Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [102]
The Doctor could sense the anger of the crowd growing the more he taunted the mummer, and the electric hate in the air was making him feel faint. Yet he held his ground as beads of sweat appeared on his brow and his hearts began to race against each other as if to see which would be the first to burst.
‘But it will be new to those to whom you lie,’ he replied firmly.
‘Lies?’ the mummer hissed. ‘I am here to destroy lies.’
‘Then show them your real face, Great Pretender.’ The Doctor placed his hands on his hips defiantly. He paused, then threw his final barb. ‘Ah, but then, you can’t, can you? Resuming your natural morphic form would make you too vulnerable to the pull of your birthstone. You might get sucked back into it. But, by that logic, you can’t amplify those same forces to the degree needed to blanket the world in antipathy unless you retreat into your morphic state. Am I wrong?’
The mummer’s response was merely a snarling laugh. As if unperturbed by the Doctor’s intuitiveness, his body glowed a lurid green colour - and the hideous shape of the Ragman stood hunched and spindly before the crowd. The slowworm hair lifted evilly, the grey head slowly surveyed the faces of his ragamuffin disciples. One thin arm rose and gestured to the hillsides where distorted black shapes still cavorted to the whistling of discordant pipes. The moon was hanging low over the horizon, and its face 241
was the Ragman’s, blood dripping from crooked jaws and falling to the fields below where the bones of civilisation lay scattered.
With each drop that fell a baby screamed in agony, the sound seemingly drifting from far away, yet simultaneously clear and distinct as if from over the next hedge.
‘Let it be,’ the Ragman said. ‘Your plutocratic society has crumbled away. Children of the shameful are dying upon birth.
There will be no more children, but those of the Leveller.’
‘You don’t want a world changed for the better, Ragman. You just want a world run in your image. The ultimate vanity.’ The Doctor turned to Kane and Charmagne. ‘Look upon your "father", see the lies, the pretence. They are worse than any you’ve suffered in this society’ He strode forward and seized Kane by the shoulder. ‘Look at him!’
Kane turned slowly, looked at the Ragman, blinked. Blinked again. His eyes momentarily resumed their natural colour then flicked back to grey rock.
The Doctor grasped Charmagne’s hand, swung her round to face the ‘mummer’ in his natural state. ‘You’re a tyrant: a selfish egomaniac embodying everything these people want to destroy,’
the Doctor continued, waving an arm towards the travellers, the punks, the hippies, the Rastas. ‘You’re a morphic monstrosity; a mutation of cosmic spew and human indignities. You are scum, Ragman. Real scum from the end of time. And your time’s surely run out, because I don’t think your children want to play any more. They’ve had enough of your tyranny.’
The Doctor’s eyes narrowed as the Ragman looked from Kane to Charmagne and the nest of worms coiled furiously on his bald rock-head. ‘They’re the only ones you’re scared of, isn’t that right, Ragman? Like most children, there comes a time when they grow older and want to disobey the rules - challenge authority! Your authority. Maybe they have a little of their father in them... maybe just enough to stop even you.’
Charmagne released Kane’s hand and her eyes were almost human, albeit with a grey shade. She glared at the Ragman with 242
reawoken horror. ‘You’re not my father,’ she said quietly. The horror smouldered into rage. ‘You’re not my father!’ She lunged towards the Ragman.
The Ragman twitched his sharp-fingered hand towards one of the roadies standing at the fringe of the crowd. The biker was still clutching a pitchfork with which he had repeatedly stabbed the corpse of one of the policemen, as if to check the lawman really was dead or perhaps simply because he enjoyed