Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (21 page)

Deactivation. The Doctor thought of the blond-haired boy whom he’d found in the alley in Soho. What was his name? Stone – that was it – Eddy Stone.

It seemed impossible that the boy who’d fought so hard to stay alive had only been a mannequin, animated only by Jack’s love and need to be loved in return. What would Jack make of this? Best not to tell him, the Doctor thought. No point in hurting him further.

The room was long and thin. There was a door with an opaque glass panel set into it at the far end. The Doctor pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his nose and mouth with it, trying to hang on to his stomach.

Slowly, mindful of where he found his footing, he began to wade through the human swamp towards the door on the far side.

He was halfway across when something snagged his ankle in the depths of the bodies. The Doctor froze, trying to prevent his imagination from running wild. He waited for a moment and then tried to move on. Something pulled at his ankle again, only harder this time.

There was something alive at the bottom of the pile of bodies. A something that had wrapped itself around his foot. The Doctor fought an impulse to make a mad, desperate dash for the far side of the room. If he fell he might end up under the sea of corpses – it wasn’t a prospect he relished.

Instead he bent over until his face was only a foot from the surface of the swamp and reached down through the entwined limbs until he found his own ankle. A cold hand was gripping it tightly.

A shiver ran up his spine.

The Doctor swallowed and began to prise off the icy fingers one by one.

He’d almost freed himself when a strangled hoarse cry emerged from some-116

where beneath him and the hand transferred its grip from his ankle to his wrist.

The Doctor yelped in surprise and fear and yanked his hand free. The surface of the sea of dead mannequins began to heave and fall, the corpses shifting like flotsam on a rough sea. Something was coming up after him.

Whether it was tiredness or just plain fear, the last remains of the Doctor’s bravery left him; he turned and started to try to run out of the swamp. Inevitably, he lost his footing and fell face down against the bodies. They were soft, cool and dry against his face. He clawed at several of the moving bodies as he attempted to get back on to his feet. He only succeeded in tearing the skin of several of the Toys. Thick red blood seeped out of the saggy cadav-ers, adding a new chaotic pattern to the regular blue and white stripe of his pyjamas.

And then, behind him, a blank-faced mannequin erupted out of the surface of the swamp, howled in rage or perhaps in pain and then leapt at him, using its long, sharp fingernails to scratch at his face. The Doctor tried to bat it away, but his blows only glanced off its thin, muscular grey body.

It thrust itself forward until it was leaning over him, and all he could see was its empty, oval head silhouetted by the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The Doctor fought on, slapping the creature’s head with the heel of his open hand. As he did so, his fingers caught in the creature’s face and he retched bile as they sunk into the thick, tacky flesh. The air around the creature’s face was filled with a rich aniseed flavour. Instinctively, he pulled his hand back, but his fingers were embedded, up to his knuckles, in the mannequin’s soft face and as they came away they tore the creature’s blank face from its head as if it were a mask.

It was a mask. And beneath it was the face of a young woman. Her eyes were wide and saucer-like. Her mouth opened to make a silent scream. Her face was blistered and inflamed by the flesh-mask. She made a few pitiful guttural sounds and then collapsed on top of the Doctor, all the fight suddenly gone out of her.

For a moment there was stillness, the silence only interrupted by the occasional rasping breath of the young woman. The Doctor stared at the pancake of flesh as he felt it shift and slide on his hand. The aniseed smell was stronger now – the Doctor was grateful for it as it hid the stench of the rotting bodies around him.

After a few minutes, the Doctor regained his footing and dragged the young woman to the far side of the room. Despite the scars and blisters left by the mask the Doctor could see that she was no more than seventeen. Her head had been roughly shaved at some point and now thin, dark stubble was growing back.

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He pulled her into his arms, supporting her head with his hand. He was only vaguely aware that he was making soft reassuring noises to her in a language that didn’t belong to this world. The Doctor could feel her growing weaker in his arms, he sensed the life drain out of her. There wasn’t anything he could do and so he resolved to sit with her until. . .

Just until.

She was unlike the Toys the Doctor had seen in the ward and in the hologram recording. They were clearly artificial creatures grown from Moriah’s tissue and organ cultures. Grown from the bodies of the black cab’s victims.

The young woman moaned and he stroked her head gently. Perhaps she was part of an earlier version of the Toys? When Moriah used whole human beings, fashioning them into his therapeutic instruments.

Whatever Moriah was doing here, it had nothing to do with healing. A person capable of so cruelly hurting and exploiting someone for their own ends couldn’t possibly be committed to helping people in distress. The idea of inflicting this level of pain to help others was horribly absurd. No, whatever Moriah was about, whatever he was trying to achieve in this ghastly place, it wasn’t psychotherapy – whatever Julia Mannheim thought.

Why were the search for scientific truth and moral blindness so often bed-fellows? The Doctor grimaced. He rather suspected that Julia Mannheim’s scientific detachment was going to be rudely shattered.

A noise cut through his thoughts. It was the woman in his arms, her voice was a tiny breath – too faint for the Doctor to make out what she was trying to say. It was only when he curled over to try to listen more closely that he realized she had uttered her last words and had died.

The Doctor sat with his back against the wall for what felt like a long time, just cradling the dead girl in his arms, looking at the sea of corpses in front of him. And then he stood up, opened the door and left the room.

They found the Chinese boy curled up and sobbing in one of the carriage toilets where Patsy had hidden him. He was more alert than he had been on the journey up until now. Chris picked him up and hugged him tightly.

After the coldness of the roof, the little Chinese boy felt incredibly warm and smelt of sleep. His heart was like a tiny engine pounding in Chris’s arms.

Something inside Chris melted, the hardness he needed to fight, and he stood for a moment, nuzzling the drowsy child in his arms. His ears were still ringing from the tunnel.

Patsy matter-of-factly examined the boy over Chris’s shoulder, gently opening one of his eyes with a finger. ‘The sedatives are wearing off. He’ll be all right.’

‘What’s his name?’ Chris said.

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Patsy took the boy from him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, flatly. ‘Does it matter?

Whatever the next person decides, I guess.’

They were interrupted by several passengers, led by the man in the bowler hat who Patsy had rudely dissuaded from sharing their compartment. They managed to look surprised when the bowler-hatted man reported that someone had been assaulted on the train and no one could find any of the staff.

Had they seen the ticket inspector?

Patsy and Chris exchanged glances and said that they hadn’t.

‘Come on,’ Patsy said, when they were alone once more. ‘We need to get off the train at the next station. The police are going to be crawling all over the place.’

Jack Bartlett was dreaming. Dreaming that he was on the bottom of a vast ocean. He was struggling to swim to the surface, but his legs were incredibly heavy and he kept being pulled back down to the seabed. Finally, he couldn’t hold his breath any longer – he relaxed his aching lungs and waited for them to flood with salt water. . .

‘Jack,’ a voice said close to his ear. Jack woke with a start and gasped for breath, feeling as if he really had just surfaced from deep in the ocean. He was lying on a cold bench. Marble. It slowly dawned on Jack that he was in a morgue. And he was lying on the slab.

‘Oh blimey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Am I dead?’

The Doctor was sitting next to him, his arm resting gently on Jack’s. He smiled, kindly. ‘Ssh. You’re not dead, very much alive in fact. But we’re in a lot of trouble, a lot of danger. Keep your voice down.’

Jack swung his legs off the bench and hopped down beside the Doctor. He realized too late that his feet were full of pins and needles and collapsed in a heap on the floor. ‘Oww!’

‘Ssh,’ the Doctor chided. He knelt down beside Jack and started to rub the life back into his numb legs. ‘I think it’s an effect of the anaesthetic. You’ll be all right.’

‘Why am I wearing pyjamas?’ Jack asked, noticing that the Doctor was similarly attired. He realized that he’d never seen the Doctor without his funny little hat. ‘What happened to our clothes?’

‘I’ve no idea. Were you particularly attached to them? If it’s really important I suppose I
could
go and look for them, but I’m a bit more concerned with getting us both out of here alive.’

‘I see.’ Jack thought about this. The events of the night before came rushing into his head like a tidal wave crashing on to a dusty beach. ‘Hey, what happened to that black cab? Blimey! I was inside of it. Where are we, Doctor?

What’s going on?’

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The Doctor finished his impromptu massage and fixed Jack with a weary look. ‘To take your questions in order: I don’t know; somewhere very dangerous; nothing good. What’s the last thing that you remember?’

Jack searched his memory. ‘Being sucked inside that horrible taxi and then. . . oh –’ he found himself suddenly blushing furiously ‘– you kissing me.’

The Doctor laughed. Jack thought that it was an easy laugh – not one out of awkwardness or embarrassment. ‘I had to blow the liquid from your lungs.

I put you into a trance to reduce your body’s requirement for oxygen to near zero. It’s a little trick I picked up from a Tibetan.’

Jack grinned. ‘I bet that’s what you say to all the boys.’ He wasn’t really sure that he understood what the Doctor was saying, but that probably only meant that things were getting back to normal, as only half of what the little man said ever made any kind of sense. ‘So you weren’t kissing me then?’

‘No,’ the Doctor said and climbed to his feet. ‘You’re about nine hundred and eighty years too young for me, Jack Bartlett,’ he added, as he headed for the door. ‘Not to mention an entirely different species.’

Different species? Things were definitely getting back to normal. ‘Good,’

Jack whispered to himself, as he followed the Doctor out of the room.

‘Should we be doing this?’ Jack asked as the Doctor picked the lock to Moriah’s private quarters.

‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ the Doctor replied, busy with a hairpin.

‘Thought not.’ The corridor was empty. There didn’t seem to be anyone in this part of the hospital. The pyjamas he’d woken in were too big for him.

Jack folded back the long sleeves of the jacket and rolled the trouser bottoms into turn-ups. The linoleum floor was cold under his bare feet and he felt vulnerable without his shoes and socks on.

After a moment, the Doctor finished working on the lock and pushed the door gently. ‘Ta-da!’ he announced, as it swung silently open. He stepped to one side. ‘After you,’ he said.

Jack stepped over the threshold and into the room beyond. He let out a low whistle. Whoever lived here didn’t want for much. It was a large room, bigger in fact than the whole ground floor of his mum’s and dad’s place back in Darlington. The walls were wood panelled and lined with tall bookshelves.

Thick rugs covered the floor and an open fire lit up the room with a warm orange glow. It reminded Jack of a gentleman’s club like the ones he sometimes walked past on Pall Mall. He’d never actually been in a room like this before.

In fact, he’d only ever seen them at the pictures.

The thick carpet gently tickled his bare feet as he walked around the room.

One corner of the room opened out into a windowed turret, a large wooden 120

desk sat in the circular space, its chair positioned so the occupier could look up from his work and gaze out over the grounds of the building. Jack watched as the Doctor crossed to the desk and began to root through the stacks of papers laid out upon it.

The Doctor flicked through great sheaves of papers so quickly that for a moment Jack thought he was just using them to fan himself. It was only when he joined the Doctor and saw his mouth moving slightly that Jack realized that the Doctor was actually
reading
each page that flashed past his eyes.

‘You’re from somewhere else, aren’t you?’ Jack began, giving voice to a suspicion that had been growing since the previous night. ‘I mean really somewhere else, like Mars or Krypton or somewhere?’

The Doctor’s mouth twitched slightly at this but he proceeded with his task, continuing to read at his roller-coaster pace. Jack cast his eyes down at the papers on the desk. The paper looked old and stiff, like parchment. Someone had etched delicate symbols on the sheets. Animals, mostly. Some snakes, furry horses and something that looked like a lizard that stood on its hind legs, like a person. One of the symbols caught Jack’s eye. It was a bird of paradise framed by a circle. The bird in the circle was elegant and exotic, and was clearly preparing for flight. He’d seen that image before, carved on to the surface of the glass sphere in Gordy Scraton’s nightclub.

‘Is this Egyptian writing, Doctor, you know, hierographics?’

‘Glyphs, Jack. Hieroglyphs.’ He shook his head, irritably. ‘Ancient Egyptian isn’t the only language with a pictorial alphabet in the Galaxy, you know. And this one certainly didn’t originate on this planet.’ The Doctor dropped the papers he’d been reading on to the desk with a satisfying thump. ‘Don’t they teach you anything useful in your schools?’