Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [56]
An obscenity then, nestling behind The Cat in the Hat.
The text was scrawled below the midden artwork, and it was rife with glee in all things horrible. The story unfolded beneath his trembling fingertips: the couple - the mayor’s daughter and the magistrate’s son; the mummer; the thing squeezed from the standing stone. The artist had really tripped out in his depiction 135
of the grey creature and its subsequent vile acts when it appropriated the body of the mummer.
Kane could smell the binding, the paper of the book. It smelt of tombs, of slinking rats, of bones. It smelt of eye gouge and tongue rip, and dirty hands rudely imposing inside eviscerated bellies.
But the pictures were worse.
Kane read on.
The villagers approached the field of stones. The mayor led them, and they carried blunderbusses and a rope. The undead mummer was waiting beside the pieces of the magistrate’s son, its hands gloves of blood. It still grinned, a grin too wide to belong to living tissue. Blunderbuss shot buffeted it, slapped it back against a standing stone. Dust puffed from its body as the pellets struck home. It came on, took one of the villagers, uncorked his head from his body. Grin. Blunderbusses.Blood.
One page was just a full frame of blood. Kane could almost feel it staining through the paper into his fingers.
The rope was flung around the corpse thing’s neck; four stouthearted villagers dragged it to a nearby larch, hoisted it into the air. The mummer was not kicking, not struggling at all, only grinning.
A page devoted entirely to that rictus.
The mummer freeing itself with a slash of its wicked fingers, rolling to the grass, unwrapping the ribs of the blacksmith, splattering another page with more gruesomeness.
Then...
The retreat.
Back into stone, blunderbusses bellowing after it. The creature sank into the standing stone from which it had emerged as if slipping into a portal of quicksand. The ‘busses kicked up splinters of rock and the thing was gone.
In the truck.
In the dark.
The Ragman and Charmagne, and the things he shows her.
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She can see them in the dark: all the children. Boiling out of the sewers like an endless spring of rats. Advancing on her, hands outstretched, a litany on their lips.
Nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa nu mama nu papa.
NU MAMA, NU PAPA!!!
And Charmagne, forced to scream. scream the single important truth of her life and the reality that has marked her more than anything:
‘I’M AN ORPHAN TOO!!!!’
She was kneeling on the metal floor of the truck, and the Ragman was gone. She could hear her own sobbing echoing in the confined space - and it was a confined space, and, of course, always had been. A crack of light coming from under the back doors allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Her hair was soaked with sweat, her clothes stuck to her body. The smell of the truck was overbearing. Butchery and filth.
Her eyes were adjusting, but what they were beginning to see was no less alarming than what she had just witnessed.
She could see the vague outlines of a jumble of musical equipment: amps, speakers, guitars, a drum kit, generators. And lying sprawled amongst this mess like discarded life-size dolls she could see the vague outlines of four men.
As she watched, they began to move.
The mummers were still sitting around their camp fire, still playing their tunes. Either they were oblivious to all the carnage that had ensued across the meadow, or they simply did not care.
The magistrate found them guilty on the spot regardless, and the mayor heartily concurred. A justice of the peace was not required on this wild night. They were bound to the very rock that housed the beast. Four villagers lined up before them and zestfully unloosed their blunderbusses until the rock was splattered with more blood and brains.
Then, with much straining and grunting, and the aid of five 137
ropes and ten villagers, the large rock was unearthed from its mooring. The