Doctor Who: Rags (25 page)

interpreted them in her own way, and found peace and contentment in them, and that was enough. She remembered the time he had entered the Devil’s Elbow, she remembered the child beside the stream reaching for him; most of all she remembered what it was like to be... happy?

And Jimmy the Wild, he was thinking of violence, and clashes, and rage, and yet it was all so good, because for once he was revelling in strife that was righteous strife; he was the hero in a modern morality tale where the coppers really did deserve to take a dive in the final reel. He felt vindicated for all his past misdeeds and, yes, he was the rebel with the bloody greatest cause.

And Nick... Nick listened quietly, chin on his knees, hands clasped around his legs.

And the mummer talked.

And talked...

And the camp fire crackled and popped, and the moon grinned as it rode through the night, and all around the field of stones the travellers were at peace.

‘Our journey has reached its end,’ the mummer announced, and his fingers slid over the strings of his lute and notes trickled sharp and cold into the fire-lit night. Some distance away at the edge of the field the police officers and local villagers watched from behind the (safety?) of the wire fence, like cardboard characters that did not move.

‘This journey began in violence, and now it must end the same way. But freedom was always bought with violence, were it not?’

With that, the mummer tossed the lute into the fire and spread his hands wide, grubby fingers poking through leather mittens like straw through the gloves of a scarecrow. The strings popped with discordant squeals and the wood warped to black.

‘This here journey began for I in the Bogside; soldiers firing at will - as soldiers are wont - and the common people falling. But falling for truth even as they bled. This journey continued as I watched police clash with thugs and believers in racial freedom 184

at the burgh of Lewisham; names and places change, but the noble riots go on, and I am with them. This is your age, my children. The age of riot.see, I have roamed at the site you call Notting Hill and seen the good blood in the streets, though I have wandered there before the first bricks were laid; I ‘ave been to all the troubled areas, seen it all: the fury, the hope, the belief. Most recently, I strolled beside your princess (whose princess? not mine, will you have her either?) as the gun flared in One’s blue-blooded hand, severing the last link between rich and poor, and with five bullets destroyed the future of this detestable monarchy.

Now there is a royal public hanging... rejoice.’

The mummer bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. The eyes held all these histories inside them, and revelled in their violence.

‘But the march is over and the work almost done...’

Yet there came a challenger to the storyteller: a lone voice from the group of friends huddled around the fire. A quiet, shaking voice, and one which made Sin stare with hate, Jo with contempt, and Jimmy with bafflement.

‘And you’ve done a good job, Mr Mummer.’

Nick was looking up now, arms still folded round his knees. His eyes were scared, but resolute. The clouds had gone from them, though his face was bone-white.

‘All these places...’ he continued, ‘...you were really there?’ It was a sceptical accusation, his voice laden with tired cynicism.

The mummer took a step towards him before answering, and Nick’s face became even whiter in the firelight. The final catgut string of the lute burnt away with a lonely wail. Silence for a sweaty fistful of seconds as the mummer turned the full gaze of his implacable shark eyes on the spike-haired young man.

‘In spirit, if not in flesh: he replied at last, his voice a menacing drawl, the menace of which was lost to all but Nick.

Nick nodded, then furnished his own slant on the mummer’s words: ‘In thought, if not in deed.’ And suddenly, he saw the truth of the whole shambles: Rod’s face floated up from the darkness of his mind: there he was, walking up to Glastonbury tor in the dead

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stretch of night, alone, having said goodbye to his friends for the last time. Nick saw what was waiting for him at the top and tears were in his eyes, and a great righteous fury flared up from his heart.

‘I’ve been to those places too,’ he said slowly, and his voice was no longer shaking but iron hard, as the tears trickled down his cheeks, not dissipating his strength but rather intensifying it. He looked at Sin.

And she saw the tears and the inner strength and her eyes widened momentarily, and horror and loss filled them, for one blissful moment only. Then she was the cold, hateful sin again, and Nick made his speech.

‘Yes, I’ve been to all those places too - in my head. Along with hundreds of other places like them, and I saw a different story.

Not glory. Not glamour. Not a celebration of violence and discord.

I saw only fear and desperation. A need to change, not destroy.

What do you offer, Mr Mummer? A solution? Hope?...’ He laughed. ‘Freedom?No. What you offer is a walk into the heart of hate, purely for the wild joy of it. And hate is all you’ve got.’

The mummer’s eyes were no longer lustrous and dark. They were grey, grey as hard stone. And Nick stopped talking, and his head drooped on to his knees once more, and Sin looked at him, once, then looked away.

The fire burned. A knot of wood burst, then hissed. The mummer left them and walked across the field of stones towards the cattle truck.

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It was like a hellish version of the TARDIS’s dimensional transcendence, but knowing that did not save the Doctor from his own private horrors. He was bound to a stake as fire kissed the tinder wood and a crowd of bellowing ragged people celebrated.

And, under the hoods and tatters, he recognised every one of them. There was Susan, there Vicki. And bearing the flickering torches that had kindled the faggots, Ian and Barbara grinning with bloodlust.

‘Not you, Jamie,’ he moaned, as another figure hurled a stone that gouged his cheek. ‘Oh, not you.’

And although he knew he was simply caught like a leaf in a perceptual whirlpool inside the filthy cattle truck, it did not make the flames burn any less. He was a wicker man offered up to the hungry gods of his own delusions and fears and, inside his head, he’d found the one place where there really was no haven.

Zoe was mincing up to him and her rags were dropping away, freeing her to dance naked and wild before him. She threw her arms and head back and moved sinuous as a snake to the sound of his screams. He saw his skin blackening, and the agony was unendurable.

The stones came thick and fast then, all of them hurled by people he had loved and lost.

But now he was back in the control room of the TARDIS, holding on to the console while the craft shook wildly as if grabbed in the jaws of a monstrous cat. Lights flicked on, off, on, off. The floor bucked and threatened to hurl him against the indented roundels of the far wall. He held on, braving the psychic storm. The observation screen glowed into life and simultaneously the thrashing of the ship ceased, leaving the Doctor still clutching the console, sweating and panting.

He looked over his shoulder at the screen. It showed only an unfamiliar star system, shifting, beautifully coloured coronas 187

embracing alien worlds; an asteroid-gemmed canvas of virgin territory. He longed to explore it, the chaos of the preceding moment all but forgotten. That is, until the scratching sound reached his ears.

Something was tearing at the outer hull of the timeship, scratching to get in. The sound echoed around the length and breadth of the TARDIS, mighty strips of environmental force-field gouged away with each clawful - and it had to be claws, judging by the noise. Claws that would strip away the onion layers of the ship and grope for him if he stayed put.

He hammered at stiff buttons on the mushroom-shaped console, prodded switches that came away in his fingers and, horribly, the TARDIS was screaming as it was clawed to death.

The Doctor heard those screams as he finally succeeded in grappling with the dematerialisation lever, the location of which he had incredibly, albeit momentarily, forgotten. The TARDIS

shook as if a big boot had stomped on its transdimensional spine, and the system spanning the screen blurred into nothingness to be replaced by the purple orgasmic thrusting of the space-time vortex. The Doctor collapsed against the console.

And then the scratching recommenced.

Impossibly, there was something out there, clinging piggyback to the TARDIS, riding with it through space and time and ripping its way slowly inside.

Irrational terror caught the Doctor and had him up and running for the door. He passed through, staggering blindly into the corridor beyond as lights pulsated greenly and sickly and the symphonic death rattle of the TARDIS crashed in his ears.

His fear chased him through corridor after metallic corridor, each the same, each seemingly endless - all apart from one which, inexplicably, was overgrown with nettles and weeds. In the centre of this passage a simple stone tomb nestled. The Doctor kicked his way through the undergrowth, slowworms easing away from his shoes to slither under the memorial.

There was a name etched on the eroded lid, and the Doctor 188

gazed at it in fascination. So the TARDIS was dead, he was dead, and the craft had become a floating tomb adrift for ever in the vortex. The thought had him running again, as if he’d forgotten the essential truth that there was nowhere to run to. Through the nettles and hogweed, then through the far door, down endless corridors and up to a final door which led back inside the control room, to stare at the screen and what it showed him.

The scanner revealed a portion of the outer shell of the TARDIS

and the spindly spider thing that clutched it with black, irradiated limbs. The teeth of the beast, as well as its claws, were ripping at the exterior, leaving long scorings. The repulsive hitchhiker turned towards the screen and the Doctor saw the face: his own face, mutated by the unknowable forces of the vortex, eyes locked with madness, mouth grinning and losing teeth that spun away into the void. The white hair was alive like a sea anemone, coiling and thrusting even as the flesh charred away to drift into the time stream, but yes it was his own face.

And yet not. Evil as much as the cosmic erosion of the vortex had eaten away at it; perversion pulled at the corners of the leering grin. Bare id incarnate lusting after a whole universe, playing the beast with four backs with the craft that would take it where it willed. Insanity urging it to destroy what it needed. The Doctor’s own ego, loose and satanic, scratching away the layers of his goodness.

The Doctor fell to his knees, eyes tight shut, hands over his ears as the TARDIS cried with everlasting sorrow.

The Cirbury villagers watched the roadies unload the cattle truck the next morning, hefting amps, speakers, instruments and cables over the stone wall and into the field of stones. There was plenty of discussion of course; this was the ‘convoy of evil’ after all - or half of it, anyway. But, strangely enough, there was no undue consternation. The newspapers told them the main batch had headed off for Stonehenge, and that made much more sense.

Stonehenge was a symbol of old and arcane things; it was a natural magnet to social outcasts and hippie types. Cirbury, while

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just as old and equally as mystic, had for some reason never entered into the public consciousness to the same degree as the Salisbury Plain monument. If anything bad were to happen, it would happen there; and the soldiers also believed this -

television newscasts showed the UNIT forces protecting the stone circle in an impressive display of armed doggedness.

If a few of the villagers were troubled by passing thoughts about the apparent short-sightedness of not deploying at least a token force to supervise the Cirbury part of the convoy, their thoughts were just that - passing - and immediately left those who had entertained them with a dull feeling of curious tolerance towards the colourful invaders of their historic community.

The general consensus was that nothing bad could happen here. UNIT would protect them if there was anything to worry about and, besides, they had a handful of local bobbies keeping a pragmatic eye on things.

Yes, a curious complacency was the order of the day amongst the villagers of Cirbury. Except in the case of one young man.

Becoming more dishevelled and wild-eyed with each passing day, Kane was also in a permanent state of drunkenness. The villagers referred to him as an alcoholic now, adding to his long list of socially undesirable epithets, and he was roundly shunned.

The sunny morning of 20 June found him waking beside one of the standing stones out in the field, his body stiff with cold, his hair wet with dew.