Doctor Who: Rags (17 page)

So, so sad. (Can you feel the sadness, Kane?) 122

There was a name etched into the base of the tomb, beneath the maiden’s stone feet.

Kane lit his cigarette and in the flare of the match he read the name.

His mouth formed a rictus. Sweat sprang out upon his brow.

He was cold, so horribly cold at that moment.

The marble etching said simply EMILY SAWYER.

‘Your name, I presume?’

A stranger had followed him into the crypt. He wore a velvet smoking jacket, frilly cuffs and had a bizarre, white, bouffant hairstyle.

Charmagne lay on the floor of the truck in the most absolute darkness she had ever experienced in her life.

There should have been sunlight showing through the cracks around the doors and certainly through the rusted hole: there wasn’t. It was as if deepest night had fallen outside as well as inside the truck. She lay for a moment, too scared to move, traumatised by the darkness. She had heard the roadie slam the doors and the click and rattle of the padlock. she would have to try to escape anyway. But not... just... yet. She felt like a child again - if she moved, something dreadful would snatch her.

Something with a gruesome grey eye.

Waves of horror rippled through her, making her sure she would vomit. Then she was moving. Leaping to her feet and hurling herself against the doors - against where the doors should be.

There were no doors.

She fell headlong, banging her knees and elbows against the corrugated metal floor. She sat up, stunned for a moment, trying to think logically. The giant had tossed her in through the doors, just inside them in fact. They had to be right behind her. She stumbled up and groped carefully behind her, in the direction her common sense dictated behind had to be.

Nothing.

123

No doors.

She was breathing heavily now, and the first tears had spilled down her cheeks. You got what you wanted, you got to look inside the truck. Now just please let me get out again. she groped sideways, reaching for the metal wall.

There was no wall.

Feeling panic uncorking itself within her, she lurched to the other side of the truck, reaching blindly for the wall she knew had to be there.

And wasn’t.

Her scream echoed madly within the metal vehicle.

‘LET ME OUT. LET ME OUTITT!!!!!’

My God please let me out.

‘It’s his name, all right.’

A new voice, a new visitor to the crypt. And that made three.

The new arrival was the old cleaning woman Kane had glimpsed at the church doorway when he’d contemplated bottling one of the stained-glass windows a week or so before.

He was waiting for an explanation. Cleaning lady and frilly man didn’t seem in a hurry to give one, gazing at the marble tomb in silence. Kane decided he’d better force one out of them.

‘Is someone having a laugh at my expense?’ He stood before the velvet-jacketed stranger in a threatening posture. The man was taller than him by about three inches, and he stroked his chin thoughtfully as he turned his wise eyes upon Kane. That was no answer, though.

‘Well?!’

‘I assumed it must be your family name from your extreme reaction, my dear chap0,’ the stranger said in elegant tones.

‘Don’t you pissin’ "dear chap" me.’ Kane was furious. He didn’t like this situation - oh no, not at all: it was freaking him. ‘What were you doing following me down here - are you some sort of pervert?’ The man certainty looked a bit dodgy in his frills and velvets.

124

The stranger straightened to his full height.’I am nothing of the kind, young man. I heard the erratic ringing of the church bell, and wondered if someone might be in trouble. I found the crypt door open and discovered you here, staring in obvious shock at this monument.’

‘I heard you, too, love: the cleaning lady piped up. ‘That certainly ain’t the way the regler bell-ringers does it, and that’s fer sure.’ Her face was a bowl of wrinkles bound by wisps of grey hair. Grape-green eyes peeped cheerfully at Kane. ‘Bit of a shock to yer, was it, love? Findin’ that there memorial? Don’t s’pose you’d have had cause to hear of it from anybody else, seein’ as not many folks gets to come down here.’

Kane stared at her like she was a witch. Were these jokers playing mind games with him? shit, he needed another drink. ‘So who is it?’ he said, and his voice was more of a whisper. He turned to stare at the marble form again, with its lost, vacant eyes and pitiful baby clutched tightly to its chest.

‘Why, lordy, but it’syer ancestor, love. Emly Sawyer. She who was cruelly neglected, specially when she was with child. ‘Tis a sad story, and no mistake, and not one I expect yer family would keep in memory. Some things is best left buried.’ However, now that she was warming to her theme, the old lady was obviously not of this opinion. ‘Her father abandoned her, see, when she fell pregnant. She was..now what was the words?... Disowned, reviled and so fell into moral decline, my love - at least that’s how the story was passed down to me by the Reverend Tieburnhisself.’

‘I know exactly how she felt.’ Kane was recovering his composure now, and beginning to wonder why seeing the form should have freaked him so. Perhaps it was the aura of tragedy hanging over the marble tomb - and then seeing his name connected with it.

‘This here memorial is a father tryin’ to put right what he done wrong. She died, see, in poverty and want.’

‘And the baby?’ Kane asked, poking a boot at the tiny form radled in its stone mother’s arms.

125

‘Oh, the Church looked after it when its mother passed away, of course. The girl’s father made sure of that. A father’s shame paid for the child’s upbringing in a godly house.’ The old lady gave what was supposed to be a sanctimonious smile, but in the dim light of the crypt it looked lewd and creepy. Her eyes had lost their cheerful aspect too. Kane’s head was buzzing with questions, yet at the same time he wanted to get out of here.

‘So when did all this happen?’ he managed, trying not to imagine the old lady’s face transforming into something nightmarish in the gloom.

‘Maybe you should go to the village library, love. You can read all about it there, I’ll be bound. Not that you’ll want to.’ And now it was too late - her face had turned into a vampire crone’s, feeding on his curiosity with unholy relish. Kane found himself thinking of a horrible black-and-white German film he’d seen once: Vampyr. There’d been just such a ghostly harridan in that.

He reined in his fantasies, because the crone was continuing her rambling.

‘It’s one local legend they likes to forget round ‘ere, my love .You see feryerself: go find the book’

All this time the stranger in the velvet jacket had stood quietly by, with a sort of thoughtful impatience. Now he roused himself from his contemplation of the tomb and stopped the old lady in her tracks.

‘Legend?surely this is actual history?’

The woman grinned at him. ‘Depends how yer read it, sir. Most folks like ter think ‘tis just a story. But the book holds the entire sordid tale. It weres’posed to be burnt, but I know it never were.

Some things is just too hard to get rid of; they has a habit of hanging around - like a bad smell, if you like. Strong stuff it were, and should never have been on the children’s shelves.’

The stranger looked even more thoughtful. Kane decided that now that his own family history had been divulged, it was the frilly man’s turn to give. But the stranger was already turning to leave the crypt. Kane put a hand on his arm.

126

And what’s your story, mate?’

The dandy smiled, and casually removed Kane’s fingers from his jacket. ‘Oh, I’m just a passing stranger. But I imagine you get rather a lot of those here.’ With that he minced grandly up the steps, leaving Kane with the old cleaning woman, who was still watching him with those bright green eyes, as if longing to tell him more tales.

Her shoes rang on the metal floor of the truck as she stumbled blindly around. Then suddenly the hollow clanging stopped. The floor was soft beneath her feet; springy... like...

Impossible!

The roadie had slipped her some kind of drug, some hallucinogen - that was the only answer. That, or she was losing her mind.

Losing her mind, tripping, or whatever - she was walking on grass. The darkness was receding, as if dawn were breaking inside the nightmare truck. She could feel a wind sighing like a ghost through the grass, and the cold light of morning showed her the endless heath all around.

Sheep were grazing near and far, and for a moment she was convinced that, impossibly, she was back on Dartmoor. When she saw the hut in the distance however, she realised that, just as impossibly, she was somewhere entirely different. And much further away.

This is a dream. You’re going to wake up back in your flat in Plymouth, and you’ll drive to the office and there’ll be a neighbour dispute to report on or... or...

Or a gig on the moor at Princetown to visit.

She knew that hut, and as she walked towards it, drawn like she’d been drawn ever since that fateful morning in her flat, she knew she was walking back into her childhood.

And she really didn’t want to go there! Not to that hut, not to that lonely crofter’s but in the absolute middle of nowhere on the east coast of Scotland. Don’t make me go back.

127

Please.

The hut was close enough for her to see the cobwebbed windows now, the element-bullied wooden boards that held it up, the rope bridge crossing the brook winding beside it.

The bridge was as she remembered it, too: the missing slats were still there, just as they’d been when she’d skipped across in search of her father, heart swelling with the thrillfear of finding this fairy-tale cottage and of being lost and alone on the moor.

He’d left her - and she had never understood why. Nobody had ever been able to tell her. They’d tried: but she’d never listened, because it hadn’t been right. He’d left her, and that was it.

She’d been playing hide-and-seek with him as they trekked through the glen. She’d hidden in some trees and giggled as he called for her. She’d waited until he’d gone over the rise and then she’d slipped out of her hiding place, still giggling. She’d picked some daisies beside the stream and sat in the sun making a daisy chain, and the cries of her father had grown first more anxious, and then more distant. Just like the mother of Flip the penguin in the storybook she’d read the year before. And that was when she stopped making the daisy chain and leapt to her feet, feeling suddenly scared. Flip had hidden from his mother because he wanted to carry on sliding through the ice, even after it started to get dark. His mother had called for him, waddling over the ice floes, and Flip had hidden. Then his mother had stopped calling and Flip could play all he wanted. Then it got very dark and Flip was alone. And scared.

Just like little Charmagne was now. Except Flip’s mother had come back for one last search for her son and the little penguin was no longer alone. And little Charmagne...

Little Charmagne had already lost her mother to a traffic accident. she didn’t want to lose her father too.

So she skipped over the bridge, scanning the moor for any sign of the old man, and of course there was nothing but the crofter’s hut with its impenetrable windows smeared with cobwebs.

Daddy was inside. That’s where he was hiding. she swayed over 128

the bridge while the brook sang sweetly beneath her feet, and then she was across and traipsing up to the buckled wooden door.

Little Charmagne reached for the handle. She pulled it down and pushed the door open.

She saw her father sitting inside. The room was bare apart from the plain wooden table and the plain wooden chair, and cobwebs: So many cobwebs, like a witch’s lair. It was a fairy-tale cottage after all. Nothing there to tempt him inside. So why had he left her?

Why hadn’t he come back for one last look for her, like Flip the penguin’s mother in the storybook?

He was sitting with his old grey head slumped on his chest, one hand dangling down beside the chair, the other resting on the table.

It looked like he was asleep.

‘Why did you leave me, Daddy?’

Why did you leave me?

Little Charmagne stood in the crofter’s cottage and screamed at her dead father.

A world of time away, a clutch of years away, a handful of seconds away, twenty-five year-old Charmagne stood in the crofter’s hut in the middle of nowhere in the nightmare truck and screamed at her dead father.

‘WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?’

The dead old man in the chair lifted his head up to face his daughter. A length of cobweb stretched from his mouth to an empty plate on the table.

‘Heart attack, love. Didn’t they ever tell you?’ His voice was whispery and dry as if his throat were crammed like the hut with cobwebs. ‘I looked, but I couldn’t find you, and I was so tired, I had to play a game of hide-and-seek of my own.’