Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [140]
She was standing in the bathroom doorway and she couldn’t look away from what was going on inside.
* * *
The cat was just about finished. Pam had seen a lot of animals in her time and she knew that this one had just about reached the end of its experimental viability.
The fat white cat howled feebly out of its misshapen mouth. Not long now,’ said Pam, her teeth clenched. It had been a fairly rewarding session. Of course, she had been so busy working directly with the animal that she had been able to make only the sketchiest notes. She could have written her ideas down in more detail if only she’d had someone to assist her.
If only Tommy had been here.
Pam forced all thoughts about her brother out of her head. She made herself concentrate on the cat and the closing phases of the experiment. It wasn’t easy, with all the noise.
The cat had been bad enough; but she’d expected noise from the cat and allowed for it. It was the noise from one of the dogs that really bothered her.
As soon as she had set to work on the white cat this dog had begun barking and howling, as if in sympathy with the discomfort experienced by the cat. It didn’t matter where in the lab she placed the dog’s cage, he seemed to be aware of the plight of the white cat and he would respond in synchronization.
It was an intriguing phenomenon and Pam duly recorded it, with a note that the odd liquorice smell seemed stronger at those moments when the cat experienced pain and the dog barked.
The barking of the dog had a peculiar tone to it. Pam could almost have characterized it as helpless rage. The sort of painful emotion you might feel if someone you loved was in agony and there was nothing you could do about it.
But Pam knew she was merely projecting; reading her own feelings about Tommy into the situation. That didn’t stop the dog’s noise from getting on her nerves.
That’s why Pam decided to suspend the cat experiments when this one was over.
She was going to attend to that dog next.
But then, as she prepared the killing injection for the white cat, the dog began making a noise like nothing she’d ever heard before.
* * *
The barn was cavernous and empty. Tin‐roofed and windowless, a concrete room filled with metal shelf units. Even buried here, among the stacked boxes of pharmaceuticals, Sean could hear the noise the dog was making in the laboratory. It had begun to howl in a way that made his hair stand on end.
Sean had heard that sound once before, on his uncle’s farm. His uncle had been dying in the main bedroom of the house with his aunt and assorted other relatives in attendance. His uncle’s old dog had been in the yard outside and it had begun to howl as soon as the old boy went. And it kept the unearthly sound up for hours.
Howling for the dead.
Now Sean was hearing the same spectral sound coming from the laboratory. A high‐pitched keening of animal pain.
Sean’s nerves had been on edge for hours, sitting in this room with the three living corpses. And then the body of the tattooed girl had twitched. He was certain he’d seen it twitch.
Now there was this endless wailing from the lab. It seemed to be vibrating through the metal roof of the place. It was so high‐pitched it was almost beyond the audible, which lent it an itchy eeriness.
It was the final straw. He had to get out of this place. He looked at his charges, lying slumped in their dentist’s chairs, the straps which had once held them now unfastened and draped loosely over their slowly breathing bodies.
Their breath was plodding and shallow, like some forced air heating mechanism sighing in an old building in the winter, dragging dirty air in and out and in mindless repetition. Their bodies had a putty‐like lack of muscle tone, as if whatever spark of life that had once inhabited them had fled somewhere else.
Sean had had it. He would go and check on Pam in the laboratory. This would have the twin effect of shutting the damned dog up and getting him out of this place.