Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [32]
Something made him look up at the tor just then. Call it fate -
and if that was what it was, then it was an evil fate that had no time for a loner like Rod; because what he saw marked the end of the road for the good-natured bum from Tavistock.
A figure was moving up on the hillside. A stooped, ragged silhouette - he could discern the trailing tatters even from this distance. The mummer? For a moment, Rod was sure it was...
but no, this figure was dressed differently, was somehow more twisted, like an old and stunted tree. It wasn’t a particularly cold 80
night, but Rod’s skin felt suddenly coated with frost. Yet despite his unease, he really wanted to see that figure more closely.
Hesitating, he looked back once, and only once, at the camper.
Through the smeared windows he could see Nick’s head cosied into his sleeping bag, Sin sleeping beside him. A yearning to be back with them hit him like a stake through the heart. My friends: my only friends. Never had anything else but them. Why was he saying his goodbyes - because that’s what it felt like. His eyes moistened. This was ridiculous. He needed a drink, not a trek up the hill at - he looked at his watch - three-thirty in the morning. He glanced around the encampment. Uncannily, everyone was asleep. Not a sound. On other nights at least some of the travellers had stayed up until morning, smoking and drinking and listening to music. But not tonight.
His mind made up, Rod moved slowly through the rusty vehicles towards the stile at the edge of the field. He climbed over on to the path that led up the hill.
The hunched, spindly figure was still there, and whatever it was doing Rod was sure it was unhealthy work. He didn’t recognise it, but somehow he knew it was someone he should investigate.
Why? Murder! Because Rod had woken up, and he suddenly knew the others wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
With every step he took up the winding path, his thoughts ran clearer, gathering momentum. He knew what the figure was. It was the reason for the tour, the philosophy behind the band, and he knew this because every nerve in his body wriggled with terror as he got nearer the crest of the hill. This was what they were all following.
MURDER!
He stopped on the path, tears of utter terror trickling down his cheeks. He would piss himself in a moment. Go back you old bastard - go back to your friends. Get back in your sleeping bag and pretend you never saw this hunched spectre on the hill.
And now he could no longer see it as the gradient of the hill obscured the monument. The grass was silver beneath his feet, 81
sweating dew, Above him the moon hung, a glowing, dead face. As lonely as him, but tonight it was a dreadful thing.
It was just the moon, for God’s sake!
He reached the brow of the hill and the tor reared into view. The figure was gone. Rod slowed his pace, treading softly towards the tower. His tired eyes left it, roved across the world stretching all around him. Looking out over the patchwork nightland he could make out objects that he knew had not been there in the day; there was one in the field below the hill - a wooden pole with a cage at the top. A black gibbet with a corpse manacled inside rusting metal ribs, its eyes stolen by crows. And there, beside a dike running with moonlight, a gallows with its highwayman trophy swinging in the breeze - Rod could hear the creak. The body swung more violently and the rope broke. Other, more distant figures tumbled from their hanging poles like rotten fruit and began to totter on long-disused legs. Some wore tricorn hats and clutched flintlock pistols in their bone hands. All of them were converging on the tor, seemingly from across the land.
Unreality rushed him: this was a trip and nothing more. Jimmy must’ve slipped him some acid, the bastard. He tilted his head up to the sly old moon, sucking in cold air, and then looked down again. The