’re trespassers, Colonel,’ he answered curtly. ‘I’ve arrested them.’
    Willow’s final shove had sent Tegan and Turlough staggering across the room towards a small woman, who sat at a long oak table with outrage and astonishment spreading across her face. ‘I don’t believe this!’ she exploded, and jumped to her feet.
    Wolsey’s face, too, was a picture of surprise and embarrassment. ‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’
    he challenged Willow.
    The Sergeant casually removed his riding gloves. ‘Sir George has been informed,’ was all he would say in reply.
    Wolsey turned to the Doctor with an apologetic smile.
    ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘Some of the men get a bit carried away. We’ll soon have this business sorted out and you safely on your way.’
    The Doctor, who had been giving the room a close examination, now turned to Wolsey. He leaned forward and treated the farmer to his most courteous smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with only the slightest hint of sarcasm.
    Indicating the furnishings, he added, ‘This is a very impressive room, Colonel.’
    Ben Wolsey smiled proudly. His head nodded