Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [61]
He had been afraid Swan would want to accompany him, but to his relief she had returned to spend the evening with her husband. Soothing his troubled brow, no doubt. The Doctor wondered if he'd been right to accept her invitation. He had no intention of posing for Teddy Acree, no matter how brilliantly done his haunted house was. He felt as if he were leading Swan on. And Teddy as well.
What would the sculptor come up with to persuade him after this failed?
In the Gothic 'courtyard', the crowd became quieter. Partly this was owing to the presence of two tall robed figures with long bony heads that stood swaying on either side of the doorway, beckoning the visitors to enter. The fact that these had to be no more than people on stilts wearing the horse-skull masks didn't diminish the eeriness. A girl said, 'Ew!' Then she and a number of others screamed and ducked as something glowing swooped at them like a bird of prey before vanishing on to a dark balcony.
The Doctor admired the lighting: recessed, mostly concealed, coming into the area at peculiar angles, throwing deformed shadows. Had Teddy designed that too? Other than morbid taste, did Teddy actually have any connection with the charm, or the dream, or the graveyard, or the murder?
With Mrs Flood, the lost elemental in her prison of flesh? The Doctor shivered. In retrospect, his experience with her was uncanny. He would have sworn he was holding a human body against him before it shimmered and& changed. To have been so physically close to something so, well, alien, and not to have known& It occurred to him that Fitz and Anji each must have had a moment like that with him.
'Welcome,' whispered one of the horse-skulled gatekeepers, and ushered the Doctor inside.
It was pitch-black. People shuffled timidly forward, bumping against one another. The Doctor, who could see comfortably, sidestepped bumbling gropers. He had known blacker than this: darkness that had forgotten the light, or that the light had forgotten and left imprisoned in its own blindness.
Elementals always had trouble taking on human form. That was why Mrs Flood had had no eyes. A curse of sorts, though at least it meant she hadn't had to see her husband.
He wondered whether, now that she had gone, something would grow in the ruins of the drowned plantation.
With a grinding roar and a blast of light, a masked figure appeared, brandishing a chainsaw. Everyone jumped and yelled. Then it was black again. People laughed nervously, then yelled again as hands reached from under the walkway and grabbed at them, then laughed some more. The Doctor tried to remember what happened next. He expected the flying baby would get quite a reaction.
The next exhibit was the unwilling patient on the operating table. Whoever was playing the victim was giving his all, rolling his head and eyes and spitting ketchup. The doctors, their white robes dripping red, stabbed enthusiastically at the mass of cow intestines in the fake body and tried to laugh insanely. This particular setup had a surprise twist: as people stepped back from the gore, arms reached out of the wall at them. Nicely staged, the Doctor thought as he dodged.
More darkness. More grabbing hands. Something light and dry brushed against the Doctor's face. 'It's just string!' one boy yelled above the exclamations. 'Just string! "Whoa!' yelled someone else as the walkway began to shake back and forth, not hard, just enough to make the crowd jump in surprise. They turned a sharp corner and another tableau lit up: the mock tomb. A hideous-looking hand emerged through the barely open door, its fingers wriggling. 'Ugh!' said a girl delightedly.
Nothing else happened. The fingers just continued to wriggle menacingly.
People edged by, waiting for something to jump out. No one wanted to be next to the tomb when whatever it was leaped forth, but no one wanted