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'I saw some of his work for Jack Dupre. Are they friends?'

'No,' she said. Jack's a little crazy in a not-good way. We stay away from him. But Teddy's always wanted to do something on this scale.'

She switched on the lights. They were in an area constructed as an entrance foyer, twenty feet high with a Gothic-style gallery halfway up supported by columns carved like skeletons, smiling in sardonic welcome.

Even under the bland light of ordinary 150-watt bulbs, the effect was impressive and the skill of the work breathtaking. The Doctor went closer and saw that, though they looked like stone, the figures were constructed of papier-mache.

'Did he do all this himself?'

'Just the design. It was all built by this business that makes Mardi Gras floats.' She pointed to the gallery. 'People dressed like demons swoop down from there. On harnesses,' she added, in case he was wondering whether the people actually flew.

"Who are they?'

'Volunteers. College kids, mostly. Lots of guys from Tulane.'

'Anyone I met at your party?'

'Oh, no,' she said, almost offended. 'They'll come, of course, to see Teddy's work. But working here night after night, jumping out of closets to scare the mundanes? It would just be too spaz.'

'Yes, spaz, of course,' the Doctor murmured and meekly followed her into the heart of the Nightmare.

A series of hallways raised a couple of feet off the floor had been constructed on a twisting path through the big empty warehouse space.

These opened out into rooms or sometimes just wide spaces where, Swan explained, various tableaux would be set. Some of these were already in place. She demonstrated one in which a sickly-looking baby suddenly flew out of a cot and whizzed past the Doctor, to the accompaniment of an anguished infantile shriek.

Additionally, there were niches off the walkway, unseen until the lights shifted suddenly, and these would contain various grotesque skits such as mummies winding a screaming victim in bandages, witches preparing to drop a puppy into a boiling pot, corpses bursting out of a tomb to seize a hapless mortal and drag him back inside with them. One of these displays was to feature a grisly operation, and the fake body out of which the fake doctors would haul gobs of viscera and ketchup was already sculpted in place. Swan pulled aside the sheets smeared with red paint to show how the bed was constructed so that a volunteer could lie with his own body resting comfortably beneath the artificial one while his head appeared on a pillow to jerk and yell.

A couple of the longer, tunnel-like passages contained lighting effects. Red laser beams shot through one, more beautifully than frighteningly. Another was set up to reflect a whirling, disorientating op-art pattern. But most of the corridors relied on the simple device of being utterly black and having people hiding beneath the walkways grab at the pedestrians' feet.

As with Acree's tomb sculptures, the Doctor had to acknowledge that the Nightmare of Horror was extraordinarily well done. Acree had studied Geiger, as well as Harry Clarke's illustrations to Faust, but these had only been starting points.

'Your husband's very talented,' he said inadequately to Swan, as she showed him a couple of masks made from the long skulls of horses.

'He's a genius,' she said simply.'You see now why he needs you.'

'No, I don't, actually.'

She hung the bone masks - again, the Doctor had a fleeting, unsettling sense of déjà vu - back on the wall and frowned. 'You don't?'

'No.'

'Don't you understand? He sculpts what he sees.'

The Doctor slowly looked around the room they stood in. Things grinned at and reached for him. He said quietly, 'Literally?'

'I don't know. Neither does he.' Swan was plucking at the ends of her hair again. Her violet eyes were bright. He realised she had tears in them. 'He hopes he's crazy, of course. But sometimes he's afraid he's not.' She stepped forward and laid a hand softly against the Doctor's cheek. 'You're beautiful, you see. He wants to sculpt something