Doctor Who: Rags (30 page)

Yates could feel it peeling layers of sanity from inside his skull as he ran - or was that just his natural horror at everything he had witnessed today. The five soldiers jogging alongside him were silent, rifles cradled tightly, their boots crunching reassuringly on the gravel of the path.

They reached the stile and Yates didn’t hesitate to vault over it, landing amongst the daisies in a defensive stance, revolver 219

levelled. He was scanning the crowd for Jo, but the medley of heaving bodies was so confused he couldn’t pick her out. He waited for the others to clear the stile, then set off at a jog towards the crowd, bearing slightly to the right so as to skirt the mob and lead the troopers around to confront the band. He was going to pull the plug on those bastards and it was going to be the most satisfying thing he ever did in his life.

Kane had been watching the proceedings from the edge of the field for some time. He saw the policemen torn apart with abstract amazement. He listened to the band playing and the amazement, the fear, the madness began to level out. He felt a calm steal over him, and he knew peace of mind for the first timein...

For the first time in years.

He gazed at the mummer standing next to the blonde woman, and all his paranoia, all his self-doubt vanished. When you’ve pissed and puked your way to the bottom of the pile, there’s really nowhere left to go, no stone left which hasn’t already been lifted and crawled under. Debauchery had betrayed him. It was never as good as it sounded. He had watched people first laugh with him, then laugh at him, then no longer laugh at all. He had been watching himself die without realising it. Now he stood beside a puddle of gore from a ruptured bobby and listened to the music call, and felt suddenly clean. The mummer had seen him, and beckoned him to join him near the big standing-stone behind theband.

Kane began trudging through the field to answer the summons.

He ignored the soldiers who leapt over the stile a few hundred yards behind him. His eyes were fixed on the mummer, and for the first time in front of his fellow villagers he could hold his head up high. They parted to let him pass, and there was respect and awe on their faces.

Kane was no longer a bum.

There was the towering barman from his local, the Falcon, 220

extending a warm hand of friendship. Kane took it, a smug grin on his face. The vicar whose font he’d spat in the other day, here he was now, his dog collar spattered with blood and patting Kane on the back. Ha! My old friend the librarian - don’t we go back a long way! Give me a hug you old trout! So many faces that had always despised him, now stepping forward to claim some acquaintanceship with him. And Kane lapping it up as he strode through the crowd, heading for the mummer, jeans crusty with urine, stubbled and wild-eyed, hair dishevelled; he was the sorriest sight you ever saw, and yet tonight he was the big man, apparently. Kane didn’t stop to wonder why, he just let it come.

Right at the front of the crowd... Cassandra: gorgeous, always aloof, now gazing at him with a lascivious glint in her eye, her cheekbones exquisitely hewn, hair a dark, shining mystery. And she fell into his arms.

‘Kane, you’re a sodding hero,’ she said and kissed him sweetly.

Kane barked with savage laughter and glee.

Every dog has his day.

He crushed her lips with his, squeezing her against him as if he somehow knew he would never get the chance again, and was going to make up for all the lost time - all the pouts and scornful glances, in the pub, in the street; all the sarcastic put-downs that he had always known were hiding some obstinate passion. Time to collect, bitch.

And she tasted good.

The crowd roared with approval, and Kane finally lifted his head from her delicate beauty and pushed her firmly away, smacking his lips with the back of his hand as he strolled towards the mummer.

Yates led his troops around the crowd. Nobody tried to intercept them, confounding the captain’s expectations after the mob’s summary treatment of the token police force. As the UNIT men got nearer the furiously performing band, the hellish noise made Yates feel his head was about to pop open like a nut squeezed in 221

a nutcracker. He halted, lifting up a hand to warn the soldiers.

They were in a position to the right of the crowd, behind a standing stone that blocked them from full view of the mummer, who, though he was only twenty yards from them, was apparently not aware of their presence in the field,.

‘OK,’ he briefed the men, ‘we’re going to take out the band.

You’ve seen what their influence has caused the crowd to do to those policemen; you don’t need me to remind you of all the other atrocities that have taken place probably because of them. I’ll handle the mummer.’ He turned to a gangly private next to him, whose eyes were wide and scared.Yates sympathised with him; he felt unnerved himself. There was something horribly unnatural about the whole situation.

‘Hooper: terminate the singer.’

The private immediately steadied his FN against the standing stone, sighting along the barrel. He fired a quick burst that was only just audible above the din coming from the band. The singer was performing a macabre jig, spiked codpiece thrusting out lewdly. The round caught him full in the chest and hurled him backwards, microphone spinning from his hand. He landed in a thistle patch and lay still. The rest of the band continued to play as if nothing had happened. The mummer turned slowly in their direction.

You’re mine, you bastard. Yates aimed his revolver at the gaily coloured figure. The gun coughed in his hand, once, twice, three shots. The mummer jerked as each bullet smacked into him, but did not go down. Yates steadied his arm for a head shot, and delivered it. A rose of dry, ruptured flesh bloomed on the mummer’s forehead and he grinned wide, wider. As he grinned, the singer sat up with a sudden movement, his shades still in place. He groped for the microphone and finding it, stood up and lurched towards the mike stand where he slotted the mouthpiece back into place with an almost disgruntled air.

The mummer’s grin was impossibly wide now. He looked past the soldiers crouching behind the standing stone, and Yates followed his gaze.

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The cattle truck was parked not far from them and now, as the UNIT captain watched, its back doors were opening.

‘You’ve got to be joking!’ he hissed incredulously as a group of figures began to descend the ramp. The five troopers stiffened, and one of them dropped his sub-machine-gun with an oath of horror.

Jo saw Yates hiding behind the stone and wondered for a moment how she knew him. She watched as the singer was shot down, his howling momentarily and rudely cut off. Then the word she was groping for popped into her mind just as Sin voiced it for her:

‘Pig! It’s that pig friend of yours!’ the Chinese shouted over the roar of the band.

‘No friend of mine. I told you -’ Jo began, and then stopped. The mummer was buffeted by bullets from the ‘pig’s’ gun. He was Captain Mike Yates of UNIT, and she was Josephine Grant of the same organisation, assistant to...

The patroniser.The bully.The know-it-all. Yes, she thought uncertainly, that’s right. If he were here now, she’d... Sin’s hold on her hand became tighter. The Chinese was watching her carefully. On impulse she leant forward and kissed Jo softly on the lips. Her other hand caressed her cheek. In front of them, the singer was back on his feet and continuing his horrible vocals as if he’d merely been heckled.

And Jo remembered all the indignation, all the anger, oh yes, all the hate...

The figures lurched down the ramp and advanced towards the troopers. Five of them, all wearing eighteenth-century clothing: tricorn hats, long dark, rotting overcoats with large brass-buttoned sleeves, leggings and boots with silver buckles. One was wearing the leather mask he must have adopted to perform his roadside chores, the eyeholes revealing dry sockets of bone within. Three of them still bore the remains of the nooses that had hung them around their necks, and all five were carrying long flintlock

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pistols. Their faces were eaten away by time and the worm; what flesh remained clung precariously to yellowed bone, like lymph peeling from a fresh tattoo. The fists that clutched the pistols were also bereft of skin, and glowed white in the moonlight.

One of the soldiers - the young private who had dropped his weapon - backed away, moaning.

‘Private Councell!’ Yates barked immediately. ‘stand fast!’

Private Hooper, who had been so ineffective in terminating the singer, spun to confront his superior officer. There was a wet sheen of horror on his face. ‘This isn’t happening! It can’t be.’

Yates turned to the trooper and hope flared suddenly inside him. ‘You’re right, Hooper! This is just an illusion. The mummer’s playing with our minds, that’s all!’ Just suggestive hypnosis, then; and of course Yates was fully aware of similar assaults from the not so distant past. The Keller machine, for one. ‘Concentrate, men. Try to clear your minds. Like Hooper said: this isn’thappening.’

The leading highwayman levelled his pistol. There was a flash of gunpowder and Hooper was lying on his back in the daisies, a golf ball-sized hole in his forehead.

Yates almost lost it then. Luckily, his training and experience kicked in. ‘Fire at will,’ he shouted to the four remaining troopers as he aimed his own revolver at the lead ‘ghost’ and squeezed the trigger.

The chatter of sub-machine-guns tore through the night. The highwaymen from beyond the grave tottered and jerked under the impact of the hail of bullets, and came on.

Yates was still groping for sane answers. Of course, the Keller machine had produced hallucinations that were incredibly real toits victims. They believed they were being eaten by rats or drowning, and their belief killed them. If he could somehow convince his men not to believe in these horrors they couldn’t be hurt...

The UNIT trooper to his immediate right spun round inaperfect 180 degree turn, his FN dropping from his nerveless 224

fingers, his throat opening up to release a torrent of blood where eighteenth-century shot had ploughed through twentieth-century carotid artery. Helplessly,Yates watched him fall.

Charmagne waited meekly beside the mummer for Kane to reach them. He seemed to be taking his time, enjoying the adulation.

She could feel it herself, coming off the crowd, mixed in with the hate vibes. The adulation was confined to just the three of them, she understood that vaguely: the mummer, herself and Kane, and although she didn’t fully realise why, a suspicion growing deep in her subconscious was slowly moving to the surface. The hate -

and that was by far the stronger of the two emotions streaming from the crowd - was directed at the forces of repression beyond this select gathering. The Establishment, society, the monarchy, any system that inflicted rules and regulations which enforced poverty on one side and riches on another. Even the villagers, some of them comfortably affluent, were joining in the hate party

- they’d long forgotten who they were supposed to be reviling. She registered the electric animosity and it made her feel indefinably strong. Over to her left, she could see the soldiers battling with the uncanny representatives of wealth-redistribution, and it moved her to smile. With all the hate directed at them from the maddened crowd and embodied in those walking cadavers, the troopers didn’t stand a cat’s chance in hell.

She wondered for a moment how she came to be standing in a field of ancient stones with a furious crowd in front of her and a man dressed as a seventeenth-century mummer next to her. She wondered, too, who she was. The answer to both questions didn’t matter, so she let them go. A vague memory of stumbling around in endless dark troubled her, but gazing into the mummer’s bizarre, bottomless eyes wiped the fear from her mind. The moon reassured her too - it was so serene and beautiful. Kane reached them, and though she had never seen him before she felt instinctively that she knew him, and that it was right he should be with them. She smiled, and he grinned wolfishly in return.

* * *

Kane reached for the blonde woman’s hand. It was something he felt he should do. It was like finding a long-lost sister or a best friend he hadn’t seen for years, although he was quite certain they had never met before. She was beautiful, and yet he felt no sexual desire for her. He stood beside her and faced the crowd.

He beamed at the strange mummer man, who walked forward to take his free hand and then Charmagne’s forming a little circle of three. There was a name floating distantly in his mind, and it carried a rag of fear with it. Rag? Yes, Ragman. What was that? It was gone. It was nothing. So was the fear.

The mummer smiled wildly at Charmagne. ‘Orphan no more: you too are my descendant.You are both children of my loins and well matched: a yearning for truth and change in the fair one, a lust for despoiling in the foul one.’ He swung his head so that the grin covered Kane, and then faced the journalist again. ‘Unlike your distant blood kin who stands beside you, stinking of his own excesses, your forefathers wandered far from the birthplace of your disgraceful lineage - now ‘tis time to come home.’ His words were clear even over the roar of the band. ‘You two shall live and spawn alone. In a new world filled with the children of the Great Leveller. In a kingdom of rags.’