Doctor Who: Rags (18 page)

His old face was stiff with rigor mortis, the words squeezed out of a locked mouth. The eyes were cold and frozen and...

Grey. Grey as snail flesh. Grey as the flesh of his face. Grey, like stone.

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The figure in the chair stirred and Charmagne saw the rags that hung from its twisted frame. she saw the things that squirmed upon the hairless head; she heard the rasp of air coming from the mouth and realised the Ragman was laughing.

Thick-legged spiders, living knots of darkness, trickled out of the mouth and down the bridge of web towards the plate.

‘It took me so looooongto find you...’

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Kane’s hand was on the library door. The hand was shaking. He’d been back to the church since childhood - admittedly only once when he was pissed, and once more today. The library he hadn’t visited since...

His throat felt gripped and his breathing was thin, because -

Because this was a bad place.

Bad things had happened to him here.

Didn’t bad things happen in everyone’s childhood?

The crofter’s hut was gone. Snatched out of existence like it never was.Oh yes it was it was I know it was...

She was in the cattle truck. She could feel the metal beneath her shoes. Dark.

But she wasn’t alone. The Ragman was with her.

It still possessed her father’s features - she could see them in a faint glow as if dawn were struggling to arrive in the impossible truck, just like it had before she walked the moor. The creature was four yards away, close enough for her to smell him, and the smell was farmdeath shambles: blood, hay and garbage.

Her father’s nose, hooked; her father’s chin, protruding like a bony nub.Her father’s eyes, but not her father’s eyes.Stone-grey, dead pebbles, snail things without iris or pupil.

The Ragman.

Hunchbacked, thin as a ghoul, cloaked in vile tatters.

Unspeakable hair - it wriggled, it writhed. Hair?

Worms.

Slowworms nailed to the rock head, stirring limply, blindly.

Charmagne knew she was screaming, but there was no sound in the horror truck. No echo.

Nothing.

Her hands were over her mouth, but she knew she was screaming.

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And then the Ragman showed her things.

Kane pushed the door open and the first thing he saw was the check-out counter. The receptionist.

The library shook, but the quake was in his head. He was sweating.

Remember me? I’m back. You forgot me all these years, but now I’m back to haunt you.

Remember remember.

DON’T WANT TO REMEMBER! DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT

THAT AGAIN!

No choice, no choice. Walk over here, there’s a nice window seat near the Dr Seuss books. Remember? The Sneetches, The Sleep Book, Yurtle the Turtle, they’re all here...

Oh, and one other book. That’s it, over here. On THAT shelf.

Warm, warmer... But of course it’s hidden away, isn’t it, just where you shoved it all those years ago. Put your hand behind those books, that’s it, that’s a good sodding little boy. That’s it...

REMEMBER??????

And there it was in his hands again after twenty-two years, impossibly hidden, as if waiting for him, and him alone, to find it.

Now she was standing beside some ancient stones in a field, and the moon was high and full. Again she was not alone. A young couple were embracing nearby, oblivious to her presence. They wore old-fashioned clothing: she was in a gorgeous scarlet dress, he was in jerkin and hose, buckles on his shoes, his hair lustrous and black. Their features, like their clothes, were fine. Haughty, carefree. They leant against a gnarled standing-stone and kissed in the moonlight.

The midnight breeze brought with it a trickle of music. If Charmagne stepped around the stone nearest to her she might be able to see where the sound was coming from. She did so, and there they were: five travelling mummers sitting around a camp fire across the meadow, separated from Charmagne and the 132

embracing couple by a grassy trench running the length of the field and rimmed by more standing stones, all of them twice the height of a man. Daisies glowed in the moonlight, scattered across the meadow and in the gulley like drops of spilt milk.

The mummers were dressed in striped jerkins and trousers thickly adorned with brightly coloured paper streamers. They were playing lutes and singing softly along to old songs. When they moved, bells jingled from their boots and sleeves.

Charmagne watched them, and knew they were scorned. Lights from the village winked in the near distance. They weren’t welcome there; they weren’t welcome here. She was about to see that first-hand, for one of them was rising from the fire and approaching her now. No, not her, because of course she wasn’t there at all. The mummer was approaching the couple; he had spotted their solitary lovemaking and was about to crash the party. He disappeared from view for a moment as he descended into the trench, then he was up again on the other side.

Jingling.Charmagne watched.

He was begging. He had taken off his cap, and its bell jingled as he held it out to the kissing couple. Had they still not heard the bells?

Or were they ignoring this miscreant from across the divide?

The mummer obviously thought so, and decided to cross all barriers in one fell swoop: he touched the young man.

Charmagne watched.

The young man released his love. His face, her face, were masks of outraged arrogance. He snatched his arm free and struck. The mummer fell, awkwardly, dropping his begging cap, his feet slipping on the dewy grass, his head pounding against a standing stone as he went down.

Charmagne heard the crunch. she saw the red smear where his skull had cracked.

The young aristocrat stood over the corpse for a moment, gazing, his face ablaze with revulsion and excitement. The woman clung to him, lips shivering, and then... smiling. She tugged at him

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and he turned to see the smile, then kissed it hungrily.

The body lay where it had fallen. The blood trickled down the uneven surface of the rock, and Charmagne saw that it formed a face, a ghastly, grinning blood-face.

The face was moving....

Pushing outwards, stretching from the rock. Made of the rock, with a mask of blood covering features that were grinning, obscene.

A grey head now protruded from the stone: mouth, nose, eyes, drip, drip, dripping blood on to the grass.

A neck followed, rock-coloured too. Then the body, squeezing forth like a calf from its mother, spindly shoulders squirming as it struggled to free itself.

It was out of its stone womb, this grey figure, naked in the moonlight, sniffing the air like a beast, licking at the blood that dripped down its face, trembling all over as if wallowing in the spurt of violence, drinking in the pertinence of what had caused it.

It smiled.

This newborn creature with a head full of hate - smiled. A child appreciating its first vestigial emotion.

And the smile was horrible.

Snail eyes watched the oblivious lovers. It stalked them, spidery thing of malice. Hands long and thin like stone knives, and the worms were stirring on the scalp.

It stalked them, and Charmagne heard it hiss.

The lovers turned.

It was gone.

The grey thing from the stone was nowhere to be seen.

As soon as the dead mummer began to move Charmagne knew where it had gone.

The corpse’s head twitched and for a moment the dead eye were grey as stone. The head lifted, and the lips smiled.

The lovers backed away and found themselves trapped by standing stone that leant towards them, almost as if to embrace 134

them, and the mummer was jerking like a marionette and stiffly on its feet now, yes, stalking the lovers frozen there in fear against the stone and Charmagne saw it all she saw -

Oh, she saw.

The aristocrat was unravelled. Bits of him scattered by hands that were dead but no longer human. The woman’s lovely face was cradled by those bloody hands, and then kissed. She screamed, and the screams would wake the -

They must surely wake the village, at least, Charmagne thought, but the mummer was too busy with the woman to care, and her lovely dress was a tattered thing now as he took what he wanted, grinning a dead grin all the time, as he took her against the embracing stone.

Then the groping thing, the dead thing, the mummer from hell, let her go.

And boy, did she run.

The memories returned with each page he turned. His horror was a trapped thing inside him, and it would never be free, never be exorcised. It had lain dormant all these years, just waiting to be awoken. And maybe he was the trapped one, and the horror would not let him go now that it was stretching and yawning inside him.

The book was old, and it was full of dust. Just like it always had been. A dust thing.A horror thing. He stared at the pictures -

grotesque artwork pencilled from the edge of madness. No sane mind could have conjured such four-colour atrocities. Faces were contorted, either by fear or by malice; limbs were too long, postures unnatural, the whole book stained by barbarous intent.

An obscenity then, nestling behind The Cat in the Hat.

The text was scrawled below the midden artwork, and it was rife with glee in all things horrible. The story unfolded beneath his trembling fingertips: the couple - the mayor’s daughter and the magistrate’s son; the mummer; the thing squeezed from the standing stone. The artist had really tripped out in his depiction 135

of the grey creature and its subsequent vile acts when it appropriated the body of the mummer.

Kane could smell the binding, the paper of the book. It smelt of tombs, of slinking rats, of bones. It smelt of eye gouge and tongue rip, and dirty hands rudely imposing inside eviscerated bellies.

But the pictures were worse.

Kane read on.

The villagers approached the field of stones. The mayor led them, and they carried blunderbusses and a rope. The undead mummer was waiting beside the pieces of the magistrate’s son, its hands gloves of blood. It still grinned, a grin too wide to belong to living tissue. Blunderbuss shot buffeted it, slapped it back against a standing stone. Dust puffed from its body as the pellets struck home. It came on, took one of the villagers, uncorked his head from his body. Grin. Blunderbusses.Blood.

One page was just a full frame of blood. Kane could almost feel it staining through the paper into his fingers.

The rope was flung around the corpse thing’s neck; four stouthearted villagers dragged it to a nearby larch, hoisted it into the air. The mummer was not kicking, not struggling at all, only grinning.

A page devoted entirely to that rictus.

The mummer freeing itself with a slash of its wicked fingers, rolling to the grass, unwrapping the ribs of the blacksmith, splattering another page with more gruesomeness.

Then...

The retreat.

Back into stone, blunderbusses bellowing after it. The creature sank into the standing stone from which it had emerged as if slipping into a portal of quicksand. The ‘busses kicked up splinters of rock and the thing was gone.

In the truck.

In the dark.

The Ragman and Charmagne, and the things he shows her.

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She can see them in the dark: all the children. Boiling out of the sewers like an endless spring of rats. Advancing on her, hands outstretched, a litany on their lips.

Nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa.

NU MAMA, NU PAPA!!!

And Charmagne, forced to scream. scream the single important truth of her life and the reality that has marked her more than anything:

‘I’M AN ORPHAN TOO!!!!’

She was kneeling on the metal floor of the truck, and the Ragman was gone. She could hear her own sobbing echoing in the confined space - and it was a confined space, and, of course, always had been. A crack of light coming from under the back doors allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Her hair was soaked with sweat, her clothes stuck to her body. The smell of the truck was overbearing. Butchery and filth.

Her eyes were adjusting, but what they were beginning to see was no less alarming than what she had just witnessed.

She could see the vague outlines of a jumble of musical equipment: amps, speakers, guitars, a drum kit, generators. And lying sprawled amongst this mess like discarded life-size dolls she could see the vague outlines of four men.

As she watched, they began to move.

The mummers were still sitting around their camp fire, still playing their tunes. Either they were oblivious to all the carnage that had ensued across the meadow, or they simply did not care.

The magistrate found them guilty on the spot regardless, and the mayor heartily concurred. A justice of the peace was not required on this wild night. They were bound to the very rock that housed the beast. Four villagers lined up before them and zestfully unloosed their blunderbusses until the rock was splattered with more blood and brains.