49 - The City of the Dead

The City of the Dead

Prologue

The magician had a problem. There was a fish-hook in his heart. It was a

metaphorical fish-hook, of course, but he sometimes forgot that because the

hole it had torn and now kept seepingly open was of such a perfect fish-hook

shape - a soft-walled, meticulously fitted case for the tool that wounded it.

As a small boy, fishing with his father, he had caught a hook in his hand, in

the web of flesh between his index finger and his thumb. There hadn't been

much blood. There hadn't been that much pain until he tried to pull the hook

out and screamed. Then there had been plenty of pain, and choking, drowning

waves of panic. He pulled and screamed and ran for what he remembered as a

long time until his father caught him and slapped him to make him stop.

Later, in the emergency room after everything was over, he could see that the

actual injury the hook left when, barb clipped, it had been withdrawn was a

tiny thing. Nothing like the red tears around it that he himself had made.

Just a neat, almost invisible hole. 'There's a lesson there,' his father had

said, and he was sure there was, but he had never been able to figure out

quite what. He kept this failure, along with the many others, to himself.

So when the thing - the rip - happened to his heart, he understood immediately

that he had been caught on a fish-hook.

The magician liked children and was protective of them. It made his work

difficult. As soon as he had begun to study, he had realised that children

were almost a necessity. Oh, you could get along without them, and he had, but

it was like walking rather than taking a jet. And in the end there were places

you simply could not reach by foot. Swamps and fissured glaciers of the

psyche. Those airless places in the soul. At times he felt as if he were

standing on the bank of a great river, eyes narrowed at the dim far shore,

unable to cross because of the damned inviolate children he had held his

chilly gaze upon and then passed by.

Because there was no doubt about it - children were different. To use the

language of physics, they had stronger energy fields. It was odd, when you

thought about it, that in all the millennia of writing on magic no one had

actually made a specific study of the value, the absolute and utter value, of

children. Only Abramelean magic, with its emphasis on the child as a pure

medium, had come close to addressing the matter.

Of course, self-styled 'black' magicians - a nonsensical distinction - went

after children immediately, but that wasn't because the fools understood

power: they just wanted society to perceive them as evil. So naturally they

chained themselves to society by adapting its definition of evil and then

running after it as fast as they could, practically tripping over their

lolling, panting tongues. Their true ambition wasn't to become magi but to

inspire a serial-killer movie.

The magician scornfully considered himself too sophisticated for such

sophomoric antics. But his years of study and a penchant for intellectual

honesty forced him to admit that, while 'black' and 'white' magic were

specious terms, there did seem to be two differently structured varieties, one

of them considerably more unreliable and dangerous than the other. With a nod

to the labelling of DNA, he thought of them as left- and right-handed magic.

He also had to acknowledge that the practices involved took on a no doubt

coincidental but undeniably moral overtone. There was the unmistakable sense

of contracts agreed to, then broken, of good faith betrayed, of what might

almost be called slyness. There was the unavoidable fact that sacrifice - of

oneself, of others - produced biases to the left or right, and the peculiar

corollary that more sacrifice was necessary to accomplish effects tending

towards the right. To put it in Sunday school terms, the evil way was easier.

Not that there was anything evil about the - to use the word in its chemical

sense - elements of his art. Or anything good, either. They were in themselves

as morally neutral as the sun and the moon. They burned and reflected and went

on their way. While he, far below, horribly small, squinted at their passage

in terror and desire.

How simple if life were a fairy tale. A supernatural servant -Come, Puck! Fly,

Ariel! - flits in an instant to the pale moon and returns with a cool ivory

salve that at one touch shrinks his wound away to the condition of never-was.

There isn't even a scar. Where the pain boiled and spat there is now sweet

calm, and peace fills him like light. He often imagines this. He often wonders

how he can imagine something he has never, never felt.

This is part of his gentleness towards the children. He believes that they

feel it. Possibly not: the private sufferings of childhood can be terrible.

But he suspects they do, that they know. It's something in their eyes. Some

clarity. Some grace. They are not yet sullied.

Which is why, of course, they're so valuable. It's another example of the

queer way morality appears to intrude into what he knows is simply a hard

science. The peculiar innocence of childhood clearly has a special organic

reality in the brain, a chemical composition that enables the electrochemical

field - the energy - to manifest almost without resistance and so achieve such

impressive power. A child is a near-frictionless conductor. The old Abramelean

term is perfect: a child is a fabulous medium.

The magician was not, to be quite honest, certain this was true of all

children - but that was a line of thought he preferred not to pursue. It was

nothing to his purposes, anyway. He had no intention of working with children.

Adults, obviously, were another matter.

PART ONE

Dream Place

'Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour

isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands?'

- Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

Chapter One

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

The Doctor didn't know he was dreaming. He thought he was lying on his back

with his eyes shut, trying to figure out why he was awake. He felt as if he'd

been lying here for hours, heavy-limbed yet restless, his mind skittering from

one trivial thought to another. He decided to focus on something relaxing by

turning his thoughts into music. Mozart. One of the horn concertos.

He said out loud,'Why am I afraid to open my eyes?'

His words bewildered him. Then he realised they were true. Perhaps 'afraid'

was too strong a word, but he definitely did not want to open his eyes. Why

not? He extended his other senses out into his bedroom in the TARDIS.

Everything was in order. There were no strange smells or unusual noises. The

sheet lay raspily light against his skin; the room temperature was the same as

always.

Open your eyes, he thought, but he didn't. His hearts continued to beat at the

usual rate; his breathing didn't change. He wasn't showing any of the symptoms

of fear. But that didn't matter. He didn't want to open his eyes.

'Oh, for heaven's sake,' he muttered and, just as he spoke, muffled under the

sound of his voice, there was a noise. Not nearby. Far away in the corridors

of the TARDIS. It was sudden and, if not loud, carrying, but he hadn't heard

it clearly, he wasn't sure what -

It came again.

It sounded like a stick breaking. Only it echoed.

He opened his eyes. Blackness. He shifted his vision up and down the spectrum

into what human beings called the 'nonvisual' wavelengths, but all he saw was

the usual pulse and flow of the TARDIS energy, running its engines,

maintaining the environment. In the 'normal' spectrum, everything was black.

Nothing.

Nothing and silence.

He listened to the reassuring sound of his own breathing, still regular and

calm. He listened to the deep double thump of his hearts.

Crack!

He inhaled sharply. It was nearer. And the sound wasn't a breaking stick& no,

something else& a grinding snap& like a bone cracking. How could it be so loud

when it was still so far away? No. No, it wasn't loud so much as& penetrating.

He had felt the vibration of that splintering bone in his own marrow.

He lay quietly, listening. He wondered why he had wanted so badly to keep his

eyes shut. The darkness was gentle. It was his ears he wished he could close,

at the same time as he wanted to hear more, hear better, hear something

identifiable&

I should get up, he thought. Go into the hall. More options for escape there.

Assuming whatever it was was after him. That didn't necessarily follow.

Perhaps it was merely taking a stroll through the TARDIS&

Something patted at the door.

The Doctor stopped breathing. He lay still as stone, staring at the ceiling he

couldn't see. The patting came again. Tentative. Exploratory. like a palm

placed flat against the door, but very softly. Very, very softly. The Doctor

found he couldn't move. His limbs felt like clay.

How had it got past the TAEDIS defences?

'Nothing can get in,' he whispered.

Then he realised that Nothing had.

Jonas Rust looked at the body and asked,'Is this Chic?' 'Huh?' said Beasley.

'lieutenant,' he added quickly. Rust eyed the beat cop patiently. 'This

establishment is called

"Chic's House O' Bones". Is this Chic?'

'Oh, the owner. I guess so.' Beasley checked his notes. 'ID says Maurice

Chickly.'

Rust nodded.

'Spooky, huh?' said Beasley. "The setting and all.'

Rust agreed that the long, dim shop would have made a passable set for a cheap

horror movie. Patches of the stained plaster walls had flaked away, revealing

crumbling brick. Pallid light seeped through the front window for a few feet,

then faltered as it touched first a dusty glass case containing ornaments of

human hair and bone, then a shelf of animal skulls, then a couple of broken

tombstones - and finally gave up and faded away at a boxed jumble of bones

topped with a handwritten card reading 'Complete Child's Skeleton - Peru -

$875.'

'I called Mr Thales and asked him to come over.'

'He's on crutches, for God's sake,' said Rust, exasperated. 'We can take him

over an inventory list later. Go call and see if you can catch him, tell him

not to come. Where's the fellow who called this in?' Beasley gestured over his

shoulder with his thumb as he started up front to the phone. 'And find out

what the hell's holding up the coroner. I can't babysit a stiff all morning.'

Rust looked again at the corpse. He'd been a homicide detective for what he

would have characterised as a fair spell, but he still hadn't gotten used to

the amount of blood there was in the human body. The dead man's throat gaped

wetly at him. Well, he thought, at least the cause of death was a no-brainer.

He turned toward the back of the shop where a couple of sixty-watt bulbs

weakly illuminated more objets de la morte: a locked case of human skulls, a

stack of coffin lids leaning unsteadily against the wall, a little nineteenth-

century marble tombstone crowned with a lamb that weather had eroded into

something more closely resembling a rat. On the other side of the coffin lids,

in the corner, a mart was sitting so still that Rust hadn't even realised

somebody was there.

'You the one who called the police?'

The man nodded. In the shadows, his pale and striking features seemed almost

to be floating, detached, like a mask. The proportions of his face struck Rust

as somehow wrong: the forehead too high, mouth too wide, eyes too large and

far apart. Rust thought of old fairy tales and stories of changelings.

'Want to come tell me about it?'

The man stood up. He was not quite Rust's height, slender and lithe, like a

swimmer. As he moved closer, the goblin beauty resolved into a more

conventional handsomeness. His face was framed with tousled light-brown hair.

He wore a dark shirt and trousers. Rust would have said his old-fashioned-

looking, dove-grey coat was linen, except that it wasn't wrinkled.

'I know you've already told this story,' Rust said.' Likely you'll tell it

again more than once. Start with me.'

'I came just after ten,' the man began. English: that explained the pallor. No

one could live in New Orleans and get that little sun unless he were a near-

recluse like Thales. "The sign indicated the shop should be open but it

wasn't. I looked through the window and saw that something was wrong.' The

man's eyes flicked for a moment to Chic.'I could see a hand. I thought perhaps

he was ill or passed out, so I ran round to the back. The door was open.'

"The perp broke in that way.You walked all over the footprints.'

'I know,' sighed the man. 'I'm sorry. I moved around as little as possible

once I found he was dead: I went up to the phone, then, when the officer and

the photographer arrived, I came back here.' His manner was disarmingly

guileless.

'Beasley says you're a "Dr Smith".'

'Dr John Smith,' the man affirmed, without a trace of irony.

'What's your specialty?'

'I'm not a medical doctor,' Smith said. 'It's more of an honorary title, I

believe.'

'You believe?' Rush echoed, but, before he could ask how anyone could be

uncertain about what struck him as a pretty basic fact, the front door opened.

An elderly man on crutches edged awkwardly in, shrugging off an offer of

assistance from the policeman stationed outside. Rust stepped quickly around

the corpse and started toward him. 'You don't want to come back here, Mr

Thales.'

'Oh, dear God.' Thales stopped in alarm and distaste.'The body's still here.'

"The coroner's late -'

'Oh, I don't like this at all.' Thales turned away, bumping into the box of

child's bones. They clattered on to the floor. 'Really, Lieutenant, I am

always ready to help the police but this is too much.'

'I'm sorry,' said Rust.'I thought everything would be cleared out before you

got here.'

Thales was floundering back toward the door. Somehow, unobtrusively, Dr Smith

was at his elbow. 'I believe I noticed a cafe just at the corner. Perhaps we

could wait for Lieutenant Rust there.'

Through the dirty plate-glass window Rust saw the coroner's old Chevy cough up

to the kerb.'Go ahead. I'll be along directly'

When he got to the cafe half an hour later, he found Thales and Smith at a

small table in the courtyard. Thales had propped his metal crutches against

the wall behind him. He was shivering and looked exhausted . How old was he,

anyway? Rust wondered. At least seventy. 'You know, this can wait,' he said.

'Well, what do you want anyway?' Thales snapped.'You may as well go ahead and

tell me. Sit down.' Rust sat, stretching his legs out comfortably. Thales

fixed him with his watery eyes. 'The human body is very poorly put together.'

'Well, that's one way to look at it,' Rust said. 'Would that be your opinion

too, Dr Smith?'

'Just Doctor,' said the man. Great, thought Rust, one name. Like Madonna or

something. The guy had probably given up some legitimate profession and become

an artist. New Orleans drew second-lifers just like Los Angeles.'It's very

vulnerable, I've always thought.'

'It's a horror,' said Thales. 'All fluids and tubes and decaying tissue.' He

lowered his head as if he were about to cry. Old age talking, Rust reflected

with some sympathy. His own heart was dodgier than it should have been at his

age. He cast a professional eye at the Doctor. Late thirties to look at, but

Rust got the feeling he was actually older.

'Mr Thales, as I said -'

'I'm fine,' said Thales. 'Kindly don't patronise me.' He took a swallow of

coffee, then sat staring into the cup.

The Doctor touched a strand of the brilliant purple bougainvillea that fell

down the brick wall. 'Full bloom in October,' he murmured appreciatively. Rust

took note of the long fingers that looked as though they could, with equal

skill, pluck music from a harp or your wallet from your pocket.

'First time in New Orleans?'

'I think so,' said the Doctor candidly. In the autumn sunlight, his pale eyes

were a startling greenish-blue. 'I had rather a bad accident some time back.

It left holes in my memory'

Rust hoped that 'accident' wasn't a euphemism for shock therapy: there was

definitely something off about the man. He didn't seem threatening, though.

More the contrary.

'The Doctor is a scholar of the occult. He has been telling me about his

studies.' Thales raised his eyes and stared at the Doctor for a second or two,

as if puzzling where he'd seen him before. 'Lieutenant Rust is, of course, a

homicide detective. Regrettably, homicide in this city occasionally involves

people participating in what they imagine are& esoteric rites. As curator of a

museum of magic, I can sometimes offer insight into such crimes.' He sighed

deeply. 'Though this, in spite of its setting, appears a straightforward

enough killing.'

'Some of the cases were smashed,' noted the Doctor.

Rust nodded. 'The murder was secondary. Chic probably surprised the burglar -'

'Was his name really Chic?' said the Doctor. 'Or was that just a catchy

business alias?'

Rust caught the disgust the irony was meant to conceal. So the place had

gotten to him after all. 'His name was Maurice Chickly. He was a creep, but I

always thought he had the sense to keep out of trouble. He stayed out of that

cemetery art theft mess back in '99. We had antiques dealers on Royal Street

who didn't have the brains to dodge that one.'

The Doctor frowned. 'Cemetery art? You mean statues of angels and things like

that? There's really a market for those?'

'A big one. Not all of it freaks, though of course it's the freaks I tend to

end up having business with. Sexual weirdoes. Black-magic nuts.'

'Ah, I see,' said Thales. He seemed fully recovered. 'You want me to look over

the inventory list and tell you if something is missing that might have

appealed to a would-be sorcerer. But you know, almost anything connected with

the dead is supposed to have magical value.'

'Why steal whatever it was?' said the Doctor suddenly.'So much attention-

getting fuss. Why not just quietly buy it? Unless,' he added thoughtfully,'the

thief had tried to buy it but it was already promised to another purchaser.'

'Why, yes,' Rust agreed languidly. 'My mind was running along that very track.

Chic was a practical fellow. He'd have given the thing to whoever offered the

most money. So the purchaser must have had deep enough pockets to outbid

anyone else. Institutional money, maybe.' He looked lazily at Thales, whose

mouth tightened.

'You're not a gentleman, Lieutenant.'

'A cop can't afford to be.'

'I was going to tell you.'

'Well, I thought you might. I've been waiting. But you were taking your time.'

Thales was silent. 'You were bidding for something Chic had, weren't you?'

With surprising quickness, Thales seized his crutches and stood up. He didn't

look at either of them.'Let's go back to the museum,' he mumbled. I'll explain

things there.'

* * *

Thales irritably refused Rust's suggestion of a cab. The three of them - the

Doctor remained unselfconsciously attached to the party -moved along the

sidewalk at an awkward pace, the two able-bodied men shifting ahead or falling

behind to dodge other pedestrians while Thales clanked stubbornly straight on,

forcing people to make way for him. Rust wouldn't have been surprised if he'd

swatted at someone with a crutch. When he wasn't watching out for Thales, Rust

found himself trying to keep track of the Doctor, who continually stopped to

admire the long balconies with their iron-lace railings or became transfixed

by a hint of greenery at the far end of a dim tunnel-passage. It was like

escorting two children, one ill-tempered and the other wide-eyed.

Fortunately, the Museum of Magic was only a few streets away, on a quiet block

in the eastern part of the old French Quarter of the city. Thales unlocked a

wrought-iron gate in a high blank whitewashed wall. The Doctor glanced at the

tiny brass plaque that read simply Eula Mae Lavender Museum of Magic, no

opening or closing hours.'Very discreet,' he observed.

'This is not a tourist attraction like those voodoo museums and fortune-

telling parlours,' Thales harrumphed. 'It is a serious museum.'

Somewhat to Rust's surprise, Thales allowed the Doctor to help him push the

heavy gate open. They entered a narrow bricked yard fronting a pale-green two-

storey house with dark-green shutters fastened tight across its extremely tall

front windows. Thales opened the right-hand shutters, revealing that this

window was in fact a door, and they stepped into a hall, then turned left into

a high-ceilinged room lined with display cases.

'Unfortunately, the house was much altered during the last century and is of

no historical interest.'

'Are we going to meet Ms Lavender?' said the Doctor.

'Regrettably, Miss Lavender is no longer with us. It is thanks to her generous

bequest that this museum exists.' Thales pulled open the shutters flanking the

fireplace, and long bars of light fell across the oriental carpet and on to

the polished wood of the cases. The Doctor peered into one.

'An Enochian cipher ball!'

'One of only three in existence,' said Thales, 'and the only one not in

England.' He watched with wary pride as the Doctor went from case to case with

small exclamations of recognition and admiration:

'This is quite wonderful,' he said. 'Is there a catalogue of the collection?'

'Not yet,' Thales admitted. 'I keep making organisational notes toward one,

but I've never actually sat down and pulled everything together.'

Rust, who had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, said, 'And

this widget you wanted to buy from Chic would have made a nice addition?'

"That widget, as you call it, is a rare - very rare -summoning charm.'

'What does it summon?' said the Doctor. He was still making a tour of the

cases, his eyes bright with interest.

Thales hesitated. He seemed nervous, but enthusiasm for his subject got the

upper hand. 'Purportedly, it was designed to endow the summoner with power

over an elemental, in this case a water spirit.'

'A naiad?'

'Nereid, naiad, undine.' Thales waved a hand. "The beings that are supposed to

embody the secrets of the watery element of the universe.'

'And what's so rare about it? Surely there exist a great many charms meant to

control elementals. Is this a Dürer?'

The Doctor sounded so impressed that Rust came and looked over his shoulder.

He saw a finely detailed woodcut of a man in a medieval robe, crouched or

crumpled on the ground, one hand thrust out in a gesture of either command or

pleading. The man's face was not visible, but the artist's supple depiction of

the twist of his shoulders and spine conveyed despair and terror. He was

ordering away or warding off what at first glance looked like not much more

than an enormous dark cloud, so skilfully rendered that it seemed to be

seeping into the picture from out of the frame, like a fog. The cloud was

composed of hundreds of curls and hatchings, each as thin as a hair, and if

examined closely, the shadowings seemed to form something like malevolent

features.

'Nasty,' said Rust.

'Yes, isn't it?' the Doctor agreed.'Superbly done, though.'

'As far as we know, it's not a Durer,' said Thales,'though it's from the same

period.'

'Yes, Dürer was a sane sort of fellow,' said the Doctor thoughtfully.'There's

something quite vivid about this, isn't there, as though it were drawn from

experience rather than fancy? It doesn't change, does it? I read a story about

something like that once.'

'Change?' said Thales bewilderedly.'No.'

'Well, of course, the picture in the story was a mezzotint, not a woodcut,1

said the Doctor, as if that settled the matter. He looked up. 'You don't have

a picture of this charm, do you? Something Chic might have sent you?'

The photograph was a three-by-five-inch black-and-white print of a small,

cylindrical, ivory-coloured object, its surface incised with scratchy runes.

Rust stood by the window, examining it, the Doctor beside him. Thales had sat

down in a spindly cane-backed chair, staring glumly at his well-polished,

uncreased shoes. 'Bone?' Rust said to him. 'Supposedly human bone.'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'That's what makes it unique?' "That and the

fact that the would-be magician probably carved it from his own body'

Both Rust and the Doctor stared at him. Rust said,'What?' "The most powerful

charms were traditionally made that way. Generally from a rib, though

sometimes, if there was a lot of inscription to be done, something larger was

necessary, like a shin.'

"There's a fair amount of inscription here,' murmured the Doctor. 'Can you

make anything of these runes?'

"They're very queer. I don't know of anything like them.'

'Do you?' Rust asked the Doctor.

'No.' The Doctor held the photograph up in the light and squinted at it.'But I

think I know what they're meant to be.' Thales looked at him intently.

'Phonetic renderings of the supposed language of the elemental being

summoned.'

'How would you know the language,' said Rust,'without having already summoned

- I can't believe I'm saying this.' He turned and pushed open the window, as

if he needed the common sense of fresh air. The side yard was greenly

overgrown. At least three large banana plants spread their fronds above a

vigorous tangle of other foliage. Somewhere unseen, a fountain splashed

softly.

'Theoretically,' said the Doctor, 'there could be prior communication between

the -'

'Dimensions?' said Rust.

'I was going to say "planes of existence". A dimension is a property of

matter, not somewhere you can actually be -'

Rust held up a hand. The Doctor stopped. Still gazing out the window, Rust

said to Thales.'You got the photo in the mail when?'

'Day before yesterday'

'Presumably, Chic would have emailed the other interested parties. Any notion

who those might be?'

"The only ones I know of with sufficient purchasing power are the Musee de la

Metaphysique in Geneva, the Yasui Collection in Tokyo, the Pryor Foundation in

Virginia Beach, and, among private collectors, Louis Eikenberg and Pierre

Bal.'

'Bal is French?'

'From Lyon, I believe. Mr Eikenberg resides in Los Angeles.'

Rust turned into the room. 'Mr Thales,' he said politely, 'I'm going to be

real disappointed if you turn out to know more than you're telling about the

whereabouts of this thingamajig.'

Thales said stiffly,'You accuse me of murder?'

Don't get all huffy. We don't know that the charm was even there when the

murder happened. Hell, until we go through the place, which could take days,

we don't know the thing's not still there. Or hidden somewhere else. All we

know is that Chic mailed you a picture of it, probably three days ago, and

this morning he's dead. I don't suppose you still have the envelope?'

'No.'

Rust shrugged. 'Of course, the murder and the charm could be completely

unconnected. Chic knew a deal of unpleasant people.'

'What I don't understand,' said the Doctor, still examining the photograph,'is

why the magician would mutilate himself to make this.'

'Unless the magician cut Chic's throat,' said Rust, 'I don't particularly

care.'

Thales had sunk back in the chair and shut his eyes. 'Fundamentally, magic is

an attempt to manipulate the laws of probability.'

'Ah, of course.' The Doctor nodded. 'like the stars.' The other two looked at

him. 'Well, you know; He moved a hand vaguely in the direction of the

heavens.'Stars.'

'Yes,' said Rust patiently.'I believe it's safe to say we both know about

stars.Your point would be&?'

49 - The City of the Dead

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