Doctor Who: Rags (28 page)

he called, swivelling his backside towards the man. Then, as the teacher’s face flamed with red rage and he bore down on this 204

rebel of rebels, the classroom door burst open and in came Jimmy’s gang. All paper tatters and worn leather, dyed punk hair and ferocious boots; and the girls he’d always fancied and who never spoke to him normally could see that he had the coolest, meanest mates as the gang ripped the clothes from old Fryer and displayed his minuscule member for them all to laugh at before pounding him senseless, trashing the class and burning the school. Jimmy was striding through the smoking corridors with his new gang, and the girls were the only ones allowed out of the inferno through the main doors. The rest could burn. Jimmy considered letting his schoolmates out too, but nah, they thought he was crazy so let them burn too. Then Jimmy was pulling away from the flaming pyre of education gone wrong, roaring away with the band on big, shining Hogs, and the girls were running after him, and the soundtrack to all this dreamy cool stuff was Generation X’s ‘Wild Youth’, or maybe, yeah, maybe ‘New Rose’ by The Damned, cos that was probably the best soddin’ song ever written and - and...

The band stopped playing.

Along with the rest of the crowd Jo, Sin and Jimmy turned to face the car park a few hundred yards away to their right. A growl of diesel-fuelled engines. The cattle truck was on the move. It grumbled towards the half-open gate leading into the field and then forged straight through it in an explosion of splintering wood. The filthy vehicle came on, lumbering over the tussocks towards them. The band struck up another number, and the playing was faster, the grizzled vocals more urgent as the vibration, the vibe, built within Jo, within them all.

The guitarist and bassist weaved between the tall standing-stones, trailing flexes through the daisies. The singer threw his head back and howled, and the drums beat an evil tattoo that pounded inside Jo’s skull like something very nasty was trapped in there and trying desperately to get out. The cattle truck swung in a slow trouncing curve until the back doors were facing 205

towards the band and its enrapt audience; then its engine cut out and the singer’s shriek ended. The rest of the band carried on playing, fast, faster.

The doors were opening.

Kane came to and wondered blearily what had roused him. His head felt like someone had been having a right royal go at it with a pike. But that wasn’t what had stirred him. For a moment he struggled to work out where he was. Sitting outside the pub of course, stupid. Where else would he be? The street was quiet and he wondered if it was a Sunday. Sundays in Cirbury were a special kind of hell. Then he remembered.

Everything.

And he knew what had woken him.

The music - he could hear it. The hell band was playing, but he knew instinctively it was not their racket that had jolted him from welcome oblivion. No, it was the low, evil vibration that was moving through his guts. That was coming up through his feet from beneath the ground.

He heaved himself up, and his stomach revolted against the action. He turned to the pub and threw up in the doorway, somehow sensing it was the last gesture he would ever make towards his old haunt, and feeling it was a damn suitable one.

But the music was calling...

Time to go.

One of the roadies had erected a ramp below the open backdoors of the truck, and now, walking grandly down it from inside like a princess revealing herself to her subjects for the first time, came a pretty young blonde woman. Jo recognised her; she’d seen her before, and wondered where... the Devil’s Elbow. And again at Amos Vale cemetery.Journalist. Jo felt a pang of envy at this special treatment the woman was receiving. Like she was some May queen or something. Yet the journalist didn’t seem to be exactly savouring the attention; she moved like she was in 206

dream, eyes wide and empty. Her white blouse and slacks were covered in dust and cobwebs but she made no move to brush them away as she descended the ramp and stepped trancelike towards the band.

The moon watched her approach, granting her an even more ghost-like appearance, brushing the eerie stones, too, with luminous paintwork. The band continued to play, the music thrusting towards orgasmic peaks of frenzy. The singer’s vocals had become one long guttural scream, and Jo also felt like screaming - to release all her pent-up frustrations, and embrace this music of the damned as if it would satisfy her every desire.

She was free now, at last. Tears streaked her cheeks and she groped for Sin’s hand, and found it. Sin’s face was lit with cruel relish, flushed with extreme passion. Jimmy was grinning like a lunatic and the band played fast, faster...

Charmagne moved wraith-like behind the band and took up her position in front of the restored stone, arms at her side, beautiful and calm in the moonlight.

And now someone else was descending from the truck. The back doors swung closed behind him.

The mummer. Colourful paper streamers stirring in the night breeze, leather-mittened hands outstretched as if he were some all-healing Messiah spreading benedictions amongst the chosen, eyes fixed ahead - on Charmagne Peters, on the stone behind her.

Cracked leather boots carried him slowly through the dandelions.

Ley lines. The mummer could feel their power ripping through the earth, the primal violence of them, pouring into the willing crowd around the stones and amplified beautifully by the band’s psyche-moulding music. The violence was escalating, and upon hitting orgasm the forces at his control would be staggering; morphic forces forged beyond the other side of the cosmos, married to the convulsive energies beneath the stones of Cirbury. The result: a widespread tidal wave of volatile negativity. Pure antipathy.

The summer of hate was just beginning.

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Enjoy, my children...

On his way to join Charmagne, the mummer passed Jimmy.

Jimmy found himself staring into those depthless eyes - I can see for miles and miles he was thinking helplessly, so terrified he almost pissed his jeans and so excited he wanted to laugh and shout and...

Without a word, Jimmy peeled away from the crowd congregating around the band and headed off towards the car park. Neither sin nor Jo noticed him leave.

‘Riot shields?’ the Brigadier repeated in outraged disbelief upon hearing Yates’ suggestion. ‘Good heavens, man! We’re an intelligence task force - we’re the army, dammit, not a bunch of rural bobbies.’ He enunciated the last word with heartfelt contempt.Yates flinched as if he’d been slapped. Such an outburst was incredible. The UNIT troops were virtually defenceless against the stones and bottles that were beginning to fly thick and fast now; protective gear was essential. The rage in the Brigadier’s eyes was completely uncharacteristic - his lack of reason too. But he was Yates’s commanding officer and, like all good soldiers, the captain was trained never to directly challenge a superior. He glanced over at the ring of UNIT men guarding the sarsons. He could tell they were itching to unsling their rifles and blast away at the shouting, screaming mob of hippies and punks surrounding them.

He decided to drop the subject of riot shields for now, vital as he was convinced they were. Something else was worrying him almost as much.

‘Sir… I was wondering if we shouldn’t deploy a squad to Cirbury,’ he announced in the most diplomatic tone he could manage. The Brigadier glared at him, but said nothing.

Encouraged, Yates forged ahead: ‘It’s just that the band is at Cirbury, and they’ve always been the figurehead for the convoy.

Every time the band plays there’s hell to pay. Can I suggest we send a squad there just to keep an eye on things?’ He waited 208

nervously for a reply. Nervously? This was the officer he’d followed blindly and devotedly through all sorts of bizarre and horrific conflicts and eventualities; this was the man whose judgement and command he had never before even thought to question. He would have trusted him with his life, so strong was his confidence in him. But now? What the hell was happening to him, to... everyone?

He thought of Jo: the blind, manic fervour that had been in her eyes at Amos Vale. And now he looked at the Brigadier and saw -

‘How dare you question my authority,Yates? Are you trying to suggest I’m not in control of events? The bloody police can deal with the few troublemakers at Cirbury. The real situation is here!

The bloody hippies are here - can’t you see them? The enemy’s here, man!’

Yates backed away, stupefied by the violence in his superior officer’s voice. A bottle exploded against the jeep parked beside them. The Brigadier turned, whipping out his pistol, eyes sparking with fury. Yates could feel the latent violence crackling in the air between the soldiers and hippies. And it made him feel cold and afraid.

On impulse he left the Brigadier standing like an angel of vengeance beside his violated jeep, and headed for a Land Rover parked further away from the stones. A group of reserve soldiers sat inside the vehicle, awaiting their turn to be sent out to relieve some of the Stonehenge cordon. He barked an order at the driver as he eased himself into the passenger seat.

‘Sir?’ the trooper asked in bewilderment.

‘That’s an order, private. Do it!’

The Brigadier didn’t even see them leave as the Land Rover lurched over the field towards the main road.

Yates was thinking hard. Why wasn’t he as caught up in all this mania as everyone else seemed to be? He had been in both camps

- hippie and UNIT - over the last few days, so he had been exposed to two fields of influence. Yet he remained calm and Unaffected by the - what could he call it? - mesmericbloodlust 209

that seemed to have blanketed his colleagues and friends. What made him so special? He’d hardly excelled himself over the last few days, had he? Got sussed at the cemetery and smashed over the head as a consequence

He frowned. He’d been unconscious for the better part of a day as a result of that blow, and ever since he’d been subdued and sheepish. In a low mental state. And of course that could be the answer: he hadn’t been in a very receptive condition. So how did that help him?

It meant, as Kipling once mentioned (although Yates was sure the writer could never have imagined his wit being linked to such a wild occasion), that he could keep his head while everyone else around him was losing theirs...

But could he sort out this mess alone? And where the hell was the Doctor when he was needed most? Yates hadn’t seen him since the incident at Amos Vale. He could have slipped away to Cirbury ahead of the convoy, of course, but nobody had even thought to ask. Maybe Yates was affected by this malign influence to some degree. Maybe it was making him forget important things.

Well, he’d just have to concentrate a bit harder, that was all.

And right now he had to concentrate on getting to Cirbury.

The Doctor was trudging dazedly through the reality-wound of the cattle truck. The tidal wave of delusions that had ripped through his mind seemed to be receding at last, but this didn’t seem to be helping him find an exit. He had to focus his mind deliberately on one goal - locating the back doors of the truck. If he visualised them perfectly, if he concentrated on every rusting fleck, every rib of corrugated metal - even the hole through which he’d peeped when the truck was on Dartmoor - then surely it would help him to break through this perceptual warp.

He had no idea how long he’d been trudging through the black cricklegrass. It could have been merely a handful of hours, and yet it could have been whole days, whole days while Jo remained at

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risk, while the planet remained at risk.

And what could he do if - when - he found an exit? It wasn’t like him to succumb to self-doubt, but in this case he really did feel helpless. It wasn’t a question of rigging up some last-minute contraption to defeat the aliens - he couldn’t simply reverse the polarity on the Ragman. The entity would simply laugh at such arrant nonsense. And yet...

The ley lines obviously held the secret to the monster’s power.

After all, the rock inside which the entity had travelled through space had been imbued with ancient forces analogous to ley energies - along with other, more cosmic potencies - that much the boastful being had already revealed. But the Doctor could only guess at what those forces were, so how could he hope to find an antidote to them? The morphic power to transmute organic materials - to resurrect them from death and infuse them with life-simulating energies - that was truly awe-inspiring; and that, coupled with the ability to create mass mesmeric effects, made the Ragman a daunting adversary to say the least.

And the Doctor couldn’t even begin to think about defeating him while he was still trapped in this tangible distortion of viewpoint.