Doctor Who: Combat Rock (28 page)

At least they were incubated without access to passion or mercy. This man had jettisoned those emotions quite casually to further his own position.

‘Barbarity must sometimes be met with an equal “lack of decency”, my child. Sometimes that’s the only way to ensure world peace and harmony.’

‘Yeah, well. That’s more than enough glib bullshit for one day,’ Pan said, reaching forward to cut the connection, winking at Sabit’s fading scowl. ‘Let’s get on with some honest killing instead, shall we?’

Victoria sank back into her seat and felt like sobbing. But she wouldn’t. Oh no. She
wouldn’t
.

The cruiser skimmed the treetops, and Pan broke into song anyway.

He was happy, goddammit. They were all set to climax the kill mission, and then after that particular distraction was taken care of, he could go back to Baru and indulge in some serious whoring again.

Life could be wonderful.

So he sang, and he cleared his thoughts for battle, and he didn’t remember
her
at all.

Well, tell them this, for God’s sake,’ Jamie pleaded as he and Santi squatted in the tree-house while flies buzzed around the remains of the meal from the night before. ‘Tell them I’m completely lacking in courage or any spiritual attributes whatsoever – Victoria could vouch for me there, aye. So eating me would not benefit them in any way, ’cos they would only be gaining bad qualities by digesting me. Have ye got that?’ He nodded his head as if satisfied with his logic. Santi blinked at him, waiting for him to finish. And besides, I’ve got very tough thighs,’ he finished lamely.‘Can you no tell ’em all that?’

Santi shook her head. ‘How can Santi translate when she no understand you?’

‘What d’ye mean ye don’t understand me?’ he said with exasperation and indignation, fearing his beloved Scottish dialect was under attack again. ‘Don’t
you
start...’

‘You must more slowly.’

‘What? Oh, you mean
speak
more slowly? Oh, aye. Well, tell them...’

He was interrupted by a droning buzz from outside. He stuck his head out of one of the ragged holes in the thatched wall and there, drifting above the cleared space that housed both tree houses, was an Indoni cruiser. He yelled enthusiastically, waving his hands in the air, and would have continued to do so until he was hoarse had not the sharp tip of a bone knife suddenly pressed the back of his neck. He obliged by shutting up and sulkily withdrawing inside the but again.

The cannibal who had prodded him also sat down, having been waiting impatiently for his toke on a long bamboo ‘pipe’

of sorts which gave off a great deal of smoke, and caused some of the tribesmen to cough quite inordinately.

‘Well, are ye going to tell them or what?’ Jamie nagged Santi again. ‘Or do ye want me to end up as the main course for your wedding feast?’

‘Santi not marry cannibal!’ she said with disgust.

‘You sound like ye’re more worried about that than me being eaten. Remember, you’d have to have a slice of me, too.’

Santi didn’t look too pleased with that idea. ‘Santi like rice and vegetable more.’

He gave her a double take, just in case she was being serious, but still couldn’t tell. Then his face slowly creased into a thoughtful smile as a bright idea came to him. Even the Doctor would have approved of this one, he congratulated himself ‘Santi,’ he said eagerly. ‘That was an Indoni cruiser.

Tell yon cannibals that it belongs to those who would kill their gods.’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Go on!’ he insisted. ‘Tell the chief man. Lie: tell him the men wi’ furry hats are in it, and they are responsible fer making great holes in the mountains, and fer chopping down all the trees that house his people’s spirits. If he takes us to the lake where they live, we can help him rid his land of these sassenachs.’

Santi was still watching him with a blank expression.

‘Well, go on! What’s holding you up now?’

‘What is sasseenakker?’

Jamie sighed with genuine exasperation. He was pretty sure the cruiser was not being operated by OPG rebels, of course. They’d only acquired one and promptly managed to crash it soon after. What he didn’t know was whether the cannibals even cared about the mountains of their land being mined, or the trees being felled; but he felt it was a gambit he had to play. He was, admittedly, getting desperate. But then again, no self-respecting cannibal liked strangers in their territory did they? Particularly strangers who were invading their homelands and killing off their gods. Just so long as the cannibals were crazy enough to confuse the OPG with the Indoni it didn’t matter. So he looked at Santi with hope and expectation and urged her again to translate his request to the Indio chief.

Then he thought of something else, and a slow smile played across his face. “Then, of course, there’s you, Santi.’

She put her head on one side waiting for him to continue.

‘Well, how do I put this... you’ve been with too many men to make an eligible wife for any self-respecting chief. He wouldnae want spoiled goods now, would he?’

Santi’s hand cracked across his face.

‘Och, I’m just being practical, lass,’ Jamie said ruefully, putting his hands up in case of further attack. ‘We need to put our cannibal friend here off the idea of marrying you, and then he won’t need me for the wedding celebration either. Think about it: he told you you were tae be his tenth wife. So where’s the other nine? Maybe one of these preganant lasses, or even both of ‘em, but that still leaves seven. What d’ye think he did wi’ them, eh?’ He patted his stomach demostratively.

Santi looked over at the Indio who was smoking the fat bamboo pipe and watching her amorously, quite content in his cannibal world.

‘Santi tell him. And she not stupid. She know how to make cannibal not want her.’

‘Well do your best. It might just save both our lives.’

Tigus was right behind the Doctor as he pulled himself up into the dark antechamber. The time traveller struggled to accustom his eyes, the splinters of sunlight from the chinks in the wall showing him the dirty curtain that divided the upper storey.

Tigus hauled himself up to join him. The Doctor turned nervously to confront the guerrilla leader. ‘Ah, perhaps this wasn’t such a wonderful idea. Maybe he can send me a letter.

Preferably when I’m back in Batu!’

‘I think you are brave man, Doctor. Do not prove me wrong.’

‘Hmmph! Well, yes, I wouldn’t want to disillusion anybody I suppose.’ He took a mincing step towards the curtain. ‘Behind here, I presume..?’ His face was like a frightened child and an inquisitive scholar all at once. ‘Are you coming with me?’

Tigus shook his head, and ushered the Doctor forward with one hand. ‘Krallik want see you alone, Doctor.’

‘Well, I’d better not keep him waiting then, had I?’

He plucked at the curtain, looking for the parting, and only managed to get himself tangled up in the folds. ‘Oh crumbs!’

he said, unravelling himself and making for the ladder again determinedly. Tigus barred his way. The guerrilla leader pointed to the edge of the drape and tapped the hilt of his machete meaningfully.

‘Let us hope you return from your audience, Doctor. The last man go see Krallik did not.’

‘Yes, well, we must always look on the bright side, mustn’t we?’

The Doctor sighed and pulled the curtain aside. He took one look back at Tigus and then stepped through the gap.

More darkness. And a smell. The Doctor had been aware of it out in the antechamber, but here it was far stronger. the stink of rotting meat. Sunbeams picked out patches of bamboo and wicker that formed the floor, and the face of a young Papul man lying on it, staring up at the ceiling. The Doctor strained his eyes to see further into the room, and could make out a hunched shadow at the centre, flanked by two thinner silhouettes. He looked again at the face on the floor. Stooping closer, he saw that the young man’s body was severed messily in half at the waist. The Doctor straightened up quickly and his foot slipped on something moist and slimy on the floor. He let out a cry and pinwheeled his arms.

‘Are you enjoying making a fool of yourself, Doctor?’

The voice came from the dark shape in the centre of the room. Except it didn’t sound so much like a voice, but more a tremble of echoes creeping through a coffin lid under six feet of earth. It was like a whisper from the other side of the greatest divide; a signal emanating from behind the last taboo.

The Doctor straightened himself with as much dignity as he could muster, and puffed his cheeks defiantly. ‘The Krallik, I presume? Well, I don’t think much of your hospitality... or your domestic tidyness!’

‘What...’ A hiss, as if the voice were fading through time and distance, ‘do you hope to achieve with your puerile jokes, Doctor?’

The Doctor was squinting at the two thin figures slumped on either side of the main shadow, but he could not make out what they were. He ignored the question, and came back with one of his own, holding onto his frockcoat with both hands, and inflating his chest.

‘So this is your ultimate solution, is it?’ He tried to sound as unconcerned and bold as possible. ‘Regression to savagery and cannibalism. Mass murder. Headhunting.’ He glanced at the torso beneath him. ‘Atrocity upon atrocity!’

‘Of course,’ the echo concurred softly. ‘But then what else would you expect from someone who looks like
this
?’

A match was struck, and a candle appeared, held by a slender hand. The wick was lit, and the candle-flame bloomed upon the face of the Krallik.

The Doctor said nothing. He didn’t move. What could he say?

What could he do? This was beyond grotesque, beyond appalling.

The Krallik was sitting half-naked on an old wooden chair, the dark skin of his torso daubed with depictions of agony and torture, war graffiti painted with blood long since dried.

Tattered khaki combat trousers covered his legs. An arm lifted, undeniably a man’s arm, but of a slighter build than the average Papul’s; a gold bracelet of the type popular with all the Indoni merchants the Doctor had seen on Batu gleamed in the candlelight. But the Krallik was not showing off its jewellery, but rather lifting the candle to exhibit its macabre body for the Doctor’s benefit. The Doctor’s gaze was drawn to the hands, slender, feminine, the fingernails still adorned with red crumbling nail paint. The hands were stitched crudely onto the masculine arms.

The candle moved upwards, and the ghostly light fell upon the head of the Krallik, and what the Doctor had only glimpsed moments before was revealed in all its glory.

The Krallik’s head belonged to that of an elderly white man, and like the woman’s hands, it was sutured in crude fashion onto the brown skinned neck. The grey hair was dishevelled, flecked with dried blood, the pale eyes returned the Doctor’s incredulous stare with a stare of their own, but this one contained no animation whatsoever.

It was like staring into the eyes of a fish, dead on the beach.

The Krallik was speaking again, and its lips were moving flaccidly, dead meat moved by a macabre ventriloquist.

‘The head of a missionary...’ the Krallik hissed, and the lips were out of tune with the words, adding to the sickness of it all, ‘... the body of a merchant, and the hands of a prostitute.

An assemblage of shame, offworlder. You see that I have become the twisted symbol of everything that is eating away at my land. This way I can never forget...’

The Doctor was emerging from his shock, and fascination was kicking in. He took a step nearer, and then promptly took two steps back when he became aware of the two Mumis squatting motionlessly on tree-trunk stools in the candlelight, one on either side of their king: an unholy trinity of corpses.

‘So, the feared Krallik is a collage of body pieces....

extraordinary. I wonder how you can possibly be alive? But then, of course, you can’t be, can you?’

‘You are an intelligent man, Doctor. You do not believe in symbols. But there are plenty who do. My people
need
a symbol. They need an idea. But you are wrong: I am very much alive. I am kept alive by my hate.’

The Doctor squinted at the bizarre figure. The head was too big for the slender body, the hands in turn too small for the muscled arms. Everything was wrong about the Krallik; it was an amalgamation of wrongness.

‘Oh no, I’m sure it must be more than that animating you, Krallik...’

‘This is no carnival trick, offworlder. The Krallik is very real.’ He lifted the prostitute’s hands to demonstrate. ‘Can you not see the cruel poetry of my body?’ the voice was hushed, fading, then growing strong again, as if the voice were crawling up a very dirty tunnel, and gasping for air, or for expression. The head nodded gruesomely, the ghost eyes fixed on the Doctor, but not fixed at all. ‘The beauty of irony... the loveliness of pure obscenity. You will see how gorgeous it all is, Doctor, and share in the moral carnage that is me, that is everything I represent.’

‘
You’re
wrong too, Krallik: You are definitely a carnival trick!’ The Doctor puffed his cheeks out in a show of antagonism, even if his legs were betraying him by wobbling so.

‘Did you think I brought you here to act as a mere hostage, offworlder?’ The candle tremored, the whore’s hand spasming. ‘You are here to die. To be an example to all intruders encroaching like insects where they are not wanted.

You and your kind are cockroaches, infesting corners, creeping,
creeping
... But I will not stamp on you; Doctor, I shall embrace you. You will become a part of me too, just like the God-liar, the stealer and the whore. You are an offworlder of some eminence: that I detected some time ago – and offworlders are the biggest cockroaches of all: swarming, swarming...’ the ghost voice echoed, was silent. Just when the Doctor thought the grotesque figure was slumped in sleep, if such a thing were possible, it reanimated itself, rocking back and forth on its chair, as if striving to console itself. The voice was renewed, a whisper of malice in the gloom.

‘You trample our holy sites, despoil our ancient customs with rancid money, finance the Indoni vultures to gut our spiritual mountains for one to propel your craft. You are cockroaches from space, always creeping, always making filth of my land...’ A wail, a weakness. A sob. ‘Creeping, creeping...’ A hushed madness. Silence for a breath, two, three