Read Doctor Who: The Awakening for Free Online Page B

table towards her. ‘I shouldn’t let that bother you, Miss Hampden,’ he sneered.
    ‘As the local magistrate, I shall find myself quite innocent.’
    There was something so abnormal about the intense brilliance in his eyes, and so sardonic in his complacent half-smile, that Jane shuddered. For a moment she felt physically sick. This man held all the aces. There was no stopping him.
    The barn door was immovable. Tegan pushed and pulled and grunted; she kicked it and bruised her toes, and stretched up to wrench at a padlock high on the door until her nails split, but it would not open. When it had slammed shut, it had jammed tight.
    Panting with the effort, she gave up the struggle. She needed to rest for a moment, and toppled forward to lean her head against the door, The wood smelled of old age and creosote and pitch. She gasped for breath, thankful at least that the thief who had stolen her handbag was not shut in here with her, in the darkness. He had simply disappeared
    - it was probably he who had slammed the door shut on her, on his way out.
    But even as she breathed that sigh of relief she felt that there was something in here. Something odd.
    As she leaned with her forehead pressed against the musty wood, she heard a strange, unidentifiable sound. It was not a single note, but a continuing long, low hum which grew louder and stronger and gradually became a pressure which hurt her ears She stiffened. There was a tingling sensation in her spine and she felt a sudden apprehension that something weird was building up in the gloom behind her.
    She hardly dared to look round. But when she did she breathed another sigh of relief, for there was nothing to he seen. There was just the whirring sound in the darkness.
    But then -- she stiffened again -- she saw something in the gloom up above her, where she had supposed the gallery to be. She strained her eyes to see, and suddenly discovered a light dancing around up there in the dark.
    Now the noise in Tegan’s ears began to change in pitch.
    It rose and crescendoed and abruptly shattered like glass, breaking into tinkling fragments of sound that sparkled like droplets in the still air of the barn. At the same time the light became more and more brilliant, and then it too broke, dividing and dividing over and over until there was a constantly changing kaleidoscope of points of light up there. They whirled below the invisible rafters, now spreading, now contracting, accompanied always by the tinkling noise.
    Backed up against the door, Tegan stared upwards at these flickering movements that were both light and sound together. They fascinated and frightened her at the same time, and she felt her body begin to tremble so violently that she had to press into the rough timber to steady herself Then she gasped: something was happening inside the lights.
    Between the pinpoints of brilliance ceaselessly dancing and vibrating a glow began to emerge - still, solid and white, it was spreading and forming into a kind of shape ...
    Tegan felt a scream rise in her throat as the glow steadied into the distinct shape of the torso of a man - a pale, grey-white, headless body suspended up there in the darkness under the roof. Ribs protruded from its gaunt, naked chest; two arms hung bare and limp at the sides and folds of sacking were loosely draped about its waist. Its skin was as pallid as the skin of a corpse.
    The noise had changed once more, dropping again to a deep roar that seemed to surround the glowing torso like a force holding it together. The lights which still played about it moved less violently now. But suddenly everything activated again: the lights whirled and leaped about and the droplets of sound sparkled. The torso laded from sight.
    It was replaced by a disembodied head.
    ‘Oh no,’ Tegan whimpered. She pressed back against the door, as if she was trying to burrow down inside it.
    It was the head of a very old man, and it stared down at her with cold, dead eyes. Long