Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [75]
* * *
In a mental hospital in London, Cristián Alvarez turned in his sleep, disturbed. Nurses went back and forth in the cool darkness, glad of the quiet, no matter how brief.
* * *
The room must once have been a large dining hall. They had converted it into some sort of laboratory, complete with those old computers with the chunky coloured lights and big tape DASDs spinning around for all they were worth.
There were scientists with clipboards, someone trying to guess cards from behind a screen, a young girl with electrodes attached to her forehead while she watched a strobing light. The white‐coats smiled or nodded at Macbeth as he moved through them, glanced at the short woman in the anorak. He did his very best not to look terrified.
No sign of the Doctor. He’d be kept separately, of course, Macbeth’s prize project.
A small corridor led off the main room, to a smaller room, perhaps an old bedroom. Macbeth unlocked the door and took Ace inside.
The room was small, cold, no window. A second door led into a tiled en suite bathroom. Another hospital bed, another EEG, this one recording meaningless squiggles as it tried to process alien input. ‘Close the door,’ Ace told Macbeth quietly.
The floor was concrete, the walls white plaster, bare and featureless as the inside of a ping‐pong ball. Incongruously, there was an Escher poster on the wall over the bed, two hands drawing one another in a loop that went on forever.
Ace felt something change inside her when she saw the Doctor in the bed, his head propped up by a pile of pillows, the covers pulled up to his shoulders. She realized she’d been expecting a corpse, a dissecting room. If she’d found the Time Lord in jars and sponges she’d have whacked Macbeth like a bug. Now she felt the killing tension go out of her: there was other business to take care of.
The Doctor was the colour of the plastered walls, eyes closed. Wires ran from white discs on his temple and neck to an old‐fashioned EEG machine, its needle scratching noisily over a slow‐moving reel of paper. Not showing a lot of activity. Was he going grey, grey at the temples? It didn’t seem possible.
She wrenched down the covers. He was wearing hospital pyjamas. His wrists and ankles were handcuffed.
‘Get those off him,’ said Ace. Rage climbed up her spine in lumps. ‘What the frag have you been doing to him?’
‘Nothing,’ said Macbeth, taking a step back. ‘Nothing. Really. Just observing him. Trying to look after him.’ He carefully produced the key from his pocket, making no sudden moves, and undid the cuffs. ‘We had to restrain him. I would have preferred something a lot less crude than this. But we couldn’t tranquilize him.’
The Doctor opened his eyes. ‘I’m not asleep,’ he said, very quietly.
Ace shoved Macbeth to one side and leaned over the Time Lord. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Sorry we took so long.’
He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. ‘Ace,’ he said, at length. His eyelids flickered again, and the pen of the electroencephalogram went scritch scritch, dancing roughly over the paper.
* * *
In the hospital, Cristián sat bolt upright, his eyes electric. ‘Here we go again,’ sighed one of the nurses.
* * *
Scritch scritch scritch.
Ace looked from the Doctor to Macbeth to the machine and back again. ‘What’s this?’ She kept the weapon aimed at the paranormalist.
‘I don’t know,’ said Macbeth, peering at the EEG. ‘We still haven’t been able to determine the significance of these readings.’
‘You mean this has happened before?’
The Doctor was sitting up, one hand clutching at the side of the bed, breathing in gulps. Ace started to move towards him, but he waved her back. She actually saw beads of sweat start out of his forehead.
‘The blood tests we did – the ones that worked – showed there’s still lysergide in his system.’ Macbeth traced a finger along the EEG scrawl. ‘I think he’s having a flashback.’
* * *
Cristián screamed.
* * *
A wind was blowing. It came out of nowhere, chilling the heated room. ‘Oh shit,’ said Ace. Macbeth started for the door, but