Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,73
book covered in a pink material. It said ‘My Diary’ on the front in big, childish letters. Gwen took it out and held it for a moment. Somewhere in those pages were Lucy’s feelings about Rhys. Fantasies, perhaps, of him doing all kinds of things to Lucy that he’d occasionally hinted at doing with Gwen but never followed through on. Gwen’s fingers curled around the edge of the cover. She could read it, while Lucy was still unconscious. There might be clues in there as to what had happened to her. There might be useful information she could take back to Jack.
There might also be descriptions of things that had happened between Lucy and Rhys for real, things that he hadn’t admitted to Gwen.
She threw it back into the drawer. There were some questions it was probably best not to ask, not when things seemed to have improved between them.
Beneath where the diary had been was a flyer advertising a diet clinic: presumably the one that had helped Lucy lose so much weight. Was that what the pills were for? One to start losing weight, the other to stop. Could life really be that simple? No counting of calories, no cutting back on carbohydrates, no tedious exercise? Just two simple pills?
Gwen took another look at the flyer for the diet clinic. It was headed ‘The Scotus Clinic’, and there was a photograph underneath the heading of a thin and youngish man with a short, well-coiffured mass of blondish hair. The blurb underneath was written in short, pithy sentences, asking questions that begged particular answers, like Do you want to lose weight and be the size you deserve to be? and Tired of not getting dates and getting passed over for promotion because of your size?
Looking at the flyer, Gwen began to wonder. Lucy went to a diet clinic, and ended up wanting to eat everything in sight. Had Marianne – the girl they had back at Torchwood – been to the diet clinic too? Was something going on there that needed to be looked at? Jack would probably disagree – if there was no alien context then he was quite prepared to walk away, no matter how many lives had been lost or might still be lost – but Gwen still thought like a policewoman. If the Scotus Clinic was preying on young girls, screwing up their metabolisms with dodgy drugs, then they needed to be called to account. And if Jack wouldn’t get involved then she would do it herself.
The rest of the search turned up nothing of interest. By the end, Gwen was sick and tired of sharing a room with a corpse and a cannibal. Torchwood were taking their own sweet time turning up, so she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea.
‘Why don’t you like getting close?’ Marianne insisted. ‘Is it because you might get hurt?’
Owen shook his head. He still couldn’t look at her. ‘It’s because it’s never permanent. Everything dies. Everything gets destroyed. Even love. So we just make the best of it – get our pleasure where we can.’
‘And what brought you to that conclusion?’
‘Seven years of hospital, and then this place…’ He paused, remembering his medical training: the gradual knowledge that there was nothing to humanity but flesh, blood, bone and brain, and the soul-destroying realisation of how fragile they all were. How easily broken. And then discovering through Torchwood that even the little comfort he had taken from the warmth of flesh was an illusion, that humanity was a small bubble of sanity floating in an ocean of madness.
‘Poor Owen.’ For a moment he thought she was being sarcastic, but her tone of voice was genuine, concerned. ‘And I thought I was trapped.’
‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘I have my cross to bear. I’m more interested in you at the moment. You’re not showing any obvious symptoms. You’re still lucid, I can see that, but what about how you’re feeling? Any aches and pains? Any unusual tiredness? Mood changes?’
‘No more than usual,’ she said morosely.
‘I can prescribe some stuff that might help. Paracetamol if you’re feeling feverish.’
Marianne shook her head. ‘I hate taking tablets. I’ll just ride it out, I guess.’ She paused, and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Strange thing is that I’m hungry, all the time. My stomach seems to be churning, although that might just be the stress of being locked up here.’
Owen looked at the pizza boxes and foil containers from the