Doctor Who: Rags (22 page)

It started with a journey. This journey began on the far shores of infinity - so inconceivably distant it would stretch the sanity of a human, then snap it like a spider thread. So, so far, at the other end of the vast black desert of space that was the universe, littered with the bones of stars and the dust of forgotten worlds.

Here the creature was conceived within a womb of rock spinning through the radiation-bathed flue of a black hole, passing on, cosmic spawn without rhyme or reason, simply being; cast adrift through barred spirals and asteroid belts, surfing meteor wakes and moving ever on...

On, on.

Galaxies bloomed and died around its passing. Species ended screaming in the silent void of space, and the creature cared not at all, knew nothing of his stargate floating. Merely was, and thought not.

The rock tumbled on, through tides of time, through eddies of the infinite, guided by an indefinable call that echoed only within the core of the cradle rock.

The call grew louder, more tangible, and now the Doctor can recognise galaxies, systems, planets. The rock was locked into an interstellar flight path of inconceivable, perhaps mystical, programming, and it had passed through its incredible voyage practically unscathed. The rock was moving towards planetfall now, answering the ley summons of primal energies locked 159

within the earth of one particular field in one particular country of one particular world.

The parent rock recognised those signal energies: they pulsed within its own core. Perhaps it had sensed a kindred force from across the infinite, and felt like it was coming home.

And now the Doctor could see primitive man, awed by this cosmic fall and subconsciously surrendering to alien urges that seethed within his brain. These ancient savages worked on the field of stones already erected on the mystical site they had long sensed as unearthly, as special: they incorporated the still-warm rock into the group of stones, and they worshipped it. Maybe it had come home, for it was identical to the other standing stones in every way. Maybe it was ejected into the depths of space at some primal point of Earth’s spawning, and only now had begun to find its way back, impregnated with alien detritus.

The Doctor found himself pondering these imponderables, and the Ragman either refused to provide enlightenment, or could not.

The Ragman remained silent throughout the spectacular screening, the sick grin on its grey face the only sign that it was enjoying the process, as if boasting of its unique journey into existence.

Ley-line nexus beneath the stones, nurturing the dormant creature, and then the Time Lord witnessed the entity’s brutal birthing into society through the midwife catalyst of blood and hate one summer midnight.

The mayor’s daughter and the mummer.Conflict and intolerance.Inequality and oppression. These were the first emotions and concepts experienced by the alien life-form, experiences that shaped an emerging ego and appetites; that drew him from his chrysalis of stone.

The Doctor sensed the creature’s frustration: the environment was not right for this predator from the beyond. His full emergence would have to be postponed. Social strife was limited, the spirit of levelling far too undeveloped - there were no 160

wayward children to lead on a merry dance of dissolution. The being sensed his own weakness and lack of growth, and retreated until times were a changin’ enough for him to revel.

Until a time when anarchy was bursting the land at the seams and violence and division incited the monster once more to step from stone.

The Doctor spoke, and his words dissipated the images like soap bubbles popping in a sudden breeze.

‘Stop!’

He held out a gloved hand for emphasis. ‘I’ve seen enough, and still I don’t understand.’ His voice was husky with fear he could not control in the presence of this entity. It was a fear he felt only seldom, but which was all the more piquant for it. Yes, he feared this grey man from the fringes of nowhere, he feared what he might do with this world; that he might unravel it like a ball of wool, and think nothing of it. ‘Stop these pictures, and talk to me.

Why are you stirring such hatred among the people of this world?

What can you possibly hope to gain?’

The creature shimmered and receded to become a distant tiny figure lost on the bleak horizon of the reality-wound, then just as suddenly sprang into close-up mere yards from the Doctor, slowworms twining, eyes baleful. The transporting disorientated the Doctor so much he backed away, a weakness he realised the alien assumed to be obeisance before a more supreme presence. He let this vanity pass, and pressed forward with his questions.

Knowledge was the key, understanding would prove to be the solution. It always had been in the past. And the vanity of his opponents had always helped in supplying understanding, and in their subsequent downfall.

Even as the Doctor entertained these reassuring thoughts, he suddenly knew they would not apply this time.

He spoke out, regardless - just as he always had done in the face of alien terror.

‘Like I said: what can you hope to gain by this madness?

Already your tour is being manipulated by humans for their own 161

Machiavellian political ends. Is that what you want? The forces of repression have many subtle avenues and expressions, and all the newspapers are full of their successes. Successes created by your fiddling. You think you are creating disorder, whereas you are merely strengthening the hands of those who would crush your wayward children for ever.’

The Ragman smiled. He smiled, and then he spoke.

The voice was a bizarre mismatch of British accents and periods, sliding from Tudor grandiloquence to twentieth-century gutter slang. Hushed, then strident, whispered then guttural. A changing journey through mores of expression and enunciation that were hypnotic to the ear.

‘Everything must be levelled!’

These were the first words to pass the grey slug lips. Then came more: and as they came, four shapes shuffled out of the darkness to guard their mentor. The reanimated amalgamation of four seventeenth-century mummers, executed and then buried on Dartmoor, and the doomed punks who arrived at the same spot three hundred years later. The Doctor understood their existence and their creation in a flash of telepathic intuition and, while his skin crawled at their unnaturalness, his mind reeled at the morphic powers inherent in the Ragman that were used to fuse eight separate essences into one Frankensteiniansupergroup of resurrected flesh, bone and irony.

‘Hate ‘n’ insurrection, channelled by my mummers and their strife music, will prise wide the fissure ‘tween rich and poor.

Society will slide into the hole for ever. This hole will be where greenery turns to black; sophistication transforms into nihilism; architecture to ruin. I mean it maaan!’ And here the being gurgled unpleasantly with what the Doctor could only assume was laughter. ‘Everyone will be equal.’

‘Everyone will be dead,’ the Doctor stated simply, aghast at the extent of the Ragman’s vision.

The being nodded its boulder-like head, and the worms twisted idly like seaweed in a current.

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‘Death be the only true state of equality.’ A set of panpipes was suddenly at the monster’s lips, and he was playing notes of such haunting horror the Doctor felt compelled to fall to his knees. He saw a vision in his mind of this murderous Pied Piper leading his children screaming into a cataclysm - the only solution the alien could accept as the logical answer to his twisted and abnormal philosophy.

The Ragman replaced the pipes inside his tatters and gestured at the gruesome landscape of body parts and black weeds around them. ‘This is but a foretaste of my whims. This is but one land I will level. There are plenty more in need o’ my attentions.’ The worms writhed ecstatically as the being’s excitement rose. The Doctor backed away, terror rising within him like a great wave, and then he was running blindly, desperately, as impossible rain began to fall inside the nightmare truck, turning ash into mud beneath his feet. The Ragman’s words echoed around him as he ran, a mad monster’s litany:

‘Pretension shall putrify. Elitism smoke like a gutted corpse’s entrails in the rain. Sophistication will become defecation.

Grandiloquence shall be gored by degradation.’

The Doctor was running nowhere and still the Ragman was in front of him, grinning obscenely, tatters lifting in unison with the slowworms. The Time Lord stopped, though horror was fisting his soul.

‘You’re not championing equality,’ he panted,’you’re celebrating nullity.’

‘They are the same, frilly one,’ came the croaking response.

‘They are the same.’

On the steps of the Bristol University Hall...

Princess Mary hesitates. she is level with Pole. She is also flanked by two bodyguards. she hesitates, and our hero seizes his moment. He drops the camera with a SMASH to the pavement, And he sweeps out the revolver in one fluid movement. He...

* * *

The Ragman approached the Doctor, seemingly gliding through the darkness without taking steps. One grey arm shot out, the hand snapping closed around the Doctor’s neck. The Time Lord froze in the being’s grip, all will to struggle sucked away. Tilting the Doctor’s head back, the Ragman examined him thoughtfully.

‘You too are an Everyman, like me, Doctor; a wanderer with no distinction, no shackles - a Man of the People. Like me you enjoy fiddling while societies burn. It feeds you, this constant interfering, this toppling of tyrannies, this trampling of egocentricities.’

The slowworms wound around each other as if in orgasmic appreciation of the Ragman’s words. The eyes blazed with intelligence unfathomable. The voice was a voice from midnight cemeteries, vocal cords eaten away by maggots. A death whisper, and then, continuing, it became a moist gurgle as if the alien were swallowing the blood of his enemies as he ranted his hypnotic litanies:

‘I see into your past, your present and your future... Time Lord... I see into your eyes and your soul is there. How many have read your secrets? We are both orphans of space... both condemned to wander in search of meaning and both ultimately trapped here. Yet I have found my destiny here - in correcting sociological wrongs, even if I do confront them in an extreme way.

Have you found yours?’ He released the Doctor who crumpled to the ground, eyes haunted.

The Doctor was alone again. His tormentor had abruptly vanished.

Princess Mary turns towards the man with the gun and the whole world sucks in its breath. Photographers are too shocked to snap, bodyguards pose like players of a children’s game where to move is to be caught out. Princess Mary turns towards the man with the gun and she smiles. Her eyes are suddenly grey pebbles and she is reaching for the gun, smiling her crooked smile, and she takes it from the man as if it’s a present being offered. Now the world

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breathes out and the cameras fire away like crazy and the bodyguards reel like drunks and the gun is blazing, the Princess is pumping the trigger like Dirty Harry and explosions are ripping little holes in the man’s body as he stands there taking it. Then he’s falling, blood squirting from those holes and he’s hitting the dirt of the pavement and the princess has shot him five times and now she’s leaping forward, on top of the body and look: she’s dancing.

Dancing on death.

She’s giglling as she performs her macabre jig, trampling on the leaking corpse, and the cameras lavish her with their praise and even the BBC have got in on the act with their big OB camera which moves in like a greedy beast to devour the action.

The bodyguards have stopped their confused reeling; now they stand, completely lost. They’re watching the show too.

The princess finishes her dance, and she turns towards her audience as the bodyguards finally move forward to lead her gently away. she laughs brightly, like a delighted child at Christmas.

‘This is Our Birthright,’ she says proudly, stepping off the corpse of her would-be assassin. ‘To dance on the grave of the filthy poor.’ A few streets away, in the car park of a department store, the cattle truck growls into life and pulls away from the kerbside where it has been waiting, seemingly abandoned, all morning.

And the day goes mad.

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CLASS WAR, the headline of the Daily Mail bawled, AND THE

ROYAL SOLUTION. The Guardian was more poetic: THE

PRINCESS AND THE PAUPER. The Communist Worker positively roared its own take: MURDERING MONARCHY. The Sun had the best laugh with: ONE SHOT HIM FIVE TIMEs M’LUD.

Jo was reading all of them, as Nick tossed the newspapers to her one after the other. Now she glanced at the Mirror which had trotted out some headlines from Derek Pole’s own magazine Class Hate to accompany its article: DON’T WORK, WON’T WORK: A REDUNDANT MONARCHY SMASH THE RICH. Jimmy was chuckling obscenely as he drove the camper, repeating some of the choicer extracts like punch lines as Jo read them aloud.