Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [98]
Jo smiled. ‘Then you remember. so you’ll know you have to come.’
231
The Ragman.Perceptual vortex.The TARDIS.Gallifrey.Daleks.
They could be real. There was just the slightest chance they could be. The thought filled him with hope.
‘Jo?’
‘Yes, Doctor?’
‘We always win, don’t we?’
She smiled again. ‘Yes, Doctor?’
His hope faded. ‘That’s not very realistic, is it? Then it’s just like I feared: a dream within a dream. And so are you.’
The telephone rang. He jerked his head towards it.
‘You should answer that: Jo said, wiping away her tears:It might be important.’
The Doctor let it ring:And it might be another dream. Another shade.
Jo plucked the receiver from its cradle and passed it to him.
The Doctor took it reluctantly
‘Hello,’ he said carefully.
Jo vanished. The Doctor didn’t even notice. ‘Yes: he said into the mouthpiece. If you’re sure.Very well.’ He pulled himself stiffly to his feet, hung up the receiver and pushed open the police-box door.
Outside it was dark, but he could see the faint outlines of moonlight around the back doors of the cattle truck. He pressed his hand against one. It wasn’t locked. He was about to push them apart when they began to move outwards of their own accord, slowly, creaking with protest. He hesitated.
The guitarist had fixed his strings. The mummer gestured agitatedly at the band and the four undead punk minstrels launched into another atrocity ballad.
Jo blinked at them, and her confusion vanished.
At Stonehenge the law and the lawless tore into each other with renewed ferocity. The moon swung over the mayhem, and blood splashed on the sarsens.
* * *
232
Midnight. The witching hour, and now it was a new day. The mummer gazed across the sea of frenzied heads before him and released the hands of his two ‘children’. He stepped slowly backwards, nearer to the lodestone, his birthstone. Not too close.
He was only too aware that the shock waves he was divining could consume him now that the morphic fires were stoked to their fiercest intensity. He felt the pull, felt the waves of power rippling through him. His vision turned red: everything, the trees, the stones, the grass, the travellers, villagers - all red. The beasts of anarchy were about to be released upon the land. Already he could hear their snarling.
Yates ducked behind a dead elm as gunpowder ignited and bark flew from the trunk next to his face. The highwaymen were still shambling onwards, steadfastly reloading their ancient weapons with balls and ramrods, grinning their yellowed bony grins as they came.Yates found himself contemplating the surreal nature of the scene: five rotting corpses dressed in Dick Turpin outfits lumbering through buttercups in the moonlight with the bodies of modern-day UNIT troopers stretched out in death at their feet. He shook his head. He mustn’t lose himself in the dream. They’d destroyed the Keller machine and its Pandora’s box of phantoms.
All he needed to do was destroy whatever was producing these horrors of the mind.
It was no good running. He had to confront this head-on. The mummer was the answer. And if he didn’t respond to bullets, perhaps he’d respond to an honest to God grenade.
The trouble was the only one carrying grenades was Private Hooper, and he’d been the first to bite the thistles.
Yates took another look around the tree trunk. The shuffling highwayghosts were twenty yards away. If he ran fast and resumed his zigzag gait, he might be able to dodge them and their flintlocks and maybe reach Hooper’s body unmolested. Maybe.
A branch exploded above his head as another eighteenth-century weapon discharged itself angrily.
233
And maybe it would have been a hell of a lot easier if he’d used his head earlier and ordered Hooper to use his grenades straight away. But then maybe that was why he had never made major.
Hell, maybe he was being too hard on himself. Maybe there were too many maybes.
He leapt out from the cover of the trees and started his suicidal flight back across the field. If his actions surprised