Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (18 page)

That Moriah hadn’t killed Petruska, that she had used her device to escape.

But that was just wishful thinking.

It was late in the evening when Gilliam finished translating the fifth wall.

The temperature had already dropped substantially. She would shortly have to finish her work for the day or else risk hypothermia.

Much of the later journal entries referred to the functioning of the bird/globe device, which appeared to be nearing completion. Gilliam couldn’t make any sense of the technical details, although she wasn’t surprised by this.

It was the last part of the journal which caught her attention:
And tonight I sleep above the bird/globe waiting only Tol’gar’s return
We’ll caress the birds

And in the safety of the mountain we’ll pass through the opening door
Entwined

This was the first time Gilliam had come across a direct reference to the location of the device. She rubbed the chill out of her arms; it had been almost an hour since the sun had sunk below the horizon, and the desert was cooling rapidly. She really ought to seal herself into her tent for the night, but she couldn’t bear to stop working after reading the last journal entry.

I sleep above the bird/globe

According to the many reconstructions of the palace, Petruska’s bed would have been situated in the centre of the room. Probably a large, canopied affair, much like Gilliam’s own aboard the royal barge. The bed, of course, was long gone. The floor of Petruska’s chamber was decorated with small hieroglyphs; according to the musicologists these represented harmonies which 99

complemented the melody etched into the walls.

There were four bird/globe symbols on the floor, marking out the points of a rectangle.

Caress the birds

Ten minutes later, Gilliam was ready to give up. She’d tried tracing each of the symbols in turn to no avail. She’d tried pressing them one after the other in every possible combination – still nothing.

She slumped down on the floor and hugged her knees. What did she think she was doing anyway? Searching for secret doors like Nancy Drew. She ought to pack up and go home and leave it for the professor to write his papers about.

She sighed. Time for bed. She read back her translation notes as she walked over to her tent. The last paragraph of Petruska’s journal was different in style to the technical reports which preceded it. Almost poetic and filled with hope and. . . love. Gilliam tried to imagine what it would have been like for the queen and her bodyguard lover, to be together in this room. Secretly working towards the day when they would escape through the gateway. It must have been terrifying. Exciting too.

We’ll caress the birds

Together

Suddenly Gilliam knew how they would have entered the mountain. She ran back to the centre of the room and kicked off her heavy boots. By stretching herself out like a starfish, she was just able to reach all of the bird/globe symbols at the same time. She pressed them.

Together.

The ground shuddered once and Gilliam felt rather than heard ancient ma-chinery grind into action. The rectangle of floor on which she was spread-eagled began slowly to descend. Dragging her down into the mountain. Down to the bird/globe, the gateway, the opening door. And away from her thermo-tent and the protection it provided from the night cold.

Gilliam shivered as she sank into the darkness.

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7

On Being Sane In Insane Places

Julia Mannheim had slept badly, waking in her room at the Institute feeling as if she had only just put her head down on the pillow. Feeling cheated of the benefit of a good night’s rest, she ran a hand through her disheveled hair as she padded through the labyrinth of corridors of the old asylum building.

She had only managed to get to bed in the early hours after the alert over the escape had finally died down. The director hadn’t actually seemed to be that concerned when the security team had reported their usual failure.

He’d just murmured that the matter was in hand in that quiet voice of his.

Well, at the end of the day he was the one who was accountable for all the research equipment. As assistant director, her responsibilities were focused on the organization of the research team. When it came to the Toys, it was his head on the block. Still, the idea of one of the Toys stumbling across the countryside unsettled her. They weren’t likely to hurt anyone, but they might give some poor soul the shock of their life.

The sudden suspension of the project by the government had left all their work half done. The prospect of another long day of tying up administrative loose ends did not inspire her. Julia entered the Institute’s morgue where two corpses were laid out on adjacent slabs. A juvenile male and a mature male adult. She added another note to her mental list of things to do. She would have to arrange for the regular delivery of sample human tissue to be discontinued.

One of the sample human tissues sat up suddenly and grinned goofishly at her.

Julia Mannheim yelped and, much to her later embarrassment, sprinted for the door.

‘Hello there,’ the mature male adult called after her. ‘I’m the Doctor. . . ’ he started, and tried to stand, but his legs buckled under him. He clutched the side of the bench to support himself. ‘And. . . I feel terrible.’

Julia Mannheim had seen some strange sights in her time at the Institute, but reanimated corpses beat everything.

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ she managed, edging back into the room.

‘People are always saying that to me. I shall get a complex,’ the naked man 101

said, hanging on to the bench. ‘I wonder, could you help me? My legs don’t seem to be working.’

He made an appeal to her with his large, droopy eyes. ‘I won’t bite.’

Julia sighed, unable to resist a patient in distress. She crossed the room and hooked her arms under his shoulders and lifted the naked man back on to the slab. He seemed completely oblivious of his own nudity. She covered him with a white sheet.

Julia’s mind was racing. How the hell had this happened? If she were in a college hospital she would have assumed that she was the victim of a medical student prank. It was a frequent occurrence back in the States – but out here in the middle of the English nowhere?

‘Now, would you mind telling me how you came to be lying in my morgue?’

His brow furrowed and he blinked in surprise. ‘I was rather expecting that you were going to be the one to do the explaining.’

‘Me?’ Julia looked at him: he appeared to be quite serious. ‘What have
I
got to explain?’

‘Everything. Why you’re kidnapping people off the streets of London will do for a start. Then I’d like to know what that black cab is? And how you’ve managed to create something far beyond the technology of this planet in the mid-twentieth century? Who’s helping you?’ he added, fixing her with a hard stare. ‘Aliens? The government? What do they want? Hmm?’

Julia felt her heart sink. He wasn’t a zombie: he was a patient. One that was clearly lost, deep in a psychosis. The poor man was hopelessly and clas-sically delusional. He must have been left behind when the last experimental ward was closed and the patients were transferred to the mental hospital at Chelmsford.

A misplaced schizophrenic, playing dead amongst the corpses. Damn, that was all she needed. Didn’t anyone bother doing a head count when they bussed the inmates out?

She patted him sympathetically on the arm. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you sorted out. I’m going to have to leave you here for a moment while I go and find someone who’ll arrange to have you taken to your new home.’

He was staring back at her, thoughtfully. ‘You’re patronizing me. How interesting. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’

Julia felt her training kick in. ‘No. The things you describe aren’t real. They only exist in your mind. They’re part of your illness. You won’t have had your medication today, will you? Damn, your records will already have been transferred. I’ll have to phone Chelmsford and get them to have a look at your medication requirements. Can you tell me your name?’

The naked man had started muttering to himself, something about barbarism and twentieth century psychiatry. He glanced up at her in response to 102

the question. ‘My name? How much time do you have? A literal translation has thirty-eight syllables – or at least it did last time I counted. And anyway, mine keeps changing. Call me the Doctor. Everyone does. Where are my clothes?’

Time for some reality confrontation. ‘You think that you’re a doctor? If that’s true, why are you lying naked in a mental hospital?’

‘I’m not a doctor. I’m
the
Doctor,’ he snapped, clearly annoyed.

It was quite common for a patient to feel anxious and angry when the safety of a delusion was being threatened by rational confrontation. Julia found herself wondering how long it would take for an ambulance to come and pick him up. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have other things to do.

‘But why am I lying naked in a mental hospital? It’s a good question,’ he continued. ‘As I said before, I was rather hoping you were going to tell me.

Feel free to gloat while you explain your plan. Well?’

‘I think that you may have been left behind when the coach took the other patients to your new home,’ Julia said, patiently. ‘This facility is being closed down.’

The patient who believed that he was a doctor shook his head and looked puzzled. ‘No, that’s not the right answer. The last thing I remember was being inside the gelatinous creature. I put myself into a trance. Jack too.’ He wagged his finger excitedly in the air, as if suddenly remembering having left something in the oven. ‘My goodness, Jack!’

Wrapping the sheet around himself, he hopped off the slab and – legs apparently recovered – hurried over to the juvenile male on the next bench. Julia was taken aback when the Doctor made a good approximation of a medical examination, checking the corpse’s vital signs. Julia couldn’t take her eyes off him. There was something deeply charismatic about the little man. His personality was magnetic – a well-documented but little understood side-effect of certain categories of schizophrenia.

The patient nodded to himself, apparently satisfied with the corpse’s progress.

‘He’s out of the trance now, just sleeping. He’ll be fine.’ He rubbed his hands together, as if preparing to get down to business.

Julia thought that his delusions were both absurd and tragic.

‘Now, on to more immediate concerns. I need to prove to you that I am not one of your patients. How can I prove to you that I’m quite sane?’

‘You can’t.’ Julia blurted out, before she could stop herself – the idea was ridiculous. More softly – more professionally – she added, ‘You don’t have to prove anything. You
must
be one of my patients. After all, you’re here, you’re describing things that can’t possibly exist. What else could explain the situation?’

103

The man sighed and started speaking rapidly to himself, as if working through a problem out loud. ‘Words won’t convince you, you’ll just take them to be symptoms of my malaise. Let’s try working with physical evidence.’

He turned to look at her again, and Julia was shaken by the intensity of his gaze. He looked like a professor gently trying to explain a basic concept when he’d much rather get on with something more interesting. ‘I take it you don’t recognize me?’ he said, after a moment.

Julia decided to go along with him. ‘No. But I haven’t spent much time on the men’s ward. My work was mostly with juveniles.’

‘Ha!’ the Doctor erupted, his face suddenly brimming with excitement.

‘Then my friend here should be known to you?’

‘Hardly. Your “friend” isn’t a patient here. He’s part of a regular supply of human material we use for research purposes. He –’ Julia realized she was in danger of colluding with the patient’s perceptions. ‘Rather, this
body
was brought here from the local cottage hospital. Despite your protestations to the contrary, this boy is long dead.’

‘Touch him.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He’s not dead, only sleeping. Touch him. His name is Jack Bartlett and he is a friend of mine. Last night we were attacked and brought here against our will. Take his pulse – you’ll find that it’s a little slower than normal, but not dangerously so.’

Julia joined the man at the other table. She was going to have to handle this delicately. Completely breaking apart a firmly held delusion could often cause a patient distress. Sometimes, although not frequently, inducing a violent response as the carefully constructed fantasy was shattered, leaving the patient in a world they no longer understood.

The juvenile male’s body was motionless. Its skin was very pale, almost grey and its eyes were sunken. She reached for its wrist, preparing to go through the motions of taking its pulse in order to attempt to bring her patient’s perceptions into line with reality.

The hand was warm.

The man noticed her surprise and raised an eyebrow in question.

She felt the pulse of the ‘corpse’ push softly against the skin of her finger.

Faint, but regular. The boy was alive.

The Doctor smiled, reassuringly. ‘Welcome to the real world,’ he whispered.

Chris sat up and hugged the army surplus bag around his skinny waist. It was cold in the trench. Through the smoke he heard the distant sound of shells falling. The Doctor lay beside him, fading badly. His ashen face was creased with pain. Bullet wounds kept appearing and disappearing on the Doctor’s 104

body, oozing thick dark blood down the front of his shirt before vanishing, only for the cycle to start over again.

‘The future,’ the Doctor wheezed, ‘and so much left undone.’

‘No!’ Chris tried to pick up the Doctor, but huge cracks appeared in his body and he turned to dust in his arms. The dust flaked into the floor of the trench, merging with the dark puddles of mud.

‘No!’ Hopelessly, Chris tried to scoop up the Doctor’s ashes.