Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [95]
The fireplace, complete with fire, had made its appearance in the wall opposite the chaise, which was technically impossible, since behind the wall was the hallway, but Rust didn't let it bother him. He wondered briefly if it were true that the fireplace moved around, or if this were a second, identical one that had simply appeared upstairs. There was, of course, no way to find out.
On the brick hearth sat an elaborately carved mahogany chair, a malignant wooden face topping its back, its arms ending in lion heads. Rust lifted the Doctor gently, as if he were a precious and fragile object, and settled him in this. He carefully turned his face from side to side. The bruises had almost vanished. When Rust opened his shirt, he noted without surprise that no trace remained of Dupre's scars. Pulling the shirt away from the Doctor's shoulder, he looked again at the tattoo, an abstract pattern he recognised as Meso-American: a shaman transforming into a jaguar. 'What are you?'
he muttered, refastening the buttons. Even you don't know. Once you had secrets but now you've lost them. Now you're a secret to yourself.'
He sat down in a leather armchair across from his prisoner and studied him. The Doctor's refined handsomeness seemed anachronistic, like a face in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype.
Rust recalled reading that at that time the photographic process was incapable of registering blue. What looked like sky in those old pictures was in feet nothing at all. A line from a short story came back to him: "The doctor had no cure for autumn, no medicine for the north wind.'
For a while he stared into the fire, his eyes reflecting the flames. Finally, with a grimace, he faced the Doctor again and made a fluid, complicated gesture with his left hand. The light receded. The Doctor's eyes opened.
'How do you feel?'
'I feel fine.' The Doctor looked around the room curiously. 'Peachy-keen, to use one of my favourite out-of-date Americanisms. What did you hit me with back there in the past?'
'I just released your own energy back to you.'
'Really? My. I had no idea I was so explosive. I feel as if someone's been through my head with one of those drain-cleaning thingummies. What are they called? It's a funny name. Roto-Rooter? They're advertised on television. Do you know what I'm talking about?'
'I have no idea what you're talking about,' said Rust, who had been staring at him in increasing bafflement. 'Do you?'
'Oh look, a bird's egg.' The Doctor stood up, not entirely steadily, and reached his long fingers into a nest on the mantelpiece. He withdrew a tiny egg the colour of his eyes. 'A robin's, isn't it? Do you have others? I've always thought the eggs of the American quail - I believe you call them bobwhites - are very beautiful. Ah, this is interesting: one of those horns that occasionally develop on the human skull. And here's a meteorite. You have a collection of curiosities here, a wunderkammer. Or have you? I mean to say, how here is here! This room is rather strange. Are we in your house?'
'This is my house,' Rust answered when he realised the Doctor had finally finished. 'It's different on the inside than it is on the outside.'
'As are we all. It's not larger, is it?'
'I don't think so.'
The Doctor nodded in satisfaction, then glanced dubiously at the fire. "This isn't where you torture me, is it? Because I've had enough of that this trip.'
'I'd like to ask you a few questions,' said Rust with exasperated calm.
'And you'd like me to answer them too, I'll bet.'
'Sit down,' Rust snapped.
The Doctor obediently sat, hands clasped in his lap. 'Ask away.'
'What exactly happened to Dupre?'
'He was eaten.'
'By what?'
'A demon.'
'Do you happen to know what kind?'
'The toothy kind.' The Doctor eyed Rust sardonically. 'You were good back