38 - Casualties of War

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1918. The world is at war. A terrible raging conﬂict that has left no

one untouched.

In the North Yorkshire village of Hawkswick, it seems that the

dead won’t stay down. There are reports of horriﬁcally wounded

soldiers on manoeuvres in the night. Pets have gone missing, and

now livestock is found slaughtered in the ﬁelds.

Suspicion naturally falls on nearby Hawkswick Hall, a psychiatric

hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, where Private Daniel Corey

senses a gathering evil.

As events escalate, a stranger arrives on the scene. Can this Man

from the Ministry solve the mystery of Hawkswick? And can

Hawkswick solve the mystery that is the Man from the Ministry?

This is another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth

Doctor.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

STEVE EMMERSON

Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd

Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT

First published 2000

Steve Emmerson 2000

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format c

BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

ISBN 0 563 53805 8

Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright c

BBC 2000

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of

Chatham

printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton

For Shirley and Ben

Contents

Prologue 5

Chapter One 10

Chapter Two 28

Chapter Three 46

Chapter Four 64

Chapter Five 83

Chapter Six 104

Chapter Seven 127

Chapter Eight 146

Chapter Nine 155

Chapter Ten 169

Chapter Eleven 178

Chapter Twelve 190

Epilogues 205

Who on Earth is Steve Emmerson? 211

Acknowledgements 212

Prologue

19 March 1918

The cries in the night were terrible things. They echoed with an eerie hollow-

ness, ampliﬁed by the luxuriously spacious rooms that made up Hawkswick

Hall.

Corporal John Sykes lay awake, fully dressed in khaki kit, listening to the

shrieks. Every night, the same torment. Every morning he woke with the same

dark bags under his eyes. He wondered which was better sometimes; this

nightmare world, or the one in the trenches. Both were ﬁlled with dead men.

Except the dead men here still screamed.

Sometimes he even considered making a request for an early board. Get

himself back to the front. Get himself over the top to ﬁnd a ﬁnal release from

this hell. But Sykes had a wife and a baby. He found Lily’s face in his dreams,

her eyes swelling with tears as he boarded the train. And most nights he woke

with his pillow soaking wet. There were many kinds of wounds, he’d learned.

And the worst of them weren’t visible at all.

Lifting his watch into the moonlight, Sykes saw that it was almost 0100

hours. He should be in the land of Nod now, being plundered by the Germans

and murdered in his sleep. Reliving the horrors like everybody else in this

godforsaken place. But instead he was waiting for Collins so they could pursue

their crazy scheme of getting into the good doctor’s secret room in the cellar.

Now the time had arrived, Sykes was beginning to have doubts. If Dr Banham

wanted to vanish into a locked room every night when he thought nobody was

watching, who were they to pry? Even if Collins insisted that Banham was up

to no bloody good down there, and even if he had heard screams coming from

the room, which Sykes doubted anyway, surely it was the man’s own personal

business?

There was a light knock at the door, and it swept open to reveal Lance Cor-

poral Collins’s shadowy face peering at him. Sykes swung his legs off the bed

and waved Collins in.

‘Did you get it?’ Sykes whispered.

6Casualties of War

Collins waved a large key through the air between them, a Cheshire Cat grin

slapped across his scarred face.

‘You ready?’ Collins asked.

He reminded Sykes of a kid on a night-time raid on the apple orchard. Except

that most kids Sykes knew hadn’t had half their heads blown off in the mud of

Ypres.

‘Yeh. Come on.’

They left the room together and ventured silently into the large corridor that

was the ﬁrst-ﬂoor landing. It never failed to amaze Sykes that people could live

like this. This landing alone was as long and wide as his street back home. The

rooms off to each side were bigger than the entire houses most of these men

would normally live in. And this was the home of a single family. There must be

more servants than family in a house this size. Sykes wondered what the lord

of this particular manor was doing in the War. Very doubtful that he was on the

front line, knee deep in shit and splashed guts, shoving shells into mortars one

after another faster than you could shoot the bloody things off. That wasn’t

a job for the gentry. Oh no. He was probably sitting with others of his kind

round a secret smoky table. Sipping bourbon. Deciding which battalion was

to be sacriﬁced tomorrow for another two feet of advance, just for the Hun to

reclaim it the day after with more slaughter and more dead Allies lost to the

mud of no-man’s-land –

‘Shh.’ Collins stopped abruptly and they both listened.

‘What?’

‘Thought I heard somebody sneaking about.’

‘Us!’

‘No. Listen.’

Sure enough, Sykes heard it as well. Shufﬂing in the dark downstairs. They

crept to the banister and cautiously looked over. At ﬁrst the hall was empty.

Then they saw a solitary ﬁgure darting silently about, nipping from one shadow

to another. The man wore pyjamas, standard issue, but had nothing on his

feet. He crouched low by the door to the drawing room, listening to the silence

inside, then glared fearfully at the surrounding emptiness. Suddenly he was

scuttling like a spider, then he was gone.

‘Just Richardson,’ Sykes whispered. ‘Poor sod.’

‘Don’t think Banham’s sludge therapy’s gonna do much for ’im, d’you?’

‘Don’t think anything short of a bullet’s going to be much help to Richardson,’

Sykes agreed solemnly.

Prologue 7

Some of these men would be better face down in the mud than returned to

Blighty. Some of them were such hopeless cases they’d never see civilisation

again. Dead or Mad. Hobson’s.

‘Come on,’ Sykes hissed, making a move to descend the stairs.

They advanced in complete silence until they reached the door to the base-

ment. There they stopped, eyes ﬂashing white in the black. The house had

taken on an expectant, brittle silence. A stillness between the screams of ter-

ror. Sykes became aware of the scent of perspiration mixed with stale cigarette

smoke coming from Collins. The air was cold but Sykes felt hot and anxious.

Satisﬁed that nobody had heard their movements, he grasped the door handle

and they plunged into the impenetrable blackness of the basement. The door

sliced shut, and the narrow wedge of pale light extinguished.

‘Did you bring a torch?’ Collins breathed.

‘No. You?’

‘Did I buggery.’

‘Got any matches?’

There was the sound of fumbling, followed by a sharp scratch and a puff of

light. Collins’s features looked to Sykes even more horriﬁc with their shifting

shadows, like dark things, alive, crawling across his pitted face. The man’s eyes

were sulphurous yellow. The match reeked like spent artillery. Sykes found

himself shivering, unable to shake the ghosts of the trenches.

‘Gi’s a kiss,’ Collins said.

Both men burst into a brief ﬁt of laughter, before Collins led the way with

the match.

The basement steps were narrow and built of creaking wood. They groaned

under the weight of the two men, until Sykes and Collins reached the solid

ﬂoor.

The air was thick with a damp, musty smell. Sykes recognised it from the

yard at the back of his house, where the privy stood only four strides from

the back door and the brick walls were gooey with bright-green mould. As

they moved with care through the dark, Sykes found himself thinking again of

Lily. He wondered what she was doing now. He wondered if she was thinking

about him. If little Annie was being good. Most probably howling the house

down, starving, cold and lice-ridden. Sykes wished he could be there with

them. Wished he were lying with Lily, keeping warm in their bed rather than

sneaking about like a big kid.

‘D’you wanna wait here?’ Collins asked, striking up a second match.

‘Why?’

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摘要：

1918.Theworldisatwar.Aterribleragingconictthathasleftnooneuntouched.IntheNorthYorkshirevillageofHawkswick,itseemsthatthedeadwon'tstaydown.Therearereportsofhorricallywoundedsoldiersonmanoeuvresinthenight.Petshavegonemissing,andnowlivestockisfoundslaughteredintheelds.Suspicionnaturallyfallsonnearby...

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38 - Casualties of War

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