Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [47]
'I can't tell you how much computers have meant to this organisation, 'said Mrs Loysel as she searched. 'Why, before we had everything on disks, we had a real storage problem. Now we can operate out of this one little room and spend that extra rent money on preservation. Here we are. Just let me print this out for you.'
The notes Mrs Loysel gave the Doctor informed him that the extant Delesormes records went back only to the decade preceding the Civil War, though the family had to be older than that since scholars dated the tomb itself as eighteenth-or very early nineteenth-century. The first recorded Delesormes was a sugar-cane planter. Even for those days of high mortality, the family had bad luck: aside from the usual number who never made it out of childhood, many of the adults died at a fairly young age, and without issue. It had withered to one branch by 1980, when Alain Auguste Delesormes and his wife Helen, nee Dubois, had died in their mysterious catastrophe, leaving one child, a boy, Alain Auguste Jnr (spelling modified to Alan August), aged four. Originally placed with local foster parents, he was no longer in the state of Louisiana when the cemeteries society first enquired into the status of the Delesormes tomb in September 1990, and subsequent research revealed that he had died earlier that same year in a small town in Vermont, of a staph infection contracted while he was in the hospital for an appendectomy.
The Doctor was back at Owl, sitting in the wicker armchair rereading this history, when Laura came over from the bookstore to tell him Swan Acree was there.
'Want me to say I can't find you?'
The Doctor thought about it, then sighed and got to his feet. 'I suppose not.'
Swan was wearing a long purple dress and crocheted black shawl, her striking hair falling straight down her back. As usual, she was fiddling with a strand of it. This was the first time the Doctor had seen her in anything other than candlelight, and he was surprised to discover that her face was quite freckled. It gave her an incongruous, healthy-farmgirl look.
'Well,' he said, 'hello again. How's the cat?'
'OK,' she said in her flat voice. 'Teddy wants to ask you a favour.'
'I don't suppose he's here himself.'
'No,' she said, as if the Doctor were an idiot. 'He wants you to see the Nightmare of Horror'
"That's the charity haunted house,' said Laura impatiently when Swan didn't elaborate. 'It opens this week.'
'I've heard about it.'
'He'd like you to see it before then,' said Swan, 'so you can appreciate his work without all the lights and special effects.'
'Why?'
'He wants you to.'
The Doctor had the familiar wading-in-treacle feeling that had accompanied his previous conversations with the Acrees. 'I'm not going to change my mind about modelling for him.'
'He really wants you to see it,' said Swan monotonously, pulling at her hair.
'Your opinion means a lot to him.'
'Why?'
'It just does.'
'I see.' Well, he thought, it was a chance to gather a little more information about Dupre at least. 'In that case, I suppose I must.'
She smiled. 'That's right.'
The Nightmare of Horror was being constructed in part of a massive old warehouse on Tchoupitoulas Street across from the rail yards by the river.
A huge floodwall cut off actual sight of the water; above it, the tops of cranes loomed like the heads of mechanical dinosaurs. The warehouse, once apparently green, was a vague, muddy colour except where vermilion graphics reading Shock! Shock! Shock! and Your Best Nightmare! had been painted in ten-foot letters on the walls. More modest signs revealed that admission was $17, that all proceeds went to NOCS, and that the last was a nonprofit organisation to which contributions were tax deductible.
'This has been running for several years, hasn't it?' said the Doctor as Swan unlocked a large sliding door.
"This is the first year Teddy's worked