Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [94]
The detective from Homicide had finished looking over the room and was crouched by the body again. Watching his face, Early detected familiar signs of someone who'd been in the job too long. He'd known it the minute he came in: the heavy step, the strain around the eyes. Man should put in for a desk transfer.
'Sorry we had to call you in, lieutenant,' he said. 'It looks like open-and-shut suicide.'
'I suppose he got the knife from the kitchen.'
'It's not part of a set, so we can't be sure. But that makes sense.'
The detective nodded.
'Lot of blood,' commented Early. 'Sure a lot of blood in the human body'
'Yes,' said Rust. 'It always surprises me.' He remained crouched beside Teddy Acree, head down, as if he were listening to the woman's keening, as if he would be listening to it for ever.
Rust walked home from work, as he did every day. He lived in Marigny, just east of the French Quarter, in a narrow, two-storey frame house a little less than a hundred years old. Though simple, it had always suited Rust, whose material needs were few. It was not, however, ideal for keeping someone imprisoned. When Anji had shown up at the door, he'd thought for a second his heart was going to stop. He wasn't sure what he'd do if she came back.
But she wouldn't, he thought with resignation and grim regret. She was too proud and too self-possessed.
Rust turned the key and entered his house. It was not the same on the inside as you'd expect from the outside. Rust himself wasn't entirely sure where the details had come from. Memories of stories he'd read, movies he'd seen, illustrations from books, old paintings. These details changed occasionally. Rust had gotten used to it. The fireplace, for example, was sometimes in the front room, sometimes in the middle room, and sometimes upstairs in the bedroom. He was positive that when he'd bought the house it hadn't even had a fireplace.
There were books - thousands of leather-bound volumes, many more than the rooms could hold - and ancient prints, and obscure and antique implements: a lunary; something resembling a sextant; a miniature pendulum; strangely curved lenses in narrow metal frames. The light came from odd, unseen places. It was impossible to tell exactly where the ceiling was. There were no windows, though the exterior walls contained eighteen.
Rust could have done with more sunlight, but he'd never been able to arrange this. In the warm months, he often slept on the screened-in back porch, just for the morning light. Right before dawn, the birds would wake him with their cries.
This mutating interior, his home, remained mysterious to him. He hadn't actually made it; he wouldn't have had the power. The changes appeared to result from the energy residues left by the working of magic in the space.
They took form from his mind, but their creation was independent. The results weren't unpleasant. Rust had been relieved to discover that no images from his id had been borrowed for the decoration. But living here was peculiar. The house was at once intimately familiar and fundamentally unknowable.
The Doctor's presence made a small but identifiable difference. In his unconsciousness, in this house, his odd energies took the form of light - a subtle luminosity surrounding him, somewhat, but not exactly, like moonlight. It wasn't an aura. Rust had never seen anything quite like it. Its most intriguing feature was that if he looked through it past the Doctor's body, the wall beyond would appear in its simple, ordinary state, as when he'd first bought the house.
Rust had discovered he could modify this disturbing light so that it formed an actual box around the Doctor, imprisoning him in his own energies and keeping him unconscious. This took nothing from Rust, and he preferred it to storing his captive under the stairs. The strange light made a more appropriate cage for this rare bird he'd netted from the night's Plutonian shore. This unhuman being.
Looking at the Doctor now where he lay on a leather-covered