Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [95]
A match was struck, and a candle appeared, held by a slender hand. The wick was lit, and the candle-flame bloomed upon the face of the Krallik.
Chapter Fourteen
The Doctor said nothing. He didn’t move. What could he say?
What could he do? This was beyond grotesque, beyond appalling.
The Krallik was sitting half-naked on an old wooden chair, the dark skin of his torso daubed with depictions of agony and torture, war graffiti painted with blood long since dried.
Tattered khaki combat trousers covered his legs. An arm lifted, undeniably a man’s arm, but of a slighter build than the average Papul’s; a gold bracelet of the type popular with all the Indoni merchants the Doctor had seen on Batu gleamed in the candlelight. But the Krallik was not showing off its jewellery, but rather lifting the candle to exhibit its macabre body for the Doctor’s benefit. The Doctor’s gaze was drawn to the hands, slender, feminine, the fingernails still adorned with red crumbling nail paint. The hands were stitched crudely onto the masculine arms.
The candle moved upwards, and the ghostly light fell upon the head of the Krallik, and what the Doctor had only glimpsed moments before was revealed in all its glory.
The Krallik’s head belonged to that of an elderly white man, and like the woman’s hands, it was sutured in crude fashion onto the brown skinned neck. The grey hair was dishevelled, flecked with dried blood, the pale eyes returned the Doctor’s incredulous stare with a stare of their own, but this one contained no animation whatsoever.
It was like staring into the eyes of a fish, dead on the beach.
The Krallik was speaking again, and its lips were moving flaccidly, dead meat moved by a macabre ventriloquist.
‘The head of a missionary...’ the Krallik hissed, and the lips were out of tune with the words, adding to the sickness of it all, ‘... the body of a merchant, and the hands of a prostitute.
An assemblage of shame, offworlder. You see that I have become the twisted symbol of everything that is eating away at my land. This way I can never forget...’
The Doctor was emerging from his shock, and fascination was kicking in. He took a step nearer, and then promptly took two steps back when he became aware of the two Mumis squatting motionlessly on tree-trunk stools in the candlelight, one on either side of their king: an unholy trinity of corpses.
‘So, the feared Krallik is a collage of body pieces....
extraordinary. I wonder how you can possibly be alive? But then, of course, you can’t be, can you?’
‘You are an intelligent man, Doctor. You do not believe in symbols. But there are plenty who do. My people need a symbol. They need an idea. But you are wrong: I am very much alive. I am kept alive by my hate.’
The Doctor squinted at the bizarre figure. The head was too big for the slender body, the hands in turn too small for the muscled arms. Everything was wrong about the Krallik; it was an amalgamation of wrongness.
‘Oh no, I’m sure it must be more than that animating you, Krallik...’
‘This is no carnival trick, offworlder. The Krallik is very real.’ He lifted the prostitute’s hands to demonstrate. ‘Can you not see the cruel poetry of my body?’ the voice was hushed, fading, then growing strong again, as if the voice were crawling up a very dirty tunnel, and gasping for air, or for expression. The head nodded gruesomely, the ghost eyes fixed on the Doctor, but not fixed at all. ‘The beauty of irony... the loveliness of pure obscenity. You will see how gorgeous it all is, Doctor, and share in the moral carnage that is me, that is everything I represent.’
‘ You’re wrong too, Krallik: You are definitely a carnival trick!’ The Doctor puffed his cheeks out in a show of antagonism, even if his legs were betraying him by wobbling so.
‘Did you think I brought you here to act as a mere hostage, offworlder?’ The candle tremored, the whore’s hand spasming. ‘You are here to die. To be an example to all intruders encroaching like insects where