Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [94]
And Jo remembered all the indignation, all the anger, oh yes, all the hate...
The figures lurched down the ramp and advanced towards the troopers. Five of them, all wearing eighteenth-century clothing: tricorn hats, long dark, rotting overcoats with large brass-buttoned sleeves, leggings and boots with silver buckles. One was wearing the leather mask he must have adopted to perform his roadside chores, the eyeholes revealing dry sockets of bone within. Three of them still bore the remains of the nooses that had hung them around their necks, and all five were carrying long flintlock
223
pistols. Their faces were eaten away by time and the worm; what flesh remained clung precariously to yellowed bone, like lymph peeling from a fresh tattoo. The fists that clutched the pistols were also bereft of skin, and glowed white in the moonlight.
One of the soldiers - the young private who had dropped his weapon - backed away, moaning.
‘Private Councell!’ Yates barked immediately. ‘stand fast!’
Private Hooper, who had been so ineffective in terminating the singer, spun to confront his superior officer. There was a wet sheen of horror on his face. ‘This isn’t happening! It can’t be.’
Yates turned to the trooper and hope flared suddenly inside him. ‘You’re right, Hooper! This is just an illusion. The mummer’s playing with our minds, that’s all!’ Just suggestive hypnosis, then; and of course Yates was fully aware of similar assaults from the not so distant past. The Keller machine, for one. ‘Concentrate, men. Try to clear your minds. Like Hooper said: this isn’thappening.’
The leading highwayman levelled his pistol. There was a flash of gunpowder and Hooper was lying on his back in the daisies, a golf ball-sized hole in his forehead.
Yates almost lost it then. Luckily, his training and experience kicked in. ‘Fire at will,’ he shouted to the four remaining troopers as he aimed his own revolver at the lead ‘ghost’ and squeezed the trigger.
The chatter of sub-machine-guns tore through the night. The highwaymen from beyond the grave tottered and jerked under the impact of the hail of bullets, and came on.
Yates was still groping for sane answers. Of course, the Keller machine had produced hallucinations that were incredibly real toits victims. They believed they were being eaten by rats or drowning, and their belief killed them. If he could somehow convince his men not to believe in these horrors they couldn’t be hurt...
The UNIT trooper to his immediate right spun round inaperfect 180 degree turn, his FN dropping from his nerveless 224
fingers, his throat opening up to release a torrent of blood where eighteenth-century shot had ploughed through twentieth-century carotid artery. Helplessly,Yates watched him fall.
Charmagne waited meekly beside the mummer for Kane to reach them. He seemed to be taking his time, enjoying the adulation.
She could feel it herself, coming off the crowd, mixed in with the hate vibes. The adulation was confined to just the three of them, she understood that vaguely: the mummer, herself and Kane, and although she didn’t fully realise why, a suspicion growing deep in her subconscious was slowly moving to the surface. The hate -
and that was by far the stronger of the two emotions streaming from the crowd - was directed at the forces of repression beyond this select gathering. The Establishment, society, the monarchy, any system that inflicted rules and regulations which enforced poverty on one side and riches on another. Even the villagers, some of them comfortably affluent, were joining in the hate party
- they’d long forgotten who they were supposed to be reviling. She registered the electric animosity and it made her feel indefinably strong. Over to her left, she could