Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [9]
Fitz gaped. 'What's all that?'
The Doctor pulled the door lever. Anji poked her head out into the damp pre-dawn air. The row of small silent buildings seemed hunched in the dull light.
She said, 'There aren't any windows.'
'No need.' The Doctor stepped past her into the cool morning. He looked left and right, as if expecting to see someone he knew, then turned slowly in a circle. Anji got the impression that he was somehow listening with all his senses. The soft breeze ruffled his hair. His blue eyes reflected the grey sky. 'No need.'
For the first time, Anji noticed that the stone doors of the building were engraved with lettering.
'Oh, bloody hell,' said Fitz from behind her. 'We've put down in a cemetery:
'Water table,' explained the Doctor, eyes still narrowed at the paling sky.
'New Orleans is below sea level. They have to bury their dead above ground.'
'Don't tell me,' said Fitz. 'This wasn't where we were supposed to land, was it?'
'No. I was aiming for Audubon Park.' The Doctor had reached out and gently touched the wall of one of the tombs. Crumbling stucco powdered his
fingertips. 'But we're still in the right place.'
* * i
'He's been fine since we got here,' Anji pointed out.
Fitz had to admit this was true. In the past four days, the Doctor had taken them to eat in wonderful restaurants and to listen to wonderful bands. They had danced all night at a bar the location of which Fitz couldn't even remember. They had stood shoulder to shoulder with other tourists on a paddlewheel boat that went a few miles up the Mississippi and visited an old mansion approached down an alley of two-hundred-year-old oaks hung with trailing grey Spanish moss and walked down behind that mansion to look sombrely at the cramped slave cabins. He, personally, had drunk, among other libations, about seventeen litres of coffee.
But still The Doctor's expression when he was lying on the floor -Fitz had seen it before, and it always spooked him. The thousand-year stare, he thought. To Anji, he said, 'What about that charm, then?'
"What charm?'
'You remember - the little one with the funny carvings, that he analysed and said was human bone.'
She grimaced. "The one he found on the bottom of his wardrobe?'
'He said he'd never seen it before.'
'In all that junk, how would he know?'
'He'd know.' The Doctor had always known, even when there had been a hundred times more 'junk'. 'He was going to ask around about it here, remember? He went by that magic museum, but it wasn't open. Then he said he left it with this bone dealer who was going to research it.'
'What does that have to do with his dream?'
'That's the question, isn't it?'
She brushed at his sleeve. 'You shouldn't wear black if you're going to eat beignets. Powdered sugar really shows up on it.'
He moved his arm irritably. 'I'm serious about this.'
'Well then, ask him about it. Here he comes.'
Fitz spotted the Doctor walking along beside the high iron fence surrounding Jackson Square, in company with a long-limbed man in a nondescript suit. They were in earnest conversation. Anji stood up and waved: 'Doctor!'
The Doctor looked up with his beautiful, sunny, and in some ways, Anji had decided, meaningless smile. He and his companion crossed the street and wove among the tables to join them. Anji selfconsciously dusted flecks of sugar off her blouse in a way that made Fitz look again at the man with the Doctor. He was elegantly lanky, with a strong nose, narrow, sleepily sardonic eyes and reddish-brown hair brushed away from a steep forehead. Good-looking enough, Fitz conceded, if you liked them at a well-preserved fifty. Bit old for Anj, he would have thought.
'These are my friends Anji Kapoor and Fitz Kreiner,' the Doctor was saying.
'And this is Lieutenant Jonas Rust of the local homicide department.'