Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [96]
Someone was coming. Getting down on his hands and knees, Harris saw a man’s legs and feet on the other side of the ambulance. The shoes were sturdy and practical, the trousers neatly pressed and black. A uniform? Perhaps an ambulance driver or a hospital orderly? What was Harris going to say if the man found him crouching there with his two odd companions?
Harris climbed to his feet, he couldn’t resist taking a look at the man. He moved to the cab of the ambulance and peered through the passenger window.
He’d been right. The man in the orderly’s uniform was framed in the driver’s side window. He had his back to Harris and was carrying a length of chromed metal in one hand – it looked like a. . . fork. Two sharp prongs, and made out of the same reflective metal that surgical instruments were fashioned from.
The rasping breathing was louder now. It didn’t sound like a man, more like. . . like a large, dangerous animal. The orderly turned his head forty-five degrees and Harris let out a little gasp.
The Doctor pulled him down roughly and slapped a hand around his mouth, the little man’s bright blue eyes glaring with mute fury at Harris. ‘Ssh.’
No face. The orderly hadn’t had a face at all. Just smooth pale flesh, like uncooked dough. Harris shivered and felt bile rise in the back of his throat.
He prised the Doctor’s hand from his mouth and crouched there by the wheels of the ambulance, cradling his head in his hands and trying to breathe silently.
No face. It was unthinkable. Horrible. How could such a thing be possible?
After what might have been a few seconds – or perhaps an hour – the Doctor tugged at Harris’s coat sleeve.
165
‘I think it’s safe to move on now.’
Harris let himself be led away.
Jack’s nose itched. Every few minutes he had to press his face up against the wall of the padded cell and rub it against the plastic walls. Plastic walls which smelt of urine and disinfectant. The only light in the room came from the gap under the cell door; a strip of sickly yellow that leaked in from the corridor outside. Jack could just make out the outline of Mikey’s head next to him.
The faceless creatures had pulled the leather threads of the straitjacket tightly behind his back, before hoisting him up in the air from behind and fastening the final strap of the straitjacket between his legs. His groin ached from the pressure of the strap, making him feel continually light-headed and nauseous.
Mikey was sitting next to him. From his irregular breathing, Jack could tell that his flatmate was crying. Mikey had struggled desperately when the faceless men had separated them from Dennis – soon after they had material-ized in front of the grey man in the underground cavern. Jack could still hear Dennis’s terrified squeals as he had been carried away.
They were going to kill Dennis; the grey man had said so. Moriah was tall and muscular, like a stone golem from a storybook. In a quiet voice, almost a whisper, he had ordered that Dennis was killed. It didn’t make any sense.
Why would any one want to kill Dennis? What reason could anyone have for killing a child?
Jack wanted to say something reassuring to Mikey, but he couldn’t find any words. Everything that came into his head sounded trite and stupid. He wanted to say that the Doctor would come for them, that the Doctor wouldn’t let Dennis die. But they had left the Doctor alone at the Scratons’. Two against one. Jack remembered the last time the Doctor and Carl Scraton had fought, hearing the Doctor’s agonized cries as he was buried beneath Carl’s pounding fists. What had happened then? Oh, he’d saved him, hadn’t he? Jack had saved the Doctor, bringing the heavy glass sphere down on the thug’s head.
Blimey, had that really been him?
Feeling stronger,