Doctor Who: Rags

RAGS

MICK LEWIS

Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd,

Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 orr

First published 2001

Copyright @ Mick Lewis 2001

The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format @ BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC ISBN 0 563

53826 0

Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright @ BBC 2001

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton Luckily, the books he wanted were on the bottom shelf.

He pulled out Dracula first, a thick book with a purple cover as large as his head. He nearly dropped it, it was so heavy. He flicked through the yellow, well-thumbed pages in search of the scary bits. The bloody bits. His eyes bugged when he found them.

Next he dragged down Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The text was dense and long-winded, but he still managed to find passages that excited him. Utterson’s bones jumping on the street under the blows from Hyde’s cane. He memorised the powerful words of violence, and then he reached for a third book.

This one was bound in an ancient plastic cover that depicted a monstrous figure peering between the curtains of a four-poster bed at a terrified man.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ The shrill voice cut through his secret pleasure. The librarian with her bird-like features and pointed, no-nonsense spectacles was behind him, staring down at him in rather the same awful manner as the monster on the cover.

He glanced back at the book in his hands. It was obvious what he was doing. The librarian snatched Frankenstein from him, holding it out so that she could examine the cover. She slammed it back into its slot on the shelf and seized hold of his right hand, pulling him up from his cosy squatting position on the parquet flooring. The rubber soles of his shoes squealed on the wood as he struggled.

‘You’re far too young to be reading these,’ the woman barked at him, dragging the eight-year-old boy away from the adult section of the library. She didn’t notice him snatch Dracula and slide it under his jumper. He hugged the book close as she dumped him in the children’s corner.

‘Does your mother know you’re reading this sort of thing? I don’t think she would be very pleased. Although, then again, maybe she wouldn’t care. Where is Mrs Sawyer?’ The librarian glanced around peevishly. Although only in her thirties, the severe bun of hair and vicious glasses transformed her into a middle-aged spinster. Her brow crimped with displeasure as she realised the

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boy’s mother wasn’t in the library. She crossed to the checkin desk and reached for the telephone.

The boy slumped down on a window seat in the children’s corner, flicking desultorily through The Sleep Book and The Sneetches, comforted by the feel of the thick book under his jumper and the naughty thrills it would deliver later when he got home.

He glanced over his shoulder as he pulled more children’s books down from the shelves. Mrs Nasty Specs was wittering away into the telephone. He hated her. Ugly witch. She was like all of them, treating him like some kind of weirdo. At school they still made him read Janet and John. He’d been reading proper books without pictures in them for about three months now at home, although his mother didn’t approve. She’d clouted him once when she’d caught him with a book of horror stories by Poo.

He sniggered. Not Poo: Poe. They’d been pissin’ good. And he could swear like a grown-up too - especially when his mother took Poe off him; she was just like his teachers at school who thought he was stupid, just like Nasty Specs. They all wanted him to be stupid. But he wasn’t. He’d show the pissin’ lot.

His investigating fingers found a large hardback stuffed behind the leaning books, hidden like a guilty secret. Dust puffed at him as he pulled it free. He glanced at the cover, wondering idly when his mother would come and get him. And then he forgot his mother, the librarian, even the book shoved behind his jumper.

Suddenly he felt very cold, even beneath the hot strip-lighting of the library.

A claw raked at his guts as he stared at the chilling illustration.

Foreboding thick as lukewarm soup clogged inside him. Without knowing why he did it, only knowing that it really would be better for his peace of mind if he didn’t do it, he opened the book and began leafing through the large illustrated pages.

Dust billowed up with each turn of the page, like kisses from the dead. And with each page, his fear grew. Not conventional homely fear that eight-year-olds could understand: not fear of the 2

dark or something under the bed. This was top-gear terror that squeezed his mind black. He was crying softly to himself after the first six pages, his little pudgy hands trembling pathetically as he held the book. His embryonic sense of self shattered. The library with its ordinary everyday walls, its Tintin posters, orderly bookcases and quiet readers seated at tables was gone. He was lost. Horror stalked him, like the grim, awful thing it truly was.

The pictures in the book, luridly drawn, possessed a life of their own; they seemed to reach for him, to shriek for him, although of course he knew they didn’t. They couldn’t. And still he read, and stared, and cried.

Finally he dropped the book and staggered to his feet. The library was back around him, but it didn’t feel safe and ordinary any more. And he knew it never would again. He made for the exit, tears streaming from his wide, wide eyes. Then he was outside, almost fainting, and the air was good and clean and...

He didn’t even notice Dracula fall from under his jumper to lie forgotten on the road.

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Side One

‘We’ve been crying now for much too long...’

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It had been a lousy gig. Doc realised they should have known better than to play a sheep-pen like St Columb, population twenty-three and a half. Nobody had even applauded, let alone danced to their racket. But then where else could they get to play? The answer was only too painfully obvious. They were hardly The Rollin’ Bleedin’ Stones. More like The Sex Pistols if Malcolm McLaren had decided not to choose the yob with the meningitis stare as his singer. They were nothing. They were shit.

Next to Doc in the passenger seat of the Bedford van, Animal was dozing fitfully, despite the roar of Slaughter and the Dogs playing on the dashboard stereo. A half-empty bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale was balanced on one knee. Doc glanced at the hedgehog-haired singer in irritation as he guided the van along the twisting moor road. The dozy pillock was still wearing his shades, for Christ’s sake. Doc could hardly see where he was driving what with the rain and the dark, and that tosser was still hiding behind his wraparounds. Sham. Like the band. Sham soddin’ ‘79. As he threw the van angrily round a sharp bend, the equipment slid across the back. Winston the skinhead cursed as the amp toppled on him for the umpteenth time. Nobody laughed.

A tor reared up in the headlights ahead, bleak and ominous.

Doc suddenly drew the van to a halt alongside it, jerking the handbrake on roughly.

Animal stirred. ‘Whass ‘appenin’?’ he mumbled, beer bleeding from the bottle tilted on his knee. Doc ignored him, pushing the driver’s door open against the force of the wind. He needed to take a leak, but more than that, he needed air. Fresh air that didn’t stink of his smelly friends, of beer, cigarettes and failure.

Rain pattered on his head and slicked down his face, and the cold blasted at him from across the moors as he made his way over to the jumble of rocks beside the road. But it felt good. It felt 7

real. It was the beginning of May; yet out here on Dartmoor, it could have been November.

He paused before the rock pile that littered the base of the tor, his back to the dazzling headlights. Black snakes uncoiled and crawled amongst the boulders. His chest tightened in sudden panic; then he relaxed as he realised they were just the shadows cast by his long, straggly hair.

This was a wild place. He felt at home here, without really understanding why. This barren beauty, this emptiness. Here there was no sham. No laws. No rich, no poor. Here a king could be a clown, a prince a pauper. Doc was as good as them all here, with the wind roaring; and the rain, the wonderful rain, falling...

The Range Rover was doing at least sixty. And on these roads, in these conditions, at this hour, that was hardly a good idea. Or a sober idea, for that matter. But then, not one of the singing, roaring, joking young men in the vehicle was sober. They were returning from the University Spring Ball in Exeter, they were wearing tuxedos, and they were wired. Roger Browne was the first to see the shabby Bedford van parked awkwardly at the side of the road. But then he should have been, as he was the driver. He slammed on the brakes, yanking down hard right on the steering wheel and for a moment it looked like they might just make it.

Then the wheels slipped on the wet road, the rear of the Range Rover backswiped the Bedford and the vehicle was rolling, the laughs and jokes turning to screams.

Animal was smashed sideways against the driver’s seat at the impact. His beer flew from his hand. The passenger window shattered, the door bulging inwards as if a giant had punched it.

The whole van rocked and slid across the road. The singer looked up to see the Range Rover rolling to a standstill on its side, and then he was climbing out through the driver’s door, and doing what came naturally to him: shouting obscenities.

‘You crazy bastard!Whassamatterwivya? Got hay for brains?’ He stood in the road, staring at the overturned vehicle, waiting for 8

someone to make a move from inside, making no effort to step forward to help. Eventually a head did pop out of a buckled door.

And when Animal saw the well-groomed, callow face, when he saw the tux; when he heard the young man’s cultured and indignant voice return his obscenities as he fell out on to the road, Animal began to see red.

Doc heard the rending of metal and shattering of glass as he urinated into the wind. He was about to turn to investigate when he spotted something glinting, half-buried beneath the rocks in front of him. He paused. He could hear Animal shouting now, which meant at least he wasn’t hurt. He realised with a dreamy languor that he really didn’t care either way. He glanced again at the glinting object and, responding to some impulse that was beyond his ken, he crouched down and tugged at it. It was a handle fashioned from some sort of bone and it resisted his efforts, so he tugged with all his weight.

Animal had the beer in him, and the fury too. If there was one thing in all this world he hated, more than coppers, more than bosses, more than anything, it was toffs. They made him just lose it. He’d done six months for ABH once when a toff in a pub spilled beer on him. Animal wouldn’t have given a toss if anyone else had spilled beer on him, shit he did it to himself all the time. But a toff...