• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He lay quietly, listening. He wondered why he had wanted so badly to keep his eyes shut. The darkness was gentle. It was his ears he wished he could close, at the same time as he wanted to hear more, hear better, hear something identifiable

I should get up, he thought. Go into the hall. More options for escape there.

Assuming whatever it was was after him. That didn't necessarily follow.

Perhaps it was merely taking a stroll through the TARDIS

Something patted at the door.

The Doctor stopped breathing. He lay still as stone, staring at the ceiling he couldn't see. The patting came again. Tentative. Exploratory. like a palm placed flat against the door, but very softly. Very, very softly. The Doctor found he couldn't move. His limbs felt like clay.

How had it got past the TARDIS defences?

'Nothing can get in,' he whispered.

Then he realised that Nothing had.

Jonas Rust looked at the body and asked, 'Is this Chic?' 'Huh?' said Beasley. 'lieutenant,' he added quickly. Rust eyed the beat cop patiently.

'This establishment is called

"Chic's House O' Bones". Is this Chic?'

'Oh, the owner. I guess so.' Beasley checked his notes. 'ID says Maurice Chickly.'

Rust nodded.

'Spooky, huh?' said Beasley. "The setting and all.'

Rust agreed that the long, dim shop would have made a passable set for a cheap horror movie. Patches of the stained plaster walls had flaked away, revealing crumbling brick. Pallid light seeped through the front window for a few feet, then faltered as it touched first a dusty glass case containing ornaments of human hair and bone, then a shelf of animal skulls, then a couple of broken tombstones - and finally gave up and faded away at a boxed jumble of bones topped with a handwritten card reading

'Complete Child's Skeleton - Peru - $875.'

'I called Mr Thales and asked him to come over.'

'He's on crutches, for God's sake,' said Rust, exasperated. 'We can take him over an inventory list later. Go call and see if you can catch him, tell him not to come. Where's the fellow who called this in?' Beasley gestured over his shoulder with his thumb as he started up front to the phone. 'And find out what the hell's holding up the coroner. I can't babysit a stiff all morning.'

Rust looked again at the corpse. He'd been a homicide detective for what he would have characterised as a fair spell, but he still hadn't gotten used to the amount of blood there was in the human body. The dead man's throat gaped wetly at him. Well, he thought, at least the cause of death was a no-brainer.

He turned toward the back of the shop where a couple of sixty-watt bulbs weakly illuminated more objets de la morte: a locked case of human skulls, a stack of coffin lids leaning unsteadily against the wall, a little nineteenth-century marble tombstone crowned with a lamb that weather had eroded into something more closely resembling a rat. On the other side of the coffin lids, in the corner, a mart was sitting so still that Rust hadn't even realised somebody was there.

'You the one who called the police?'

The man nodded. In the shadows, his pale and striking features seemed almost to be floating, detached, like a mask. The proportions of his face struck Rust as somehow wrong: the forehead too high, mouth too wide, eyes too large and far apart. Rust thought of old fairy tales and stories of changelings.

'Want to come tell me about it?'

The man stood up. He was not quite Rust's height, slender and lithe, like a swimmer. As he moved closer, the goblin beauty resolved into a more conventional handsomeness.

His face was framed with tousled light-brown hair. He wore a dark shirt and trousers. Rust would have said his old-fashioned- looking, dove-grey coat was linen, except that it wasn't wrinkled.

'I know you've already told this story,' Rust said.' Likely you'll tell it again more than once. Start with me.'

'I came just after ten,' the man began. English: that explained the pallor. No one could live in New Orleans and get that little