Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [42]
Ace gazed at the bodies around her. Their faces were illuminated by pale spotlights, and at the head of each bench was a twinkling pillar of electronic equipment. She scanned the faces around her
– most were elderly, but amongst them were a couple of younger people, a middle-aged woman – and a woman who could only be Joyce Brunner.
Ace dropped her rucksack and rushed over to the sleeping woman. She recognized her face from the photograph in Norma’s room – a thin, taut face, dark hair tied back severely.
Joyce could be quite attractive if she made an effort, thought Ace, but at the moment her face was pale and drawn, dark shadows under her eyes. She followed the tangle of cables that ran from the electronic pillar and saw that they led to the nape of Joyce’s neck. Gently, she rolled Joyce’s head on its side, and saw that they spread out into a silvery net, seemingly embedded in her skin. Ace gave an experimental tug, reluctant to pull too hard in case it did any damage. She was surprised when, with a high-pitched squeak, the filaments seemed to withdraw into themselves, shrinking to a shiny nub the size of Ace’s fingertip, just below her hairline. Joyce’s eyes snapped open.
Ace jumped back, panicking that she’d done some irreversible damage as Joyce opened her mouth –
– and screamed as light flooded her brain, burning through her eyes. Joyce clamped her hands over her ears to shut out the sickening din that lanced into them. Her stomach heaved, and only with an immense effort did she prevent herself from throwing up.
‘Stop it!’ Joyce screamed. ‘Make it stop! Please, make it stop!’
She felt someone grab her wrists and pull them away from her head. The light scorching into her head faded as a dark shape passed in front of her, making noises that she knew, deep down, were supposed to make some sort of sense, but she couldn’t fit them together. Like an abstract jigsaw with no box, no picture.
Something pulled at her, changing her orientation, and the nausea punched her in the stomach again.
‘God, my head,’ moaned Joyce, struggling to sit up on the bench. She squinted at the girl in front of her, confused.
Everything was fuzzed over with a strange, multicoloured halo and she felt sick. Her mouth tasted sharp, metallic.
‘Are you OK?’ the girl asked.
‘I don’t know I feel dreadful.’ She looked around. She was in some sort of church – a wet, clammy church that smelled of old fishponds and rusty oil cans. Dim light filtered down from above. The room was filled with benches like the one she was now sitting on, each of them with a sleeping figure on it.
‘Come on,’ said the girl, trying to help her up. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Another jolt of pain stabbed at her stomach as she got unsteadily to her feet, and she had to sit down again.
The girl glanced edgily at her. ‘Look, have a rest while I try to get some of these others unhooked.’
Joyce watched as the girl crossed to an elderly woman and began to fiddle around with a cable that seemed to run into the back of the woman’s head. What was she doing? She touched the back of her neck, and pulled her hand back sharply as she felt something hard and metallic embedded there. She looked around at the others, all of them apparently sleeping – and, she guessed, muzzily, all with the same metal things in the backs of their necks. She closed her eyes, faint after-images of numbers and equations dancing on her retinas. She felt sick again, her arms heavy.
‘Where are we?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ the girl replied as the woman on whom she was working began to moan, thrashing her head from side to side. Joyce raised her hand, opened her mouth to ask the girl if she knew what she was doing. The girl’s words and tone of voice suddenly registered with her, as if they’d been spoken minutes ago, smeared out into long, time-delayed echoes.
‘If I didn’t