The Anubis Gates

by Tim Powers

  She got a fair description of Kenny anyway—short, fat, red hair—and then left the place. Well, that’s what he’ll look like for the next week or two, she thought. Judging by the areas where the “apes” have tended to show up, he likes the East End—probably because disappearances are not uncommon here, and it’s easier to evade pursuit among the mazy alleys and courts and rooftop bridges of the rookeries, and any crazy stories coming out of the area would be more likely to be discounted as products of drink, opium or lunacy—so for the next couple of weeks I’ll search the low lodging houses of Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Goodman’s Fields for a short, fat, red-haired young man who’ll have no close friends, be a bit simple-minded and talk about immortality to anybody who’ll listen, and maybe need a shave on his forehead and hands—for evidently the thick fur begins to grow all over a body as soon as he gets into it. I wonder what sort of creature he is, she thought, and where he came from.

  She shuddered, and slouched away east toward a public house she knew of in Crutchedfriars Road where she could sit quietly over a double brandy for a while—for this had been the closest she’d ever come to her prey, and the ravings of poor Kenny’s father had vividly brought to mind her own encounter with one of Dog-Face Joe’s cast-off bodies. This one was bleeding from the mouth too, she noted. I wonder if they all do, and if so, why. She stopped, suddenly pale.

  Well of course, she told herself. Old Joe wouldn’t want the person he shoves into his discarded body to be able to say anything before the poison finishes him. Before he… exits a body he must, in addition to drinking a fatal dose of poison, chew up his tongue to the extent that the new tenant won’t be able to speak with it…

  Jacky, who had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and despised the fashion of fluttery helplessness in women, felt, to her own annoyance, close to fainting.

  * * *

  The Jamaica Coffee House closed at five o’clock, and Doyle found himself ordered out onto the pavement, and not very politely. He shuffled aimlessly out of the alley and stood for a while on the Threadneedle Street sidewalk, staring absently at the impressive facade of the Bank of England across the still-crowded street, the manuscript pages flapping forgotten in his hand.

  Ashbless had not appeared.

  A hundred times during the long day Doyle had mentally reviewed the historical sources of his certainty that Ashbless would arrive: the Bailey biography clearly stated that it was the Jamaica Coffee House, at ten-thirty in the morning, Tuesday the eleventh of September 1810—but of course the Bailey biography was based on Ashbless’ years-old recollections; but Ashbless submitted the poem to the Courier in early October, and Doyle had not only read but actually handled the cover letter. “I wrote ‘The Twelve Hours of the Night’ on Tuesday the Eleventh of last month,” Ashbless had written, “at the Jamaica off Exchange Alley, and the Motif was occasioned by my recent long voyage…” Damn it, Doyle thought, he might have remembered the date incorrectly ten or twenty years later, but he could hardly have been mistaken after less than a month! Especially when he was so precise about the day and the date!

  A portly little red-haired fellow was staring at him from the corner by the Royal Exchange, so Doyle, having developed a wariness of the scrutiny of strangers, walked purposefully away east, toward Gracechurch Street, which would lead him down to London Bridge and across the river to Kusiak’s.

  Could Ashbless have been intentionally lying? But why on earth should he want to? Doyle looked furtively behind, but the red-haired lad wasn’t following him. You’d better relax, he told himself—every time somebody looks at you directly you assume it’s one of Horrabin’s beggar agents. Well, he thought, resuming the puzzle, the next event I think I’m sure of in the Ashbless chronology is that he’s seen to shoot one of the Dancing Apes in one of the Exchange Alley coffee houses on Saturday the twenty-second of this month. But I can’t wait a week and a half. I’d be too far gone with pneumonia to benefit from even twentieth century medicine, probably. I’ll have to—God help me!—approach Doctor Romany. The thought made him feel sick. Maybe if I, I don’t know, strap a pistol around my neck, and keep my finger near the trigger, and tell him, “We bargain or I’ll blow my own head off, and you won’t learn one thing… ” Would he dare to call my bluff? Would I dare let it be a bluff?

  He was passing a narrow street off Aldgate, and somebody crossing one of the rooftop bridges was whistling. Doyle slowed to listen. It was a familiar tune, and so melancholy and nostalgic that it almost seemed chosen as a fitting accompaniment for his lonely evening walk. What the hell is the name of that, he wondered absently as he walked on. Not Greensleeves, not Londonderry Air …

  He froze and his eyes widened in shock. It was Yesterday, the Beatles song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

  For a moment he just stood there, stunned, like Robinson Crusoe staring at the footprint in the sand.

  Then he was running back. “Hey!” he yelled when he was below the little bridge, though there was nobody on it now. “Hey, come back! I’m from the twentieth century too!” A couple of passersby were giving him the warily entertained look people save for street lunatics, but nobody peered down from the rooftop level. “Damn it,” Doyle yelled despairingly, “Coca Cola, Clint Eastwood, Cadillac!”

  He ran into the building and blundered his way upstairs and even managed to find and open the roof door, but there was no one in sight up there. He crossed the little bridge and then descended through the other building, panting, but singing Yesterday as loudly as he could, and shouting the lyrics down all cross corridors. He drew many complaints but didn’t get anyone who seemed to know what the song was.

  “I’ll give you a place to hide away, mate,” shouted one furious old man who seemed to think Doyle’s behavior had been specifically calculated to upset him, “if you don’t get out of here this instant!” He shook both fists at Doyle.

  Doyle hurried down the last flight of stairs and opened the door out to the street. By this time he was beginning to doubt that he’d even really heard it. I probably heard something that sounded like it, he thought as he drew the door shut behind him, and wanted so much to believe somebody else had found a way back to 1810 that I convinced myself it was the Beatles tune.

  The sky was still a gray luminescence behind the rooftops, but it was darkening. He hurried on southward, toward London Bridge. I don’t want to be late for the six-thirty shift at Kusiak’s stable, he reflected wearily—I need that job.

  * * *

  The remaining leaves on the trees in Bloomsbury Square shone gold and red in the sunlight on Thursday afternoon as Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar stepped out of Paddy Corvan’s, stared with homesickness for a moment at the trees and the grass, then carefully wiped beer-foam from the artificial beard and moustache and turned resolutely to the left, down Buckeridge toward Maynard Street and the Rat’s Castle. The breeze was from ahead, out of the heart of the St. Giles rookery, and the smells of sewers, and fires, and things being cooked that ought to be thrown away, shattered the frail sylvan charm of the square.

  Jacky hadn’t been to Rat’s Castle since the night five days ago when she’d hurried down the stairs to the underground dock, right behind Doctor Romany, intent on killing Dog-Face Joe; and she was checking in now to see if anyone else had made any progress toward finding the furry shapechanger.

  When she turned right into the dark chasm, narrow at pavement level but narrower still at the top, that was Maynard Street, a little boy leaned out of an imperfectly boarded-up loading dock on the third floor of an abandoned warehouse on the corner. Under a piratical and oversized three-cornered hat his fish-blank eyes followed the shambling figure of Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar, and the nearly toothless slash of a mouth turned up in a smile. “Ahmed,” the boy whispered, “you’re mine.”

  A rope still hung from the rusted pulley under the overhanging roof three floors above—only because it hung too far away from the wall to be snagged by leaning out from the docks on each floor and its ends swu
ng too far above the pavement to be reached even by a man on another man’s shoulders—and goaded by the immensity of the reward Horrabin had offered, the child hopped up onto the board his hands had been resting on, and then sprang out across two yards of empty space and clutched the old rope.

  The pulley had rusted almost to immobility, and fortunately for the boy the rope ran through it haltingly, so that though he collided hard with the brick wall on the way down he didn’t break his legs when he landed on the pavement three floors below. He wound up sitting down, with loops of stiff, weathered rope slapping the cobbles around him and thumping his hat down over his eyes. The child sprang to his feet and scurried after Ahmed as a trio of old women emerged from a cellar stairway and began to fight about who’d get the rope. Ahmed was walking beside a low wall, and the boy climbed up onto it, ran along the coping and then sprang onto the Hindoo Beggar’s back, screeching like a monkey. “Oi’ve got Ahmid!” he shrilled. “Fetch ‘Orr’bin!”

  Drawn by the echoing racket, several men stepped out of the recessed front doorway of Rat’s Castle, stared for a few moments at the prodigy of a lurching Hindoo flapping about with a shrieking child perched on his back and clawing at his throat, then they sprinted up and seized the Hindoo’s arms. “Ahmed!” said one, fondly. “The clown is ever so anxious to chat with you.”

  They tried to pry the boy loose, but he only dug his fingernails deeper into Ahmed and bit at every reachable hand. “Hell, Sam,” one said finally, “take ‘em as is. He won’t give the reward to no infant.”

  Jacky was trying not to panic. She thought, if I could get a hand to my turban I could—maybe—snatch the pistol out and kill one of these men and maybe club this nightmare child off me. The reeling knot of people was only a few steps from the building now, and she reached up under the turban, found the butt of the pistol and yanked it down—the turban came down too, tangled around the barrel—and she pressed it against the ribs of the man on her right and yanked the trigger.

  The hammer came down on a fold of cloth, knocking open the flashpan cover but producing no sparks. Desperately she wrenched away the cloth and, as the man was shouting, “Christ, a gun, grab him!” she cocked it one-handed and again pulled the trigger. There was a spray of sparks but all the powder had spilled out of the open pan and the gun didn’t fire, and an instant later a hard fist slammed into Jacky’s stomach and a nimble boot kicked the gun out of her hand.

  The gun clanked on the paving stones, and the piggyback child, evidently deciding to take the cash in hand and waive the rest, hopped to the ground, seized the pistol and scampered away. The two men picked up the jackknifed, gasping Hindoo Beggar—”Lightweight bugger, ain’t he?”—and carried her inside.

  * * *

  Horrabin had returned to the Castle only a few minutes earlier, and he had just relaxed in his swing—Dungy was wheeling away the folded-up Punch stage—when they carried Ahmed into the room. “Ah!” exclaimed the clown. “Good work, my lads! The fugitive Hindoo at last.” They set Jacky down on the floor in front of the swing, and Horrabin leaned forward and grinned down at her. “Where did you take the American on Saturday night?”

  Jacky could still only gasp.

  “He pulled a pistol on us, yer Honor,” one of the men explained. “I had to give him a thump in the turn.”

  “I see. Well, let’s—Dungy! Bring me my stilts!—let’s lock him up in the dungeon. It’s Doctor Romany that’ll have the most questions for him, and,” the clown added with a giggle, “the most motivating questioning techniques.”

  It was an odd little parade that descended four flights of stairs and walked a hundred yards down a subterranean corridor that could have been pre-Roman—the hunched dwarf Dungy limping along in the lead, carrying a flaring torch over his head, followed by the two men who frog-marched between them the chintz-curtain-robed Ahmed, whose face behind the false beard and moustache and walnut stain was gray with fear, and Horrabin, bent way over forward to avoid brushing his hat against the roof stones, bringing up the rear on his stilts.

  Eventually they passed through an arch into a wide chamber; Dungy’s torch illuminated the ancient, wet stones of the ceiling and near wall, but the far wall, if indeed there was one, was lost in the absolute blackness. To judge by the echoes, the chamber was very large. The procession paused after a few paces into it, and Jacky could hear water dripping and, she was certain, faint but excited whispering.

  “Dungy,” said Horrabin, and even the clown sounded a little uneasy, “the nearest vacant guest room—hoist the lid. And hurry.”

  The dwarf limped forward, leaving the others in darkness. Twenty feet away he stopped and lifted a little metal plate away from a hole in the floor, and squatted down, trying to get his head and the torch both next to the hole without setting his greasy white hair on fire. “Nobody home.” He set the torch upright in a hole between the stones, hooked the fingers of both hands around a recessed iron bar in the floor, carefully rearranged his feet, and then tugged upward. A whole stone slab lifted up, evidently on hinges, exposing a circular hole three feet across. The slab came to rest at a bit more than a ninety degree angle and Dungy stepped back, wiping his brow. “Your chamber awaits, Ahmed,” said Horrabin. “If you hang by your hands and then drop, it’s only six feet to the floor. You can do that or be pushed in.”

  Jacky’s captors led her forward and, when she was standing in front of the hole, let go of her and stepped back. She forced herself to smile. “When’s dinner? Will I be expected to dress?”

  “Make any preparations you please,” said Horrabin coldly.

  “Dungy will drop it in on you at six. Get in now.”

  Jacky eyed the two men who’d escorted her, calculating whether she could break away between them, but they caught the look and stepped back, moving their arms out from their sides a little. Her gaze fell hopelessly back to the hole at her feet, and to her own humiliation she felt close to tears. “Are—” she choked, “are there rats… down there? Or snakes?” I’m just a girl! she wanted to yell, but she knew that revealing that would only add to the ordeals in store for her.

  “No, no,” Horrabin assured her. “Any rats and snakes that make their way down here are devoured by other sorts of creatures. Sam, he doesn’t want to do it himself; push him in.”

  “Wait.” Jacky carefully crouched and sat down on the edge of the hole, her sandalled feet dangling in the darkness. She hoped the others wouldn’t see how badly her legs were shaking under the chintz robe. “I’m going, I don’t need your… kind help.” She leaned forward and gripped the opposite edge. She paused to take a deep breath, then hiked her rump off the rim and swung down into the hole so that she hung by the grip of her hands. She looked down and could see nothing, just the most solid blackness she’d ever stared into. The floor could believably have been three inches below her toes, or three hundred feet.

  “Kick his hands,” said Horrabin. She let go before anyone could. After a long second of free fall she landed on flexed knees on muddy ground, and managed not to let either kneecap clip her chin as she sat down hard. Something scurried away from her across the mud floor. Looking up, she saw the underside of the stone slab appear for one instant lit by the red torchlight, and then, with a shocking, eardrum-battering crash, fall back into place; for a few more moments there was a tiny square of dim red light above her, but then someone replaced the metal plate over the peek-hole and she was in featureless, disorienting darkness.

  Though as tense as an over-wound clock, she didn’t move, just breathed silently through her open mouth and listened. When she’d dropped in, the close echoes of her fall had convinced her that the sunken room could be no more than fifteen feet across, but after a thousand silent breaths she was certain that it was far wider, in fact not a room at all but a vast subterranean plain. She seemed to hear wind in faraway trees, and every now and then a faint echo of distant singing, some sad chorus wandering far out across the plain … She grew doubtful of her memory of the stone ro
of above her—surely it was just the eternal black sky, in which any stars seen were—perhaps had always been—just meaningless flashes on the individual retina…

  She was just beginning to wonder whether the sound of the surf had always simply been the soft roar of her own breathing projected onto a certain sort of agitation of water—and she knew that there were even more fundamental doubts and losses to be discovered—when an actual noise brought her out of her downward spiralling introspection. The noise, only a tiny grating and a clink, was startlingly loud in that hitherto silent abyss, and it brought the dimensions of her cell back to her original estimate of about fifteen feet across.

  It had sounded like the peek-hole cover being removed, but when she looked up she couldn’t see anything, not even a square of lesser darkness. After a moment, though, she could hear breathing, and then sibilant but indistinct whispering.

  “Who’s there?” asked Jacky cautiously. It’s got to be only Dungy with my dinner, she insisted to herself.

  The whispering became quiet, aspirated giggles. “Let us in, darling,” came the whisper clearly. “Let my sister and me in.”

  Tears were running down Jacky’s cheeks and she crawled to a wall and braced her back against it. “No,” she sobbed. “Get out of here.”

  “We’ve got gifts for you, darling—gold and diamonds that people lost down the sewers since the long ago times. They’re all for you, in exchange for two things you won’t ever need again, like yer dollies after you growed up into a young lady.”

  “Your eyes!” came a new, harsher whisper.

  “Yes indeed,” hissed the first speaker. “Just your eyes, so that my sister and I can each have one, and we’ll climb up all the stairs there are and take a ship to the Haymarket and dance right under the sun.”

  “Soon,” croaked the other.