Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [55]
Jingling.Charmagne watched.
He was begging. He had taken off his cap, and its bell jingled as he held it out to the kissing couple. Had they still not heard the bells?
Or were they ignoring this miscreant from across the divide?
The mummer obviously thought so, and decided to cross all barriers in one fell swoop: he touched the young man.
Charmagne watched.
The young man released his love. His face, her face, were masks of outraged arrogance. He snatched his arm free and struck. The mummer fell, awkwardly, dropping his begging cap, his feet slipping on the dewy grass, his head pounding against a standing stone as he went down.
Charmagne heard the crunch. she saw the red smear where his skull had cracked.
The young aristocrat stood over the corpse for a moment, gazing, his face ablaze with revulsion and excitement. The woman clung to him, lips shivering, and then... smiling. She tugged at him
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and he turned to see the smile, then kissed it hungrily.
The body lay where it had fallen. The blood trickled down the uneven surface of the rock, and Charmagne saw that it formed a face, a ghastly, grinning blood-face.
The face was moving....
Pushing outwards, stretching from the rock. Made of the rock, with a mask of blood covering features that were grinning, obscene.
A grey head now protruded from the stone: mouth, nose, eyes, drip, drip, dripping blood on to the grass.
A neck followed, rock-coloured too. Then the body, squeezing forth like a calf from its mother, spindly shoulders squirming as it struggled to free itself.
It was out of its stone womb, this grey figure, naked in the moonlight, sniffing the air like a beast, licking at the blood that dripped down its face, trembling all over as if wallowing in the spurt of violence, drinking in the pertinence of what had caused it.
It smiled.
This newborn creature with a head full of hate - smiled. A child appreciating its first vestigial emotion.
And the smile was horrible.
Snail eyes watched the oblivious lovers. It stalked them, spidery thing of malice. Hands long and thin like stone knives, and the worms were stirring on the scalp.
It stalked them, and Charmagne heard it hiss.
The lovers turned.
It was gone.
The grey thing from the stone was nowhere to be seen.
As soon as the dead mummer began to move Charmagne knew where it had gone.
The corpse’s head twitched and for a moment the dead eye were grey as stone. The head lifted, and the lips smiled.
The lovers backed away and found themselves trapped by standing stone that leant towards them, almost as if to embrace 134
them, and the mummer was jerking like a marionette and stiffly on its feet now, yes, stalking the lovers frozen there in fear against the stone and Charmagne saw it all she saw -
Oh, she saw.
The aristocrat was unravelled. Bits of him scattered by hands that were dead but no longer human. The woman’s lovely face was cradled by those bloody hands, and then kissed. She screamed, and the screams would wake the -
They must surely wake the village, at least, Charmagne thought, but the mummer was too busy with the woman to care, and her lovely dress was a tattered thing now as he took what he wanted, grinning a dead grin all the time, as he took her against the embracing stone.
Then the groping thing, the dead thing, the mummer from hell, let her go.
And boy, did she run.
The memories returned with each page he turned. His horror was a trapped thing inside him, and it would never be free, never be exorcised. It had lain dormant all these years, just waiting to be awoken. And maybe he was the trapped one, and the horror would not let him go now that it was stretching and yawning inside him.
The book was old, and it was full of dust. Just like it always had been. A dust thing.A horror thing. He stared at the pictures -
grotesque artwork pencilled from the edge of madness. No sane mind could have conjured such four-colour atrocities. Faces were contorted, either by fear or by malice;