Doctor Who: Rags Read Free Page A

yards away from the table. The Brigadier followed its trajectory, a look of buffoonish incredulity on his face. The Doctor was more interested in the sensor probes. They were twin cones of alloy cannibalised from the guts of the TARDIS console, and were connected to the ship by leads straggling away from the desk between the blue double doors. Now they were flashing inimically and urgently and, for some reason he couldn’t fathom exactly but suspected must be due to the sensors being linked to the very core of the TARDIS, their epileptic activity filled him with instant dread.
     
    Out in the howling Dartmoor night something was moving. A large and filthy cattle truck was pulling up next to a tor on a road obstructed by two broken vehicles. The engine growled for a moment like a grumpy beast, then cut out.
    The creature from the rock watched three men descend from the cab and approach the tor. These were bad men; the creature knew that from the ease with which they had been summoned.
    They were bad, and they were vicious. They were hungry for darkness and sin.
    They would do.
     
    She was standing outside the railway station and she couldn’t remember why. Was she supposed to be meeting someone? For that matter, which station was it? The taxis parked in ranks didn’t give her any clue, nor did the grimly modern buildings across the busy square. Somewhere European, she guessed.
    Amsterdam? Then that would be the Centraal Station behind her, and she would recognise it when she turned round to look at it.
    For some unaccountable and disturbing reason, she couldn’t turn round. But she knew it wasn’t Amsterdam. More like Eastern Europe, judging from the architecture. And now a boy was beckoning to
     
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    her, so it must be him she was supposed to be meeting. He was standing beside a taxi, and he was smiling. Face a little pale, but his eyes were honest, and he was dressed well. And...and for some reason she knew she had to follow him. So she did, and it must have been something to do with her distracted state of mind, because it hardly seemed to take any time to leave the large square and to find herself in a narrow passageway hemmed in by buildings that must once have been picturesque and Gothic but were now grimy and somehow... shamed - as if they had for too long witnessed events that had marked them with guilt.
     
    The boy was standing at the end of the passageway, and he was still smiling, still beckoning, and the sun was going down behind him, which was strange because she had the distinct impression it had been broad daylight when she had been waiting outside the station. Now the alley was a trench of shadows, and the boy looked drabber, dirtier, his smile not so welcoming and innocent.
    More guileful, desperate.
    Charmagne began to feel pricked with dread. She should turn round, she knew and leave this lonely place, so near and yet so far from the busy square. She should leave. But again, it was impossible to turn. And now something was happening in front of her. A grinding sound dragged her attention to another, even smaller, alleyway branching off to the right. In the shadows she could just make out a round metallic object sliding across the paving. A hand was emerging from a hole darker than the shadows, like a pale, dirty rat questing for food. An arm followed, begrimed and sleeved in tatters. A small arm. Now a head, the head of a child, raised itself from the hole; and the face was staring at her with all the loneliness and desperation and hate that should never be in the face of a child. A boy, no more than nine, popped out of the sewer and stood there before her in his rags. Hand outstretched.
    ‘Nu Mama,’ he said. ‘Nu Papa,’ and Charmagne saw his broken teeth. The first boy - the one she had followed into this gloomy place and who she now realised was as ragged as the second -
     
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    had approached her now, and was pointing at the boy in front of her, at the hole behind him, which was