Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [100]
The GPO tower, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and, there, the grim Tower itself, all jumbled together and surrounded by rolling Wiltshire countryside. Jo could see that the white horse was still there, under the buildings. It was champing and tossing under the burden, and look! the towers were falling down...
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Falling down...
My fair...
The horse was no longer a chalk outline but a massive skeleton that reared up from the fabric of the hill and bucked with fury.
Big Ben took a dive. A giant equine skull threw the tall clock into a pile of rubble that slid down the hillside. The Houses of Parliament collapsed in a slow cascade of rubble. Immense hooves kicked backwards and the GPO tower teetered and was no more.
‘It’s all falling to pieces...’ Sin hissed in Jo’s ear, ... gloriously.’
And the band played a death knell at one hundred miles an hour, the singer chuckling and jigging on the spot.
The Tower of London was no more. The skeletal horse danced wildly across the spine of the hill, huge, empty eye sockets scanning the world for chaos, gaping bony mouth champing, champing, and then it was sinking back into the grass and soil and again becoming a chalk outline and nothing more.
The beasts of anarchy,’ sighed Jo.
‘Come to play, baby,’ Sin laughed. Jo joined in the laughter.
The mummer gestured at the rubble that littered the moonlit hills. Kane and Charmagne gazed at the spectacle, their eyes grey as stone, still holding hands.
The mummer was pointing in a different direction now, and suddenly the elm trees on the edge of the field were bearing strange fruit. Jo had to squint to make out the figures hanging from the branches in the darkness, but it was worth the effort.
Sin squealed with delight. ‘I will die happy knowing I saw this day. And so will many more.’
Jo was grinning from ear to ear.
The entire royal family was turning slowly in the night breeze, dangling from nooses. There the princess, so fond of dancing on the grave of the deprived; there the queen, gurning sourly with rigor mortis. There other feckless princes, born to squander, born to leech, purple-faced, greeting their subjects with lolling tongues rather than regal waves of the hand.
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‘Parasites!’ spat Sin. The band had turned to play to their new, albeit, dead audience. The power chords seemed to make the royal corpses twitch and spasm, as if they were jerking along to the rhythm of the damned.
Jo began to dance again, hand in hand with the lustrous-haired Sin. This was the final number of the night, they knew that instinctively. It was gone midnight and the Doctor had been right all along: the band was playing them all the way to hell.
And she’d never felt so good in all her life.
It was then the Doctor stepped down from the back of the cattle truck.
The first grenade tore one of the highwaymen messily in half. The top part of the torso rose eerily into the night sky before Humping down on top of one of the standing stones, where it lay, balanced precariously. The cocked hat rolled in the grass at Yates’ feet. The flintlock landed next to some sheep droppings. The lower torso remained standing, dust streaming from the midsection.
Yates frowned at the gruesome sight, clutching the other grenade indecisively. Should he use it on the other corpses, or save it for the mummer? He threw a look over the field towards the band and the wildly cavorting crowd. No contest. Time to ice the mummer. He lurched away from the highwaymen, wincing at the pain from his ruined left shoulder. Take out the leader and the mirages would go too. That was the plan. It seemed like a very sensible one too.
Jo and Sin turned as if somehow sensing that the Doctor was there, behind them. The band, too, whirled away from their royal performance to face this new arrival.
When the mummer swung around there was a devilish snarl on his face.
The band stopped playing, their