Doctor Who_ Empire of Death - BBC Worldwide [30]
The Doctor nodded. 'When did you first encounter your ward?'
Mrs Walker shivered, fear suddenly making her cold. 'Two years ago, in Scotland. I was visiting stately homes north of the border. One host near Glasgow suggested a tour of an asylum for the insane, a pleasant day out taking pity on those less fortunate than ourselves. That's where I first saw him.'
* * *
Extract from Observations and Analysis, A Journal: I pressed James for more details about his past while he took a hot bath, concealed behind the screen in my room. He said the Lock was a hospital for women with sexually transmitted diseases. 'But the cures were worse than the diseases. The doctors gave the women mercury to swallow as a treatment.'
I protested that would be far worse than whatever ailment it was meant to cure, and probably caused death in many of the patients.
`The women who died that way were the lucky ones,'
James replied. 'Others were suspended over heated baths of mercury, so the vapours would burn out the infection. That wasn't all it burnt out. I could hear them screaming from my cell when the treatments were taking place'
I was aghast at such barbarism. Anyone administering such treatments was a monster, not a physician. I demanded James tell me who conceived such horrors.
`Doctors, all good men and true. When the women went mad they were moved to the asylum. It was my job to tend them. They lost their noses and their teeth. The flesh was rotting from their bodies. The smell, it clung to the walls like a shroud' His voice trailed off, unable to cope with the memories any longer. 'Every evening the ghosts of all those who died in the Lock used to gather around me in the dark. I had to keep a candle lit through the night to stop them appearing. The burn on my scalp, that was from the hot mercury. Three times I tried to escape but they always caught me. Once I got all the way back to the village where I grew up. I was determined to find the gateway to the spirit world again, or die trying. It couldn't be worse than the Lock. Years had passed since I was sent away. In the meantime, the valley below Corra Linn had been flooded. I almost drowned trying to swim down to the portal but it was too deep for me.
Someone found my body and sent me back to the asylum.
Every time the doctor in charge came near me I started speaking in the voices of the women he had tortured and killed with his cure. To shut me up he held my face over the bubbling liquid. One of the bubbles burst and the mercury splashed against my head, burning into my scalp'
I found myself unable to speak, such was the horror of James's recollections. What he had been through - it was astounding he was still sane. Eventually I asked how he finally got free of the Lock.
It was hellish in that place, let me tell you,' Mrs Walker recalled. 'Gave me nightmares for weeks afterwards. What they were doing to those poor women - it weren't right. The doctors, they kept children there too. They boasted about using the children to cure visiting male patients who had been infected, how virgins could remove the disease. One of the boys was James. He must have been thirteen or so at the time. I couldn't see why he was being kept there. Then he shook my hand...'
The Doctor had been listening to her story carefully. 'And began speaking with the voice of someone who had died?'
Mrs Walker nodded vigorously. 'My husband, Bill. He passed over years ago, knocked down by a runaway carriage. Him dying was the reason I went back on the stage, only decent way I knew to support meself. This boy, he starts talking to me with Bill's voice, saying as how he was in a happier place and all. I thought it must be a trick but James did the same thing to the next person he meets, calling up the spirit of their dead niece.'
`So you adopted the boy as your ward, planning to use him as a distraction. You robbed the bereaved while James talked in the voices of their dearly