Doctor Who: Rags (31 page)

Kane didn’t really understand the words, and yet at the same time they made perfect sense. He smiled, to show he was with the dude spiritually. He looked at Charmagne and it didn’t surprise or frighten him to see her eyes were grey as pebbles. From the way she was staring at him, something similar had probably happened to his.

And now he could really feel the throbbing of the stone behind them, stronger than all the others in the field pumped by the ley lines. The stone... the lodestone... he knew what it was, and again he did not know how, or why.

Like a grotesque wedding band celebrating the union of Kane and Charmagne, the resurrected punk mummers played on....

The travellers had taken possession of stonehenge. They were in, 226

through the gap the burning camper van had left, and now they were celebrating. It was half an hour to midnight, the summer solstice was imminent and they had beaten the army. They cheered and roared and flung rocks at the soldiers who didn’t know whether to advance after them into the megalithic circle or remain where they were.

The Brigadier stood beside his command jeep and watched their confusion. His walkie-talkie was in his hand, but he didn’t need it. He had enough men; he knew what to do. The folded orders were tucked away in his pocket and they could stay there -

he didn’t need them either.

He witnessed the frenzy of violence in front of him, saw his soldiers awaiting instructions as they attempted to re-form the cordon around the flaming hulk of the camper van.

‘These filthy deviants are attacking the queen when they attack us!’ he bellowed to Sergeant Benton, who stood indecisively next to him. ‘They’re trying to bring down everything our country stands for! Give the order to fire at will, man!’

Benton grinned happily and turned to Corporal Robinson. she had already heard and immediately trotted towards the cordon, unslinging her own FN with alacrity.

She pushed past two troopers and let off a burst of staccato fire before bothering to pass on the command. Two punks who were lobbing rocks in their direction went down like mown wheat.

Sheer joy flashed across her face. ‘Fire at will!’ she bawled into the momentary silence that greeted the shooting. ‘Kill the bastards. Kill all the stinking, idle bastards!’ She was loosing off another round before she finished shouting. A tight knot of hippies and heavy-metal warriors danced a macabre jig of death as the FN round cut through them. Robinson let out a long tribal war scream as she kept the trigger depressed, hosing the scum with bullets:

‘DIMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIMMIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

The travellers surged forward, into the swathe of gunfire, not caring, tyre irons, knives, rocks all held aloft and ready to use.

The

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distance between the two forces closed. The UNIT soldiers who were still forming a cordon on the other side of the monument advanced between the trilithons, forming a pincer movement with the travellers in the middle, firing as they came, blasting the hippies and punks from behind.

The travellers tore into the soldiers ahead of them and the mummer’s wishes reached fruition. Army and hippies, the law and the lawless, locked in combat: the ultimate clash.

Microcosm of a sliding society with the mummer as its gleeful patriarch.

Through a gap in the surging crowd Sin could see Nick, still sitting against a stone not far from the band. She laughed wildly.

Got what you deserved, you bastard! That’ll teach you to lose your heart to the heartless. Gonna wind up dead, son, that’s what your mother should have told you when you started seeing me.

Dead as coffin nails.

Don’t look so bloody disapproving now, do you? She laughed again, and her heart was black.

The band played a thousand-mile-an-hour hate ballad just for her, and she was sure the singer had announced it as ‘The Song of Sin and Her Fool’, before the guitarist fired his manic riffs into the audience and the drummer released his own special kind of thunder.

Yates and his three surviving troopers backed away from the advancing highwaymen. The captain was almost out of ammo, and his men were on the point of breaking. He could see it in Private Councell’s face. The soldier was shaking and not aiming his FN properly - and even when he did, the bullets had no effect on the ghosts from another age. The shots tore away patches of rotting cloth and sent chips of bone into the air but certainly didn’t deter the corpses in their implacable march.

‘Make for the trees!’ Yates barked, firing his last round into the nearest cadaver. The bullets slapped away the tricorn hat leaving 228

a grinning skull wrapped with white strands of hair bare to the elements, but did little else. The ghoul lurched closer and Yates could see a knot of worms twisting in one eye socket. The ancient flintlock lifted to point at him and he dodged wildly aside, pulling at Private Councell to follow him.

He was too late: the highwayman pulled the rotting noose from around its own neck and flipped it over Councell’s. It pulled tight and the private collapsed to his knees choking, his FN dropping into the buttercups.

Yates paused, then dived for the weapon, rolling and coming up firing, all in one agile, practised movement. The round tore through the bony face, unfastening the robber’s leather mask and drilling away its grinning teeth. The monster carried on choking Councell, ignoring the bullets even when the ferocity of the live round dug through its spine and lifted its head away entirely, blasting it into a thistle patch. The headless gallows thing simply tugged harder.

Yates’ gritted his teeth and continued firing. Councell’s face was purple, his hands digging at the rope biting into his neck. His tongue was flopping grotesquely. From the corner of one eye Yates saw Private Whitcombe go down, a hole in his chest smoking from a flintlock shot. When he saw Councell’s head nod forward and his eyes lock on nothing, he ceased firing and ran. Ahead of him he could see the last surviving trooper dashing for the elm trees at the edge of the field. As he watched a hole puffed open in the soldier’s back, catapulting him into a bed of nettles. Yates passed him at a zigzag run, expecting to feel hot agony in his own spine at any second.

They’re only a mirage they’re only a mirage they’re... He darted a frantic look over his shoulder.

The mirages were still coming.

Captain Yates, what a fraud. He’s running away from ghosts.

Always thought you were a bit wet, Mike. Even when I was flirting with you, you big girl’s blouse.

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Jo could see him dashing frantically towards the edge of the field. What a prat. If he’d had any nouse, he’d have torn his uniform off and joined them in their Hate Day celebrations.

Thesolstice was imminent, and solstices always meant something weird, didn’t they? Midnight would unleash the dogs of war assuredly. She would be dancing at their snapping heels.

She glanced at Sin. The Chinese girl looked gorgeous and lethal and Jo wanted to kiss her again. Sin released her hand while she groped for a cigarette, and then hunched forward to light it, and in the space where her head had been Jo could see right through the crowd, and over to where Nick sat slumped against a stone.

Nick was the voice of dissent, wasn’t he? And that’s what happened to people who didn’t stand in line.

she frowned. That didn’t make sense. They were all fighting for the right not to have to stand in line, weren’t they? Why did she suddenly feel so confused and...

Alone?

The band had paused between songs. The guitarist’s strings had snapped like spider threads and he was stoically fixing them, while the singer spat into the crowd impatiently and the mummer stood in a circle with his two chosen ones.

Jo remembered that she was supposed to hate and, for a very brief moment, wondered why.

The door of the police box opened.

The Doctor didn’t look up at first. It would only be another phantom from his brain, here to torment him. He felt so very old and tired. Perhaps he was on the brink of regeneration.

Regeneration?

That was just another cheating memory. Another delusion. He was a mad old man dressed like Noel Coward, sitting hunched in a police box. That was it. No Daleks, no Cybermen. There never had been, and never would be. They were simply the products of a crazy, deluded mind. His own.

‘Doctor?’

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The visitor had spoken. Still he did not look up. It sounded like a young girl. He knew who it sounded like, but then she didn’t exist either. She was like the Master and the autons. And, just like them, she’d come to terrorise this poor old man.

‘Doctor, please...’

There was a broken sob in the plea that was so familiar. Don’t look up - it’ll only strengthen the delusion.

Don’t look up.

‘We need you, Doctor.’ She sounded desperate, forlorn.

Terrified. He raised his head and looked at Jo.

She was standing over him inside the cramped confines of the police box. He blinked at her dazedly.

‘Go away!’ he snapped.

She knelt down before him, eyes wide and tearful.

‘But we really need you. Everything’s going horribly wrong.’

‘Yes. Well, it usually does, doesn’t it? And then I come along and fix it. Well, not this time, my dear.’

‘Why not?’ she sobbed. ‘What’s happened to you?’

‘Perhaps I’ve woken up. Perhaps Idon’t want to play any more.

Perhaps I just want to go home.’ He thought for a minute.

‘Wherever that is.’

‘You’ve got to help us, just like you always do.You can’t give up now The world’s gone bad. The monsters are here... Doctor, the monsters are loose in England.’

The Doctor smirked. ‘Thinking parochially as ever, eh, Jo?

England’s not the centre of the universe you know. The fate of the cosmos does not hang on the fate of the home counties’

‘Wiltshire, actually, Doctor. And maybe, this time it does.’

He looked at her carefully. She seemed real, her tears and her anxiety, at least. ‘Did he send you?’

‘Who?’

The one who calls himself the Great Leveller.The ragged fellow.’

Jo smiled. ‘Then you remember. so you’ll know you have to come.’

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The Ragman.Perceptual vortex.The TARDIS.Gallifrey.Daleks.

They could be real. There was just the slightest chance they could be. The thought filled him with hope.

‘Jo?’

‘Yes, Doctor?’

‘We always win, don’t we?’

She smiled again. ‘Yes, Doctor?’

His hope faded. ‘That’s not very realistic, is it? Then it’s just like I feared: a dream within a dream. And so are you.’

The telephone rang. He jerked his head towards it.

‘You should answer that: Jo said, wiping away her tears:It might be important.’

The Doctor let it ring:And it might be another dream. Another shade.

Jo plucked the receiver from its cradle and passed it to him.

The Doctor took it reluctantly

‘Hello,’ he said carefully.

Jo vanished. The Doctor didn’t even notice. ‘Yes: he said into the mouthpiece. If you’re sure.Very well.’ He pulled himself stiffly to his feet, hung up the receiver and pushed open the police-box door.

Outside it was dark, but he could see the faint outlines of moonlight around the back doors of the cattle truck. He pressed his hand against one. It wasn’t locked. He was about to push them apart when they began to move outwards of their own accord, slowly, creaking with protest. He hesitated.

The guitarist had fixed his strings. The mummer gestured agitatedly at the band and the four undead punk minstrels launched into another atrocity ballad.

Jo blinked at them, and her confusion vanished.

At Stonehenge the law and the lawless tore into each other with renewed ferocity. The moon swung over the mayhem, and blood splashed on the sarsens.

* * *

Midnight. The witching hour, and now it was a new day. The mummer gazed across the sea of frenzied heads before him and released the hands of his two ‘children’. He stepped slowly backwards, nearer to the lodestone, his birthstone. Not too close.

He was only too aware that the shock waves he was divining could consume him now that the morphic fires were stoked to their fiercest intensity. He felt the pull, felt the waves of power rippling through him. His vision turned red: everything, the trees, the stones, the grass, the travellers, villagers - all red. The beasts of anarchy were about to be released upon the land. Already he could hear their snarling.

Yates ducked behind a dead elm as gunpowder ignited and bark flew from the trunk next to his face. The highwaymen were still shambling onwards, steadfastly reloading their ancient weapons with balls and ramrods, grinning their yellowed bony grins as they came.Yates found himself contemplating the surreal nature of the scene: five rotting corpses dressed in Dick Turpin outfits lumbering through buttercups in the moonlight with the bodies of modern-day UNIT troopers stretched out in death at their feet. He shook his head. He mustn’t lose himself in the dream. They’d destroyed the Keller machine and its Pandora’s box of phantoms.