Doctor Who: Rags (8 page)

He tied the horse to a wooden rail that ran around the side of the pub, where the crowd was thinnest. He was only too aware of the hostility he was evoking from the undesirables surrounding them.

‘You wait here with the horses, Henry,’ he ordered, and helped the hobbling Penelope towards the door.

A man in a long green mac with a head bald as a mushroom blocked their way. Here we go, thought Edward, and he felt Penelope tense beside him.

Just then the band began to play.

They ambled slowly across the grass from the cattle truck. Jo had seen them leap down from the back doors and had felt a sudden lurch of excitement. The crowd whistled and cheered. Dusk fell, the horizon purple above dark moor. She could feel the emotion emanating from the people around her; its intensity scared her.

She had once seen a film called The Wild Bunch. At the climax, the four surviving outlaws walked down the main street of a Mexican town side by side, towards their own extinction. It had moved her in a way she had never been able to understand. Until now. Here was the same stroll towards doom, she sensed; the four musicians moving to take up their places with an inevitable finality that punched her soul. What was she talking about? No one was going to die here. There would be no repetition of the other day. They were merely going to play some...

... Songs?

‘Scum, scum, scum; the singer spat into the microphone as the tramp-hatted guitarist struck up chords Jo could almost smell, they were so rotten. A spotlight winked on like a crimson, evil 57

eye, and the band exploded into action.

‘Scum we are, and scum we’ll stay,’ the garish singer growled and swore, and if it was a song, it was the vilest Jo had ever heard. ‘Scum, scum, scum, the scum of the earth.’ The bass player moved towards the crowd which stood paralysed in front of the band, and Jo saw Sin, the attractive Chinese girl, standing next to Nick and gazing at the band with a kind of rapt horror.

The bass player, a mummer-punk troll with hair sticking up into the evening air like black straw poking out of a scarecrow’s head, stepped on top of a rock for better elevation and bullied his instrument, the sunglasses that he and his three fellow band members were still wearing throwing off red glare from the spotlight. The notes rumbled into the night like dinosaurs venting their spleen. Sin was directly below him as he stood on the rock, the electric lead trailing back to the generator behind him. Jo sensed what was coming and moved forward, although the action was futile, separated as she was from the girl by the heaving crowd.

‘And we shall inherit,’ barked the singer, and the bass player smiled, and spewed a green waterfall of puke down into Sin’s upturned face.

The crowd went mad.

Join the Unwashed. Join the Unforgiving.

They were preaching to the converted.

The band was in full fury; Sin was staggering back, her hands clawing at her face. She opened her mouth to scream and it was clogged. She couldn’t see. But she could hear. The ecstasy of the crowd, an ecstasy of horror and revulsion and delight, and she empathised with those feelings because they were her own too.

The man had sicked up on her, and the stinking slime was still all over her, and yet she was consumed with excitement as she mopped at herself. As Nick helped her, his face torn with disgust, she could only feel the pride, the honour of being chosen. It was a kind of madness, she knew that. Yet no one else had been singled out. She was grinning through the bile.

58

They had come for her, and she was going to leave this banality Its hind - this sickening boredom that was her life.

So she grinned at Nick and at the mummers from hell as they pounced and prowled around their grassy stage, and then she began to dance, the ecstasy pulling at her as if she were on strings, and she was laughing, laughing...

The bald man blocked Edward’s way.

‘Excuse me...’ the aristocrat offered feebly. The man stared, a wax statue, eyes barely blinking. He reminded Edward of something: a grotesque character from a comic he’d read as a child. Grimly... Grimly Fiendish, that was it. The bald man in the long shiny mac looked just like Grimly Fiendish.

The band had begun to play, a fearsome din that convinced Edward he and his friends might just possibly have taken the wrong path out on the moor and ended up in some parallel hell.

The bald man bowed mockingly, stepped aside and ushered Edward and Penelope inside the pub. As they squeezed past him, Edward glanced at his face. The whites of the man’s eyes were invisible, squeezed out by black gobstopper pupils.

Inside the pub, the lounge was surprisingly empty but for two men leaning against the oak bar. Edward seated Penelope at a corner table and made for the public telephone box in the passageway leading to the toilets.

Penelope was alone with the two men. Three men: the bald mar had decided to come in too and stood in the middle of the room watching her.

She would ignore him. Even though she felt his stare like a live shock all through her. She gazed around the lounge to take her mind off him, at the familiar oak wainscoting; the cosy, though unlit fireplace; the ancient animal traps rusting on the walls; the stuffed bear’s head that had seen better days. One of the bear’: glass eyes had fallen out, giving her the impression the creature was winking at her. The other eye reminded her of the bald man’

stare.Hurry up Edward!

* * *

59

‘Come away, Jo.’ The Doctor had to pull his companion from the crowd, so reluctant was she to miss the spectacle.

She gazed round at him blankly, and he shook her. ‘Jo!’

Her eyes swam back into focus. Alarm filled them. He drew her away from the fringe of the crowd and sat her down on one of the picnic benches beside the road.

‘You’ve got to remain alert, Jo,’ he told her sternly.

She nodded, not understanding what had happened to her, what was still happening to the rest of the audience, only knowing that something had. She felt weak, a headache nagged behind her eyes. The band continued to play, swinging their instruments dangerously, careless of any member of the audience who might venture too near.

‘Wait here,’ the Doctor instructed her and, before she could protest, he was hurrying up the lane to where Bessie was parked a hundred yards away from the pub.

Jo felt unclean. She remembered the unnatural green sick that had struck Sin and felt like throwing up herself. The music bulldozed the crowd, repelling them, inciting them.

Nick was holding Sin’s hand, and he was no longer angry at her violation. The music soothed and aroused, scared and exhilarated. It spoke in a language they could understand. The whole crowd understood. The songs encouraged Nick to free resentments and prejudices long buried. All around the homeless, the loveless, the hopeless were reacting to the vibe; there was horror, and there was hate. In time there would be much more, and it would be oh so good!

The Doctor didn’t need to look inside Bessie to check on the sensor probe. He could hear it emitting its eerie bleat from yards away. He reached in and deftly detached the instrument from the dashboard. It positively rocked in his hand. A cold finger prodded his soul. It was far more active than at Princetown. On impulse, he moved away from the car, trudging across the open moorland to

60

where the cattle truck loomed beyond the band and the enraptured crowd.

As he had sensed it would, the energy indicator all but burned In his hand the nearer he got to the filthy vehicle. And there, like a statue in the dark, the roadie waited, guarding the back doors with massive arms patiently folded. The Doctor backed up, hiding he indicator inside his cloak, unsure if the giant had seen him.

In the natural hollow, the band reached a climax of obnoxious sound.

The man must be on drugs, Penelope decided. His bulbous eyes didn’t shift from her, and his mouth was working silently.

At the bar, the other two men had turned to face her. One of them was wearing a blue anorak over a white tunic of some sort, And was fiddling with the zipper, his black lank hair falling over his wide eyes.

Ziiiiiiiiiip.Ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip

The noise played on her nerves. The other man was short, fat and bearded like an oversized garden gnome, without cap or fishing rod but just as malevolently odd. He pulled something from his trouser pocket and slipped it over his head - a balaclava.

He was squinting at her, his face squashed inside the woollen I opening.

Ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip

She would scream. If Edward didn’t come back soon -

Edward appeared. He was looking harassed and grumpy but she had never been so happy to see him.

Unfortunately, the bald man chose that moment to interfere.

He seized Edward’s arm and swung him round. Penelope stood up quickly. She could see John Farris, the landlord, peering out from behind a hanging row of crisp packets, and he also looked scared.

‘Do you mind?’ Edward shook himself free. His voice was full of outrage, but Penelope could hear the quaver of fear there too. She looked up into Farris’s eyes. And it was then she knew.

61

It happened very quickly, like a circus act on fast forward.

The bald man grinned, and it was a grin wider than any Penelope had ever seen, and his eyes popped madly from his face as he seized Edward again and threw him against the wall.

‘Yes I do mind, sir,’ he said with a quaint country accent that was soft and sinister all at once. ‘I do mind, sir. And so do my friends here.’ He reached above Edward’s head and unhitched a long metal object from a hook. An animal leg-trap. Now he was clamping the sharp metal jaws around Edward’s neck, and handsome, brave Edward was screaming, and blood was squelching down on to the red of his livery and dousing the bald man as he wrestled the hideous contraption tighter round , Edward’s throat.

The other two men peeled away from the bar, taking their cue.

The man with the balaclava waited beside the door, as if he had sensed Henry was about to spill through all whey-faced and spineless. The zipper man came for Penelope. But not all at once.

He took time to take his instrument of choice - a long viciously hooked gaffe - down from the wall, and displayed it for her with relish, like a shopkeeper demonstrating his wares, as the music I burst into brutal orgasm beyond the pub walls and Penelope screamed and screamed and...

She saw the bear winking at her, just before her world went red, and then black.

62

Dawn broke stiffly over the Oblong Box.

The crowd was still there. The police had been unable to move them, and had settled for clearing them away from the immediate vicinity of the pub. An ambulance, now loaded with three corpses, trundled almost sheepishly away from the scene of the butchery.

Jo watched another vehicle, this one black, turn on the narrow road and lurch off after its white companion. In the back window a face stared out at her, eyes wide as inkwells, head bald as the mad moon.

She shuddered and leant closer to the Doctor. Throughout the night, long after the band had ceased playing and retreated into their cattle truck like motley clockwork figures, the people had continued to arrive. In beat-up VW campers, in decrepit buses, in cars of all makes and descriptions but all sharing a similar state of shabbiness.

‘What I’m going to ask you to do now is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever expected of you, Jo.’ The Doctor was sitting with her on the bench, sipping a mug of tea from the pub. ‘And probably one of the most dangerous.’

She didn’t like the sound of that at all. She tried to ask him what he meant, but her voice was a croak. She thought of the three men who had been led out of the pub by the police, docile as kittens, blood patterning them like the daubings of a mad artist.

‘From Coney Hill,’ someone from the crowd had told her. The words had meant nothing until Nick, who had been standing nearby with Sin, filled in the blanks.

‘A local asylum,’ he had said gravely. But it had seemed to Jo that Sin was smiling. Or was that just shock?

The Doctor was talking again, the morning breeze stroking his hair. ‘I’m going to have to leave you for a while.’ He put a finger to his lips as she opened her mouth to protest again. ‘Let me finish: 63

this is vitally important. I need you to stay here, with your new friends.’ He indicated Nick and Sin who had now been joined by Rod. Jimmy was sitting in the driver’s seat of his purple camper van which was parked ten yards up the road, sucking on a joint.

All of them, apart from Sin, looked detached and stunned but were unable for some reason to leave the scene. ‘I’m sure they’ll take care of you’ Jo thought he looked rather doubtfully at Sin for a second; the Chinese girl’s eyes were shining, her lips were full and pouting. Then he went on.