Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [63]
The Chinese girl knocked them out of his hand. She turned to a tall punk next to her who wore dark eyeliner and an earring in the form of an upside-down crucifix bearing a snake.
‘You saw him; he was talking to a member of the Establishment, thinking we couldn’t see him. Conspiring to betray us. He’s a police spy.’ She turned towards Jo who was staring at Mike without any expression. ‘And he’s your friend.’
The punks and hippies standing in the little clearing swivelled towards Jo.
Sin’s face was a thing of hate as she pointed at Jo. ‘Pigs!’ she spat. The tall punk beside her took up the chant and soon the others were joining in, vicious glee making them ugly.
‘Pigs! Pigs! PIGS!’
The first thing the Doctor noticed in the darkness of the truck was just exactly how dark it was. His questing hand found the slim pencil torch inside his cloak pocket and he directed it ahead of him, thumbing the button.
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He expected to see a confined corrugated iron space, jumbled with musical equipment.
What the torch beam revealed, however, was entirely different.
There were no walls or floor, but an endless dreary tract of black weeds. The beam faltered a good fifty yards away, only hinting at the twisted landscape of despair. Trees were black bones that teetered into dust as he watched; hillocks bore sculptures that might have been the mutated remains of buildings fused and tormented by horrible forces. Nature had been raped. He could taste the death of the world: a slight breeze left its sick flavour on his tongue like the kiss of a decomposing lover. No more cities, no cathedrals, no palaces, no temples. All the petty vanities and sophistication swept away like dust.
Someone, or something, had unleashed the beasts of anarchy.
The beasts of anarchy? The phrase had slithered unbidden into his mind like something alien and intangible and very nasty. It meant nothing to him, but it conjured more unease. Reeling with the shock of it all, he took a tentative step forward and his shoe slipped into a viscous steaming pool. He could smell the contents, and he moved his foot hurriedly, stepping around the wide tarn of blood.
The Doctor realised his hearts were racing against each other, and that primal fear was rearing up inside him. ‘Reality-wound,’
he said aloud, as if the application of logic would shy away the horror. It didn’t. A shivering wail kicked up out of nowhere - the hopeless moan of terror of a child locked in an eternal nightmare nursery where rocking horses cackled, dolls jerked mad fingers and teddy bears danced obscene dances, disembowelling themselves to the evil chimes of a musical box. And, imagining the images, the Doctor saw them.
Saw the images, heard the sounds.
And then, like ghosts, they were gone, to haunt the bedrooms of millions of crying children throughout the civilised world.
The Doctor was walking across a landscape generated by what could only be the festering thought processes of a madman.
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A madman or a monster.
He walked on through the criddeweeds, past more red tarns, and streams of gore along which human heads bobbed, skin seared like melted toffee. Once he passed a crumbling stairway that led to a torso balanced on the top step as if it were a waiting prize. Severed, burned hands were scattered on each stair. Arms thrust out of the ashy soil like gruesome plants. The Doctor walked on determinedly, ignoring the bone obelisks that were erected amongst the weeds as if hikers had trekked this way, losing their minds as they went and constructing hellish cairns to mark their passing.
His torch beam eventually found the rock on the horizon, raised on a dais of rotting human bodies and surrounded by a moat of blood. It was obviously a centrepiece to this whole horrendous tract of unreality. He approached it carefully, torch sweeping the barren surroundings for any movement and finding none.
A young woman with long blonde hair lay on the rock, arms and legs outstretched. The Doctor paused at the moat, then leapt