Doctor Who_ The Hollow Men Part 40

'Then make it so he does not.'

The Doctor cried out as he felt the pressure of Richard's boot on his fingers.

Ace found a suitable rock, jutting from a patch of dark soil where the angular cavern walls had collapsed. She tugged at the stone, and it s.h.i.+fted, but then stopped, as if Jack knew what she had planned. Ace pulled harder, and the rock flew free in her hands.

Ace ran to the mirror. Just for a moment she thought she could see a small man struggling at the top of a pit that glowed like a furnace, but when she looked closer she could see only her own worried face s.h.i.+ning back at her.

She raised the rock above her head, and brought it down on the quicksilver surface of the mirror.

With a crack like breaking ice, a transverse fracture appeared across the mirror.

There was a sudden moan of pain far above the Doctor's head. He tried to look up, but succeeded only in knocking himself off balance.

One hand, pushed away by Richard's boot, came free, flailing out into s.p.a.ce.

His other hand gripped the top of the pit tightly, bearing his whole weight.

His fingers began to slip across the muddied gra.s.s.

Ace turned at the sound of galloping hooves. The ghost rider had reappeared. Rebecca was slung over the back of the horse. Some distance behind came another with Trevor clinging to his back.

With the same disdain as he had shown to Ace, the huntsman picked up the body of Rebecca, and hurled her through the air like a disobedient doll.

She hit the mirror with shocking force but, incredibly, the metal parted to let her through. Then it closed around her.

Ace swung at the mirror with her boot - hoping at least to rescue her friend - and the surface fractured still further into a spider's web.

The police car approached the Red Lion suspiciously. The juke box was blaring like the PA at Castle Donington, and every window was broken.

'Blimey,' said one of the officers. 'When they said there'd been a disturbance -' The Red Lion exploded in a ma.s.s of tentacles.

Ace lashed out at the mirror again. It shattered, showering her with gla.s.s.

Chaos engulfed the Doctor.

He began to fall, but a stillness surrounded him, like the eye of a hurricane.

A shrill gale of psychic energy surged across the green.

Fractured patches of reality broke through the illusion as the Doctor clung to the shattered ground by his fingertips.

'This isn't happening,' he said, his eyes tightly closed, as if the words were enough to change the world.

Then he looked up and saw the hand reaching down towards him.

Something like a train thundered into Ace, tossing her to the floor. Around her, the cavern began to crumble, the very earth collapsing with a deep moan.

Raging storms coalesced, laded, and re-formed overhead. It was like watching speeded-up photography, the clouds expanding and shrinking as if alive.

A moment later, the ice-cold wind forced her eyes shut, and the soil began to rain down upon her.

'Ah, good,' said the Doctor, grasping the hand with both of his own, and smiling as he came face to face with an angel.

'How do you do?' He stood uncertainly on the soil that surrounded the pit.

Around them the gale was ripping through the representation of Hexen Bridge, throwing villagers, and the surviving scarecrows from the real world, to the ground. Near the Doctor and the angel, a stickman exploded in a flurry of straw, which was plucked into infinity by the screaming wind. The sky, like a Turner watercolour, crackled with lightning.

'A bit windy,' observed the Doctor as the angel turned away from him. 'If I'd known, I'd have stayed indoors.' The Doctor saw Jowett, Richard and Long John being thrown about like corn dollies by the forces that had been unleashed. He was aware of something towering above him, and he looked up to find a face in the sky, as big as the world, shot through with the green of nature. Staring eyes and a mouth of needle-like teeth were framed by strands of what looked like dying ivy and the th.o.r.n.y, flowerless stems of roses.

'Jack?'

The was no reply except for the howling moan of something dying.

A more human cry made the Doctor look down, and he saw Rebecca lying in the middle of the green, moving as sluggishly as a child fighting the dream-monsters of the dark.

'You're not having her, Jack,' he shouted above the sound of the tempest. 'You have too much blood on your hands.

n.o.body else dies. You've robbed these people of their dignity for three hundred years. Fifteen generations. No hope, no peace, no future. It ends now!' The Doctor crawled across the scarred earth and reached Rebecca, cradling her in his arms.

'What are you?' came a booming voice like the clang of a plague bell.

But the question was never answered as the ground beneath the Doctor finally ripped open, and the world turned black.

The car shook as the earth beneath it trembled. The escalating voices in Hatch's mind were crying out, chanting a siren song of unity and purpose. His lips parted in a smile of simple satisfaction. Soon, the whole world would be consumed by the will of Jack i' the Green.

And then the voices stopped. Matthew Hatch screamed out in unaccustomed terror, his last truly human act.

The road in front split open, and Hatch's car plunged into the darkness. Stone and tarmac tumbled into the creva.s.se as Jack imploded, his limbs shrinking back and dying. With a claustrophobic rush of soil, the ground closed up over Hatch, throttling his screams into silence. And he died as he had lived: alone, except for Jack.

The heart of Hexen Bridge opened up as the black earth, the tendrils of Jack and every trace of the alien creature drew back upon itself. The public house, standing on the edge of the ruptured cavern, s.h.i.+vered, stood solid for a moment, and then slid into the soil as a thousand timber beams cracked. A cloud of stone and brick mushroomed in the air.

The Green Man was gone.

For a moment there was silence, and then the ground erupted again, spewing out a stream of multi-coloured b.u.t.terflies which soared high in the air over Hexen Bridge.

Ace remembered to breathe when the noise finally abated.

Her hands, as she raised them towards her face, were shaking.

She pulled herself from the rubble of the pub. Overhead, the ragged frame of the hole in the green showed receding clouds.

'Wicked,' she said, her voice a funereal whisper in the face of the destruction that had consumed the centre of the village.

The hunters had gone. She was quite alone except for Trevor Winstone lying beside her. She checked his pulse. It was faint, but regular.

She crawled across the scree towards the remains of the mirror. She could just make out the glittering slivers of gla.s.s beneath the muddy bricks and planks of wood.

A sudden chill gripped her. 'Professor?' she asked, her head snapping from side to side. The monster was defeated, so the Doctor should return now, right? 'Doctor!' she cried in desperation.

A hand, pus.h.i.+ng up through the debris, grasped her ankle.

She stifled a cry, and was about to kick at it when she recognised that the hand was human.

Covered in dust and tiny scratches. Flexing and twisting, as if trying to communicate in some form of sign language.

Human? Well, something like that.

'Professor?' She began pulling at the stones and soil beneath her feet.

'Get me out of here, Ace!'

It was the Doctor. He only ever sounded this fl.u.s.tered when the trivial trivial things in life went pear-shaped. things in life went pear-shaped.

'You OK?' she said, pulling away a thick beam of wood.

'Of course I'm not,' came the irritated reply.

She could make out his coat, the arch of his slender back.

Some distance away was a horribly begaitered shoe.

'All right,' she said, idly hurling a vast chunk of masonry into the air. 'What've you been up to?'

Finally the Doctor was revealed, curled up like a foetus. In front of him was Rebecca Baber. It looked as though the Doctor had tried to protect her the best he could when the world collapsed around them.

The Doctor sat up, brus.h.i.+ng the dust from his sleeves. 'Oh, you know, Ace. This and that. Gangsters to overthrow, dark forces to combat.'

'The usual?'

The Doctor paused, a sombre look crossing his dirt-flecked face. 'Perhaps not this time, no.'

Denman ma.s.saged his temples, groaning. The ground around him was littered with corpses he did not recognise.

People from the recent and ancient past, held together and manipulated by Jack, now released. Some were already beginning to crumble as held-off decay tore into them.

Denman remembered stumbling under the weight of creatures, a claustrophobic wave of darkness. Hands had pressed into his mouth while unceasing blows came down upon his back and legs. It was as if he was being disa.s.sembled in the most excruciating manner imaginable.

He was on the verge of unconsciousness when the stickmen had started to fall away. There was the faintest impression of people on horseback, and animals tearing into the evil creatures.

Moments later a storm, the like of which he had never experienced, had ripped over the land. It had raged like a battle in heaven, and finally died.

Denman held his head in his hands, waiting for the pain to go away. Then he remembered what had happened in Liverpool, and realised that it never would.

Steven Chen and Joanna Matson held each other tightly as the storm faded, like a nightmare blurring into welcome reality. The last finger of the wind caressed their faces just as the rain began to fall.

'Is it over?' asked Joanna.

Steven smiled and nodded, water droplets falling off his nose. 'Yeah.' He breathed deeply. 'Feel that? The air's fresh.

Clean.'

'The thunderstorm?' queried Joanna.

'No,' said Steven. 'It's deeper than that. Something's changed.' He laughed, an earthy, throaty chuckle. 'I don't believe it. After all these years. It's all over.' His eyes roved over the chalk hills and fields, a green cloth with Hexen Bridge a jewel held delicately at its centre. Towards the horizon, a dim rainbow reached for the clouds.

He looked back at Joanna, and noticed, as if for the first time, that she was still in his arms. They parted, blus.h.i.+ng.