The Anubis Gates (21 page)

“I know what you just killed,” Jacky panted, her voice urgent. “I’ve killed one myself. But never mind that for now. Are any people, any members of your family, not here? Did anyone leave the house in the last few minutes?”

“What? There’s a goddamn ape upstairs! I just shot it! My God! None of my family are at home, thank all the saints! My wife will go mad. I may go mad.”

“Very well, what was… the ape doing? When you shot it?”

“Was it yours? You son of a bitch, I’ll have you clapped in jail for letting that thing run wild!” He began clumping down the stairs.

“No, it wasn’t mine,” Jacky said loudly, “but I’ve seen another like it. What was it doing?”

The man waved with both hands, clanking the gun against the wall. “It was—Jesus!—screaming like somebody on fire, and spitting pints of blood out of its mouth, and trying to crawl into my son Kenny’s bed. Damn me, it’s still there—the mattress will be—”

“Where is Kenny right now?” Jacky interrupted.

“Oh, he won’t be home for hours yet. I’ll have to—”

“God damn it, where’s Kenny?” Jacky shouted. “He’s in terrible danger!”

The man gaped at her. “Are the apes after Kenny? I knew something like this would happen.”

Seeing Jacky open her mouth for another outburst, he said hastily, “At the Barking Ahab, around the corner in the Minories.”

As Jacky sped out the door and ran back toward the alley she thought, you poor bastard, it’s a blessing you’ll never find out that it was probably your Kenny you shot, as, crowbarred into an unfamiliar and fur-covered and poisoned body, he tried to crawl into his bed.

The Minories was blocked by a line of wagons carrying bales of clothing from the Old Clothes Exchange in Cutler Street toward London Dock, and Jacky ran to the nearest one, scrambled up the sideboards and from this vantage point looked up and down the street. There it was—a swinging sign with an Old Testament-looking man painted on it, his head tilted back and his mouth an O. She swung down from the wagon just as the driver behind was beginning to shout about thieves, and she made a beeline for the Barking Ahab.

Though the door was open and a breeze fluttered the smoke-yellowed curtains in the windows, the place smelled strongly of cheap gin and malty beer. The owner looked up irritably from behind the counter when Jacky came clattering and panting in, but changed his expression to a doubtful smile when the pop-eyed, out-of-breath newcomer slapped a half-crown onto the polished wood.

“There’s a lad named Kenny drinking here?” Jacky gasped. “Lives over in Kenyon Court.”
Be here,
Joe, she thought.
Don’t have left yet.

A voice sounded from a table behind her. “You a Charlie, Jack?”

She turned and looked at the four poorly dressed young men around the table. “Do I look like a Charlie, mate? This isn’t a law matter—his father’s in some trouble, and sent me after him.”

“Oh. Well, maybe Kenny heard of it; he got up and dashed out of here five minutes ago like he’d remembered something left on the fire.”

“Aye,” said another, “I was just coming in, and he shoved by me without a glance, much less a ‘hullo’ for a chap he’s been pals with nigh a decade.”

Jacky sagged. “Five minutes ago?”
He could be half a mile away by now,
she thought, in any direction,
and I could never get a good enough description of Kenny to be sure of him even if I found him. And even if I was sure I’d found him, I couldn’t shoot him just because I’m almost certain that Kenny was shot in his own bed, and that his body is now occupied by old Dog-Face Joe. I’d have to question him, trick him, somehow get him to betray himself. Maybe once I could have killed him on the almost certainty, but not anymore—not after having almost punched a hole through the skull of poor old Doyle.

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 swung 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.