Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (38 page)

He had no idea which direction Patsy had taken. The smog had reduced visibility to only a dozen metres. Damn! He shouldn’t have let her storm off like that. There was no telling what could happen to her in the state she was in. No telling what she might do to herself. Feeling crippled with responsibility, Chris chose a direction at random and headed off. He’d only covered a few metres when he heard a woman’s voice cry out.

Patsy! It was hard to ascertain which direction her cry had come from.

Trying to convince himself that he wasn’t just guessing, he turned on his heel and started to run in the opposite direction.

It was after midnight, when Inspector Harris left the Middlesex Hospital. The casualty department was like something out of the war. It had been a long time since he’d seen the wounded have to wait to receive treatment.

He’d stayed with the injured boy he’d found in the riots until a nurse had come to dress the wounds on the lad’s face.

There was still the sound of fighting coming from the nearby streets, but Harris didn’t have the energy or the stomach to deal with any more violence.

Without knowing why, he made his way to the Tropics.

The club was silent, but the door wasn’t locked so he let himself in, noticing as he did so that his hands were shaking. The cold?

There was a handful of people sitting quietly on the sofas, cradling drinks.

A heavy silence filled the room. Harris was reminded of the underground shelters during the war. Tilda looked up from the bar when she saw the door open.

‘Oh it’s you,’ she said. Not the warmest welcome he’d ever received. ‘How’s our Lil then?’

The middle-aged policeman opened his mouth, intending to complain yet again about her disrespectful language, and took himself completely by surprise by bursting into tears.

Tilda’s harsh expression melted. She poured out two glasses of whisky. ‘You and me both,
deah
.’

∗ ∗ ∗

222

‘Keep back!’

Chris skidded to a halt after he charged out of the smog and almost fell upon Patsy and her attacker. The man was slightly built, with close-cropped hair and a smart black suit, but his eyes were full of wildness and terror.

‘Keep back,’ he warned Chris again, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. He ran the end of the gun down Patsy’s cheek in a parody of tender-ness. ‘This is my town, do you understand?’ he told her. ‘It don’t belong to you and your weirdo friends. It’s mine.’

‘I understand that,’ Chris nodded, adopting the conciliatory tone he’d used to negotiate many hostage situations. ‘This is your town,’ he repeated. ‘All yours.’

‘You’re one of them,’ the gun-man told Patsy. ‘I saw you singing at that club when my devil came.’

Oh Goddess, Chris thought, this man’s completely psychotic. How on Earth was he going to handle this? How on Earth was he going to handle this on his own?

‘I’ll show them I can use a gun. I’ll show all of them. Prove it to the whole frigging world. The devil said that Gordy Scraton’s a coward but I ain’t. Oh no.’

Chris took a small step forward, trying to maintain eye contact with the man, who’d begun to drool. ‘Gordy? Is that your name?’ It was familiar. The Doctor’s account had told of a criminal working for people who’d created the Toys. What the hell had they run into?

‘I know that you’re not a coward. Gordy,’ he said, mustering all the sincerity he could. ‘You don’t need to prove that to me. I know that. Everyone knows that. Give me the gun, then you can tell me all about it, hey?’

The whole point of flattering an armed suspect was to disarm them – literally as well as figuratively. While Chris would be trying to reassure and charm the suspect, Roz would be stalking him from behind. Well, Roz wasn’t there and Chris had no idea how to get the gun out of the attacker’s hand before he used it on Patsy.

‘Oh no,’ Gordy said, almost apologetically. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve got to show everyone. Albert, my devil, the Doctor. Got to show ’em all.’

Chris measured the distance between them. There was no way that he was going to reach them before the man, Gordy, fired. At the Academy, cadets were taught that, as a last resort, the only way for a weaponless officer to tackle an armed man head on was by a Diving, Rolling Breakfall with Kick.

It was always taught as a last resort because even the instructors said that it never worked. It involved throwing yourself forward and down, hands out-stretched, curling into a forward roll staying down to take out the attacker’s leg with a sharp kick to the kneecap. There were less energetic ways of com-223

mitting suicide. Chris wasn’t about to try it while the gun was pointing at Patsy.

He watched Gordy’s trigger-finger start to squeeze.

‘You’re such a cowardly little shit, Gordy,’ Chris yelled suddenly. ‘You’d shoot a woman, but you’d never dare try and take on someone your own size. Put the gun down, you’re not responsible enough to have one.’

For a terrible second there was silence and Chris suddenly knew exactly what it must feel like to be the Doctor. What it felt like to gamble with other people’s lives. It was the most terrifying thing in the world.

‘Oh yeah?’ Gordy said and pointed the gun straight at him. Chris smiled, as if it was an act of great generosity.

He whispered a prayer and leapt forward at the same instant as there was an ear-splitting explosion and the whole world slid sickenly into slow motion.

The Doctor drove the MG through the locked gates of the Petruska Institute at a casual seventy miles an hour. The impact knocked out one of the headlamps and sent the little car spinning off the driveway and into a long uncontrolled skid across the wet lawn. The scarlet sports car carved a long dark groove in the grass as it careered to a halt, narrowly missing a tree.

The shock of the accident disturbed the Doctor’s delicate empathic connection to Petruska, and she began to wake, startled to find herself in the middle of an accident. ‘What happened?’ she slurred, taking in her surroundings through sleepy eyes.

‘Small accident. The road curved but I didn’t,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Nothing to worry yourself about, your Highness.’

The Doctor inspected the damage to the little car. The whole front was crumpled, making the car appear as if it were wrinkling up its nose in distaste.

The Doctor exhaled heavily; Tilda was not going to be best pleased.

After helping the woman in the passenger seat out of the car, they set off, stumbling through the grounds, towards the building which lay ahead of them in the darkness.

If the Doctor had stayed to examine the damage a little longer, he’d have heard some rather desperate thumps coming from the boot.

The reason why the instructors at the academy said that the Diving, Rolling Breakfall with Kick didn’t work was because they knew what they were talking about.

The pain that lit up Chris’s body as the bullet entered his shoulder couldn’t have been more intense if a blow torch had been pressed up against his body.

Chris collapsed out of the forward roll, and lay sprawled on his back at the gunman’s feet. Any kind of movement at all sent jarring stabs of agony 224

through his body. His whole body was burning. Had someone poured petrol on him and set him alight?

The pain receded and he started to feel groggy, almost drunk. His ears were full of loud static. From his worm’s eye view, he could see Patsy struggling in Gordy Scraton’s arm-lock. Chris’s vision telescoped and they suddenly looked like giants fighting far above him. It all seemed strangely distant as if it somehow didn’t have anything to do with him at all. He decided that he was just going to lie there and burn.

Gordy pointed his gun at him. Chris just stared helplessly up the dark, grey barrel and waited.

Another noise began to compete with the hissing in his ears. The whole street suddenly appeared to be filled with bright white light. The noise grew to a shrill rattling crescendo. And then Gordy and the gun and the noise disappeared in a smear of shiny metallic blackness.

Gordy howled once in utter terror and then was silenced for ever as the black cab swallowed him inside of itself, and hurtled away into the smog.

‘Get on your feet, Cwej,’ Patsy ordered, her voice filled with fear and determination. ‘We need to get off the street. Now!’

Chris screamed in pain as Patsy pulled him roughly to his feet. He tottered drunkenly, leaning heavily upon her. They stood, uncertainly, in the smog-filled street for a moment. An icy emerald glow appeared in the darkness ahead of them, marking the tip of a triangle that was completed by two brilliant white headlamps.

Patsy hooked her shoulder under Chris’s armpit to support him and they broke into a lumbering run for their lives.

When Jack had stowed away in the boot of Tilda’s convertible he hadn’t given any thought to how he might get out again. It had been a snap decision, born as much out of his anger with Gilliam as his concern for the Doctor.

He’d dashed down the front stairs of the Tropics and sprinted around the back where Tilda’s car was parked, hopping into the boot only moments before he heard the Doctor arrive with the strange woman from the painting in Moriah’s study.

The journey had been terrifying; even worse than the dive-bomber at the fairground. He’d rattled around in the small space like half-pennies in a porce-lain pig. The boot of the sports car was tiny, with only just enough room for him to curl up in a foetal position. He couldn’t even straighten his legs to take a kick at the lock.

Bugger! He began to feel faintly silly. Some rescue this was turning out to be! He was probably going to need rescuing himself. That was if the Doctor made it out of the asylum alive.

225

Jack slumped in the confined space, letting his weight fall against the back of the boot. He felt it give slightly under his back. He pushed again, and felt something crack. And then it dawned on him that the rear of the boot was also the back seat of the car. Filled with new hope, he levered himself with his feet, pushing against the seat and was quickly able to force a gap wide enough to allow him to squirm through into the back of the car.

His relief of being out of the dark box was intense. The Doctor had carelessly left the doors of the car wide open. A single headlight cut a beam of light into the misty darkness. Jack clambered out of the car, panting. After taking a moment to get his bearings, he hurried after the Doctor across the wet grass.

The Doctor looked down upon the cavern from the small entrance cut into the wall close to the roof. The dark floor of the cave shifted and shimmered. Pools of black liquid erupted, forming strange, twisted shapes, before splashing back into the liquid form.

Whatever science created this strange material was alien even to the Doctor.

Quite unlike anything he had encountered before. He imagined the devasta-tion that a fleet of the murderous black cabs shaped from it might do to a city like London. If Moriah was successful, hundreds, perhaps thousand, would die.

He glanced at the woman standing next to him. Petruska stared impassively down upon her husband’s work. The Doctor reached for her hand, and began to guide her down the rough stone steps which led to the cavern floor.

‘Moriah. First King of Kr’on Tep, Emperor of the Seven Systems,’ the Doctor’s voice was a hushed whisper as he reached the last step, ‘I wish to speak with you.’

Moriah stood in the middle of a circle of emerald fire, staring in wonder at the blossoming, spiralling shapes that towered above him. On hearing his name, he swung around to locate the new presence in his underground chamber.

‘Is it not magnificent?’ he exclaimed with passion. ‘It is an expression of my thoughts, my desires, my will.’ If Moriah was surprised that the Doctor had returned he didn’t show it.

Despite the gravity of the situation, the scientist in the Doctor was curious.

‘But what is it?’

‘An artificial material that responds to my thoughts and feelings. I created it when I first attempted to bring my bride back from the dead. But it was far too crude and primitive to be shaped into the complexity of a whole person. I needed to build from human tissue itself. Now, are you ready to return to me 226

that which you stole –’ he gestured to the writhing shapes which cast shadows on the walls of the cavern ‘– or must I loose my anger upon London?’

‘I have told you that you cannot have the Toys. They’re a people in their own right now. They’re not answerable to you.’

Moriah’s face twisted into a snarl. ‘Then the consequence will be on your head.’

As if in his response, a wave of black tar-like material reared up behind the Doctor; a tidal wave, threatening to crash down upon him.

‘Moriah, wait! You don’t need to trouble yourself with the Toys any more.

I’ve brought you what you most want,’ the Doctor shouted. ‘I have completed your work, I have brought your wife back from the dead.’ He pointed to the woman who stood behind him in the shadows. ‘If you agree to leave the Toys and the Earth in peace, then you may have her.’

Moriah laughed bitterly. ‘You presume to offer me what
I
have struggled and failed to create for myself despite centuries of work? When I look into her eyes, I know that I will see her treachery written there. Do you come here to mock me?’

The Doctor shrugged, trying to look relaxed despite the wall of tar-like goo teetering over him. ‘You don’t have to take her. But can you bear to go on never knowing whether my offer was genuine? Never knowing whether you passed up your chance for happiness.’ The Doctor held his hands behind his back and turned away from the large man, staring up at the trembling wave of gelatinous material as if it were an exhibit in a gallery.

‘Wait,’ Moriah said, almost hurriedly. ‘Your attempts to manipulate me are naive in the extreme and yet –’

‘And yet have they worked, Moriah?’ the Doctor interrupted, too angry with the man to defer to him or to play any more games. ‘Do you want to be reunited with your bride? If you do then give me your word that you will leave Earth immediately. Allow me to set the gateway.’