Free Doctor Who: Rags by Mick Lewis

opening.
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    She would scream. If Edward didn’t come back soon -
    Edward appeared. He was looking harassed and grumpy but she had never been so happy to see him.
    Unfortunately, the bald man chose that moment to interfere.
    He seized Edward’s arm and swung him round. Penelope stood up quickly. She could see John Farris, the landlord, peering out from behind a hanging row of crisp packets, and he also looked scared.
    ‘Do you mind?’ Edward shook himself free. His voice was full of outrage, but Penelope could hear the quaver of fear there too. She looked up into Farris’s eyes. And it was then she knew.
     
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    It happened very quickly, like a circus act on fast forward.
    The bald man grinned, and it was a grin wider than any Penelope had ever seen, and his eyes popped madly from his face as he seized Edward again and threw him against the wall.
    ‘Yes I do mind, sir,’ he said with a quaint country accent that was soft and sinister all at once. ‘I do mind, sir. And so do my friends here.’ He reached above Edward’s head and unhitched a long metal object from a hook. An animal leg-trap. Now he was clamping the sharp metal jaws around Edward’s neck, and handsome, brave Edward was screaming, and blood was squelching down on to the red of his livery and dousing the bald man as he wrestled the hideous contraption tighter round , Edward’s throat.
    The other two men peeled away from the bar, taking their cue.
    The man with the balaclava waited beside the door, as if he had sensed Henry was about to spill through all whey-faced and spineless. The zipper man came for Penelope. But not all at once.
    He took time to take his instrument of choice - a long viciously hooked gaffe - down from the wall, and displayed it for her with relish, like a shopkeeper demonstrating his wares, as the music I burst into brutal orgasm beyond the pub walls and Penelope screamed and screamed and...
    She saw the bear winking at her, just before her world went red, and then black.
     
     
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Chapter Seven
    Dawn broke stiffly over the Oblong Box.
    The crowd was still there. The police had been unable to move them, and had settled for clearing them away from the immediate vicinity of the pub. An ambulance, now loaded with three corpses, trundled almost sheepishly away from the scene of the butchery.
    Jo watched another vehicle, this one black, turn on the narrow road and lurch off after its white companion. In the back window a face stared out at her, eyes wide as inkwells, head bald as the mad moon.
    She shuddered and leant closer to the Doctor. Throughout the night, long after the band had ceased playing and retreated into their cattle truck like motley clockwork figures, the people had continued to arrive. In beat-up VW campers, in decrepit buses, in cars of all makes and descriptions but all sharing a similar state of shabbiness.
    ‘What I’m going to ask you to do now is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever expected of you, Jo.’ The Doctor was sitting with her on the bench, sipping a mug of tea from the pub. ‘And probably one of the most dangerous.’
    She didn’t like the sound of that at all. She tried to ask him what he meant, but her voice was a croak. She thought of the three men who had been led out of the pub by the police, docile as kittens, blood patterning them like the daubings of a mad artist.
    ‘From Coney Hill,’ someone from the crowd had told her. The words had meant nothing until Nick, who had been standing nearby with Sin, filled in the blanks.
    ‘A local asylum,’ he had said gravely. But it had seemed to Jo that Sin was smiling. Or was that just shock?
    The Doctor was talking again, the morning breeze stroking his hair. ‘I’m going to have to leave you for a while.’ He put a finger to his lips as she opened her mouth to protest again. ‘Let me finish: 63
     
    this is vitally important. I need you to stay here, with your new