Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [68]
The voice was a bizarre mismatch of British accents and periods, sliding from Tudor grandiloquence to twentieth-century gutter slang. Hushed, then strident, whispered then guttural. A changing journey through mores of expression and enunciation that were hypnotic to the ear.
‘Everything must be levelled!’
These were the first words to pass the grey slug lips. Then came more: and as they came, four shapes shuffled out of the darkness to guard their mentor. The reanimated amalgamation of four seventeenth-century mummers, executed and then buried on Dartmoor, and the doomed punks who arrived at the same spot three hundred years later. The Doctor understood their existence and their creation in a flash of telepathic intuition and, while his skin crawled at their unnaturalness, his mind reeled at the morphic powers inherent in the Ragman that were used to fuse eight separate essences into one Frankensteiniansupergroup of resurrected flesh, bone and irony.
‘Hate ‘n’ insurrection, channelled by my mummers and their strife music, will prise wide the fissure ‘tween rich and poor.
Society will slide into the hole for ever. This hole will be where greenery turns to black; sophistication transforms into nihilism; architecture to ruin. I mean it maaan!’ And here the being gurgled unpleasantly with what the Doctor could only assume was laughter. ‘Everyone will be equal.’
‘Everyone will be dead,’ the Doctor stated simply, aghast at the extent of the Ragman’s vision.
The being nodded its boulder-like head, and the worms twisted idly like seaweed in a current.
162
‘Death be the only true state of equality.’ A set of panpipes was suddenly at the monster’s lips, and he was playing notes of such haunting horror the Doctor felt compelled to fall to his knees. He saw a vision in his mind of this murderous Pied Piper leading his children screaming into a cataclysm - the only solution the alien could accept as the logical answer to his twisted and abnormal philosophy.
The Ragman replaced the pipes inside his tatters and gestured at the gruesome landscape of body parts and black weeds around them. ‘This is but a foretaste of my whims. This is but one land I will level. There are plenty more in need o’ my attentions.’ The worms writhed ecstatically as the being’s excitement rose. The Doctor backed away, terror rising within him like a great wave, and then he was running blindly, desperately, as impossible rain began to fall inside the nightmare truck, turning ash into mud beneath his feet. The Ragman’s words echoed around him as he ran, a mad monster’s litany:
‘Pretension shall putrify. Elitism smoke like a gutted corpse’s entrails in the rain. Sophistication will become defecation.
Grandiloquence shall be gored by degradation.’
The Doctor was running nowhere and still the Ragman was in front of him, grinning obscenely, tatters lifting in unison with the slowworms. The Time Lord stopped, though horror was fisting his soul.
‘You’re not championing equality,’ he panted,’you’re celebrating nullity.’
‘They are the same, frilly one,’ came the croaking response.
‘They are the same.’
On the steps of the Bristol University Hall...
Princess Mary hesitates. she is level with Pole. She is also flanked by two bodyguards. she hesitates, and our hero seizes his moment. He drops the camera with a SMASH to the pavement, And he sweeps out the revolver in one fluid movement. He...
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163
The Ragman approached the Doctor, seemingly gliding through the darkness without taking steps. One grey arm shot out, the hand snapping closed around the Doctor’s neck. The Time Lord froze in the being’s grip, all will to struggle sucked away. Tilting the Doctor’s head back, the Ragman examined him thoughtfully.
‘You too are an Everyman, like me, Doctor; a wanderer with no distinction, no shackles - a Man of the People. Like me you enjoy fiddling while societies burn. It feeds you, this constant interfering, this toppling of tyrannies, this trampling of egocentricities.’
The slowworms wound around each other as if in orgasmic