Doctor Who: Rags by Mick Lewis

clearer, gathering momentum. He knew what the figure was. It was the reason for the tour, the philosophy behind the band, and he knew this because every nerve in his body wriggled with terror as he got nearer the crest of the hill. This was what they were all following.
    MURDER!
    He stopped on the path, tears of utter terror trickling down his cheeks. He would piss himself in a moment. Go back you old bastard - go back to your friends. Get back in your sleeping bag and pretend you never saw this hunched spectre on the hill.
    And now he could no longer see it as the gradient of the hill obscured the monument. The grass was silver beneath his feet, 81
     
    sweating dew, Above him the moon hung, a glowing, dead face. As lonely as him, but tonight it was a dreadful thing.
    It was just the moon, for God’s sake!
    He reached the brow of the hill and the tor reared into view. The figure was gone. Rod slowed his pace, treading softly towards the tower. His tired eyes left it, roved across the world stretching all around him. Looking out over the patchwork nightland he could make out objects that he knew had not been there in the day; there was one in the field below the hill - a wooden pole with a cage at the top. A black gibbet with a corpse manacled inside rusting metal ribs, its eyes stolen by crows. And there, beside a dike running with moonlight, a gallows with its highwayman trophy swinging in the breeze - Rod could hear the creak. The body swung more violently and the rope broke. Other, more distant figures tumbled from their hanging poles like rotten fruit and began to totter on long-disused legs. Some wore tricorn hats and clutched flintlock pistols in their bone hands. All of them were converging on the tor, seemingly from across the land.
    Unreality rushed him: this was a trip and nothing more. Jimmy must’ve slipped him some acid, the bastard. He tilted his head up to the sly old moon, sucking in cold air, and then looked down again. The ghostly robbers of the rich had vanished but now the countryside below had been transformed, grass seared to grey dust, trees deformed and leafless in the middle of summer. A spiteful land of ash and decay - and where Glastonbury should be there were just black remnants, bones of houses. The dikes that sliced the land were no longer filled with water, but were choked with bodies: trenches of gnarled, brittle human ruin, dead wood cast aside. Thousands and thousands and...
    Rod screamed, and twisted round to face the tor again.
    The figure was waiting for him, stepping out from the shadows of the tower.
    A shredded cloak hung from its body, stirring idly in the night breeze. Rod was shaking and crying aloud because he knew that in a moment he would have to look at the face he had climbed all 82
     
    the way up here to see - and that now he would do anything, anything, not to see it.
    And so they stood together for a timeless moment or two. Then one of them made a gesture and the other stopped crying.
    Stopped everything.
    Stopped...
    And at the bottom of the hill PCs Roebuck and Williams were being relieved by their colleagues PCs Luton and Smith. Roebuck and Williams had been sitting in their squad car for the last five hours, watching and waiting for something to happen; and, as it had turned out, without anything to report. Now they could go home, and home for both of them was only a few miles away in Wells. They were both looking forward to a good sleep and maybe a cuddle with their respective wives. Upon reaching their houses, however, they chose to do something rather significantly different instead. They woke their wives with a detached precision, stared at them for a moment ignoring all puzzled inquiries, and then set about systematically slaughtering them. In PC Williams’ case, there was a particularly troublesome teenage daughter to be dismembered too. He did that after bludgeoning his wife’s brains all over the bedroom wallpaper with a golf club. The screams would stay with