Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [83]
This village owes them a lot!
Simon was laughing. God, he still remembered that stupid line, even though he could scarcely remember his mother’s face without looking at a photograph.
The Village of Nobodys owes you a lot, does it, Sawyer? Why, what did your inbred family do that was so special? Anybody care to tell me?
He hadn’t realised he was speaking aloud until Kane suddenly looked blearily up at him, grinned, and said:
‘We drove away the monster. That’s what we did. But monsters always come back, don’t they? They always come back!’
Kane was grinning, and confronted by that grin Simon could do nothing but back away across the street, in the path of a Mini that swerved wildly to avoid him, honking furiously. Without another word Simon threw himself into the driver’s seat of his Jag, slamming the car door behind him. He turned the key in the ignition, not needing to look round to know that Kane was still grinning at him from across the road. Still grinning.
Simon swung the Jag in a curve, aiming the bonnet at the pub.
At Kane.
He completed the tight semicircular manoeuvre, missing the drunk by a couple of feet, then steered up the high street with a growl of acceleration.
He was getting the hell out of town.
But the hell in the town wouldn’t let him.
He was pulling up to the junction just beyond the last house.
Away in the hazy summer distance he could see the white horse galloping across the blue hills he remembered so well from his childhood, the woods fringing the chalk cutting a cluster of gold in the glorious evening light. He paused and changed down as a 198
lorry bustled past on the main road to Marlborough. The sight of the horse calmed him, or maybe it was the realisation he’d left that hated trap of a village hopefully for the last time. Why in God’s name had he ever decided to go back?
Well, he knew the answer to that well enough. He wanted to show them, didn’t he? Wanted to show all the useless, retarded good-for-nothings that he’d done something with his life. That he’d made it.
Well, he’d done that.
Hadn’t he?
He swung the Jag across the junction and picked up speed, heading east towards London. The needle kicked towards fifty, sixty... sixty-five. The last of the standing stones reared up directly beside the road as if to bid him a sarcastic farewell, and suddenly there was a figure beneath it. A gaunt, hunchbacked figure in grey tatters, with grey flesh too, and a horrible head crowned with writhing things and the car was no longer under his control and my God he could see the creature’s gruesome features and they were a twisted likeness of Kane’s!
The Jag, doing a happy sixty-eight miles an hour, ploughed into the standing stone with a horrendously dull impact-sound of crumpling metal and shattering glass.
Nobody in the village even noticed.
Dusk over Cirbury. The community mingled with the travellers amongst the stones as the band took up its position.
Silence fell over the ancient meadow. A few rooks circled the elm trees, rowing with each other in their own particular eldritch fashion. The sheep hurried away to a far corner of the field. The first stars poked through the skies, and the moon swung out from behind a cloud as if to say: entertain me.
The singer stood behind his microphone. His shades were on, of course. His leather jacket looked like it had been dragged through a farmyard; the colourful paper tatters covering his hose trousers fluttered in the evening breeze. His grass-green hair stood up 199
wildly, imparting, along with his saturnine looks, an overall impression of a punk Pan standing before his beasts.
The beasts: guitarist hunched behind and to the left of the singer, top hat with hinge crown, mummer rags, big leather boots, stubble, shades; skinhead drummer snarling behind his snare drum; Sid Vicious bassist in