Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [93]
Rust's eyes had been fixed on the limping man. Now he wheeled and strode out to the dark veranda. But he stopped there and after a moment, very slowly, as if pulled unwillingly by a wire, looked back.
The limping man reached the others. As the circle opened to accept him, the Doctor thought he glimpsed the little bone charm on the floor. The flame of the solitary candle trembled in the draft from the open gallery doors. Rust's mother took her son's hand. His father gripped the shoulder of one of the male participants to steady himself, and both parents urged the boy towards the middle of the circle. The child hung back. The mother's smile grew more fixed. The father twisted his fingers in the boy's hair and forced him forward.
'Don't!' Rust ran back into the room. 'Stop!' he cried, as the circle began to mill in confusion. The father staggered. The mother screamed. And the boy, who with a terrified face had broken from his father's grasp, dashed towards the gallery as if to throw himself for protection into Rust's arms -
but, instead, passed through him and into the night.
The Doctor plucked the end of the thread he had kept at the edge of his consciousness. The room jumped. The phantoms faded. With a soft rustling sound, almost a sigh, everything settled and was still.
Rust was on his knees, his face in his hands. The Doctor stared at him, numb with pity. As if sensing the gaze, Rust slowly raised his head. His expression was so stricken he looked almost stupid. 'So you see,' he said in an unnaturally calm voice, 'it was all my fault.'
Chapter Nineteen
The Magician's House
Officer Erasmus Early didn't like calls like this one. Just too damn weird. An example of what the world was coming to, if you asked him. He stood with a certain dignity in the gallery room of Death's Door, keeping his eyes fixed on the corpse in preference to looking at any of the, as he himself would have put it, so-called art. Devil worship was what it was, easy to see that.
Fool nonsense. Like his sister-in-law's cousin Laneen, into all that voodoo silliness. He'd put her in her place last time she came over. If voodoo works, he'd asked her, right there over the fried chicken and Emma's special Sunday-dinner extra-buttery mashed potatoes, then why aren't black folks any farther along than we are? That shut her up. Though probably not for long. He knew that white people who were into weird beliefs were often vegetarians. Maybe Laneen would take that up and not want to come to dinner any more, because of the chicken. More likely, he thought with a sigh, she'd just come and eat up all the mashed potatoes. It was beyond him why white people with no real problems took up this sort of stuff. It was never the crackers, except for some of biker-devil-cult types who were all crazy anyway. It was these middle-class folks who kept all those silly French Quarter shops going, buying those crystals and incense and ashtrays that looked like skulls. What was up with all that? Of course, maybe this fellow here had just been crazy. Most people who killed themselves were. Suicide was another of those white peculiarities that baffled Early. He'd never known or even heard of a black person killing himself. Well, maybe Richard Pryor had tried, but Rich was a man carrying a load of pain. That was why you had to forgive his language.
Maybe this white man had carried pain, too, Early considered, reminding himself of the duties of Christian charity. Certainly the widow was in agony, wailing in the other room. Sometimes women carried on at times like this, but she sounded sincere to him. It wasn't often Early was thankful to have a female partner, but today he was glad that Caroline Bethune