Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [99]
He had little need of flesh-and-blood servants, anyway. He had gradually cut back on the space he used in his mansion. Truth be told, ninety per cent of his movements were along the same track from bed to bathroom to kitchen to his conjuring closet to a particular corner of his library containing his favourite chair. There were rooms he hadn't entered for years, their silk-covered furniture slowly rotting in the stillness and silence. Most of his collection was in a room like that, shoved into dusty glassed-in bookshelves. In recent years, he'd begun to find it too much trouble to unpack and clean and store items. He just dumped the boxes into the room and shut the door, being very careful to lock it: he never knew who might sneak in, despite his precautions, and rob him.
He'd made an exception for the charm - it was such a curiosity!
It was sitting now on the table by his reading chair. He peered at it through a magnifying lens. Fascinating inscriptions. He'd have to find out exactly what to do with the thing. Possibly you had to learn to pronounce the runes.
He hoped this wasn't one of those exercises the human mouth was incapable of performing. He would seek advice from his immaterial& acquaintances. Of course, sometimes they lied. But trial and error usually worked the difficulties out.
Bal swivelled his head, eyes narrowing. His gaze shot suspiciously around the shadowy room. He had not heard not felt, either, exactly, and certainly not seen. Just sensed something. Or had he? Every now and then a bat got in, he was damned if he could figure out how, and flitted in jerky circles around the dark ceiling. Why couldn't the things fly naturally, like birds? Not that he liked it when birds came in, which they had used to do before he installed screens in all the chimneys. He remembered with particular displeasure an owl it had taken him what seemed like forever to kill. He'd kept hitting it with the fireplace shovel, and hitting it, and hitting it Was this an owl now? Nonsense. What a ridiculous notion. He would see an owl, hear its wing beat. There was no sound in the room at all except for his own breathing, and nothing moved. Still, his uneasiness persisted. It was almost as if But of course that was impossible. His snares were in place to trap and expel any extramaterial intruder, as that other had learned to his furious disappointment. It would take unprecedented, inhuman power to -
Something fell in the room, like dust slipping off the edge of a book and drifting to the floor.
Bal didn't move. Incantations died on his lips and the impulse to summon aid drained away. He slumped into the cushions as if boneless. A glisten of drool slid from the corner of his mouth. What could help him now? The unseen hunter, circling in slow silence, was his own personal death.
* * *
The Doctor had come down the chimney and he didn't like it. There was just enough substance to whatever form he was in for the passage through the screen to be hideous, and he shot into the room completely disorientated. The patches of light and shadow wouldn't assume a recognisable pattern, and he seemed to have gone deaf. This was something of a relief, since the things he'd dodged on his way in had shrieked like grinding metal, as well as glowing in colours his mind refused to assimilate.
After a bit he realised that he wasn't deaf, the room was simply very quiet.
Also, he was upside down. He decided to stay that way. Aside from being upended, he was near the ceiling of the room, a library with only a single illuminated corner, in which an old man hunched in an armchair, mouth blackly agape.
Once