by Tim Powers
Doyle waved awkwardly. “Help yourself.”
After reading the first several pages—and, Doyle noticed, leaving grease stains on them from having upwrapped the mutton—Byron put the manuscript down and looked at Doyle speculatively. “Is it your first effort?” He pulled the already loosened cork out of the bottle neck and took a liberal swig. “Uh, yes.” Doyle took the proffered bottle and drank some himself.
“Well, you’ve got a spark, sir, it seems to me—though a lot of it is damned obscure crinkum-crankum—and God knows in these times a poet is a worthless thing to be. I prefer the talents of action—in May I swam the Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos, and I’m prouder of that feat than I could be of any literary achievement.”
Doyle grinned. “As a matter of fact, I agree. I’d be more pleased with myself if I’d made a decent chair, so all the legs touched the ground at the same time, than I am about having written that poem.” He folded the manuscript, wrapped the cover letter around it, addressed it, then dripped some hot candle wax on it for a seal.
Byron nodded sympathetically, started to speak, stopped, and then quickly asked, “Who are you, by the way? I no longer want to demand any answers, for I became your lifelong friend when you shot that murderous gypsy who’d otherwise have ended my story. But I’m damn curious.” He smiled shyly, and for the first time looked his actual age of only twenty-three years.
Doyle took another long sip of the wine and set the bottle down on the table. “Well, I’m an American, as you’ve probably guessed from my accent, and I came… here… to hear Samuel Coleridge give a speech, and I ran afoul of this Doctor Romany fellow—” He paused, for he thought he’d heard something, a sort of thump, outside the window. Then, remembering that they were on the third floor, he dismissed it and went on. “And I lost the party of tourists I was with, and—” He halted again, beginning to feel the alcohol. “Oh, hell, Byron, I’ll tell you the real story. Give me some more wine first.” Doyle took a long sip and set the bottle down with exaggerated care. “I was born in—”
With simultaneous crashing explosions of glass from one side and splinters from the other, the window and the door burst inward and two big, rough-looking men were rolling to their feet from the floor. The table went over, spilling the food and shattering the table and the lamp—and in the sudden dimness more men were pouring in through the doorway, stumbling or leaping over the split door, which was hanging at an angle from one twisted hinge. Blue flames began licking over the oil-splash.
Doyle grabbed one man by the scarf knot, took two steps across the room and then hurled him through the window; the man collided with the frame, and for a moment it seemed he might grab the rope the first man had swung in on, but then his hands and heels disappeared and there was a receding, gasping cry.
Byron had snatched up and drawn Romany’s sword, and as two men with raised coshes stepped toward the still off-balance Doyle—and from below, outside, came a multiple crack, and startled yells—Byron kicked forward in a lunge too long to recover from easily and drove three inches of the extended blade into the chest of the man closest to Doyle. “Look out, Ashbless!” he yelled as he wrenched the sword free and tried to straighten up.
The other man, alarmed by this sudden appearance of lethally naked steel, swung his cosh down with all his strength onto Byron’s head. There was an ugly hollow smack and Byron fell dead to the floor, the sword clattering away.
To regain his balance Doyle had crouched and grabbed a leg of the desk, and from there he saw Byron’s inert form; “You son of a—” he roared, straightening and lifting the desk over his head—everything spilled off it, and the envelope for the Courier fluttered out the open window—”bitch!” he finished, bringing the desk shattering down on the head and upraised arm of the man who’d hit Byron.
The man dropped, and since several of the intruders were busy smothering the fire, Doyle launched himself in a furious charge toward the doorway; two men leaped forward to block his way, but were felled by his massive fists; but as he lurched out into the hall a carefully swung sock full of sand thudded against his skull just behind his right ear, and his forward rush became a sloppy dive to the floor.
Doctor Romanelli eyed the motionless form for a few seconds, waving back the men who had followed Doyle out of the room, then he thrust the weighted sock away in a pocket. “Tie the chloroform rag around his face and get him out of here,” he grated, “you incompetent clowns.”
“Goddamn, yer Honor,” whined the man who picked up Doyle’s ankles, “they was ready for us! There’s three of us dead, unless Norman survived his fall.”
“Where’s the other man who was in there?”
“Dead, boss,” said the last man to emerge from the room, pulling on a scorched and smoking coat.
“Let’s go, then. Down the back stairs.” He pressed his hands to his eyes. “Try to stay together, will you do that at least?” he whispered. “You’ve caused such a pandemonium that I’ll have to set a radiating disorientation spell to confuse the pursuit you’ve certainly roused.” He began muttering in a language none of Horrabin’s men recognized, and after the first dozen syllables blood began running out from between his fingers. Clumping footsteps sounded from the direction of the front stairs, and the men shifted and glanced at each other uneasily, but a moment later they heard a confused babble of argument, and the footsteps receded. Romanelli ceased speaking and lowered his hands, breathing hoarsely, and a couple of the men with him actually paled to see blood running like tears out of his eyes.
“Move, you damned insects,” Romanelli croaked, shoving his way to the front of the group and leading them forward.
“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.
“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”
“His what?”
“His organ.”
“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”
“Silence!” Romanelli hissed. After that they were on the stairs, and gasping and straining too much with their unconscious burden even to want to speak.
It was a chorus of shrill, discordant whistling that finally led Doyle out of his drugged half-dreams. He sat up, shivering with the damp chill in his coffin-shaped box, the lid of which had been taken away, and after rubbing his eyes and taking several deep breaths he realized that the tiny bare room really was rocking, and that he must be aboard a ship. He hoisted a leg outside the box and let his sandalled heel clunk to the floor, and grabbing the sides he levered himself dizzily to his feet. His mouth was still full of the sharp reek of chloroform, and he grimaced and spat as he reeled to the door.
It was locked from the outside, as he’d expected. There was a small window in the door at the level of his neck, with stout iron bars instead of glass—which helped explain why the room was so cold—and, crouching a little to look out of it, he saw a damp deck that disappeared within a few yards into a wall of gray fog, and, from out of the close murk, a rope, belt-high and parallel to the deck, that was evidently moored to the outside of his cabin bulkhead.
The strident whistling seemed to be coming from somewhere only a dozen yards ahead. Summoning all his nerve, and relying on the probability that his captors wanted to keep him alive, Doyle yelled, “Cut out that damned noise! Some of us are trying to sleep!”
Several of the whistles ceased instantly, and the rest faltered into silence a few moments later, and in spite of himself Doyle shivered to hear a voice that was almost Doctor Romany’s say, “You—no, you stay here; you—go shut him up. The rest of you idiots keep playing. If a mere man shouting distracts you, how do you expect to keep it up when the Shellengeri arrive?”
The eerie whistling started up again, and in a minute or so Doyle, still resolutely at the window, saw a disorienting thing—a tiny old man, bundled up in a tarred canvas coat and a leather hat, was pulling himself along the waist-high rope towa
rd Doyle, but his legs trailed away upward; it looked like he was moving underwater. When the weightless crawler had bumped against the bulkhead and peered in through the little window, Doyle saw the half-face and single eye and realized that this was the same street lunatic who had once promised to take him to a time gap and then had only led him to a vacant lot and shown him some old charred bones.
“Shout all you… please when these… people are through, Lou,” the crawler said, “but if you do it again now, you won’t get fed for the rest of the voyage. And you want to keep up your strength, right, Dwight?” Then the thing shoved its awful face right at the bars and snarled, “I recommend you eat—I want there to be some tooth left in you when the Master’s done and turns you over to me for disposal.”
Doyle had let go of the fog-wet bars, and now he actually stepped back, startled by the raw hatred blazing out of that single eye. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, “take it easy. What did I ever do to—” Then he halted, struck by a grisly suspicion that instantly became a certainty. “My God, it was the same lot on the Surrey-side, wasn’t it?” he whispered. “And you couldn’t have known I escaped through the cellar… for all you knew it was my own skull you were showing me, right? God. And so you survived Burghard’s shot of mud… but I had that paper that worked as a mobile hook… Jesus, you must have simply lived your way back here!”
“That’s right,” chittered the thing that had been Doctor Romany. “And this is my homeward voyage—kas were never meant to survive nearly this long, and damn soon I’ll take that last boat ride through the twelve hours of the night—but before I do, you will be, finally and certainly, dead.”
Not unless you’re the one who’ll meet me in the Woolwich marshes on the twelfth of April in 1846, thought Doyle. “What do you mean, the twelve hours of the night?” he asked cautiously, wondering if this creature had read the poem he’d written out last night.
The thing clinging to the rope grinned. “You’ll see it before I do, Stu. It’s the course through the Tuaut, the underworld, that the dead sungod Ra follows every night on his dark voyage from sunset to sunrise. Darkness becomes solid there, and hours are a measurement of distance, like sailing on an uncoiled clock face.” The thing paused and emitted a thunderous belch that seemed to diminish its body mass by half.
“Quiet down there!” came a shout from out of the fog, loud enough to be heard over the skirling whistles.
“And the dead cluster along the banks of the underworld river,” Romany went on in a whisper, “and beg passage on the sungod’s boat back to the land of the living, for if they could get aboard they’d share in Ra’s restoration to youth and strength. Some even swim out and grab on, but the serpent Apep stretches out… oh, very far!… and snatches them off and devours them.”
“That’s what he—I—was referring to in the poem, then,” said Doyle quietly. He looked up and forced a confident smile. “I’ve already travelled on a river whose milestones are hours,” he said; “taken two very long voyages, in fact, and survived. If I wind up on your Tuaut river, I’ll bet I pop out the dawn end good as new.”
This statement angered Doctor Romany. “You fool, nobody—”
“We’re headed for Egypt, aren’t we?” Doyle interrupted.
The single eye blinked. “How did you know that?”
Doyle smiled. “I know all sorts of things. When will we arrive?”
The Romany thing went on frowning for a moment, then it seemed to forget its anger, and it said, almost confidingly, “In a week or ten days, if the gang on the poop deck there manages to raise the Shellengeri—wind elementals, like what Aeolus gave Odysseus.”
“Oh.” Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to peer through the fog in the direction of the stern. “Anything like those fire giants that went berserk at Doct—I mean, your camp?”
“Yes yes!” cried the thing, clapping with its bare feet. “Very good. Yes, the two races are cousins. And there are others, the water and earth ones. You should see the earth ones, huge moving cliffs—”
A deafening, air-cleaving whistle—scream, rather, though out of no physical throat—hit the ship with a palpable impact, making every loose board vibrate to blurriness; Doyle leaped away from the window, certain for one unthinking moment that some massive jetliner, a 747 or something, was for some reason attempting a water landing at full throttle very nearby, possibly right on top of them; then he was flung back against the door again as a wall of wind struck from astern, snapped all the sails taut and burst several like a giant punching fist, and the ship’s bow went far down and then up again and the vessel surged powerfully forward.
In the few seconds before the ship and all its contents shifted and adjusted to the new velocity, the stern bulkhead pressing against Doyle’s back seemed more floor than wall, and when his coffin box clattered across the deck toward him he just lifted his legs away from the deck—no hop required—and let it slam end on where his ankles had been, Then gravity swung back to normal and he pitched forward onto his hands and knees in the box. Over the screaming wind he heard the first high-flung bow wave crash back across the decks.
He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the window bars and, squinting against the steady blast of icy air, peered around for the Romany remnant, but the creature was gone. I hope he went right overboard, he thought—though I guess he wouldn’t sink, just come paddling along after us like a big beetle. The ship was slamming along like a bus racing over a plowed field, but Doyle managed to hold onto the window long enough to glimpse a few figures huddled on the poop deck, evidently trying to get down. At least it’s dispelled the fog, he thought dazedly as he let go of the bars and slid down to a sitting position, blinking his wind-stung and watering eyes.
As time passed, bringing no abatement of the racket or the cold or the continual bouncing, Doyle was thankful that he was in Benner’s body—Doyle’s own had been prone to seasickness—though even in this one he was glad he hadn’t managed to eat any of the lobster salad poor Byron had bought.
* * *
At what must have been about noon a couple of things were pushed through the window bars: a paper-wrapped package, which thumped to the floor and proved to contain salt pork and hard black bread, and a lidded can that fell a few inches and then swung from a little hooked chain; this contained weak beer. Having been snatched away from the food at the Swan, and not eaten before that since lunchtime yesterday, which was longer ago for Doyle than the twenty-four hours that had passed here, he devoured it all with genuine pleasure, even licking the paper wrappings afterward.
About six hours later the procedure was repeated and again he consumed it all. Soon after, it began to get dark—though the wind and the bashing progress of the ship slacked not at all—and he had just gotten around to wondering how he’d sleep, when a couple of blankets were stuffed through the bars.
“Thank you!” he called. “And could I have another beer?” The room was not absolutely dark, and Doyle managed to improvise a good enough bed in his coffin; and as he was about to climb into it he was surprised to hear the beer can chain rattle as it was drawn up—the sluicing of the beer itself was inaudible over the wind shrilling through the harp of the rigging—and then a clank as it fell back into position, full.
He stood up and hurried over to it, and as he stood braced against the wall trying to drink the sloshing beer without spilling any of it he wondered why he was not too alarmed by his position as captive with torture and death in store. Partially, of course, it was the unthinking self-confidence he’d never entirely been without since finding himself in a body so much better than the one he’d been used to; and the balance of his stubborn optimism was based on being, as he was now willing to concede, William Ashbless, who wouldn’t die until ‘46. Watch yourself there, son, he thought. You can be fairly sure you’ll survive, but there’s no reason to assume Ashbless won’t get thoroughly stomped a time or two.
In spite of his predicament he smiled as he searched for a comfortable position, for
he was thinking about Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy, whom he would somehow marry next year—he’d always thought she looked pretty in her portraits.
* * *
The voyage—during which the furious winds never once let up, so that after a couple of days the shambling mariners Doyle could see through his window seemed to have achieved a stunned indifference to them—lasted fifteen days, and in that time Doyle never once saw either Romanelli or the weightless vestige of Doctor Romany. Until an old and overstressed beam in the ceiling of his room developed a long crack on the fourth day, all the captive had done was eat, sleep, peer out the window and try to remember the all too few known facts of Ashbless’ visit to Egypt; after the beam split, he occupied his time pulling down a three-foot splinter and trying, with his teeth and nails, to trim a one-foot length of it into something like a dagger. He considered wrenching the beer can from the bars and flattening it to make a tool, but decided that not only would that deprive him of beer for the rest of the trip, but that anything so noticeable would earn him a search when they arrived.
Only once had anything nearly as disquieting as the arrival of the Shellengeri occurred. Sometime before midnight on Saturday, the eleventh night of the voyage, he’d thought he’d heard a wailing over the eternal wind scream, and he’d tried to see out, a trick as difficult as trying to see while riding a motorcycle at seventy miles per hour without goggles. After ten minutes he’d gone back to bed, more than half convinced that the black boat he’d seemed to see, visible because it shone a much deeper black than the waves behind it, had been nothing more than a retinal misfire caused by straining his eyes to see through the blast. After all, what would a boat be doing out there?
CHAPTER 11
“… Nothing could be more horrible: its head and shoulders were visible, turning first to one side, then to the other, with a solemn and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upwards to reveal. Such sights became afterwards frequent, hardly a day passing without ushering the dead to the contemplation of the living, until at length they passed without observation.”
