Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [70]
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