Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [76]
'I don't want any supper,' he complained as the Drudge forcibly manoeuvred him out of the door.
***
'A doctor!' blustered Quences. His face was so red that Chris thought he might have a seizure. 'What do you mean, that's enough? Eh? How can a mere doctor be enough? By the megastar, any fool can be a doctor!
Where's your ambition and sense of familial duty, eh? How d'you think I've worked... we've worked to give you this opportunity? And you dare to throw it back in our faces!'
As Quences ranted, his head seemed to swell and shrink with each outburst. Chris soon lost the focus of the tirade and it became a hectoring drone.
Behind Quences, amid stacks of old-fashioned books and-new-fashioned datacores, was a glass vivarium.
Creatures were moving inside - elegant experimental creatures that Chris somehow remembered as accelerated genetic hybrids, half orchid, half axolotl. Their black and crimson speckled petal-heads waved in search of food as they clung to twigs with their spindly white lizard bodies.
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Quences slowly turned away, clutching the furniture for support. 'I cannot understand it. I have nothing more to give. You'll break my hearts.'
Satthralope rapped her cane on the desk for attention.
'The wretch means that a Cardinalship is not good enough. He'l leech us dry, the ungrateful brat!'
'Not good enough for whom?' Chris heard himself laughing. 'I reach my majority next name day. Time I had lives of my own, don't you think? Hmm?'
'Only a doctor.' She was wallowing now. 'But that's hardly unexpected. No backbone, you see. So disappointing to the Family and the House. Wel , only the Ordinal-General can resolve the situation.' She glared at the old man.
'General?'
His hunched back was turned away. She leant in beside him, but her words were lost to Chris. Al he caught was
'You must ...' and 'How wil you have it end, eh!' and '...for the House's sake!'
He watched one of the creations in the vivarium. Its eye-stamens waved as it stalked and snatched a fly out of the air.
At length the old man stirred, his eyes burning with fierce tears.
'Is that your final word? No plea for clemency? No extenuation?' He paused and looked at Satthralope, so determinedly triumphant. His voice tremored. 'So be it. Apparently Lungbarrow will no longer tolerate your hurtful presence. It is an affront, sir. There's no more to be said. You will quit the House immediately and never cross its threshold again.'
***
Chris was suddenly at the end of a long cloister. At the far end stood a tall cupboard, a wardrobe, a transduction booth (how did he guess that?) with a flashing light on its roof.
Voices began to shout at him. 'Out! Out! Out!'
He could hear drums rol ing closer and closer. He began to run through the cloister, but strands of clinging web blew across his path. Out of the side arches lurched the brutish furniture. Clawed feet lashed at him. Drawers and doors snapped at him.
'Out! Out! Out!'
The drums were pounding in his ears. Web was tangling him, choking him. He could not reach the escape route. A well gaped in front of him like a mouth.
He fell into the dark.
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Chapter Nineteen
Doctor on Call
Chris choked at the stench under his nose.
'I'm sorry I ever ran away!' he gasped and clutched Innocet's arm. His head swam and finally settled. He was sitting on the floor, his back propped against a wall under the portrait.
Innocet showed him a little green bottle. 'Attar of asafoetida,' she said. 'Most effective.' Her brown bonnet and the huge, coiled mound of hair under her cloak reminded him of Terrapin-Maiden in the FreakWarrior Vidmags he'd watched as a kid.
'I wouldn't argue with that,' he said. His head was suddenly crystal clear, but so were the grumbles and creaks of the restless House. 'I wish this place would shut up.'
'Your arrival was enough to set off al the bad echoes in the place.'
Chris closed his eyes and breathed deeply. 'What sort of echoes?'
'Old thoughts, bad memories.'
'Dreams?'
'That's one word for them,' she said firmly. 'Some echoes bang around inside