Doctor Who: Rags (2 page)

He had the toff by his stoopid bow tie before the bleeder could even begin to wonder if maybe he’d made a mistake climbing out of his overturned Range Rover. Animal began shaking him, speechless with rage. ‘Look what you done,’ he growled into the wind as rain streamed over his shades. ‘Look what you soddin’

done.’ Behind him, Winston the drummer and Alf the bass player had also got out of the van. They stood in the rain looking at the dent in the driver’s door like they were slowly and stupidly trying to work out how it got there.

Animal threw the toff down. The young man looked terrified.

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He lay spread-eagled in the road, rain pooling under him.

Animal spat on him, and lurched over to the Range Rover, yanking at the stiff passenger door, his rage only just starting.

Roger lay frozen for a moment, the expensive tuxedo sticking wetly to his back, his trousers soggy. He had been sure the punk with the shades was going to kill him. When he looked up and saw the other two lumbering towards him through the rain, all ripped leather and big boots, he began to feel really afraid. He rolled to his feet and dashed off into the night, towards the tor.

Doc was waiting for him in the shadow of the rocks. The ancient dagger, crumbling with rust, was held stiffly in his hand.

A strange glee danced inside him as he listened to the voice telling him just what he should do. Do it now, the voice seemed to whisper. Or was it the wind, was it the rain? Do it now.

Roger huddled amongst the rocks, watching the punk with the shades dragging his friends, yelling and squawking, from the Range Rover one by one. He saw the boots go in, the shrieks of pain. He didn’t notice the punk standing right behind him in the dark, rain pouring from his leather jacket, his eyes black with hate, the knife raised over his head.

Animal was laughing. One of the toffs had pulled a tyre iron from the Range Rover. Yeah right. Let’s see ya use it, rich boy.

The toff began to back away from him, across the road towards the tor.

Doc stood over the corpse, wiping the blade on the bloody tux.

Blood glistened in the grass at his feet, dripped down the partially buried boulder over which the body was draped. He considered dropping the knife, then the rage swept him again and he hacked some more. He’d done it. Just like he was supposed to. The wind laughed in his head, and at last he stopped his carnage. He tottered away from the blood, his mouth wide, the knife clasped 10

firmly in his hand. He didn’t see the rock behind him begin to flicker, begin to pulse with a sickly red glow.

‘Let’s see ya use it, rich boy!’ Animal was roaring now, the rage inside him stronger than anything he’d ever felt. ‘Come oonnn!!!’

The rich boy used the tyre iron. A glint came into his eye, and for one uncertain moment Animal recognised what it was. Hate.

He could understand that; yeah, he could appreciate that. He knew it was in his own eyes. And then, the rich boy used it. He brought the tyre iron down on Animal’s head with everything he could put into it.

Alf and Winston saw their mate drop to the grass like a slaughtered heifer. They had been standing around uncertainly, fearing Animal might just go too far this time. They hadn’t expected this. The other toffs were leaning against the Range Rover, clutching their bruised ribs where Animal had kicked them. They looked uncertain too. The sight of Animal’s blood trickling from his head, running with the sluice of rain, seemed to make them come to some sort of decision. At the same time Alf and Winston began to understand what they should do; especially when they saw Doc come stumbling out of the night, a gory knife clutched in one hand, grinning like Boris Karloff. The toffs threw themselves on Alf. One of them had a corkscrew in his hand, and he seemed to know what to do with it. Alf was screaming on the ground, and now Doc was slashing at the toffs. Winston would have laughed. It was all too crazy. He would have laughed...

But he was crazy too.

Rain.Rain and wind and darkness.

And death.

It stretched. Lifting from its bed of rock like mist rising from a lake at dawn. Mist solidifying, soaking up the blood that layered the rock, gathering form. Sniffing the air, sniffing the violence.

Two remained alive beside the wrecked vehicle now. The thing from the rock felt the rage of the two, and the rage was good. He 11

wanted more. More of this. With sinews that had once been stone, the creature raised its arms. And the two men became one.

Became none.

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If the Brigadier came in the lab just one more time ‘to see what on earth he was up to,’ the Doctor was sure he would have to kill him. He loved the man dearly, of course - although he would never have admitted it - but there were limits to any Time Lord’s patience. Jo was bad enough, knocking over his instruments and bumbling around in general, but at least she giggled her way out of his bad books. The Brig, bless him, just became bluff and flustery if he ruined one of the Doctor’s experiments with his clumsy curiosity: red in the face, and acting as though it was the Doctor’s fault for having the blasted delicate instruments in his way in the first place.

But right now, at least, peace reigned in the UNIT laboratory.

The Brigadier had been absent for a good half-hour and Jo had retired to bed. This was the best time for endless experiments with the ineffable mysteries of the dematerialisation process -

embodied in the infernally prosaic form of the circuit now cradled between two sensors on his desk. This was when he could really concentrate, could strain his consciousness, and indeed his subconsciousness, for the slightest trace of meaning; for the faintest of clues, remembered or only imagined.

And always the clues were there, and always they remained just beyond his grasp.

It was as the Doctor was reaching an almost trancelike state of mind with the spark of knowledge just beginning to glow in the darkness of his amnesia, that the Brigadier chose to visit the lab again.

For once he didn’t come out with some inane comment, but merely stood just inside the doorway, swagger stick tucked importantly under one arm, hands crossed behind his back. The Doctor tried his utmost to block the intruding presence from his mind, turning his back obstinately towards his guest and bending over the dematerialisation circuit. It was too late, of course: the 13

firefly glow of incipient knowledge had winked out again.

Gone.Maybe for ever. The Doctor closed his eyes and sighed heavily, as if all the woes of the universe were upon him - which of course they were, and now he had the burden of the Brigadier to add to them.

‘I take it you’re bored, Lethbridge-Stewart?’ the Doctor said resignedly.

The Brigadier took this as his cue to advance into the room, like a vampire receiving a welcome invitation. ‘I’m too busy to be bored, Doctor. On the contrary, there seem to be a million and one things demanding my attention.’

The

Doctor

turned

to

him,

his

face

stern

and

unaccommodating: Then why in the blazes don’t you treat one of them to a little bit of that attention, instead of continually barging in here pestering me?’

The Brigadier tried his best to look unfazed by this rebuke, only the merest hitching of his moustache betraying his irritation at being so directly challenged.

‘May I remind you, Doctor, that this laboratory remains under my authority and that I am responsible for everything that -’

‘What are you frightened of, Brigadier? D’you think I’m going to try to sneak off in the TARDIS as soon as your back’s turned, like an errant schoolboy playing truant?’

The Brigadier’s eyes twinkled with victory. He knew he had won this little argument. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time, would it Doctor?’

The Doctor surveyed him gravely for an instant. Then his irritation subsided a little. He had the grace to realise when he had been outmanoeuvred. He allowed his friend a little smile and turned back to his desk. ‘Yes, well, you really have no need for concern on that score. I’m not going anywhere.’

The Brigadier strode up to the circuit that was perched like a metallic sausage on a barbecue-spit between the two sensor probes, and said, ‘What on earth are you up to, anyway?’

The Doctor’s smile vanished. He was about to lose his 14

graciousness altogether when the circuit suddenly emitted a harsh buzz, flipped into the air - narrowly missing the astonished Brigadier’s head - and clattered to the floor a good ten yards away from the table. The Brigadier followed its trajectory, a look of buffoonish incredulity on his face. The Doctor was more interested in the sensor probes. They were twin cones of alloy cannibalised from the guts of the TARDIS console, and were connected to the ship by leads straggling away from the desk between the blue double doors. Now they were flashing inimically and urgently and, for some reason he couldn’t fathom exactly but suspected must be due to the sensors being linked to the very core of the TARDIS, their epileptic activity filled him with instant dread.

Out in the howling Dartmoor night something was moving. A large and filthy cattle truck was pulling up next to a tor on a road obstructed by two broken vehicles. The engine growled for a moment like a grumpy beast, then cut out.

The creature from the rock watched three men descend from the cab and approach the tor. These were bad men; the creature knew that from the ease with which they had been summoned.

They were bad, and they were vicious. They were hungry for darkness and sin.

They would do.

She was standing outside the railway station and she couldn’t remember why. Was she supposed to be meeting someone? For that matter, which station was it? The taxis parked in ranks didn’t give her any clue, nor did the grimly modern buildings across the busy square. Somewhere European, she guessed.

Amsterdam? Then that would be the Centraal Station behind her, and she would recognise it when she turned round to look at it.

For some unaccountable and disturbing reason, she couldn’t turn round. But she knew it wasn’t Amsterdam. More like Eastern Europe, judging from the architecture. And now a boy was beckoning to

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her, so it must be him she was supposed to be meeting. He was standing beside a taxi, and he was smiling. Face a little pale, but his eyes were honest, and he was dressed well. And...and for some reason she knew she had to follow him. So she did, and it must have been something to do with her distracted state of mind, because it hardly seemed to take any time to leave the large square and to find herself in a narrow passageway hemmed in by buildings that must once have been picturesque and Gothic but were now grimy and somehow... shamed - as if they had for too long witnessed events that had marked them with guilt.

The boy was standing at the end of the passageway, and he was still smiling, still beckoning, and the sun was going down behind him, which was strange because she had the distinct impression it had been broad daylight when she had been waiting outside the station. Now the alley was a trench of shadows, and the boy looked drabber, dirtier, his smile not so welcoming and innocent.

More guileful, desperate.

Charmagne began to feel pricked with dread. She should turn round, she knew and leave this lonely place, so near and yet so far from the busy square. She should leave. But again, it was impossible to turn. And now something was happening in front of her. A grinding sound dragged her attention to another, even smaller, alleyway branching off to the right. In the shadows she could just make out a round metallic object sliding across the paving. A hand was emerging from a hole darker than the shadows, like a pale, dirty rat questing for food. An arm followed, begrimed and sleeved in tatters. A small arm. Now a head, the head of a child, raised itself from the hole; and the face was staring at her with all the loneliness and desperation and hate that should never be in the face of a child. A boy, no more than nine, popped out of the sewer and stood there before her in his rags. Hand outstretched.

‘Nu Mama,’ he said. ‘Nu Papa,’ and Charmagne saw his broken teeth. The first boy - the one she had followed into this gloomy place and who she now realised was as ragged as the second -

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had approached her now, and was pointing at the boy in front of her, at the hole behind him, which was emitting another child. A girl this time: pretty, yet somehow made wicked by her poverty, by the stained shreds of clothes which covered her gaunt body; most of all, by the absence of anything in her eyes.

‘Nu Mama, Nu Papa,’ they said, as they came out of the sewer.

Filthy children: so many, so many. All advancing on her with heir rags and their chant and their outstretched hands, and Charmagne Peters was afraid of them, of their rat-like agility, and of their utter apathy.