Doctor Who_ The Taint - Michael Collier [46]
4.5
Cynthia found Watson whistling softly to himself on the couch in Roley's study.
'Hello, cariad ,' he said, smiling kindly at her. 'What's going on, then?
Where's old Roley?'
'Dr Roley...' Cynthia had no idea what to say.
Watson clearly realised she'd been crying. 'Are you all right, my dear?' he asked.
'Fine,' said Cynthia, forcing a watery smile.
Watson clapped his hands together. "Then that makes two of us!'He swung his legs off the couch and stood up, patting his stomach. 'I don't know what he's done to me, but I haven't felt so well for years!'
***
Fitz sat morosely on the Green Line bus to West Wycombe. Some dynamic escape this was. A rattling old bag of bolts with just a drunk and some overenthusiastic shoppers for company.
Fitz Kreiner - fugitive. He felt sick. The police would really be after him now.
He actually was late for work, but he couldn't go there now
- that was the first place they'd look. He tried to pull himself together
- he hadn't been formally accused of anything, after all. Perhaps they'd just wait for him to turn up. Maybe he should just saunter into a cop shop and explain everything. Yeah, they'd be really sympathetic. What the hell was he thinking of?
He knew he had to find Sam. She'd back him up, she'd have to.And, since his mum was there anyway, where else could he go?
'"Enjoy dreaming about living, Fitz,"' he said, mimicking Sam's voice and sinking lower in his seat. 'Jesus... Somebody wake me up.'
Fitz noticed a solitary figure standing on the pavement, in a long, heavy-looking, dark-blue overcoat. The figure stared straight at him, and Fitz instinctively looked away.
The man had reminded him of someone, someone he thought he knew.
But why had the man been smiling?
***
Between them, they'd taken Roley's bewildered test cases to lie down. Sam had steered Lucy back to her room, gingerly putting her into a fresh nightdress and tucking her in. The Doctor had assured her Lucy was harmless again now, that it was something to do with her illness that had caused her to act that way. Poor cow - she'd looked so confused, complaining it was daytime and that if the curtains hid the sky then she couldn't see it change, then falling straight into a deep sleep. She'd felt around the woman's shoulders, and had recoiled when she'd found a large lump between Lucy's shoulder blades.
Watson had been waiting outside the door. He'd made her jump.
'Can I see her? What's wrong?' he'd asked.
She'd tried to explain that Lucy had had an accident, that while she was all right now she still needed rest. Watson had just become increasingly agitated, ignoring her suggestion he come back later. She'd left him to it, in the end. Something about all this made her simply prefer not to get involved. There's a first, she thought.
Now she was sitting with the allegedly sane members of the household, while poor old Cynthia got to clear up in the Doctor's lab. Austen's body had been laid out in the Restraint Room, but it seemed to Sam that everyone had forgotten they had a slashed corpse under their roof as they all sat around drinking their tea.
Conferring with the Doctor and Bulwell, she'd gathered that the growths had renewed themselves in Russell. And Taylor, too. The Doctor said they should have a look at Watson, although he didn't doubt the leech would be in him also. He pulled out the glass phial into which he'd put Austen's cyst.
'It's fascinating,' he added. 'This thing can survive perfectly well outside of a body in a dormant state.'
Roley pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache and stared at the Doctor. 'Are you telling me it's alive?'
'In a way.' The Doctor got up and began pacing around. 'I’ve detected living crystals within, designed to respond to chemical excitation. It's some kind of biosynthetic organism.'
'Bio-what?' asked Bulwell.
'It's been manufactured, but it's alive,' said Sam.