Doctor Who: Rags (21 page)

Someone, or something, had unleashed the beasts of anarchy.

The beasts of anarchy? The phrase had slithered unbidden into his mind like something alien and intangible and very nasty. It meant nothing to him, but it conjured more unease. Reeling with the shock of it all, he took a tentative step forward and his shoe slipped into a viscous steaming pool. He could smell the contents, and he moved his foot hurriedly, stepping around the wide tarn of blood.

The Doctor realised his hearts were racing against each other, and that primal fear was rearing up inside him. ‘Reality-wound,’

he said aloud, as if the application of logic would shy away the horror. It didn’t. A shivering wail kicked up out of nowhere - the hopeless moan of terror of a child locked in an eternal nightmare nursery where rocking horses cackled, dolls jerked mad fingers and teddy bears danced obscene dances, disembowelling themselves to the evil chimes of a musical box. And, imagining the images, the Doctor saw them.

Saw the images, heard the sounds.

And then, like ghosts, they were gone, to haunt the bedrooms of millions of crying children throughout the civilised world.

The Doctor was walking across a landscape generated by what could only be the festering thought processes of a madman.

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A madman or a monster.

He walked on through the criddeweeds, past more red tarns, and streams of gore along which human heads bobbed, skin seared like melted toffee. Once he passed a crumbling stairway that led to a torso balanced on the top step as if it were a waiting prize. Severed, burned hands were scattered on each stair. Arms thrust out of the ashy soil like gruesome plants. The Doctor walked on determinedly, ignoring the bone obelisks that were erected amongst the weeds as if hikers had trekked this way, losing their minds as they went and constructing hellish cairns to mark their passing.

His torch beam eventually found the rock on the horizon, raised on a dais of rotting human bodies and surrounded by a moat of blood. It was obviously a centrepiece to this whole horrendous tract of unreality. He approached it carefully, torch sweeping the barren surroundings for any movement and finding none.

A young woman with long blonde hair lay on the rock, arms and legs outstretched. The Doctor paused at the moat, then leapt across to the island within. He almost lost his balance as his shoes slipped on a jackstraw heap of arms and legs. He steadied himself against the rock and stared at the woman. He was sure he had seen her somewhere before: pretty, maybe in her mid-twenties. He touched her pulse and was surprised to find it beating gently. Surprised to find life in so much engineered death.He became aware that the energy-detector wand he’d detached from Bessie’s dashboard was throbbing manically inside his cloak, and he withdrew it and held it over the rock.

He had found the source of the original pulse.

The pulse was an echo identical to the emanations he had detected at Cirbury. The rock was identical to the standing stones he’d found there too, ancient and implacable in their field of ages.

The wand kicked in his hand, twisting like a water diviner’s, and the Doctor turned. He knew what he would see before he directed the torch beam behind him.

He froze at the sight, but his voice was icily controlled as he 153

spoke the name that came to him as if on a telepathic breeze.

‘Ragman...’

Jo stepped away from Mike. ‘He’s no friend of mine,’ she said emphatically.

‘Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!’

The chant was becoming louder, and attracting more travellers to the clearing.

Sin’s eyes were boiling with unmitigated loathing. Nick put a hand on her arm, in an attempt to defuse the madness. She put the nails of her other hand to his, scratching troughs of flesh away.

‘He’s part of the Establishment.’ Jo continued slowly, hatefully.

Mike looked at her carefully. Her face was a mask of fervour. ‘He’s a pig!’

Jimmy leapt on Yates from behind, his arms thrown around the captain’s neck in a python hold. Yates flung him aside with practised ease. Nick stood back, taking no part in the lynch mentality. A punk spat on Yates, another picked up a stone and flung it at him. He dodged it, and someone leapt at him wielding a broken branch like a club. Yates threw him over his shoulder, cracking the punk’s head against the obelisk.

Sin stepped forward and there was something in her hand. A silver cigarette-lighter. She pressed a knob on the end and a four-inch blade sprang eagerly out. At the same time another stone spun off Yates’s temple, diverting his attention long enough for Sin to dive in with the flick knife. The captain’s eyes actually met Jo’s as the blade slashed across his right cheek, and in the burn of pain he saw her flinch and then resume her determined coldness.

Nick grabbed for the knife, but the tall punk pulled him away.

Jimmy slammed an exclamation mark on the proceedings by smashing a bottle of Newcastle Brown across the back of the captain’s head. Yates dropped face first into a bed of nettles. Sin stepped astride his body, held the lighter knife aloft in both hands, poised it above the back of his neck. Even Nick stood transfixed in the moment of frenetic violence.

A shot rang sharp and clear and a chunk of masonry spun away

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from the obelisk next to Sin. A female soldier stood in the gap in the clearing, blonde hair tucked up beneath her cap, one eye shut, the other, pottery blue, focused down the length of her rifle barrel. Her finger flexed on the trigger as she swung the barrel to centre on the Chinese girl.

‘Corporal Robinson!’

The order cracked out as loud and sharp as the rifle shot a second or two earlier.

A flash of extreme frustration twisted across the soldier’s face, but she held the rifle in position until the Brigadier pushed his way into the dripping clearing. Sin melted into the foliage. The other punks followed suit, hightailing it into the woods that pressed all around them.

The Brigadier squatted to check on Yates, then stood up to confront the corporal.

‘Shoulder your weapon, Corporal.’ His voice was clipped and angry. Robinson did as she was ordered, resentment all too clear on her face. The Brigadier stepped closer to her, eyeballing his subordinate but saying nothing. She dropped her gaze and stood to attention. Satisfied, he turned to the other soldiers who had followed him into the clearing, including a concerned-looking Sergeant Benton.

‘Look after Captain Yates, sergeant,’ Lethbridge-stewart ordered, gesturing at the unconscious captain’s body. He followed them as they carried the limp form out into the open space beside the crematorium, surveying the watching encampment for trouble. Daring the travellers to make some move, almost willing them to do so.

All this inactivity and restraint was killing him.

And where the bloody hell was the Doctor now?

Kane was back in his favourite place: sitting on a tomb in Cirbury’s graveyard. The book he had stolen from the library was in his hands. The librarian had ushered him out at closing time the

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day before, but she had not noticed him shove the large book inside his leather jacket. Or perhaps she had, and was glad of it.

Glad to see the blasphemous volume leave the library for good.

He hadn’t been able to finish it that evening in his bedsit above the fish and chip shop. Damp on the walls had assumed elongated faces and there had been a tapping at the windows that he was sure was more than rain. He had hidden the book beneath the wardrobe, determined to let it rot there.

Of course, the next morning he had lugged it out with all the relief and assurance that a bright new day will bring. The churchyard seemed a fitting place to finish the story.

The three villagers are making their illustrated return from their errand, their sanity long gone. Their eyes are empty things, and they walk like lost souls. Of their journey to dispose of the mummers’ corpses and the monster rock they have only wild and garbled tales to tell, the ranting of the insane. They promise the mayor and the magistrate that the village has not seen the last of the Ragman. He will return one day.

And of course, as is always the way with these sort of tales, return he does. Spectacularly.

Here the artist really freaked out. The last few pages were soaked in blood, with brief glimpses into hell in the midst of the red tide. Kane dropped the book, numbed to his soul. He staggered away from the tomb leaving the volume where it had fallen, face down in the buttercups.

A snail made its idle way past the book of horrors, antennae questing curiously, and then hove slowly away in search of pleasanter pastures.

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PROTECT COUNTRY SPORTS cried one banner. Another proclaimed: HALT THIS ATTACK ON THE RURAL WAY OF LIFE.

Nick had never seen so many tweeds and Barbour jackets. He felt an insane urge to spray them with red paint; indeed the urge to kill was hot within him. The infection, he called it: the Unwashed and Unforgiving infection. He glanced nervously at his companions. There was going to be trouble, that was obvious.

Castle Green was an expansive stretch of parkland covering the site of the old eleventh-century castle, long since gone. Some pieces of old wall were all that was left, and the moat ran underground, a hidden medieval world beneath their feet. The north side of the park was taken up by the elitist Country Life supporters. The south was full of travellers on a special day out from the cemetery, with beer and drugs instead of picnics. UNIT

had let them go unmolested, and Nick could only guess it was because the authorities believed more of a riot would start if they tried to contain them. If that was the case, UNIT were fools.

Instead of having a riot on their hands, they were going to have a bloodthirsty massacre if recent class-related events were anything to go by.

Could they really be that stupid or were their motives ulterior, transmitted from above? The shadowy Above. That caused all the trouble. All the shit.

Whatever, the admittedly substantial police and UNIT forces sandwiched between the two groups were certainly going to have their hands full today. So far, nothing serious had broken out apart from a few hurled beer bottles and insults. Give it time, and there would be blood. (And it would be oh so good.) He felt a cold breeze pass through him as he remembered the eager desire for violence he had experienced at the Oblong Box. He glanced at Sin who was wearing a thin leather jacket and high-heeled boots, her face expressionless apart from her eyes, which, like 157

they always seemed to be these days, were full of hate.

Hate. Why so much hate? She had always been passionate, and yet frivolous. Times they were a changin’ and the beautiful, innocent Chinese girl he had fallen in love with had transformed in the space of a few weeks into a twisted soul.

And Jo with her.

Jimmy was mad, but then he’d always been an angry young man, desperately seeking somewhere to vent his rage. This summer he’d certainly found it.

This bright, bright summer of hate.

Bristol University Hall.A cavalcade of cars.Paparazzi.Police, of course, but merely a token skeleton force.Bodyguards.

The royal visit is going ahead as scheduled. And here comes the princess now, stepping from her limousine, flanked by musclemen, caught in a fusillade of clicking cameras. Up the stain of the magnificent old university administration building she comes, nineteen years of age, not particularly striking, in face rather ordinary - but some have said (Hello! magazine among others) that she has a pleasant, homely face. The bodyguard: press around her like flies, and there at the top of the steps is the honoured dean, looking very honoured indeed as the cameras blaze away.

And here is Derek Pole, just behind the surging ranks o photographers, who are in turn behind the red ribbon barrier gauntleting the steps and the pavement. Of course he has lied n Jeremy Willis all along: the revolver inside his bomber-jacket pocket is snug and hard. He holds his camera against the bulge and takes a few amateurish snaps of the princess as she move towards a spot where she will be directly in front of him.

Of course there will be no kidnapping. That was never the plan.

Pole’s entire life has been leading up to this hot, prickly pounding moment. He can taste blood in his mouth, his excitement is so extreme.

Here she comes...

* * *

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The cattle truck had left the cemetery too; the skeleton force of UNIT men remaining there had even opened the gates for its largely unwitnessed exit. Now it was passing through the streets of Bristol, a filthy, growling thing.

‘What are you?’

The question was simple, yet the answer came in a complex series of images that kaleidoscoped inside the reality-wound of the truck without the being so much as speaking a word.

The Doctor stood in the darkness, and the being’s history was all around him, glowing with alien starlight.