Doctor Who: Rags (33 page)

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The Doctor turned his head briefly. He could see Yates staggering painfully across the field. He put up a hand to warn the captain away and the UNIT man paused.

‘You want fairness, do you, Ragman? How can that be, when you’re everything that’s foul? Let’s see you as you really are: drop the pretension that you claim to detest so much. Let your children see their real father.’

‘You be wise, despite your appearance, frivolous one.You have guessed the nature of my seed children - both descended from the same unfortunate wench.’ And here the mummer sniggered lasciviously. ‘You want to see my true appearance. Why? It is not new to you.’

The Doctor could sense the anger of the crowd growing the more he taunted the mummer, and the electric hate in the air was making him feel faint. Yet he held his ground as beads of sweat appeared on his brow and his hearts began to race against each other as if to see which would be the first to burst.

‘But it will be new to those to whom you lie,’ he replied firmly.

‘Lies?’ the mummer hissed. ‘I am here to destroy lies.’

‘Then show them your real face, Great Pretender.’ The Doctor placed his hands on his hips defiantly. He paused, then threw his final barb. ‘Ah, but then, you can’t, can you? Resuming your natural morphic form would make you too vulnerable to the pull of your birthstone. You might get sucked back into it. But, by that logic, you can’t amplify those same forces to the degree needed to blanket the world in antipathy unless you retreat into your morphic state. Am I wrong?’

The mummer’s response was merely a snarling laugh. As if unperturbed by the Doctor’s intuitiveness, his body glowed a lurid green colour - and the hideous shape of the Ragman stood hunched and spindly before the crowd. The slowworm hair lifted evilly, the grey head slowly surveyed the faces of his ragamuffin disciples. One thin arm rose and gestured to the hillsides where distorted black shapes still cavorted to the whistling of discordant pipes. The moon was hanging low over the horizon, and its face 241

was the Ragman’s, blood dripping from crooked jaws and falling to the fields below where the bones of civilisation lay scattered.

With each drop that fell a baby screamed in agony, the sound seemingly drifting from far away, yet simultaneously clear and distinct as if from over the next hedge.

‘Let it be,’ the Ragman said. ‘Your plutocratic society has crumbled away. Children of the shameful are dying upon birth.

There will be no more children, but those of the Leveller.’

‘You don’t want a world changed for the better, Ragman. You just want a world run in your image. The ultimate vanity.’ The Doctor turned to Kane and Charmagne. ‘Look upon your "father", see the lies, the pretence. They are worse than any you’ve suffered in this society’ He strode forward and seized Kane by the shoulder. ‘Look at him!’

Kane turned slowly, looked at the Ragman, blinked. Blinked again. His eyes momentarily resumed their natural colour then flicked back to grey rock.

The Doctor grasped Charmagne’s hand, swung her round to face the ‘mummer’ in his natural state. ‘You’re a tyrant: a selfish egomaniac embodying everything these people want to destroy,’

the Doctor continued, waving an arm towards the travellers, the punks, the hippies, the Rastas. ‘You’re a morphic monstrosity; a mutation of cosmic spew and human indignities. You are scum, Ragman. Real scum from the end of time. And your time’s surely run out, because I don’t think your children want to play any more. They’ve had enough of your tyranny.’

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed as the Ragman looked from Kane to Charmagne and the nest of worms coiled furiously on his bald rock-head. ‘They’re the only ones you’re scared of, isn’t that right, Ragman? Like most children, there comes a time when they grow older and want to disobey the rules - challenge authority! Your authority. Maybe they have a little of their father in them... maybe just enough to stop even you.’

Charmagne released Kane’s hand and her eyes were almost human, albeit with a grey shade. She glared at the Ragman with 242

reawoken horror. ‘You’re not my father,’ she said quietly. The horror smouldered into rage. ‘You’re not my father!’ She lunged towards the Ragman.

The Ragman twitched his sharp-fingered hand towards one of the roadies standing at the fringe of the crowd. The biker was still clutching a pitchfork with which he had repeatedly stabbed the corpse of one of the policemen, as if to check the lawman really was dead or perhaps simply because he enjoyed doing it. Now he swiftly interposed himself between Charmagne and the alien, holding the tool warningly across his chest.

Charmagne thrust him aside with one hand. The roadie spilled at the Ragman’s feet like a toy flung away by an impatient child.

She grinned in her rage, feeling the newly acquired alien strength garnered from the lodestone. She swung the pitchfork up and rammed the tines through the alien’s grey neck in one agile movement.

The crowd moaned.

Trickles of dust sprang from the wounds as Charmagne withdrew the pitchfork. The Ragman backed away a step, teetering slightly as he felt the pull from the stone behind him.

His mouth worked vilely, and again he beckoned. This time a young woman stepped forward from the crowd and wordlessly approached Charmagne. The Doctor recognised her immediately.

Sin.

The Chinese girl stood in front of the Ragman, facing Charmagne defensively. The Doctor opened his mouth to call out to Nick’s erstwhile lover - but the name froze on his lips because it was already too late.

Charmagne hardly noticed this new barrier to her fury. The pitchfork went back, then forward with brute, alien-spawned power. The long tines passed easily through Sin’s chest, impaling her against the Ragman. Blood mingled with the dust pooling at their feet.

Sin’s eyes opened wide. Wider. Her hands flew up to grasp the pitchfork sunk deep inside her. Now her eyes were filled not so 243

much with pain, but with realisation, and loss, and the horror of true regret. Her mouth opened. Blood blossomed from her perfect, sensuous lips. Her head swung painfully to one side as she searched for something... someone. Maybe she found what she was looking for. Maybe she didn’t.

She said one word, so quiet, surely no one could hear it. She said: ‘Nick...’ And then she died.

From the crowd a scream.Jo’s.

The Ragman backed away one more step. Sin’s body slumped to the grass.

Charmagne stared, without understanding, at what she had done.

Then the night lit up and the air screamed.

Yates had arrived.

His aim was not good, however, due to the impedimental effect of his wound and the grenade that was destined for the Ragman only reached as’ far as the band, still waiting immobile and silent.

After the blast, the singer and the bass player picked themselves up as if they’d been hit with pillows rather than highly concentrated explosives. The bassist had lost his shades upon the impact, and one arm. He didn’t look too bothered, but then he had no eyes to express much emotion. His instrument lay at his feet. Yates collapsed on the grass, near-unconscious from pain.

The crowd was stirring. Bewildered cries arose. Faces were shocked and afraid. The roadies stumbled towards the band as if waking from a dream, not knowing what should come next. One of them seized the guitarist, shook him slightly. The Ragman laughed gutturally, dismissively. Immediately, the guitarist wilted and the roadie was holding an empty minstrel sleeve. Beneath the pile of deflated mummer clothes, filling the leather boots - dust, and nothing more. Dust and shades. The guitar stuck up out of the dust dune like a flag. Behind it, the drums bore drifts of grey particles, the stool supported tatters and nothing more. The bass player was gone, drifting in the night breeze, not even bones to mark his fall. The singer remained. He tottered forward, seized the

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roadie by the neck, barked with mad laughter, and tore his throat apart as effortlessly as if he was ripping open a crisp packet.

‘Join the Unwashed,’ he croaked, ‘Join the Unforgiving...’ His shades tumbled from his eye sockets as his face fell inwards.

Then he was boots, codpiece and a heap of dust on the grass.

Dust and no more.

The Doctor witnessed the scene without making any moves. If he was surprised by the Ragman’s callous dismissal of his resurrected punk mummers, he didn’t show it. If the act was one of defiant perverse bravado, it didn’t impress him. Nor did it seem to impress the crowd. A shout went up from a punk:

‘Freak!’

Others rallied to the war cry until it became a furious chorus.

‘FREAK!!!’

The hate was still there, but now it was being diverted, redirected towards the one who had led them to this false night of blood and terror. Punks and hippies, Rastas and bikers -villagers too - hurled themselves forward.

The Ragman let them come.

The Doctor was pushed roughly aside. ‘Wait,’ he tried to shout.

‘This isn’t the way.’

The crowd had hold of the Ragman. They bore him aloft like an ugly banner, and then they began to tear him. He was in the claws of a pack of animals, not a gathering of humans. They wanted blood.

They got dust.

Billows of the grey stuff.Clouds. The head was ripped away and dust fountained from the neck. Arms came away like action-man limbs with more jets of crumbling grit. The torso was flung aside and the crowd, momentarily appeased, fell silent. Jo stumbled through the crush, seeking the Doctor.

The distant piping ceased. The shadowy abominations stopped their dancing, disappeared altogether. The rubble of London was also gone. The white horse slumbered in mid-gallop under the serene moonlight.

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Jo fell against the Doctor, sobbing pitifully - just as the Ragman’s head commenced rolling through the grass, hopped on to the severed neck of the torso and opened its mouth in a sick grin. The severed limbs wriggled in a similar ambition to join the parent body. The Ragman rose before the crowd, complete. The slowworms twisted with malevolent laziness.

You would challenge me?’ the being hissed. He waved one arm in a cutting gesture. Several travellers hit the grass like wheat before a scythe, and did not move again. ‘You would challenge ME?’ His mouth opened wide in thwarted, insane fury.

Kane was gaping at the Ragman with open disgust. Hate blazed in his semigrey eyes:You’re back,’ he snarled, stepping forward. In his mind it was no longer the alien standing before him, but his old enemy. The one with the crawling jar. It had always been him.

It would always be Simon.

‘I thought I got rid of you...’

The Ragman’s boulder-head swivelled, and the worms wilted on to the scalp like seaweed drooping after a retreating wave. Then the mummer was back, bright minstrel streamers, mummer’s cap, straw-like spiky hair. But now the depthless eyes were wary, the grin not so self-assured.

‘I led you, my child,’ the mummer wheedled. ‘You belong to me: look - it is your minstrel friend, your Pied Piper come to lead you to a better place.’

Kane wasn’t listening. Hands out-thrust, he launched himself at the mummer, who reeled back from the mighty shove and flailed against the pulsing lodestone immediately behind him. The rock glowed hungrily in response, and an unearthly scream came from the mummer’s shark-like mouth. The being struggled forward again, as if from the brink of a precipice. His scream became a gurgle, then a snarl.

Kane wasn’t done. ‘There ain’t no better place, boy,’ he said calmly, ‘at least, not for the likes of me.’ He grabbed the mummer’s head and slammed it hard against the standing stone.

Dust puffed from the cracked skull like spores squirting from a burst puffball.

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The mummer’s head drooped as if the alien were stunned, and then the being was the Ragman again, tatters wrapped around a gaunt, grey body. His true body, his most vulnerable body.

As if realising this, Kane shoved again. In a state of flux created by the Ragman’s own orchestrations the rock opened greedily to receive its former prisoner. Kane turned his head briefly, looking back towards Cirbury as if ironically acknowledging all those who had always stood by him throughout his life - all the countless friends and supporters who were there for him now. He didn’t see Cassandra begin to approach him, one hand outstreched. Then he shrugged stoically and threw his arms around the Ragman, propelling both of them inside the gaping red maw of the living rock.

A scream shrilled briefly, then was cut off like an echo shut away in a box. For ever.

The stone was just a stone again. A grey standing stone, in a field of grey standing stones.

Charmagne sat down on the grass, her eyes staring vacantly at the crowd, eyes that were dazed but absolutely blue.

Jo lifted her head away from the Doctor’s frilly chest, and her eyes fell first of all upon Sin’s body, and then upon Nick’s hunched against a standing stone as if waiting for the sun.

‘What have we done?’ she thumped the Doctor’s chest ineffectually. ‘How did it come to this?’