Part Eight: One of Britain's Stately Ruins

'Lieutenant Walmsley?' asked the Brig down the telephone.

'Sir,' I replied, politely.

'What do you have on at the moment?'

Slight pause whilst I wondered what to tell and what to avoid, transport-wise.

'Still trying to account for the shortfall in diesel, sir, forty gallons-worth. One of the Bedfords is getting a new clutch put in this morning, and there's a lot of paperwork to be done for the FV402.'

'Ah, yes, that sardine can on tracks,' commented the Brig. My feelings were hurt – it had taken weeks of phone calls and typed requests to persuade a reluctant Regular Army to lease UNIT one of their armoured personnel carriers. 'Nothing urgent, then. Good. I want you to drive out to Auderley House with Corporal Dene and carry out the monthly check.'

'Er – when, sir?' I asked, thinking about missing lunch.

'Straight away, Lieutenant! Straight away!'

Corporal Dene, returned to Aylesbury from a tour at Maiden's Point, sat waiting at the wheel of a Landrover outside the HQ.

'Morning, sir,' he said. 'I've got the test kit here.'

'You've done this before?'

'Couple of times. Dead easy, nothing to bother about,' he consoled me, driving off.

Auderley House; my recall of the name was a little hazy. The Daleks had attacked it a few years back, and had been destroyed when the whole place blew up. That was what I knew now; back then the six o'clock news speculated that our British offshoot of the Bader-Meinhof gang had carried out the attack, perishing in the attempt.

'I was there, you know, when the Garlicks attacked, sir,' explained Dene.

'Oh?' I remarked, looking at him. 'I believe not many from the security detail survived.'

'Too bloody true, sir, if you'll pardon my French. Sergeant Benton, who will live to be hung, and half a dozen of us, out of thirty. Right ruddy shambles – excuse me, sir.'

For the rest of the brief journey the corporal remained quiet, a silence I didn't feel like breaking.

'Here we are, sir,' he said as we swung off a minor country road, stopping at the chained, padlocked gates of Auderley House. Sharp, barbed railings rose six feet high atop a low stone wall which flanked the massive gateway pillars and ran round the perimeter of the gardens.

I got the key and unlocked the gates, locking them again once Dene drove through. Before climbing back in I took a long look at the house itself.

The roof was long gone, and no windows remained. The frontage was dirty and weeds sprouted from gutters and cracks in the walls.

'Seen better days.' Dene merely grunted in reply. We drove down a rough track, gone to seed with weeds and shrubbery encroaching on it, that led past the house front, then into a copse, then across open grassland to stop on a canal towpath. The sunken remains of a narrow boat sat at the water's edge, lending an air of abandonment to the scene. The canal ran under a railway bridge, on into the middle distance, it's weedy green water untroubled by boats. No trains passed on the bridge whilst we were there so the line must also be disused.

'That's where we go to, sir,' said Dene, pointing to the bridge supports where the towpath narrowed to go under the bridge. He carried a satchel and clipboard with him, leading the way.

What I'd initially taken to be a part of the bridge supports turned out to be a huge plug of concrete, roughly set, which filled a circular section of the earth bank under the bridge approach. Three large pipes, covered with plastic caps, protruded six inches from the concrete at waist level, and a small hinged metal plate had been positioned at the twelve o'clock position on the facing.

'This is where the Garlicks came into our timezone, sir,' said Dene, indicating the concrete mass with his thumb.

'Through a ton of concrete!' I exclaimed.

He laughed briefly.

'Lord, no sir! No, there used to be a tunnel here, going back into the earth under the bridge, and they say it was stable in our time and the future, which is why the evil little pepperpots came this way.'

Aha. Once the Garlicks were blasted to bits, together with Auderley House, UNIT must have decided to block this particular mousehole-in-time with a great big lump of concrete.

He lifted the metal flap and checked an electronic display underneath it, compared it with a notation on his chart and nodded.

'That's an atomic clock. Don't understand how it works myself, but we check to see if it tells the same time as one at Aylesbury – it always does. If there was a variation, then that means someone's been messing about with time, but like I said there's never a problem.'

The plastic covers were taken off the pipes, revealing sets of electrodes. Dene hooked up a gadget to the leads in turn, taking a reading off the meter and noting it on his clipboard.

'This is something the Doctor gimmicked up. No idea what it is, I just take the readings and show them to him, and he goes "hmmm" and that's it.'

That rang absolutely true. Our resident boffin from way-out-there acted just like that.

'All done, sir.'

Taken by surprise, I looked hard at him.

'Honestly, sir. Like I said, nothing to bother about.'

'Okay. I was expecting – oh, more drama.'

Corporal Dene shrugged.

'Sorry we can't oblige, sir. I can tell you what happened here, if you like. That was dramatic enough.'

By this time we were back at the Landrover, about to get climb in, so I nodded my approval. Dene stopped and lit a cigarette.

'With your permission, sir. The hands get a bit shaky when I go over it again. Well, the Garlicks and those big apes they use as musclemen –'

'Ogrons,' I interrupted. 'Yes, I've seen photographs of them.'

'Ogrons, right. They came out of the tunnel entrance there, just as the delegates started to arrive at the mansion. Only three pepperpots, but dozens and dozens of Ogrons. Bloody stupid creatures, didn't try to use cover or advance under fire, just came marching straight on. Mind you, there didn't seem to be any shortage of them, and the Garlicks didn't care about losing any amount of them.'

He paused to take a drag on his cigarette, the glowing tip wavering a little.

'We could have handled the big apes, but the Garlicks were another matter. Nothing we had could scratch them, and they killed anyone within fifty yards with those ray guns of theirs. There was a squad up near the tunnel looking for a couple of men who'd gone missing – they've never turned up, then or since – and they copped for it right off. Sergeant Benton took us up there on the double and we fought them all the way back to the mansion, getting picked off. Still, we made a fight of it. The Project Broom lads counted twenty-eight dead Ogrons between the tunnel and the house. The Doctor probably saved my life when he told the Brig – excuse me, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – to pull back entirely, shoo the delegates away and let the Garlicks into the house. He must have known there was a bomb in the cellar. That finished them off, and the house too. Close call, really – those politicians refused to leg it double-time, "unbecoming to their dignity" one called it. If they'd have seen what came out of the tunnel they'd have been running, not strolling, out of that mansion!'

Try as I might, the picture of alien invaders from the future rolling across the lawns of Auderley House wouldn't come, and even with Dene's testimony it didn't seem real.

'We put the telly and newspaper reporters in a group, then allowed them to leave once we'd got all their kit. They weren't happy about that. Then UNIT in Geneva got onto the BBC and their editors and squashed the story before it began.'

Now that was entirely more believable. Politicians messing about with the truth I could accept with no bother!

'Time to move on, then,' I ordered. 'And let's swing by the house just to see what it's like.'

We did. The interior of the mansion had fallen into rot and ruin, all the fittings removed, what remained become merely mould and mildew. Although empty it was also full. Full, that is, of ghosts; not the least of which were the twenty-odd soldiers who had died defending it. Looking into the ruins felt like an intrusion.

'Okay, drive on. Drive on. I'm sorry I asked. The past should remain in the past.'

Dene looked at me with mingled respect and surprise.

'Right you are, sir.'

The drive back to Aylesbury took place in silence, me thinking of what took place there years before, Corporal Dene thinking silent thoughts that may have been of the weekend's women or the end of the world. Once we left the Landrover, I took the clipboard.

'My job. I'll go and see the Doctor with this.' Corporal Dene saluted with appreciation and left. It took twenty minutes to locate the Doctor, who had ensconced himself in an alcove on the outer walls of the HQ. From there he would throw quoits at a tent-peg hammered into the ground thirty feet away, pausing to make notes in his immensely thick diary.

'Yes?' he announced, crossly, not indicating that he'd even seen me.

'Readings from Auderley House, Doctor.'

'Ah! Splendid!' he exclaimed, demeanour changing at once. 'Thank you, G – Lieutenant Walmsley. Let me see them. Ah. Hmmm. Yes, yes, yes. All temporally inert. Quite the hypochronicity, wouldn't you say?'

No, that's not what I would have said. I looked at him with a frown.

'Oh, never mind. Military intelligence and all that.'

I hit him with a line learnt years ago.

'"Military Intelligence", Doctor, is an oxymoron.'

He had been getting ready to pitch a quoit at the target, but stopped dead at my remark, staring hard at me.

'Do you know, that's the first time anyone's said that to me since Douglas Haig. And that was back in the Sudan!'

Shaking my head, I made my way back to the Guard Room. Douglas Haig! In the Sudan, no less. That – from what I remembered in military history lessons as an officer-cadet – had been in the late nineteenth century, nearly a hundred years ago. Doctor John Smith must think I'd come up the Irwell on a coal-barge.