Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [50]
What brought him here now? A desire to get out of the hot sun?Maybe. He pushed open the wooden door and entered the church, still clutching his Newky Brown.
He hated it immediately. The sanctimonious gloom, the ascetic pews that gave you back - and arse ache. The hassocks - how he wanted to lob those around.The stained-glass windows. Hadn’t he tried to smash one the other day? Perhaps he’d make up for that now. Who was there to stop him? No soddin’ vicar in sight. He strode up the nave, heading for the pompous pulpit, the Bible 121
lying closed upon it. He scooped the book up and flung it across the church.
What had God ever done for him? He toasted the pulpit with his Newcastle Brown. ‘Here’s my God, arsehole.’ He finished the ale and propped the bottle on the lectern. On impulse he crossed to the altar and hawked a lump of phlegm into the holy water. Then minced back down the nave to the curtain that hid the bell rope.
Pulling aside the curtain, he grinned wolfishly at the dangling rope.
‘Let’s rock...’ he rasped, and leapt on to it.
The bell clanged sullenly far above him. He kicked and swung madly like an overgrown kid, eliciting discordant peals from above.
Tiring of his childish sport, he released the rope and wondered what to do next. He didn’t wonder long: there was a closed door next to the open one that led up the stairs to the belfry. What pushed him towards this door? Was it the same impulse that had brought him inside the church in the first place? Kane didn’t know, didn’t care. He had to explore.
Maybe because he had nothing better to do.
Maybe because he was bored.
The door was unlocked and he opened it and followed a short flight of stone steps down into a crypt. His boots kicked up grating echoes. It stank of earth and it was dark, but light from a small window showed him the dirt floor and another curtain, this one crimson velvet, drawn across an alcove at the far end of the crypt.
He wasted no time pulling back the curtain. The latticed window was at the far corner of the crypt and only threw a little pale light over what lay within the alcove. Kane reached for another cigarette.
A girl of stone, lying in state and clutching a baby, sculpted into the lid of a solitary tomb. Her eyes were blank marble and yet conveyed such an aura of sadness that Kane froze, cigarette lifted to his lips.
So, so sad. (Can you feel the sadness, Kane?) 122
There was a name etched into the base of the tomb, beneath the maiden’s stone feet.
Kane lit his cigarette and in the flare of the match he read the name.
His mouth formed a rictus. Sweat sprang out upon his brow.
He was cold, so horribly cold at that moment.
The marble etching said simply EMILY SAWYER.
‘Your name, I presume?’
A stranger had followed him into the crypt. He wore a velvet smoking jacket, frilly cuffs and had a bizarre, white, bouffant hairstyle.
Charmagne lay on the floor of the truck in the most absolute darkness she had ever experienced in her life.
There should have been sunlight showing through the cracks around the doors and certainly through the rusted hole: there wasn’t. It was as if deepest night had fallen outside as well as inside the truck. She lay for a moment, too scared to move, traumatised by the darkness. She had heard the roadie slam the doors and the click and rattle of the padlock. she would have to try to escape anyway. But not... just... yet. She felt like a child again - if she moved, something dreadful would snatch her.
Something with a gruesome grey eye.
Waves of horror rippled through her, making her sure she would vomit. Then she was moving. Leaping to her feet and hurling herself against the doors -