Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [104]
‘FREAK!!!’
The hate was still there, but now it was being diverted, redirected towards the one who had led them to this false night of blood and terror. Punks and hippies, Rastas and bikers -villagers too - hurled themselves forward.
The Ragman let them come.
The Doctor was pushed roughly aside. ‘Wait,’ he tried to shout.
‘This isn’t the way.’
The crowd had hold of the Ragman. They bore him aloft like an ugly banner, and then they began to tear him. He was in the claws of a pack of animals, not a gathering of humans. They wanted blood.
They got dust.
Billows of the grey stuff.Clouds. The head was ripped away and dust fountained from the neck. Arms came away like action-man limbs with more jets of crumbling grit. The torso was flung aside and the crowd, momentarily appeased, fell silent. Jo stumbled through the crush, seeking the Doctor.
The distant piping ceased. The shadowy abominations stopped their dancing, disappeared altogether. The rubble of London was also gone. The white horse slumbered in mid-gallop under the serene moonlight.
245
Jo fell against the Doctor, sobbing pitifully - just as the Ragman’s head commenced rolling through the grass, hopped on to the severed neck of the torso and opened its mouth in a sick grin. The severed limbs wriggled in a similar ambition to join the parent body. The Ragman rose before the crowd, complete. The slowworms twisted with malevolent laziness.
You would challenge me?’ the being hissed. He waved one arm in a cutting gesture. Several travellers hit the grass like wheat before a scythe, and did not move again. ‘You would challenge ME?’ His mouth opened wide in thwarted, insane fury.
Kane was gaping at the Ragman with open disgust. Hate blazed in his semigrey eyes:You’re back,’ he snarled, stepping forward. In his mind it was no longer the alien standing before him, but his old enemy. The one with the crawling jar. It had always been him.
It would always be Simon.
‘I thought I got rid of you...’
The Ragman’s boulder-head swivelled, and the worms wilted on to the scalp like seaweed drooping after a retreating wave. Then the mummer was back, bright minstrel streamers, mummer’s cap, straw-like spiky hair. But now the depthless eyes were wary, the grin not so self-assured.
‘I led you, my child,’ the mummer wheedled. ‘You belong to me: look - it is your minstrel friend, your Pied Piper come to lead you to a better place.’
Kane wasn’t listening. Hands out-thrust, he launched himself at the mummer, who reeled back from the mighty shove and flailed against the pulsing lodestone immediately behind him. The rock glowed hungrily in response, and an unearthly scream came from the mummer’s shark-like mouth. The being struggled forward again, as if from the brink of a precipice. His scream became a gurgle, then a snarl.
Kane wasn’t done. ‘There ain’t no better place, boy,’ he said calmly, ‘at least, not for the likes of me.’ He grabbed the mummer’s head and slammed it hard against the standing stone.
Dust puffed from the cracked skull like spores squirting from a burst puffball.
246
The mummer’s head drooped as if the alien were stunned, and then the being was the Ragman again, tatters wrapped around a gaunt, grey body. His true body, his most vulnerable body.
As if realising this, Kane shoved again. In a state of flux created by the Ragman’s own orchestrations the rock opened greedily to receive its former prisoner. Kane turned his head briefly, looking back towards Cirbury as if ironically acknowledging all those who had always stood by him throughout his life - all the countless friends and supporters who were there for him now. He didn’t see Cassandra begin to approach him, one hand outstreched. Then he shrugged stoically and threw his arms around the Ragman, propelling both of them inside the gaping red maw of the living rock.
A scream shrilled briefly, then was cut off like an echo shut away in a box. For ever.
The stone was just a stone again. A grey standing stone, in a field of grey standing stones.
Charmagne sat down on the grass,