Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [44]
His feet tapping gently on the stone, he made his way cautiously up to the darkened landing where he stood in silence for a few moments, breathing in the musty air. Moonlight slanted in through a window set at the far end of the corridor, and, as he listened, he heard music from one of the rooms off the corridor – the sad strains of a woman singing opera. La Traviata. He paused and pressed his ear to the door, but all he could hear was the music: Addio de Passato, the heartbreaking goodbye to life from the opera’s heroine, Violetta. The Doctor found his throat tightening as he was caught up in the haunting strings and woodwind, the tremulous voice. Non lagrima o fore aura la mia fossa... neither tears nor flowers will my grave have. .
He felt a twinge of guilt, eavesdropping on such personal sadness. Necessary it may be, but not very nice. From what Ace had said, this must be Sooal’s room. He knew he ought to confront him, ask him face to face what was happening. But, just now, it seemed wrong. He felt like he was listening in on a funeral, on some private grief.
He turned away from the door. Later.
The treatment room, then. There were three other rooms –
one was empty and smelled of dust and damp as he opened the door a crack. Even in the faded ivory light from the landing window, he could see that the second one was tiled white, clinical like the cellar laboratory. He dosed the door behind him as he fumbled for the light switch. Pale orange light flared from the spotlamp in the centre of the ceiling, casting a cone of bloody light downwards onto a chair, much like a dentist’s. But this one, he noted grimly, had leather wrist and ankle restraints.
He ran the tips of his fingers over the headrest, noting the control panels that spread out from the chair’s arms and the tray of decidedly non-terrestrial, air-powered hypodermics. He picked one up, sniffed it cautiously, and set it back down. As his gaze swept around the room, he noticed a clipboard hanging on the door of a large store cupboard: dates and times of treatment sessions, patients’ names, all scribbled in an odd, angular handwriting. Most, it seemed, as he riffled through the pages, took place at night. Perhaps coming back here for a look in the wee hours wasn’t such a clever idea.
Aliens curing Alzheimer’s disease? Maybe he’d become cynical; maybe this was just some philanthropic creature who’d decided to come to Earth to do good. But then why was the atmosphere around Graystairs so cold, so dour? And then, of course, there was the fleshsuit tank in the cottage. His eyes flicked to the wrist restraints again.
He heard a noise from down the corridor and quickly moved to the doorway, flicking out the light.
An elderly woman, looked somewhat dazed, was being helped along by two younger men. One of them – Bernard? –
had shown the Doctor in earlier; the other was unfamiliar, with sandy hair and a grim, tired face. There was only one place they could be coming.
Steve wished they could wait until they got the residents into the treatment room before giving them the sedative: dragging them, half-dazed, up those stairs was a pain. But Doctor Menzies insisted, said they might be disturbed by the treatment room, the dentist’s chair. So redecorate the treatment room, Menzies – or at least move it downstairs.
Norma was one of the better ones – at least she didn’t turn into a bag of bones as soon as she’d swallowed her tablet, not like some of them; at least she could still bear her own weight.
Flicking on the light, Steve helped Bernard swing Norma into position, letting her slump down in the chair. Her eyes, unfocussed, tried to take in the tiled room. But with a thin sigh she closed them and her breathing became slow and deep.
‘Norma’s under,’ Steve said, checking the dock on the wall.
‘Come on – that’s us done for tonight.’
Bernard grunted as they left