Doctor Who: Rags (11 page)

He was striding towards them, slightly hunchbacked, his face threatening yet jovial all at once. The shark grin glinted in the firelight as he stopped beside Jimmy. He spoke.

And Jo didn’t hear a word. He was barely four feet away and she saw his mouth move and Jimmy’s head nodding frantically in response. She could see Sin smiling like a cat on the other side of the fire, pert with satisfaction. And Nick...

Nick was frowning.

Jo promptly forgot about Nick and leant closer to the singer in an effort to hear what was said.

And suddenly, as if a dial had been turned up inside her head, the words were clear as daylight.

His eyes wide and moist with intense fear, Rod stared at the wall, scarcely breathing, until he realised where he was.

‘Murder!’ he hissed, his voice clogged with ruined sleep. The moon threw a creamy blanket of light over the interior of the camper van. Snores grumbled up from Sin and Jimmy, sprawled in sleeping bags on the seats nearby. No one had heard him. His hair was slick with sweat. The nightmare that had woken him was gone, not a fragment remaining; but he knew it was a real horror. His insides were curdling, his brain seething like it was boiling with maggots. He had to get out, suck in fresh air.

He wriggled out of his smelly sleeping bag and lurched across 79

the cold floor towards the door, careful not to wake Jo who was tucked in near the driver’s seat. He pulled his leather jacket and jeans down from the baggage rack and quietly hefted the door open.

The moon was waiting for him outside, full and inherently evil; it painted the encampment with weird light, casting a surreal pall over everything. Above him the hill rose like a silver cone, topped with its strange tor. He sat on the runner and struggled into his army boots.

Murder. Prison officers kneeling in the grass at Princetown, three body bags carried out of the Oblong Box. What was he doing on this mad tour? What were they all doing? He remembered the front-page headline in a copy of the Sun, tattered and smeared with mud, lying in a thistle bed in a lay-by en route to Glastonbury. He remembered the headline clearly, because he had pissed on it: WORLD’S MOST EVIL BAND PLAYS ANOTHER

DEATH GIG. That was pretty strong stuff. How could he have forgotten it till now?

He leant against the side of the camper van, suddenly dizzy.

The moon watched him coldly, a ghost eye gloating over his horror. The passion he had felt earlier for the band was... dead?

He remembered the mummer talking, talking, and it had all made such perfect sense. Something about taking them all on a journey to a new society, where everyone would be equal: that was it. He had felt inflated with euphoria, and he was sure everyone else had felt the same.

Something made him look up at the tor just then. Call it fate -

and if that was what it was, then it was an evil fate that had no time for a loner like Rod; because what he saw marked the end of the road for the good-natured bum from Tavistock.

A figure was moving up on the hillside. A stooped, ragged silhouette - he could discern the trailing tatters even from this distance. The mummer? For a moment, Rod was sure it was...

but no, this figure was dressed differently, was somehow more twisted, like an old and stunted tree. It wasn’t a particularly cold 80

night, but Rod’s skin felt suddenly coated with frost. Yet despite his unease, he really wanted to see that figure more closely.

Hesitating, he looked back once, and only once, at the camper.

Through the smeared windows he could see Nick’s head cosied into his sleeping bag, Sin sleeping beside him. A yearning to be back with them hit him like a stake through the heart. My friends: my only friends. Never had anything else but them. Why was he saying his goodbyes - because that’s what it felt like. His eyes moistened. This was ridiculous. He needed a drink, not a trek up the hill at - he looked at his watch - three-thirty in the morning. He glanced around the encampment. Uncannily, everyone was asleep. Not a sound. On other nights at least some of the travellers had stayed up until morning, smoking and drinking and listening to music. But not tonight.

His mind made up, Rod moved slowly through the rusty vehicles towards the stile at the edge of the field. He climbed over on to the path that led up the hill.

The hunched, spindly figure was still there, and whatever it was doing Rod was sure it was unhealthy work. He didn’t recognise it, but somehow he knew it was someone he should investigate.

Why? Murder! Because Rod had woken up, and he suddenly knew the others wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

With every step he took up the winding path, his thoughts ran clearer, gathering momentum. He knew what the figure was. It was the reason for the tour, the philosophy behind the band, and he knew this because every nerve in his body wriggled with terror as he got nearer the crest of the hill. This was what they were all following.

MURDER!

He stopped on the path, tears of utter terror trickling down his cheeks. He would piss himself in a moment. Go back you old bastard - go back to your friends. Get back in your sleeping bag and pretend you never saw this hunched spectre on the hill.

And now he could no longer see it as the gradient of the hill obscured the monument. The grass was silver beneath his feet, 81

sweating dew, Above him the moon hung, a glowing, dead face. As lonely as him, but tonight it was a dreadful thing.

It was just the moon, for God’s sake!

He reached the brow of the hill and the tor reared into view. The figure was gone. Rod slowed his pace, treading softly towards the tower. His tired eyes left it, roved across the world stretching all around him. Looking out over the patchwork nightland he could make out objects that he knew had not been there in the day; there was one in the field below the hill - a wooden pole with a cage at the top. A black gibbet with a corpse manacled inside rusting metal ribs, its eyes stolen by crows. And there, beside a dike running with moonlight, a gallows with its highwayman trophy swinging in the breeze - Rod could hear the creak. The body swung more violently and the rope broke. Other, more distant figures tumbled from their hanging poles like rotten fruit and began to totter on long-disused legs. Some wore tricorn hats and clutched flintlock pistols in their bone hands. All of them were converging on the tor, seemingly from across the land.

Unreality rushed him: this was a trip and nothing more. Jimmy must’ve slipped him some acid, the bastard. He tilted his head up to the sly old moon, sucking in cold air, and then looked down again. The ghostly robbers of the rich had vanished but now the countryside below had been transformed, grass seared to grey dust, trees deformed and leafless in the middle of summer. A spiteful land of ash and decay - and where Glastonbury should be there were just black remnants, bones of houses. The dikes that sliced the land were no longer filled with water, but were choked with bodies: trenches of gnarled, brittle human ruin, dead wood cast aside. Thousands and thousands and...

Rod screamed, and twisted round to face the tor again.

The figure was waiting for him, stepping out from the shadows of the tower.

A shredded cloak hung from its body, stirring idly in the night breeze. Rod was shaking and crying aloud because he knew that in a moment he would have to look at the face he had climbed all 82

the way up here to see - and that now he would do anything, anything, not to see it.

And so they stood together for a timeless moment or two. Then one of them made a gesture and the other stopped crying.

Stopped everything.

Stopped...

And at the bottom of the hill PCs Roebuck and Williams were being relieved by their colleagues PCs Luton and Smith. Roebuck and Williams had been sitting in their squad car for the last five hours, watching and waiting for something to happen; and, as it had turned out, without anything to report. Now they could go home, and home for both of them was only a few miles away in Wells. They were both looking forward to a good sleep and maybe a cuddle with their respective wives. Upon reaching their houses, however, they chose to do something rather significantly different instead. They woke their wives with a detached precision, stared at them for a moment ignoring all puzzled inquiries, and then set about systematically slaughtering them. In PC Williams’ case, there was a particularly troublesome teenage daughter to be dismembered too. He did that after bludgeoning his wife’s brains all over the bedroom wallpaper with a golf club. The screams would stay with both constables for the rest of their lives. From the moment they left Glastonbury, picking up their own cars from the station, to the time they were led from their homes sleeved in blood a mere two hours later, they uttered not a single word. In PC Williams’ bedroom the words ARE WE FORGIVEN? were written in his wife’s blood in big spiky letters on the wall.

83

‘I’ve got just the man for you, Doctor.’

The Doctor looked up from his interminable study of the sensor probe. It was now lashed to a device resembling a dentist’s drill which the Brigadier was sure could serve no earthly purpose whatsoever apart from being there just to baffle him... like just about everything else in the Doctor’s lab, come to that.

‘Oh, really?’ The Doctor looked drawn and tired. His investigations must be leading him up a blind alley then, the Brigadier thought with a mixture of smugness and impatience.

Couldn’t the damned fellow do something more positive instead of continually poking at that infernal object? Five days he’d been buried in his lab now Maybe this news would spur him on to some action.

‘And who might that be?’ the Doctor asked, blinking sleepily.

Obviously been tinkering around the clock, to boot, by the look of him. Wouldn’t he ever learn that a disciplined mind resulted from a disciplined lifestyle? A good night’s sleep was essential for rational thought and decision. The Doctor looked crabby and haggard.

The Brigadier told him the name of the agent he was sending in and the Doctor looked suitably relieved, as well he might. Then he told him about the Prime Minister’s decision to replace the police with UNIT as the force to shadow the convoy and, as he had expected, this item of news was not received quite as well as the first one.

‘What the devil does he want to go and do a foolhardy thing like that for?’ The Doctor was blustering with righteous rage. The whole point of letting the tour go ahead is so that we can monitor it covertly and hopefully discover what their intention is. ‘We’re not going to be able to do that with your clodhopping army boys stepping on their heels! Not only will it stop whatever is behind this endeavour from showing its hand, it might even exacerbate 85

the situation and cause more trouble. Has your blessed Prime Minister stopped to consider that? Well, has he?’

The Brigadier braved this storm without batting a military eyelid, and then replied calmly: ‘The Prime Minister is in an untenable situation; he is being forced to bow to pressure from the Opposition. The tabloids are baying for blood.’

‘Not a very apposite choice of words, I would think in this situation, eh, Lethbridge-Stewart?’

The Brigadier’s voice increased in volume as he let his irritation slip free. ‘The papers are linking the horrific actions of the two constables in Wells to the tour. And for once I think they have a point.’

‘Do you?’ The Doctor stepped nearer, his hand caressing his chin, and scrutinised the Brigadier with a quizzical look in his eyes. ‘Do you...?’ he repeated more pensively. ‘Do you know, Lethbridge-Stewart, you constantly surprise me.’

The Brigadier tilted his head back. Meaning?’

‘Meaning there’s hope for you yet. You just take a little longer getting there than everyone else. Now if you don’t mind, I do have rather a lot to do.’

He’d been dismissed - like a blasted schoolboy! The Brigadier opened his mouth to bark a riposte, but the Doctor had already turned his back. Lethbridge-Stewart closed his mouth, his face prickly with humiliation and anger, and strode from the room.

‘Bristol,’ the voice said in Willis’s ear: They’re heading for Bristol.’

‘How extraordinarily convenient. For both of us,’ Willis replied, leaning back in his leather armchair and watching the sun plunge bloodily into the woods beyond his picture window. ‘I should think this tour - what’s it called?... the Unwashed and Unforgiving tour? - would be rather a cause célèbre for your...

magazine.’ The last word was pronounced with poorly concealed contempt: he might just as well have included the word ‘odious’, as he had intended to do before surrendering to self-restraint just in time. It wouldn’t do to push the grubby little man too far.

86

‘They’re nothing to do with us!’ the voice bristled. ‘They’re peddling obscenity and butchery.’

‘And what on earth does Class Hate propagate? Peace and goodwill to all men?’

‘You know what we stand for Willis: don’t piss me around. I believe strongly in what I’m doing, which is something you could never say about yourself, so don’t get on your soddin’ high horse with me. Understand?’