Doctor Who_ The Taint - Michael Collier [101]
The Doctor hurried after him.
***
Fitz woke up to find himself back in the hallway. He wasn't tied up, and no one was watching him.
He realised he was no threat to these people whatsoever. Even so, he wondered why they hadn't just killed him. Let his mum finish what she'd started. The image of her twisted face as she'd squeezed his throat harder and harder - it would haunt him for ever. But with the realisation that that woman, that thing... No way was she his mother. Mum had gone, killed by Watson, by Roley, by God knew how many people. And she'd been so happy when she was offered board here, kept wittering on about how good the food was, how nice it was to have company...
He forced himself to concentrate on what was going on, to think of anything except her, even though a large part of him was pleading to be left in ignorance of what was coming up until it was all over. I must be a masochist, he thought, and lamented there would be no time now to pursue the more interesting possibilities of that statement under the relaxation bulb in his room back home.
He decided to play possum. From where he was lying, he could see Taylor reaching out to touch Watson's hand. Aye aye, he thought. Watson threw back his head as if he'd been electrocuted, then a broad smile spread over his swarthy features.
'I can feel death,' he said in rapture. 'Feel death tingling all around me.' He shuddered with pleasure, his voice breathy and soft. 'Oh, that's exquisite, that is... A little hell to carry round with you. Here, Lucy, Lucy, cariad , feel this.'
Fitz saw Lucy throw her arms round Watson, and then arch her back, moaning with pantomime ecstasy. 'What is that?' she asked, as if a jukebox had started playing some way-out tune.
Taylor stepped forward. 'Apparently we're all prophets and this is the strong voice of the gods.'
'Who told you that?' asked Russell, a surly little sod it seemed, these days, since his new haircut. Lucy pressed the palm of her hand against his cheek and he got whatever it was too, shuddering and smiling.
'A golden man,' said Taylor. 'I thought he was an angel, first of all, but -'
'Angels always talk bollocks,' said Lucy, knowingly.
Taylor shrugged. 'Yeah. Who cares, eh?'
It pained Fitz to see them all being so chummy. He kept thinking of atom bombs. Critical mass, critical mass...
Russell smiled. 'We can give it to anyone.'
Watson slapped him enthusiastically on the back. 'We can give it to everyone , boy.'
Fitz watched in horror as Watson held his old mum by the hand, and she shook as if having one of her seizures. He closed his eyes. That was it, then. He realty could never hold his mother again. Or rather, what used to be his mother, he reminded himself. Oh Christ...
'But what will it do?' he heard Russell wonder. 'What will it do to people?'
'Glad you asked that, boy,' said Watson. 'I was wondering the same thing myself. That's why I got me a couple of volunteers...'
A couple? Fitz tried to subtly shift the angle of his 'unconscious' body, and then noticed Maria was bundled up with her feet next to his head.
'A couple of sheep for our minefield.' Watson said, with a cheery smile.
***
Maria was nearly gone now, nearly there. She'd always imagined dying would be like floating into a long tunnel of light, and she pictured one now in the hope that it would lead her there faster.
She'd thought she'd believed in God her whole life long, believed He was testing her. But you couldn't believe in Him without believing in the devil, too. Perhaps these really were the devil's children. Perhaps this really was a test.
But, objective for once, she couldn't really see God bothering to waste His time on her like this.
Still, she'd be prepared to be proved wrong, and summoned into her drowsy mind again the tunnel of light. Maybe there was another heaven, a smaller, lesser heaven, one there for the mad, the suicides, the people God wasn't so fond of. She smiled, as the tunnel got brighter and wider. Charles wouldn't be there yet, of course, but he'd arrive