Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [50]
96
Chapter Ten
Bring on the Dancing Horses
For some reason Turlough felt as though he had been moved whilst he slept, but a small patch of his dried blood on the padded floor confirmed that he was still is his white room.
The knowledge was strangely comforting.
In another corner was the place where he had soiled himself days ago. (Or was it days, since time had no meaning?)
Turlough sucked air through the pinprick hole in his tooth. The room was warm and he felt safe. Yet he knew, in the back of his mind, that at some stage the horrors would begin again. The noise. The prodding and poking.
The penetrations.
He waited for them to resume for what seemed like hours. But time continued to be meaningless. Finally he decided that he’d had enough. Whatever they wanted, he would give them. Whatever information, about whoever . . .
it didn’t matter. Everyone had a breaking point and Turlough had long since reached his.
His arms felt as though all the blood had been drained from them and then pumped back. He looked down to find his skin white and anaemic. Bullet-like needle marks covered his arms, his thighs, his buttocks; any surface that could be pierced had been.
He stood up and began to walk around his cell as though in some half-remembered dream-state. He felt dizzy and sick. He was trying to force his mind to focus on one thing, just one, that wasn’t the pain and the terror he felt. Anything. He started to count his steps. Eight from one wall to the other.
Then ten in another direction. He began to create geometrical shapes with his steps.
Triangles and rhombuses.
Oblongs, hexagons and parallelograms.
He was back in Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s trigonometry class, cleverer (by an irregular fraction) than anybody else in the room. Including Lethbridge-Stewart, for all his knowledge of alien worlds.
Brendon was the key. Keep thinking of Brendon he told himself.
97
Think about poor little Ibbotson and Bolam the school bully. Matthewson, McMullen, Pradie, Rogerson, Shaw major, Shaw minor, Turlough, Watt. The register. Or was it the back row of the rugby fifteen? No, it must have been the register because Turlough never played rugby.
He remembered that. And he remembered how he’d tried to run away, many many times. And how they always caught him and brought him back and beat him, again and again, with shoes and straps and canes. But they never broke him.
Never.
They weren’t even close. Because he was different. He was better than all of them. Turlough could remember looking in the mirror and seeing distorted, Dadaesque images of himself. The school genius. And it didn’t matter how much they threatened him or bullied him or pushed his head down the lavatory, nothing changed that fact. And they knew it. That was why they did all of those horrible things to him.
Because they were afraid of him.
‘You’re afraid of me,’ Turlough screamed. ‘That’s why you’re doing all of this. You can make me perform for you like a pantomime horse. Be your slave. You can do what you like, but you’ll never break me. Never.’
Then the sonic attack started again and Turlough crumpled to the floor, crying.
‘Sleep well?’ asked David Milligan as Tegan looked up from her bowl of cereal in the canteen.
‘Not really,’ she replied truthfully. ‘I never liked hotels much. So the Doctor said we might as well come in early and see if we could find out any more about InterCom’s background. I’ve spent two hours in front of that damn computer again and my brain hurts.’
‘Find anything?’
‘No,’ Tegan noted sadly. ‘Nothing we didn’t know already. They started in the early Eighties making computer software and financing some independent films. Went global with the spread of the Internet. Sanger, Joyce and Giresse have been there since the beginning. Lots of dark hints, but nothing solid.’
‘And clean?’
‘As a shower unit.’
Milligan nodded. ‘And you’re worried about your friend, aren’t you?’
‘Is it that obvious? I mean, I don’t even like Turlough much, you know. But he’s like a dog, you get used