Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [70]
RANDOM AND NOTHING IS LEFT TO ACCIDENT, the left side of his head arguing with the right side, SHE IS AN
AGENT OF CACOPHONY AND YOU KNOW IT, rain
forming words, OH the glory, grammatic order out of nature’s chaos, and THESE ARE OUR WORDS and PICK IT UP!
PICK UP THE BROKEN RAILING! walking with a clank-clankity-clank like the pitter-patter-pat. KILL HER. Remove her. REMOVE HER. IT IS NOT KILLING if you remove an agent of Cacophony REMOVING CHAOS FROM THE
UNIVERSE ignore the sayings and the superstitions of the witch-women.
She would simply have to UNDERSTAND THAT SHE
HAD TO BE REMOVED in the name of Reason IN THE
NAME OF REASON but obviously, she wouldn’t understand.
Women simply DO NOT do not have minds capable of understanding RATIONALIST PHILOSOPHY which is why witches are witches and therefore must be burned.
REMOVED. Removed.
He held the weapon against his chest, clinging to it, cherishing it. The Watchmakers would lead him to the witch, and everything would be returned to its usual order. CLEAN
IT UP! CLEAN EVERYTHING UP!
Paris Street was busier than it had ever been in the whole of its seventy-year history. An argument had become a dispute, a dispute had become a fight, a fight had become a made, and a mêlée had become a riot. All part of the natural process, thought the Doctor, stopping in front of a spot where a man’s head had been cracked against the ground until the road had been sprayed pink. From nought to apocalypse in under fifteen minutes. He cleared his throat. How many people? Two dozen? Three? A quick word or two should be enough to quieten them.
‘ This –’ he began.
Then something glinted in the darkness between a yellow–
stained brick building and a wrecked grocer’s store. Glinted, in the light from a bonfire where fantasies by H. H.
Brackenridge and Charles Brockden Brown were being
‘sterilized’. Glinted, in a way that seemed suspiciously significant.
The Doctor closed his mouth. There was a man in the darkness. Probably. The dim outline of a figure in a wide cape, a head topped by an extravagant stovepipe hat. The shape was entirely black, the man obviously having a good working knowledge of shadows and how to use them. The blackness was interrupted by four patches of fire-tinted light.
Two lenses. The figure was wearing spectacles. Ovoid. An affectation?
A smile. Teeth. Glinting teeth. The Doctor frowned. A good knowledge of shadows, and a good sense of aesthetics, too.
A tool of some kind, in his left hand. Gun barrel? No.
Jagged. Knife-related. A scalpel, perhaps. The Doctor was reminded of twentieth-century depictions of Jack the Ripper, a shadow with a smile and a surgeon’s knife. Faceless and unknown. The killing silhouette.
The shape moved forward. The light shifted around him, but he kept his head down, and the fire failed to illuminate his features. There was just a smile, sweeping across the street, hooded rioters – and even their victims – moving aside for him without even seeming to notice that he was there. Impressed by this manoeuvre, the Doctor very nearly missed the fact that the shape was heading straight for him.
Two. Three. Four. Five. Two. Three. Four. Five.
They were marching. Erskine Morris couldn’t remember when they’d started marching, or why, or even whose idea it had been; but it seemed entirely natural now. The rhythm they made, the beat of leather soles against muddied roads, seemed somehow comforting. Marching was easy. Hellfire and sodomy, you didn’t even have to think about it.
Two. Three. Four. Five.
So they kept marching, a handful of Society men and a dozen others who’d tagged along for the hell of it, the rhythm only interrupted by the irregular slap-slops of the prisoners’
feet as they were dragged along the streets. The prisoners were all Negroes, taken from their neighbourhoods when the trouble had started and the