Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [12]
Basically, it just doesn't make sense to him. He's an innocent. And that's scary, it gives him a blind spot.'
Anji was rolling her tissue into a tighter and tighter ball. 'Do you really think he's good?'
Fitz nodded emphatically. 'Bloody awful sometimes. But always good.'
'All right,' she said. 'You know him. I'll trust you.' She gave a final sniff.
'Where's this witchcraft shop, then?'
The Doctor had been vague about exactly what he wanted them to do: visit occult shops, get a feel for the local scene and personalities, take in a ghost tour. Anji had seen ads for vampire tours, too, but the Doctor had said they could miss those:! don't think we're dealing with vampires here.'
'But this is vampire central,' said Anji. 'All those Anne Rice novels.'
'Precisely,' said the Doctor, as if he were Sherlock Holmes. 'Any real vampire would shun the place. No privacy. Same with Sunnydale.'
"There is no Sunnydale.'
'All the more reason.'
So she and Fitz had picked up a sheaf of pamphlets at the Visitors' Center and debated the merits of the various tours as they walked from witchcraft store to voodoo museum to fortune-telling parlour. The tours all covered roughly the same territory: the LaLaurie Mansion, the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, St Louis Cemetery #1. Having been introduced to New Orleans by way of St Louis #1, Anji felt she'd seen it. The Doctor had been fascinated by the place and led them all round it in the grey dawn - down paths of crushed shells or patchy grass; past elegant little whitewashed tombs encircled with fine iron fences; between crumbling brick edifices with cracked flower urns; by grand marble structures on which broken-limbed angels wept.
He had pointed out the spotlessly white tomb of Ernest Morial - the first black mayor of New Orleans and father of the present mayor -standing next to the weathered, peak-roofed tomb of the voodoo queen Marie Laveau, all marked by supplicants with Xs scrawled in chalk and dirt, its doorstep arrayed with offerings: flowers; coloured beads; a green tin toy car; two marrows ('Mirlitons,' the Doctor said); a Mars bar; a plaster figurine ('St Expedite,' the Doctor said); six red dice; a salt shaker shaped like a black cat; a lottery ticket; an avocado; a scatter of coins; a tortoiseshell hairbrush; and a glass of rum and Coke, with a straw.
As they were walking alongside a wall of oven vaults, each coffin sealed in its own niche (like a giant version of the grid of pigeonholes behind the front desks of old hotels, Anji thought), the Doctor noticed that one of the bottom-row memorial tablets was loose. He dropped to his knees and, before either Fitz or Anji could say anything, had pulled the stone slab to the side.
Fitz instantly squatted beside him and, after a moment's hesitation, Anji rather shamefacedly joined them. The interior was a little larger than she had expected and she had a good view of a bronze sarcophagus, featureless but human-shaped. She stared.
'Cholera,' said the Doctor softly. "There were terrible epidemics. They didn't know the cause - they thought it might spread through some ether or vapour. So they soldered the dead into these, to contain any fumes. Like sealing up the ghost of the disease. Not that it did any good, of course.'
No, thought Anji, following Fitz into a tearoom, she definitely didn't need another tour of St Louis #1.
The tearoom didn't actually serve tea. Nor did anyone there read tea leaves
-
the curtained alcove in the back was for tarot consultations. Anji was sorry: she could have done with a nice cup of tea after so many days of rich coffee. She cast a desultory look over the shop's wares: packs of tarot cards, books on divination, lots of crystals and pyramids. For some reason she remembered a phrase of Carl Sagan's:'the pyramids of Mars'. Silly, like those purported canals.
'depends on what you want.' Fitz had engaged the blue-haired salesgirl in conversation and she was sorting through the ghost-tour pamphlets.
"These people have been doing it the longest. This one has