• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

'I have my own method. I just lay out nine cards.'

"That's fine.'

She started shuffling the cards. 'It's about the forces that brought you to your present position.'

'Not the future?'

"The future,' she said, 'is very evasive.'

He smiled. She handed him the pack to cut, then laid out nine cards on the coverlet, face down. The backs were solid white with grey glyphs. 'OK,' she said, 'this is where you began.' She turned up the Hierophant. 'Does that mean anything to you?'

'No.'

'OK. This was where you went next.' She flipped the second card. The Hermit. 'Any vibes?'

'I'm afraid not.'

The third card was the Emperor. This was followed by the Fool.

Then came the Star, the Moon and the Hanged Man. Then the Tower.

Laura shot the Doctor a sharp glance, but his expression was no more than pleasantly interested. She turned over the final card. The Magician. She looked at him hopefully. He shook his head.

'You sure? This is supposed to be the progression of your past. And it's very unusual that the cards are all Major Arcana.'

The Doctor examined the layout curiously. It meant nothing to him. 'I'm sorry.'

'No, no.' She pushed the cards back into the deck, slightly embarrassed.

'I'm sorry. I do this professionally, I'm supposed to be competent at it.'

'I'm amnesiac. You could just have spelled out my past in capital letters and I wouldn't have recognised it.'

'Oh. You should have said so. I wouldn't have wasted your time. Or did you think it would jog your memory?'

'I suppose I thought it might.'

'But it didn't, huh?'

'I'm sorry, no, it didn't.'

'Don't be sorry.' She grinned. 'Maybe you have some deep dark secret it's better not to remember.'

Floor-to-ceiling shelves of books - and it was a high ceiling, maybe fourteen feet. The shelves were elegant, like something in a nineteenth-century private library, but the room itself, Anji thought, was small for a bookstore.

The Doctor said it had once been the apartment of a famous American writer. Apparently, most famous American writers had lived in New Orleans at one time or another.

The Doctor pounced at a volume on a lower shelf. 'Observations^. Capote's rarest book.'

Satisfied with this find, he was finally able to pry himself away from the store.

"The morning's getting on,' he noted as they left, remembering her for the first time in an hour, 'and you haven't had any breakfast.'

'I can't eat any more,' said Anji. The Doctor nodded and kept walking. She pulled on his sleeve. 'I'm serious. We can't have another conference in a restaurant. I'm in cholesterol overload. I need to live on Cheerios for a week.'

'Are those the little dry round ones?'

'Yes. I don't even want to smell rich food, do you understand? I know that doesn't make any sense to you, but have mercy on me, a mortal.'

The Doctor looked uncomfortable. 'I'm mortal.'

'Except for the needing to eat and sleep and, as far as I can tell, shave, yeah. Oh, the ageing thing too.'

'Let's go to Jackson Square,' he suggested.

They stopped in the broad pedestrian-only area in front of St Louis Cathedral and sat on the cathedral steps. Across from them, the iron fence surrounding the square was hung with the work of local artists. Jugglers and buskers performed for the sightseers, and a number of tarot-card readers and palmists sat at little tables talking seriously to clients. One of the more roughly hand-lettered signs read Sykick Readings & Terror Cards.

The Doctor thought there was something to that.

Anji told him about the drowned plantation. He listened with interest, and nodded when she brought up Fitz's speculation about the connection between the unnatural flood and the charm.

'That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it?' she said.

'It's too early to rule anything out.'

He gave her a somewhat expurgated version of his night at Dupre's. 'After I'd gone, Rust paid him a visit. It really wasn't his night.'

'Oh,' she said. 'I didn't know he'd do that. I didn't mean to send him after you like some guard dog.'

'That's all right.'