Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [97]
They’re only a mirage they’re only a mirage they’re... He darted a frantic look over his shoulder.
The mirages were still coming.
Captain Yates, what a fraud. He’s running away from ghosts.
Always thought you were a bit wet, Mike. Even when I was flirting with you, you big girl’s blouse.
229
Jo could see him dashing frantically towards the edge of the field. What a prat. If he’d had any nouse, he’d have torn his uniform off and joined them in their Hate Day celebrations.
Thesolstice was imminent, and solstices always meant something weird, didn’t they? Midnight would unleash the dogs of war assuredly. She would be dancing at their snapping heels.
She glanced at Sin. The Chinese girl looked gorgeous and lethal and Jo wanted to kiss her again. Sin released her hand while she groped for a cigarette, and then hunched forward to light it, and in the space where her head had been Jo could see right through the crowd, and over to where Nick sat slumped against a stone.
Nick was the voice of dissent, wasn’t he? And that’s what happened to people who didn’t stand in line.
she frowned. That didn’t make sense. They were all fighting for the right not to have to stand in line, weren’t they? Why did she suddenly feel so confused and...
Alone?
The band had paused between songs. The guitarist’s strings had snapped like spider threads and he was stoically fixing them, while the singer spat into the crowd impatiently and the mummer stood in a circle with his two chosen ones.
Jo remembered that she was supposed to hate and, for a very brief moment, wondered why.
The door of the police box opened.
The Doctor didn’t look up at first. It would only be another phantom from his brain, here to torment him. He felt so very old and tired. Perhaps he was on the brink of regeneration.
Regeneration?
That was just another cheating memory. Another delusion. He was a mad old man dressed like Noel Coward, sitting hunched in a police box. That was it. No Daleks, no Cybermen. There never had been, and never would be. They were simply the products of a crazy, deluded mind. His own.
‘Doctor?’
230
The visitor had spoken. Still he did not look up. It sounded like a young girl. He knew who it sounded like, but then she didn’t exist either. She was like the Master and the autons. And, just like them, she’d come to terrorise this poor old man.
‘Doctor, please...’
There was a broken sob in the plea that was so familiar. Don’t look up - it’ll only strengthen the delusion.
Don’t look up.
‘We need you, Doctor.’ She sounded desperate, forlorn.
Terrified. He raised his head and looked at Jo.
She was standing over him inside the cramped confines of the police box. He blinked at her dazedly.
‘Go away!’ he snapped.
She knelt down before him, eyes wide and tearful.
‘But we really need you. Everything’s going horribly wrong.’
‘Yes. Well, it usually does, doesn’t it? And then I come along and fix it. Well, not this time, my dear.’
‘Why not?’ she sobbed. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Perhaps I’ve woken up. Perhaps Idon’t want to play any more.
Perhaps I just want to go home.’ He thought for a minute.
‘Wherever that is.’
‘You’ve got to help us, just like you always do.You can’t give up now The world’s gone bad. The monsters are here... Doctor, the monsters are loose in England.’
The Doctor smirked. ‘Thinking parochially as ever, eh, Jo?
England’s not the centre of the universe you know. The fate of the cosmos does not hang on the fate of the home counties’
‘Wiltshire, actually, Doctor. And maybe, this time it does.’
He looked at her carefully. She seemed real, her tears and her anxiety, at least. ‘Did he send you?’
‘Who?’
The one who calls himself the