Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [19]
Fitz didn't reply. He was staring at the rose. It was fresh and full, a water drop trembling on one of the leaves. 'That's never been bunched up in some hidden pocket.' He touched a blood-red petal.' How'd he do that?'
The Doctor let Swan draw him into the hall a few paces, then stopped. 'You have a sick boy in there.'
'Kids drink.'
'It's not beer, it's heroin, and if it made him that sick it's probably his first time.'
To his surprise, her face twisted in outrage and concern. She rushed into the bathroom where, also to the Doctor's surprise, she grabbed the ill boy, now more or less peacefully resting his forehead on the toilet seat, by the ear. Startled by this old-fashioned manhandling, he tried to jump to his feet, but she held on to him, shaking his ear as if she were trying to jar something out of his head.
'I have told you and I have told you,' she yelled, 'it's your business but not here! I will not have anybody hurting themselves here!'
The boy stared at her, open-mouthed, his head jerking back and forth in her grip. The Doctor saw that the other boy and the girl in the chartreuse shoes had slipped away. As Swan seemed to be hitting her stride for a long haul - 'Say you end up in the emergency room!' Tug-'How do you feel about taking an overworked doctor's attention away from some poor stabbing victim so that you can get out of trouble you got your spoiled-brat self into in the first place?' Tug! - the Doctor slipped away too, down the dark hall to the rear of the house.
He gently pushed open a door and peered into a large corner room wanly illuminated by the glare of a distant street light. The floor was covered with plastic sheeting. Half-finished canvases leaned against one wall, sketches of buildings and people were pinned to another, and a long table held tomb sculptures in various stages of construction as well as a series of extraordinarily well-modelled and inventively designed grotesques. Looking down into the weedy backyard, the Doctor spied a kiln. The room smelled, not unpleasantly, of paint and turpentine and raw clay.
Quietly pulling the door to, he continued along the back hall. The boards beneath his feet vibrated with bass from the music downstairs: 'No! I say no! No in thunder! No in decibels! No in digital!' The next room, a small one, contained a sewing machine and piles of fabric. The Doctor moved on.
'No-va- caine! No more pain!' Good beat, thought the Doctor. He must ask Fitz what style of music this was. The third door opened on to a messy, empty bedroom scented with incense and marijuana. 'It's the Zombie Life!
It's the Zombie Life! It's the Zombie life!'
Oxymoron, the Doctor noted. Very sophisticated. Unless it was just a clumsy use of irony. He stared at the tumbled bed. He had become afraid of his own bed. He knew he was going to dream again.
There had been no foreshadowing while the TARDIS was in the vortex.
Whatever it was had got in only after they'd landed in New Orleans. Was it connected to the bone charm? How had that come to be on the floor of his wardrobe? And did he find it before he decided Fitz and Anji would enjoy a visit here, or afterwards? He couldn't recall. 'Too many coincidences,' he muttered, though in his hearts he was beginning to suspect that a spate of coincidences was no coincidence, that somehow he generated them, a catalyst of chance.
A corner of the room was hidden by a large draped screen that glittered faintly with sequins, glass jewels, metallic thread. The Doctor poked his head around the edge of this and, without surprise, discovered an altar made of an old iron-legged sewing-machine stand, its surface crowded with candles, statues, icons, bits of animal bone, saucers of earth. Something that had dried thick and dark on the floor might be spilled paint or it might not. On the wall above the altar, Teddy Acree had drawn a remarkably detailed image that the Doctor found difficult to look at. He turned away.
A fluffy orange cat emerged from under the bed. It