Part 11 (2/2)

Jane Hampden was close behind them. Will Chandler, sticking to his resolution of not trying to understand anything at all and letting himself be carried along from one crisis to another, ran at her heels. Turlough, with a last glance of satisfaction at his fallen foes, hrought up the rear.

Although they hurried to follow the Doctor, they were all afraid of what they were going to have to face in the church. As they walked warily into the small chapel at the top of the steps, the roaring of the Malus, the clouds of smoke and the acrid stench of destruction hit them; they had to force themselves to go further, and steel their nerves to turn through the archway and into the nave.

The wall beyond the pulpit was now all Malus. The gigantic head turned its eyes and loured at them as they came in. It trembled and shook with rage and lurched forward, still trying desperately to break fire. Every effort, though, used up energy, and the Doctor had cut of'its power source in the village. With eyes narrowed to slits it watched their every move.

Wolsey, who was keeping close to the Doctor's shoulder, blanched at the sight. 'Now what?' he asked. The Doctor, searching for inspiration, was looking at the Mattis as intently as it was at him. 'I don't know, yet,' he admitted.

'Doctor...' Turlough pointed towards the top of the nave The Doctor turned away from the Malus to look, and stiffened with surprise.

Three troopers had appeared, and were moving slowly down the nave towards them. They were no ordinary soldiers, though -- and they were certainly not twentieth-century villagers in disguise. Everything about them was drained of colour. The helmets, breastplates and tunics of Parliamentarian soldiers, which they all were, showed an identical shade of lifeless, greyish white; their stern, bloodless faces were the faces of men roused from their graves in the service of the Malus.

Verney shuddered. 'Where did they come from?'

'The Malus,' the Doctor whispered. He watched the ghostly troopers' relentless progress: they marched down the nave in eerie, silent unison. He felt the tension of his companions, their growing suspense as they started to move backwards.

Now the troopers' slow, marching motion was propelled and echoed by the hollow heating of a drum.

Jane looked doubtfully at the Doctor. 'They're psychic projections?' He nodded.

'I'd feel happier with a gun,' Wolsey announced. He was a true man of the soil, forthright and practical, to whom the possession of the right tool for the job always gave a sense of comfort and well-being. But there was no tool for this job. 'It wouldn't make any difference,' Tegan told him.

'They're not real.'

'They look solid enough to me,' Wolsey muttered.

'This is the Malus's last line of defence,' the Doctor explained. 'And they'll kill just as effectively as any living thing.'

The unseen drum throbbed, and the troopers marched on in absolute unison. Their austere and forbidding faces stared at the Doctor and his companions. There was no hatred in them, but nor was there any compa.s.sion; they were dead faces, with no expression at all. The little, frightened group retreated before them. moving closer and closer to the broken altar.

In the crypt below them, another trooper was stirring. The man Andrew Verney had tilled with his stone had begun to groan and murmur to himself. Now, with much grunting and pulling, he pushed himself up to his knees.

He was still only half conscious. He knelt for a while, swaying groggily and holding his aching shoulder; gradually his head cleared a little - enough for him to notice Willow's body lying on the floor beside him. He bent over it and pulled it up to look at the Sergeant's face.

Willow was still out cold.

The trooper let him slump again as dizziness and nausea cane flooding back. He shook his head and mumbled to himself. He couldn't remember where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing.

Although the Doctor and his companions had withdrawn out of the nave and retreated into the sanctuary, still the ghostly figures advanced unrelentingly, and still the hollow drumming hoonsed through the roar and smoke of the Malus.

Turlough glanced over his shoulder; the stained gla.s.s window loomed above them and scattered fragments of coloured light across the floor and their bodies, making their situation even more bizarre and unnerving. 'We're running out of places to run,' he murmured to Tegan.

'That's becoming the story of our lives,' she sighed.

Will Chandler, tucked behind Jane, peeped out at the deathly faces advancing towards him. He had seen them before. These men had been among the Puritan force which attacked the church when the great and terrible battle began. He had seen each of them cut down by Cavaliers. Yet here they were, marching up the nave, large as life and pale as death. Marching Marching. He whimpered with fear.

Verney was moving slowly backwards at Will's side.

'Why don't they attack?' he asked.

'They will,' the Doctor promised. 'But in their own time.' He looked past the troopers to the Malus. Already swollen obscenely, it was swelling still further, and shuddering and looking their way. The huge, glinting eyes were pointing directly at them. 'Now we're the Malus's last source of energy,' the Doctor said, 'it will make us sweat for as long as it can.'

10.

Fulfillment

In the crypt, the trooper had remembered who he was.

He was on his feet, swaying over Willow's body. He shook his head again, trying to clear it of the dizziness which kept threatening to swamp him. Then he drew his sword and staggered towards the steps.

Their backs were to the wall. As Turlough had predicted, there were no more places for them to run to, and they were trapped.

Realising that victory was theirs for the taking, the ghostly figures stopped at the entrance to the sanctuary, close beside the archway which led to the side chapel and the steps to the crypt. With that uncanny precision they swung their hands across their bodies to the hilts of their swords. As one the troopers grasped them, and drew the swords together in a unified sweep which rasped steel on scabbard with a shrieking sound. The swords swept up into the light. Then they pointed them at the group huddled against the altar, with the colours of the stained gla.s.s window lying across them like a rainbow.

Will drew in his breath and s.h.i.+vered. 'I's gonna die,' he moaned.

The Doctor gripped his shoulder encouragingly. 'Be quiet, Will,' he whispered.

'He's right, Doctor.' Jane was shaking too; she could feel the edges of those swords already.

'Not yet he isn't,' the Doctor said. He was sure there must be something he could do, but for the life of him he couldn't think what it was.

The trooper, who had remembered at last that he was supposed to be searching for the Doctor and the lost Queen of the May, came lurching and staggering up the steps from the crypt. He clattered across the side chapel, swung out through the archway and found himself surrounded by three grey phantoms.

As he fell into their midst, three glinting swords swished through the air and joined each other around his throat.

Pinned by the swords, he stood rooted to the spot for a moment, wide eyed and bewildered. His head was still dizzy, and he tried desperately to make sense of what was happening to him. He glanced fearfully from one to another of the ghastly, grey-white faces, and his mouth opened wide with surprise.

The church, which had fallen silent with the trooper's arrival, now erupted with noise. The Malus trumpeted a triumphant roar and Tegan and Jane screamed and turned away their faces as the phantom soldiers raised their arms and swung their swords for the kill. The blades flashed and the brief, b.l.o.o.d.y, one-sided fight came to its inevitable close: the trooper shrieked in his death agony, then sank to the floor and lay face down among the debris and dust.

'Oh, no.' Tegan was shaking.

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