The door closed behind them and Clara stood for several seconds, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the gloom of the interior of the building.
The area just inside the door was piled high with packing crates and discarded pallets. A forklift truck was parked against the wall, along with rack upon rack of heavy-duty electrical cable. Overhead, the ceiling was thick with chain hoists, and there was a metal walkway running around the interior of the building, access ladders positioned every couple of metres.
Clara edged forward though the boxes. The building seemed deserted, but ahead of her she could make out a circle of large, blocky shapes illuminated by a pale blue light. Keeping to the shadows near the wall, the two women started to make their way towards the light.
As they got closer they began to hear noises, a strange low electrical hum and other, more familiar sounds. Clicks and buzzes. Insect noises.
Against the far wall of the building stood dozens of wire and glass cages. Some stood empty, their doors open, others still held huge monstrous shapes that clung to the wire mesh or buzzed and quivered in the middle of their cells.
Angela recoiled in horror. ‘What are they?’
Clara had to admit that she didn’t know. At first glance, she had thought that the creatures were enormous spiders, but as she forced herself to look closer she could see wings and scales, and far too many legs. It was as if someone had dismembered three of four kinds of insect and then stuck the parts back together in a different order. One of the creatures snapped at her lazily, and she jumped back.
Beyond the cages were benches heavy with complex scientific equipment, and a large glass window looked out into another room containing a sophisticated laboratory.
‘Who is doing this?’ whispered Angela angrily. ‘And what on earth are they doing it for?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Clara. ‘But I’d be very surprised if it didn’t have something to do with that.’
In the middle of the room stood thirteen big black boxes, each about the size of a single wardrobe, each with a large LED display set into the front. Arm-thick cables wound from the base of each to huge, grey bell-shaped machine, surrounded by consoles, CPUs and industrial-sized generators.
Letting go of Angela’s hand, Clara started to make her way towards the humming monoliths. As she got closer she could see images flickering across the LED screens mounted on the boxes, patterns that seemed familiar somehow. It was only when she was standing in the middle of the circle that she made the connection. The patterns on the screens were the same as the patterns inscribed on the stones outside the village.
‘It’s the stone circle,’ she breathed. ‘Someone has built a technological version of the stone circle.’
‘How very clever of you.’
The voice cut through the room like a gunshot. Clara shielded her eyes as lights all around the building snapped on, flooding the warehouse with a bright white glare. As the lights came on, the hybrid insects in the cages screamed their displeasure, filling the air with a cacophony of screeching and hissing. Angela ran to Clara’s side as white-coated figures closed in on them.
‘Cover those things up.’
As two of the figures hurried towards the cages, a tall man in an immaculate grey suit stepped into the centre of the circle. The first thing that Clara noticed about him was that he was holding what looked like a vintage Second World War service revolver. The second was that one half of his face was covered by a white plastic mask.
From the descriptions she had already heard there was only one person this could be.
This was the mysterious Jason Clearfield.
Only lightning-fast reflexes saved the Doctor’s life. As the gun fired, he threw himself to one side, landing hard on his shoulder and rolling back onto his feet in one smooth, fluid movement. A muffled curse came from inside the house.
Sprinting forwards, the Doctor grasped the barrel of the shotgun and yanked hard. There was a loud thump and a grunt of pain from the other side of the door. Immediately the Doctor released the gun and pressed his sonic screwdriver to the lock, slamming his shoulder against the door as he did so.
It crashed inwards, and there was another cry of pain as his assailant was thrown to the floor. The Doctor pushed his way inside. An elderly man lay in the flagstoned passageway clutching at his shoulder. The Doctor snatched up the shotgun and glared at him with distaste.
‘Well, it’s good to see that you’re following the traditional military model of shoot first, ask questions later.’
Charlie and Kevin pushed through the door behind him, the constable hurrying forward to help the man to his feet.
‘What on earth did you think you were doing, Robin? You could have killed us!’
‘Thought that your were some of them, didn’t I?’ The old man grimaced with pain. ‘Thought you’d come to turn me into another zombie.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ snorted the Doctor contemptuously. ‘It’s perfectly fine to try and kill your friends and neighbours despite the fact that they are being used to do things against their will.’
Robin shot him an angry look. ‘No friends of mine out there.’
The two men glared at each other for a moment, then Robin gave a deep sigh.
‘You’d better come in.’ He turned to Kevin. ‘You, boy, close the door. And make sure you lock it properly. Don’t want any of those creepy crawlies getting in.’
Robin led them down the hallway to a large, homely kitchen. An open box of shotgun cartridges lay on the ancient oak table that dominated the room. The Doctor handed the shotgun to Charlie.
‘Here. Much as I dislike these things, it seems foolish not to keep it. Just in case.’
Charlie took it with a nod, snapping it open and removing the spent cartridges. Robin sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, rubbing at his shoulder, obviously still in discomfort from the fall he had taken.
The Doctor crossed to his side. ‘You’d better let me have a look at that.’
‘Why? Some kind of doctor, are you?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’ The Doctor started probing the muscles around Robin’s shoulder, ignoring the grunts of pain that he produced. ‘Nothing seems to be broken.’
‘No thanks to you,’ grumbled Robin. ‘Still, I suppose that’s something. It’s going to stiffen up something rotten, though.’
‘Not really.’ The Doctor adjusted the settings on his sonic screwdriver and ran the tip over Robin’s shoulder, filling the kitchen with a low warbling noise. ‘You’ll have a nasty bruise for a while but, other than that, you’re as good as new.’
Robin moved his arm experimentally, and then looked up at the Doctor in amazement. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed …’
The Doctor pulled up another chair and sat down opposite him, elbows on the table, chin cradled in his hands and eyes blazing with energy.
‘And now, Mr Sanford, perhaps you’d like to tell me about your experiences fighting giant insects during the war.’
‘Excuse me, sir?’
Corporal Palmer stood in the entranceway of the mobile command centre.
‘Yes, Corporal?’ Captain Wilson looked up gratefully from the laptop, feeling the tendons in his neck pop as he did so. He hated desk work.
‘Gunshots heard inside the perimeter, sir.’
Colonel Dickinson immediately looked up from his own computer screen. ‘Gunshots? Where?’
‘South side of the village, sir. Shotgun, most likely.’
‘Then we’d better have a look. Get my Land Rover ready, would you, Palmer.’
‘Sir.’
As the corporal hurried away, Dickinson leaned back in his chair, pursing his lips thoughtfully. ‘What do you think, Captain? Resistance inside the village?’
Wilson shrugged. ‘There are enough farmers with shotguns so it’s hardly surprising that someone would let fly at one of these things eventually.’ He paused. ‘If I’m honest, I’m surprised we haven’t heard more.’
‘Which suggests that there has been some kind of suppression of the locals.’
‘Possibly. Assuming that the rest them aren’t dead.’
The colonel was quiet for a moment, then he got up and shut the door to the command centre.
‘Captain, what I am about to tell you is confidential. It concerns a Wunderwaffe.’
‘Sorry, sir.’ Wilson shook his head. ‘Languages were never a strong point.’
‘A Wonderweapon. A top-secret Nazi technological device known as Die Glocke.’
Captain Wilson looked at him blankly. ‘Die Glocke?’
‘The Bell.’
‘The Bell?’ Charlie Bevan looked puzzled. ‘What the devil is that?’
Robin Sanford got unsteadily to his feet, crossed the kitchen and pulled a battered and ancient-looking mug from a rack, dropping a teabag into it and setting it down next to an equally ancient-looking kettle.
‘During the Second World War, the British army intercepted a coded radio signal. At the time they were trying to break the German U-boat cyphers, and everyone assumed at first that it was just some new ultra-complex encryption. The problem was that the signal didn’t come from the North Atlantic, it originated in deep space.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ huffed Charlie dismissively. ‘German propaganda, surely?’
‘A lot of people thought the same at the time, but then they started to get reports from agents inside Europe indicating that the Germans had detected this signal too, and they were close to translating it.’
Robin watched the kettle boil, lost in his memories for the moment. The Doctor sat and waited, quite happy to let him tell the story in his own time, but Charlie was impatient.
‘Well? What did it say?’
‘It took the best minds months to get even a rough translation. Turing, Welchman, Knox … They all had a crack at it. They even had Judson working on it for a while.’
The Doctor stiffened at the mention of that name. ‘Judson?’
‘Yes, before he got whisked off to work on the ULTIMA project.’ The kettle turned itself off with a click and Robin poured the boiling water into his mug. ‘It was a set of instructions for building a machine, a huge metal bell, about twelve feet tall. Nobody had the slightest idea what it was for, but the Germans had already started construction, so we had no choice other than to start building one too.’
‘You must have been very young at the time,’ said the Doctor.
Robin nodded, sipping at his tea. ‘I was 18. Denied active service because of a hereditary heart defect. Was made a private in the Home Guard here in Ringstone, though.’
‘I thought that the Home Guard only defended beaches and things,’ piped up Kevin.
‘Quite right, young man. But they also guarded important military installations.’
‘Like Ringstone,’ said the Doctor quietly.
‘Yes, Doctor. This is where the British Army constructed and tested their version of the Bell.’
Colonel Dickinson sat back down at his computer. ‘Once I started asking questions about Ringstone it started all sorts of alarm bells ringing higher up the chain.’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘No, pun intended.’
He brought up a series of files showing plans, blueprints and grainy, black-and-white photographs.
‘Die Glocke was the most secret of the Nazi weapons programmes, conducted in the dying months of the war. Code-named “Project Chronos”, it was under the command of an SS General named Hans Kammler. The Nazis were getting desperate by this point, and were convinced that this was some kind of super-weapon, or new kind of aircraft, or antigravity device.’
He enlarged a series of aerial pictures of a factory complex set in a barren, mountainous area of northern Europe.
‘They built their device in what is now Poland, at the Wenceslas mine in the Sudeten Mountains. A local dam was used to generate hydro-electric power for the experiments and inmates from a nearby concentration camp were used as workforce for construction of the test site.’
Wilson leaned forward and pointed at an indistinct circular shape on the aerial image. ‘What’s this? It looks for all the world like …’ He broke off, suddenly feeling foolish.
‘Yes?’ The colonel looked at him expectantly.
‘Well, it looks like Stonehenge.’
‘Quite right, Captain Wilson.’ Dickinson tapped a key and another picture flashed onto the screen, a modern-day image of a huge, circular, concrete structure, standing in the centre of an overgrown tarmac expanse. ‘The Germans called this “the Henge” or “the Fly Trap”. It was where Die Glocke was tested and is all that’s left of the Chronos project.’
Captain Wilson sat back in his chair, his face a mask of confusion. ‘I’m not sure I understand, sir. Nazi super-weapons and stone circles?’
Colonel Dickinson closed the laptop. ‘The Nazis had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the machine. Hitler was delusional, convinced that it was some ultimate weapon bestowed upon them by aliens to help him win the war. A lot of people were killed because of that belief. Several scientists died on the first operation of Die Glocke. Even with refinements to the machine and protective clothing, five of the seven scientists who conducted later experiments died from their exposure to it.’ His expression hardened. ‘And that doesn’t even start to cover the number that were exposed to it deliberately, or the workers who were murdered by the SS at the end of the war to keep it secret.’
‘I’m assuming that the British experiments were more successful?’
The colonel nodded. ‘Apparently, it wasn’t just a question of building the machine, it was a question of finding the right kind of energy to power it. In the end it was Aleister Crowley who solved the problem for the Allies.’
‘The occultist?’ Wilson struggled to keep the incredulity from his voice.
‘He was working in counter-intelligence at the time, and suggested that our experiments were having more success that the German’s because they were conducted in proximity to ley lines.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Wilson rubbed at his jaw. ‘I’m having a hard time believing all this.’
‘Quite agree, Captain. Took me quite a while to get to grips with it myself. The point is Crowley was right. The experimental results did significantly improve when the machine was placed along ley lines. The Germans must have come to that conclusion themselves towards the end, but because of the location they had chosen for their test site they had no means of testing that hypothesis. There is some evidence of a possible incursion made by an SS commando squad to a Neolithic circle in Scotland with a much smaller Bell prototype sometime in 1944, but I’m not cleared to view those files.’
‘So, our machine was located at Stonehenge?’
The colonel shook his head. ‘Too obvious. The Allies knew that the Nazis were keeping tabs on the experiments, so they needed to find somewhere a little more off the beaten track. Ringstone was chosen as the British test site. Code name “Project Big Ben”.’
‘Using the local stone circle? The King’s Guards?’
‘Exactly.’ The colonel leaned forward. ‘The machine wasn’t a weapon, Captain. It was a teleport device. And it worked.’