Doctor Who: Rags (27 page)

Seventeen years on from that memorable victory, Simon kicked Kane as he sat slumped against the pub wall.

‘Scum!’ he spat. ‘Always knew you’d be nothing. You just had to go and prove me right, didn’t you? You dirty little drunk. You touched my sister, Kane. You fondled her, you disgusting creep.

You were never good enough for her, and I just wanted you to admit that. Remember the slugs, Kane? Remember the worms?

Dirt to dirt.’ He stepped back and swung his shoe into Kane’s kidneys. The drunk grunted and his head flopped to one side.

‘And the funny thing is, you never knew why I hated you, did you? Too thick to work it out.Just another local yokel, eh, Kane?

Just another bum, from a long line of bums... Except you weren’t, were you?’ And now the smile was gone from Simon’s face, and true paranoia leapt in his blue eyes. He staggered back a step as the extremity of his passions burned through him, leaving him flushed and sweaty and short of breath. Helplessly, he stared at his old enemy and felt, at last, that there was a reckoning between them. Kane was brought down to the ultimate state for which he had been destined, while Simon had scaled the peaks of achievement. Yet his mother’s words were as clear as the sobs of his victim on that summer’s day in the playing field seventeen years before.

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‘He comes from a good family, not that you’d know it now. A very old family. The Sawyers used to practically own the village, my boy, in olden days. And we should respect them for that, no matter what their circumstances are today. Be kind to him, Simon. According to local legend this village owes them a lot.’

This village owes them a lot!

Simon was laughing. God, he still remembered that stupid line, even though he could scarcely remember his mother’s face without looking at a photograph.

The Village of Nobodys owes you a lot, does it, Sawyer? Why, what did your inbred family do that was so special? Anybody care to tell me?

He hadn’t realised he was speaking aloud until Kane suddenly looked blearily up at him, grinned, and said:

‘We drove away the monster. That’s what we did. But monsters always come back, don’t they? They always come back!’

Kane was grinning, and confronted by that grin Simon could do nothing but back away across the street, in the path of a Mini that swerved wildly to avoid him, honking furiously. Without another word Simon threw himself into the driver’s seat of his Jag, slamming the car door behind him. He turned the key in the ignition, not needing to look round to know that Kane was still grinning at him from across the road. Still grinning.

Simon swung the Jag in a curve, aiming the bonnet at the pub.

At Kane.

He completed the tight semicircular manoeuvre, missing the drunk by a couple of feet, then steered up the high street with a growl of acceleration.

He was getting the hell out of town.

But the hell in the town wouldn’t let him.

He was pulling up to the junction just beyond the last house.

Away in the hazy summer distance he could see the white horse galloping across the blue hills he remembered so well from his childhood, the woods fringing the chalk cutting a cluster of gold in the glorious evening light. He paused and changed down as a 198

lorry bustled past on the main road to Marlborough. The sight of the horse calmed him, or maybe it was the realisation he’d left that hated trap of a village hopefully for the last time. Why in God’s name had he ever decided to go back?

Well, he knew the answer to that well enough. He wanted to show them, didn’t he? Wanted to show all the useless, retarded good-for-nothings that he’d done something with his life. That he’d made it.

Well, he’d done that.

Hadn’t he?

He swung the Jag across the junction and picked up speed, heading east towards London. The needle kicked towards fifty, sixty... sixty-five. The last of the standing stones reared up directly beside the road as if to bid him a sarcastic farewell, and suddenly there was a figure beneath it. A gaunt, hunchbacked figure in grey tatters, with grey flesh too, and a horrible head crowned with writhing things and the car was no longer under his control and my God he could see the creature’s gruesome features and they were a twisted likeness of Kane’s!

The Jag, doing a happy sixty-eight miles an hour, ploughed into the standing stone with a horrendously dull impact-sound of crumpling metal and shattering glass.

Nobody in the village even noticed.

Dusk over Cirbury. The community mingled with the travellers amongst the stones as the band took up its position.

Silence fell over the ancient meadow. A few rooks circled the elm trees, rowing with each other in their own particular eldritch fashion. The sheep hurried away to a far corner of the field. The first stars poked through the skies, and the moon swung out from behind a cloud as if to say: entertain me.

The singer stood behind his microphone. His shades were on, of course. His leather jacket looked like it had been dragged through a farmyard; the colourful paper tatters covering his hose trousers fluttered in the evening breeze. His grass-green hair stood up 199

wildly, imparting, along with his saturnine looks, an overall impression of a punk Pan standing before his beasts.

The beasts: guitarist hunched behind and to the left of the singer, top hat with hinge crown, mummer rags, big leather boots, stubble, shades; skinhead drummer snarling behind his snare drum; Sid Vicious bassist in worn leather and ragamuffin tatters.

The singer shrieked once, like a night-hidden fox. Then he leant closer to the mike.

‘Welcome to the village of the damned,’ he snarled, and the band began to play.

One last time.

200

‘I say we rush them, Sarge.’

Yates glanced up from his RT as he heard the corporal’s words.

She was standing next to Sergeant Benton, and her eyes were hard and determined.

Benton shrugged in response, unaware he was being watched by his superior. Yates waited for some more definitive reply from the sergeant. None came. He closed the connection on his RT

unit, dismissing the irritation the scene had left him with, and strolled over to where the Brigadier was studying a brief that had just been couriered to him from Whitehall.

‘Trouble, sir?’

The Brigadier looked up.‘Hmm?’

‘New orders?’

‘No. same orders, unfortunately. In duplicate.For me to sign and return ASAP.seems the RT isn’t good enough. They want me to be in possession of hard evidence in case of recriminations.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘No, Yates,’ the Brigadier said, folding the brief away inside his jacket pocket. ‘Neither do I.’

He glanced over at the restless ranks of travellers who were now actively beginning to taunt the soldiers protecting the stones. A few bottles were hurled and though no injuries had been sustained so far it was only a matter of time. The soldiers were becoming restless too, increasingly nervous and angry.

‘Whitehall wants me to maintain our defensive position.’ the Brigadier said gloomily, his fist clenching on his swagger stick.

‘Surely that’s wise, sir?’ said Yates with a puzzled expression.

The Brigadier turned to him and his eyes were small and hard, emphasising the sharpness of his tone. ‘Wise,Yates? How the devil can doing nothing in the face of such hostility possibly be deemed "wise"?’

Yates looked at his feet, taken aback. Then he remembered the 201

reason he had approached his superior officer. ‘We really should try to get Jo out of Cirbury,sir.’

‘Yes,Yates,’ snapped the Brigadier, obviously irritated at the note of reproach, however accidental, in the captain’s voice. ‘I’m fully aware of my responsibilities towards Miss Grant.’

Then why don’t you act on them? Yates felt like answering, but contained himself. It really wasn’t like the Brigadier to procrastinate over something as important as this. Perhaps he just had too much on his plate. After all, he seemed to need all his resources here. Still, if Yates volunteered to head for Cirbury by himself, or maybe with just a few soldiers as back-up, he might be able to free Jo from the obviously malign influence under which she had fallen.

‘Sir?’

Yates and the Brigadier turned to face Corporal Robinson, who was obviously agitated.

‘Yes, what is it, Corporal?’ the Brigadier inquired before Yates could say anything.

‘The boys want to take them on, sir. There’s a bad feeling brewing.’

Yates was speechless. What the deuce was a corporal doing voicing such concerns to UNIT’S commanding officer, for God’s sake? Was discipline slipping to such a disastrous degree? He waited for the Brigadier’s reprisal. Again, as with Benton, it was not forthcoming.

‘They’re a bad lot, sir, these hippies,’ continued the corporal, brushing a lock of sweaty blonde hair away from her forehead.

Her eyes were stark with prejudice. ‘The boys want to wade in, good and proper. There’s a lot of hatred.’

‘Indeed,’ was all the Brigadier said, hands clasped behind his back as he stared past the bitter-eyed corporal to the cordon of UNIT soldiers ringing the monument. The sun was going down fast.

‘I know what they mean, sir.’ Robinson hadn’t finished yet; she was just beginning to warm to her theme of hate. ‘My parents died

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in a car crash caused by their sort.’ She gestured towards the group of travellers taunting the picket. ‘Stoned to their eyeballs, they were. Bloody, filthy hippies... They shouldn’t be free to do this, sin. They shouldn’t be free...’

Yates waited, dumbstruck by this extraordinary display of emotion and insubordination, for the Brigadier to shout her down, and still... nothing. He glanced at his superior, and was astonished to see a bitterness mirroring Robinson’s in his eyes.

The Brigadier’s mouth was set in a stern line. It was Benton who intervened, but even his voice carried no conviction. ‘That’ll do, Robinson.’

From beyond the monument the chanting intensified as the falling sun threw golden spears of light across the impartial sarsons.

Jo could feel it; she knew Sin and Jimmy must be able to feel it too. The whole village could surely sense the vibrations. The vibe.The vibe that had been trembling through them all ever since that first incredible gig back in Princetown, which seemed like years ago now - a lifetime ago. But now it was stronger, thrumming towards some peak, orchestrated by the wild playing of the band.

‘It’s the ley lines,’ Jimmy shouted next to her.

She turned to him, startled. ‘What do you mean?’ she shouted back.

He shrugged, still watching the cavorting band.’Dunno. But it is.’

Ley lines Jo tried to concentrate on the idea, thrown rather off guard by guttersnipe Jimmy’s sudden flash of erudition. She knew Cirbury and Stonehenge were reputed to be ley-line nexuses, but what did that have to do with Dartmoor, and the band? She had very little understanding of what a ley line was.

She imagined the Doctor lecturing her, and the need to know suddenly vanished and hate returned. Memories of all the patronisation, all the condescension, returned in force, stoked by the vicious riffs of the guitarist. Her heart beat in time with the drums and her fists clenched.

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You’re a reasonably intelligent young woman, Jo.

Did you fail Latin as well as science?

Stir your stumps, Jo.

BASTARD!!

If he were here now she would reduce him to soddin’ stumps.

The constant humiliation and put-downs. She should have been carefree and happy, finding a nice exciting bloke to spend her days with, not chaperoned through time and space by a supercilious old fop in a box.

Sin closed her eyes and the music took her. She felt hornier than she’d ever felt in her life, and it had nothing to do with mere sex.

This urge went beyond the body. She pictured herself dancing with the great god Pan in some secret glade deep, deep in the darkest wood. A stream chuckled magically in the background and wood pigeons cooed and badgers nodded at her as she danced with the cloven-hoofed one. And now He took her in his arms and smiled a wicked smile and the horns curved back into the tangled bramble-hair and the eyes, oh my God, the eyes...

such fierce beauty she had never beheld. And then she opened her eyes as the music lulled, and the first thing she saw was Nick’s body, still slumped against a stone behind the band, picked out by a spot of moonlight. She quickly closed her eyes again and waited for the music to come for her.

Jimmy was dreaming of school. Only this time, when the teacher belittled him for his poor understanding of percentages and fractions and ordered him to stand outside the classroom for catapulting paper balls at the rest of the class, instead of sheepishly doing as he was told, instead of taking it - he stood up and climbed on the desk so that all the kids could see him, and faced down the teacher with a snarl that he was only beginning to learn how to use at fifteen years of age. ‘Hey, Mr Fryer: kiss this,’