by Doctor Who
Fantasy crazy.
And with that thought, Rose remembered something else she had heard. From Domnic, last night. About Hal Gryden. ‘He opens our eyes. . . ’
‘Static,’ she gasped.
‘That’s what it’s doing, isn’t it?
The pro-
grammes. . . somehow, they’re making people see.’
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‘. . . makes us look at the world in a different way.’
Now it was her turn to take Domnic’s arm and drag him along with her.
‘Where are we going?’ he cried.
‘Find Jack and back to the TARDIS,’ said Rose. ‘And hope the Doctor finds us there. C’mon, it isn’t safe out here.’
She wasn’t running away, she told herself. She didn’t run away. She was just. . . This made sense. This was more than she could handle.
She needed. . .
‘I. . . I can protect you, Rose.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s up to me. I’m the man. I’m the hero.’
‘Like hell! You ever done anything like this before?’
‘Well. . . no, but. . . ’
‘Stick with me, then. I’ll –’ The words froze in her throat. She had caught the eye of a passer-by, just for an instant before he had looked down at his feet again.
And she knew.
‘It’s all of them,’ she whispered.
‘Wha – what do you. . . ’
‘They know, Domnic. Don’t you see? They know that we know! All the people, everyone you can see, they’re under the control of this. . .
this. . . whatever it is that’s controlling this world. Only we’re free and they know.’
Domnic was nodding his head vigorously even as his eyes betrayed his lack of comprehension. ‘You mean they’re all informants. The police have put out a wanted bulletin, haven’t they, and everyone knows our faces.’
And they were running down another alleyway, to the spot where it was crossed by another, and here they stopped because in all four directions there were roads and people – maintaining their fronts, the façades of their everyday lives, but Rose knew the truth. She knew the truth, and she knew they wouldn’t allow her to expose it.
A shuffling sound.
A woman cleared her throat and appeared
through a tall wooden gate, weighed down by a pile of cardboard.
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Putting out the rubbish, or something more sinister? Rose wasn’t sticking around to find out.
The first gate was locked. The second opened to her frantic jiggling of the latch and they burst into a tiny builder’s yard. They were surrounded by piles of timber. Two doors led into the building proper, one directly ahead of them, the other at the top of a single flight of metal stairs. Rose’s first thought was to take shelter inside, but she braked as some sense warned her of danger.
Was that someone at the window?
She’d only caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye. A white-faced figure with hollow eyes and ragged clothing. When she tried to look at it directly, it disappeared and there was just the reflection of the sky in the dark glass.
The gate banged shut behind her, like a gunshot, making her jump.
Rose knew there were more monsters behind it, sneaking up on her through the alleyways.
‘Can you hear them?’ she whispered.
‘I can hear them,’ Domnic confirmed, eyes wide with terror.
‘This is it, Domnic. We’re surrounded.’
He tried to pull away from her. ‘I’ll give myself up. I’ll tell them it was my fault. You. . . you hide behind one of these piles of wood and maybe they won’t. . . ’
‘This isn’t one of your comics, Domnic, and you aren’t my knight in shining armour. There’s no way out of this for either of us.’
Rose grabbed a length of timber and wielded it like a club, her eyes fixed on the closed gate. The itch in her brain had turned into a full-blown buzz which seemed to drown out everything. The only semi-coherent thought she could form, somewhere in the back of her mind, was that the lighting was all wrong. Too bright. It was daytime, when night was the time for monsters.
Then the sun was swallowed by a bank of clouds and the yard fell into shadow.
And they came for her.
The gate flew open and there they were. Four of them, fighting to be the first to squeeze through the aperture. Rose turned, knowing 63
what she would see before it happened: two more zombies appearing in the doorway of the building behind her. And another, emerging onto the staircase above her head, silent but for the shuffling of its feet.
Rose and Domnic stood back to back, surrounded. Domnic was whimpering. Rose hefted her makeshift weapon, ready to swing it at the first creature to come within range.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said with as much confidence as she could muster. ‘I know what you want – but I’m not gonna scream or faint or fall out of my clothes, all right? So, if you want me. . . well, just bring it on!’
The zombies closed in.
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The Big White House was big. It was white. And it was a house.
At least, it had been a house once: a sprawling multi-winged mansion, built to a classical design, as distinct from the concrete towers around it as could be imagined. It even had its own grounds, to the Doctor’s surprise, though they were small and paved aver. He suspected that much of the house’s land had been carved off for neighbouring developments – and what was left was cluttered with parked cars.
It couldn’t really be described as a house any longer. It had had too many extensions grafted haphazardly onto it. The ugliest of them was a square block, five storeys high, which jutted up from the building’s centre.
There was some peace to be gained here, though. The grounds were ringed by a wall, three metres high, which deadened much of the sound of the city – though the Doctor knew that that certainly wasn’t its primary purpose.
A grey plaque on the outside of the wall had given the building no name, just a description: Home for the Cognitively Disconnected.
They’d been nodded through the gate by a guard as soon as he’d 65
seen Waller’s police bike and ill-fitting uniform; the Doctor had been reaching for his psychic paper, but had had no need of it. Anywhere else, he’d have been surprised by the lack of security. Here, though, he doubted anyone could conceive of anything so audacious as a jail-break. Anyone outside of this building, anyway – until recently. Until Hal Gryden had begun the process of change.
The hallway was air-conditioned cool, painted in pastel colours.
They were met by a young man of Oriental descent who wore a white coat over his grey jumpsuit. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the Doctor guessed he’d been working all night.
‘Cal Tyko,’ he introduced himself, ‘duty nurse. I take it this is the prisoner?’
He glanced at the Doctor without really seeing him. When Waller corrected his misapprehension, repeating the Doctor’s cover story, Tyko’s features clouded. It was obvious he thought this a waste of his time.
‘We won’t get in your way,’ the Doctor promised.‘I’m just looking for a few scare stories – you know, what happens to you when you lie, who comes for you, that kind of thing. Maybe a bit of technical jargon to make it sound plausible.’
Tyko raised an eyebrow. ‘You need to make the truth sound “plausible”?’
‘We’ve got competition these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Tyko sighed. ‘You mean Gryden, don’t you?’
‘Dead right. What I want from this documentary is to restate a few basics but to back them up with evidence, make sure people believe us and not what they might see on the other side.’ As he spoke, the Doctor darted around, making the shape of a TV screen with his fingers and looking at Tyko through them.
The nurse’s attitude softened. ‘I can give you an hour. I’m into over-time already, but the morning shift is short-staffed. And I’ve rou
nds to do – you’ll have to keep up.’
‘Glad to,’ said the Doctor enthusiastically. ‘I want to see everything.’
Tyko took them to a lift and up to the first floor of the tower block.
‘I wish someone could do something about Gryden,’ he lamented as 66
he led them along a series of white-lit corridors. ‘Every other patient we get in here these days has something to say about that fellow. And they’re coming in thicker and faster. We don’t have the beds. We’ve been sending the minor cases out to private clinics. I tell you, if I could get my hands on him. . . ’
‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor mildly, ‘but “if” is a dangerous word.’
Nurse Tyko nodded, looking a bit shamefaced. They came to a whitewashed metal door. Tyko opened a hatch in it to reveal a barred window. Through this the Doctor could see a tiny dorm with another barred window at its far side. It was furnished with a bed, a chest of drawers and the ubiquitous flat TV screen taking up fully half of one wall. The TV was on, but the sound was turned down, the subtitles on. A young woman lay on the bed, wearing a plain white nightgown.
She was painfully thin.
‘Morning, Su,’ said Tyko. ‘You had your breakfast?’
‘I’ve been a good girl, Mr Tyko. I ate it all up, I did.’
‘You know we can check, don’t you? Show me the plate.’
The woman gave him a resentful look, then forced herself into a sitting position, picked up an empty plate from the floor and tilted it towards him.
‘Very good, Su. The orderlies will collect it soon. Do you need a pill this morning?’
Su shook her head. Tyko nodded, satisfied, and closed the hatch.
‘I think we’re getting somewhere with Su,’ he said as they strolled on. ‘Of course, the orderlies will check under the bed and behind the drawers, but it’s been a few weeks since she lied to us, and she’s certainly getting stronger. Silly girl, she wanted to look like the women she saw on Static. Her friends told her that imaginary food tasted as good as the real thing and helped you lose weight. When she first came in, she could hardly stand by herself.’
‘She can’t tell fantasy from reality, is that it?’
‘Who can?’ said Tyko. ‘This next fellow, he couldn’t accept that his grandma had passed away. He kept her in his flat for six months. He imagined she was talking to him. It was only when she persuaded him to take her out shopping. . . ’
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‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.
There were more after that – many more, filling dozens of rooms and no doubt many more above them. People who had been committed for fraud or assault or just for eccentricity, all with one thing in common. They had acted as they had, or so they claimed, because they had believed in something unreal: voices in their heads, whispers behind their backs or just dreams of bettering themselves.
Tyko addressed each of them with unstinting politeness, dispensing encouragement and – guided by a data pad – pills in varying strengths and dosages. Sometimes he made a note on the pad before they moved on. The Doctor strode alongside him, ever cheerful, hands clasped behind his back, asking interested questions. Waller said nothing, a brooding presence in her black police helmet. Only when Tyko commented that the number of admissions for violent crimes had increased sharply in recent months did she grumble something to herself.
Back on the ground floor, the Doctor spotted signs for two operating theatres. Tyko was adamant that they were off-limits. A sterile environment, he said – and any further discussion was forestalled by the bleeping of his pager.
The nurse unclipped the small white device from his belt, read a message on its screen and scowled. ‘It appears I won’t be home on time today after all,’ he said. ‘They’ve just brought us another guest.’
Arno Finch didn’t resist as he was unloaded from the back of a police transport vehicle. It was only when he saw where he was that he began to struggle. He was outnumbered, though, and his hands were still cuffed.
Four cops carried him into the Big White House, four more following with guns drawn. Nurse Tyko made a token attempt to direct them, but they knew where they were going.
‘Strictly speaking, there should be a doctor handling this,’ Tyko confided to the Doctor and Waller as they hurried after the new arrivals,
‘but we’re stretched to the limit.’
‘And you can’t take on more staff?’ the Doctor ventured.
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‘No,’ said Tyko and Waller in unison.
‘Cos that’s not the way things are. OK.’
He recognised some of the officers from the scene of Finch’s crime.
They’d raced past him into the office block as he and Waller had left it. Waller hadn’t even acknowledged them, marching stiffly up to her bike, keen to move on. Of course, the Doctor never liked to stick around for the mopping up either.
Tyko showed them into a small, windowless room with a desk, two chairs and a computer, and shut them in. Two walls were covered in TV screens. Each showed the inside of an inmate’s room – the cameras seemed to be hidden behind their own TVs – apart from the biggest, most central screen, on which a featureless cell with white padded walls was displayed. A moment passed, then the door of this cell flew open.
Arno Finch was hurled to the floor, unable to use his hands to break his fall. Four cops took a limb each and pinned him down as Tyko came in, holding a hypodermic needle filled with a clear liquid. The nurse stooped beside Finch, muttered something soothing to him, and slid the needle into his neck.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Shutting down the right hemisphere of the brain,’ said Waller stiffly.
‘That’s the subconscious side, the side that deals with fiction.’
‘Yeah, I know what it does.’
Tyko straightened and nodded to the escorting officers before leaving the room. One of the cops directed two bursts of a solvent spray at Finch’s bound wrists, then hurried out with his colleagues. The door closed again and the Doctor could hear the clunks of locks being engaged.
‘They got here quick, don’t you think?’ he remarked to Waller.
‘Maybe there was a wagon in the area.’
‘Not what I meant. Your lot must have brought Finch straight here.
No questioning, no trial, nothing.’
‘No need,’ said Waller. ‘He’s a fiction geek. It’s up to the doctors to decide his treatment. You’ll see.’
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Cal Tyko had appeared in the white cell again, without the door opening. A hologram, the Doctor deduced, probably operated from a nearby control booth. It gave off a tell-tale fizz as it stood beside Finch, who was lying where he’d fallen, blubbering to himself. Tyko spoke to him in gentle tones, assuring him that he was safe, that the doctors would protect him from the nightmares and that if he could just answer a few simple questions and provide his credit number then everyone would be happy.
Finch, his hands free now, tried to lever himself into a sitting position. He gave up and burst into a renewed flood of tears when he realised that the left side of his body was paralysed.
‘It’s OK,’ Tyko reassured him. ‘This is just a temporary side effect of your medicine, that’s all.’
The Doctor glanced at Waller. ‘You must be hot in that helmet.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Must be stuffy,’ he said. When she didn’t answer, he persisted, ‘just wondered what it’s for, that’s all. You don’t reckon you need protecting in here? Didn’t think so. And it can’t be to intimidate the bad guys, cos that’d imply you want them to use their right hemispheres.
You know, to imagine what’s behind the black visor.’
‘They don’t have to imagine,’ said Waller sharply. ‘They can see I’m a police officer. That’s all anyone needs to know.’
On the screen, the holographic Tyko was asking Finch about his childhood. The answers came resentfully and were slurred as Finch struggled to speak th
rough one side of his mouth. Tyko responded to each one with a weary tick on his data pad.
‘OK,’ said the Doctor. ‘My fault. I know you didn’t want to come here. I thought maybe you had something to hide.’
There was a long silence. The Doctor stood, smiling innocently.
He didn’t expect Waller to lie, of course. Which left her with only one choice.
She took off the helmet.
They both stared fixedly at the screen for a few seconds. Then the Doctor risked a sidelong glance. Waller was a dark-skinned woman, approaching middle age, with shaved greying hair and a misshapen 70
nose that had obviously been broken a time or two. She was standing almost to attention, obstinately avoiding the Doctor’s eye.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Don’t see anything wrong there. Two eyes, two ears, the right number of noses, all in the right places. No hideous scarring. Must be the other thing, then.’ Waller didn’t take the bait, so the Doctor asked a question of his own. ‘When were you here?’
‘A lifetime ago,’ she confessed grudgingly.
‘But you’re still afraid they’ll recognise you. Was Tyko here then?’
‘No. It can happen to anyone, you know.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘I was a teenager. You know what it’s like. No matter what they tell you, you can never quite resist the dreams. The dreams feel good.
Until you get older. Until it goes bad for the first time.’
‘How long did they keep you in?’
‘Sixteen months,’ said Waller bitterly. ‘Sixteen months out of my life, and the worst thing is I’ve no one to blame but myself. No one can say they weren’t warned. No one can say they haven’t seen.’
‘But they let you go.’
‘I was one of the lucky ones. They taught me to repress the images.
I couldn’t do my job otherwise. It means everything to me, Doctor.
When I’m out on the streets, on my bike, everything is clear. Everything is black and white. I know the procedures. I can throw myself into the work because it’s real, because it’s now, because I enjoy it –and because, while I’m doing it, it’s as if the ghosts aren’t there for a while.’
