Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [86]
The band stopped playing.
Along with the rest of the crowd Jo, Sin and Jimmy turned to face the car park a few hundred yards away to their right. A growl of diesel-fuelled engines. The cattle truck was on the move. It grumbled towards the half-open gate leading into the field and then forged straight through it in an explosion of splintering wood. The filthy vehicle came on, lumbering over the tussocks towards them. The band struck up another number, and the playing was faster, the grizzled vocals more urgent as the vibration, the vibe, built within Jo, within them all.
The guitarist and bassist weaved between the tall standing-stones, trailing flexes through the daisies. The singer threw his head back and howled, and the drums beat an evil tattoo that pounded inside Jo’s skull like something very nasty was trapped in there and trying desperately to get out. The cattle truck swung in a slow trouncing curve until the back doors were facing 205
towards the band and its enrapt audience; then its engine cut out and the singer’s shriek ended. The rest of the band carried on playing, fast, faster.
The doors were opening.
Kane came to and wondered blearily what had roused him. His head felt like someone had been having a right royal go at it with a pike. But that wasn’t what had stirred him. For a moment he struggled to work out where he was. Sitting outside the pub of course, stupid. Where else would he be? The street was quiet and he wondered if it was a Sunday. Sundays in Cirbury were a special kind of hell. Then he remembered.
Everything.
And he knew what had woken him.
The music - he could hear it. The hell band was playing, but he knew instinctively it was not their racket that had jolted him from welcome oblivion. No, it was the low, evil vibration that was moving through his guts. That was coming up through his feet from beneath the ground.
He heaved himself up, and his stomach revolted against the action. He turned to the pub and threw up in the doorway, somehow sensing it was the last gesture he would ever make towards his old haunt, and feeling it was a damn suitable one.
But the music was calling...
Time to go.
One of the roadies had erected a ramp below the open backdoors of the truck, and now, walking grandly down it from inside like a princess revealing herself to her subjects for the first time, came a pretty young blonde woman. Jo recognised her; she’d seen her before, and wondered where... the Devil’s Elbow. And again at Amos Vale cemetery.Journalist. Jo felt a pang of envy at this special treatment the woman was receiving. Like she was some May queen or something. Yet the journalist didn’t seem to be exactly savouring the attention; she moved like she was in 206
dream, eyes wide and empty. Her white blouse and slacks were covered in dust and cobwebs but she made no move to brush them away as she descended the ramp and stepped trancelike towards the band.
The moon watched her approach, granting her an even more ghost-like appearance, brushing the eerie stones, too, with luminous paintwork. The band continued to play, the music thrusting towards orgasmic peaks of frenzy. The singer’s vocals had become one long guttural scream, and Jo also felt like screaming - to release all her pent-up frustrations, and embrace this music of the damned as if it would satisfy her every desire.
She was free now, at last. Tears streaked her cheeks and she groped for Sin’s hand, and found it. Sin’s face was lit with cruel relish, flushed with extreme passion. Jimmy was grinning like a lunatic and the