The Anubis Gates (55 page)

Jacky was weeping hopelessly as Carrington shifted his position above her; he paused for a long several seconds, and then jerked and began making a peculiar muffled groaning. He shifted again, his hand scrabbling weakly at her face, and a moment later he lurched off of her and she heard a sound like a pitcher of water slowly being poured out; and when she caught a smell like heated copper she realized that it was blood splashing on the stones.

Because she’d been crying she hadn’t heard the things approach, but now she heard them whispering around her. “You greedy pig,” giggled one, “you’ve wasted it all.”

“So lick the stones,” came the hissed reply.

Jacky started to get up, but something that felt like a hand holding a live lobster pushed her back down. “Not so fast,” said another voice. “You’ve got to come deeper with us—to the bottom shore—we’ll put you in the boat and push you out, and you can be our offering to the serpent Apep.”

“Take her without her eyes,” whispered another of them. “She promised them to my sister and me.” Jacky didn’t begin screaming until she felt spidery fingers groping at her face.

What he found in the cages pretty much confirmed Coleridge’s suspicion that he was having another opium dream—albeit an extraordinarily vivid one.

When the pain of his headache and stomach cramps had receded a while ago he’d found himself in a dark room with no recollection of how he’d arrived there, and when he sat up on the bed and reached for his watch and couldn’t even find the table—and noticed how profoundly dark the room was—he realized he was not at his room at Hudson’s Hotel; and after standing up and blind-man’s-bluffing his way around the tiny chamber, he’d realized he wasn’t in John Morgan’s house either, or Basil Montagu’s, or any other place he’d ever been before. Eventually he’d found the door, and opened it, and for a full minute just stood in the doorway, staring up and down the dimly torchlit stairwell, whose architecture he recognized as debased provincial Roman, and listening to the distant wails and roarings that he didn’t recognize at all.

This Fuseli-esque scene, together with the familiar—though extra strong this time—balloon-headed feeling and the warm looseness in his joints, made him certain that he had once again taken too strong a dose of laudanum and was hallucinating.

In Xanadu,
he’d thought wryly,
did such a morbid dungeon world decree.

After a while he had wandered out onto the stairwell landing. The folk notion that a house explored in a dream symbolically represented one’s mind had always struck him as having a grain of truth in it, and while in many dreams he had explored the upper floors of his mind house, he’d never before seen the catacombs beneath. The nightmare noises were coming from below, so, bravely curious about what sort of monsters might inhabit the deepest levels of his mind, he carefully picked his way down the ancient steps.

Despite a moderate apprehension about what he might run into, he was pleased with himself for conjuring up such a detailed fantasy. Not only were the weathered stones of the stairwell done in painstaking chiaroscuro detail, and the scuffing of his shoes producing a faint echo, but the cold air rushing up from below was dank and stale and smelled of mold, mildew, seaweed and—yes, that was it—a zoological garden.

It had grown darker as he’d descended, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he was in an absolute blackness relieved only by occasional faint flickerings that might have been distant torchlight reflected around more than one corner, or might just have been the random star patterns provided by a bored retina.

He had walked slowly out across the uneven floor in what seemed to be the direction the groaning and cawing came from, but when he’d still been a few yards short of finding the cages he’d been frozen by an echoing scream that had as much weariness and hopelessness as agony in it.
And what was that?
he’d wondered.
My ambition, fettered and all but starved by my sloth? No, that’s misleading; more likely it’s the embodiment of my duties—not the least of which is talent—ignored by me and imprisoned in this bottommost oubliette of my mind.

Now he continued forward, and in a moment he felt the cold bars of the nearest cage. Something slapped heavily on the floor within, then there was a sound like a wet mop being slowly dragged over stones, and presently Coleridge realized that the intermittent breeze on his hand was the breath of something.

“Hello, man,” it said in a profoundly deep voice.

“Hello,” said Coleridge nervously. After a bewildered pause he said, “You’re locked up?”

“We are… all locked up,” assented the unseen thing, and there were grunts and chirps of agreement from other cages on each side.

“Are you, then,” muttered Coleridge, mostly to himself, “vices that I have actually managed to shackle? I wouldn’t have thought there were any.”

“Free us,” said the thing. “The key is in the lock of the cage at the end.”

“Or are you,” Coleridge went on, “as is more likely, strengths, virtues I’ve been too lazy to exercise, warped by long confinement and inattention down here?”

“I don’t know… these things, man. Free us.”

“And would not a twisted strength be a thing more to be feared than an atrophied vice? No, my friend, I think I’d be wise to leave you caged. I must have had good reason to make these bars so solid.” He started to turn away.

“You cannot just ignore us.”

Coleridge paused. “Can’t I?” he asked thoughtfully. “That might be true. Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error. But surely these cages represent a—rare!—manifestation of my will, my control. I must already have taken you into account.”

“Free us and be sure.”

Coleridge stood pondering it in the darkness for a full minute; then, “I don’t see how I can not,” he whispered, and groped his way to the last cage, where Carrington’s key ring still dangled from the lock on the open cage door.

The harsh ammonia fumes dragged Ashbless back to consciousness—and the horrible little mud-floored, torch-lit room—one more time.

After the last ammonia-enforced revival he’d found that he was able to remove himself from the tortured body tied down on the table, or, more accurately, to sink so far down into the fever dream depths of his head that he felt Romanelli’s desperate surgeries only as distant tugs and jars, the way a deep swimmer can faintly feel agitations on the surface.

It had been a welcome change, but in this new moment of clarity he realized that he was dying. While none of the injuries Romanelli had inflicted were instantly fatal, Ashbless would have needed the attentions of a 1983 Intensive Care ward to achieve even a qualified recovery.

He blinked up at the near wall through his good eye, noting without even any wonder the row of four-inch tall toy men along a shelf above the water pump, then rolled his head and stared into the weirdly lit face of Romanelli.
I guess this is an alternate world after all,
he thought with a cold remoteness.
Ashbless dies in 1811 here. Well, he’ll die silent, too. I don’t think, Romanelli, that you could extrapolate the location of a future gap by learning what I know about previous ones—but I’m not going to give you the chance. You can die here with me.

“You’re overdoing it,” came Horrabin’s Mickey Mouse voice from behind him. “It’s not as easy or quick as just ripping open a crate. You’re just killing him.”

“He may think that too,” gasped Romanelli. The sorcerer stood in an evidently painful net of miniature lightning bolts.

“But listen to me, Ashbless—you won’t die until I let you. I could cut your head off—and I may—and still keep you alive in it by magic. You probably imagine you’ll be dead by dawn. Let me assure you I can prolong your death agonies decades.”

The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room.
Whatever they are,
he thought,
I hope they’re real, and kill us all.

But there was a flicker of motion on the shelf above the pump—one of the little dolls twitched, pointed its tiny arm and shrilled, “The Mistakes are loose!”

Horrabin spun on one stilt like a compass and, poking out his tongue until it touched his nose, produced a piercing two-tone whistle that jarred Ashbless’ remaining teeth. At the same moment Romanelli took a deep breath—it sounded like an open umbrella being dragged down a chimney—and then barked three syllables and flung his bloodstained hands out, palms forward.

One of the Mistakes, a long, lithe furry thing with huge ears and nostrils but no eyes, launched itself in a cat-like leap at Horrabin, but thudded against a barrier and tumbled back to splash in the mud of the wet floor.

“Get… rid of them,” sobbed Romanelli. Blood was welling freely from his nose and ears. “I can’t do… another one of these.”

Half a dozen of the Mistakes, including one amphibian giant with an underslung lower jaw and multiple ranks of wedge-shaped teeth, were noisily hitting and clawing at the barrier.

“Open little holes along the floor,” said Horrabin tensely. “My Spoonsize Boys will make ‘em glad to get back in their cages.”

“I… can’t,” Romanelli said in a faint whine. “If I try to alter it… it will just… break.” Blood had begun running from his eyes like tears. “I’m… falling to pieces.”

“Look at the clown’s trousies,” boomed the thing with all the teeth.

Horrabin automatically glanced down at himself, and saw by the torchlight that his baggy white pantaloons were spattered with mud from the furry Mistake’s splash in the puddle.

“Mud goes through,” the creature bellowed, prying up a fist-sized stone from the floor and flinging it.

The stone thudded into Horrabin’s belly, and he reeled gasping on his stilts until two more struck him, one on his polka dot ruffled wrist and one on his white forehead, and he folded backward, his face a mask of horrified wrath, to sit down with a loud splat in the mud.

The Spoonsize Boys bounded down from their shelf like oversized crickets, drawing their tiny swords in midair, splashed and tumbled in the mud and then bounded through the barrier, stabbing the ankles and swarming up the legs of the Mistakes.

Romanelli folded Ashbless’ ruined leg back and belted the ankle to the thigh, then, with an effort that crumbled the teeth between his hard-clenched jaws, the sorcerer lifted the dying poet and lurched across the floor to the far archway.

Every step down the hall produced further snaps and internal burstings, but Romanelli plodded on, the breath shrieking in and out of him, as crashes and shouts erupted from the hospital behind them, to the archway that led into the descending cellar.

Carrington’s men, huddled against the wall below one of the torches, had been getting increasingly impatient for the return of their chief, and swearing to each other in whispers that they would damn well go in there without him, but they blanched and stepped back when the grisly spectacle of Romanelli and his burden walked in through the arch and passed them.

“Jesus,” whispered one of them, fingering the grip of a dagger, “shouldn’t we go after him and kill him?”

“What are you, blind?” growled one of his fellows. “He’s dead already. Let’s go get the clown.”

They had just started toward the arch when a gang of the Mistakes burst hopping and slithering through, hotly pursued by a leaping swarm of the Spoonsize Boys.

Ashbless had, despite all the chemical and sorcerous consciousness maintainers, sunk into a semi-comatose state from which he roused only for moments at a time. At one point he was vaguely aware that he was being carried down a steep incline; at another he noticed that his bearer was mindlessly and in a bubbling voice singing some jolly little song; then things became confused: there was a lot of yelling behind them, and by the light of his bearer’s personal electrical storm he saw a thing like a huge toad wearing a three-cornered hat bound past on one side while a six-legged dog with a man’s head galloped by on the other, and then the air was full of leaping bugs which weren’t bugs at all but tiny angry men waving little swords.

Then his bearer had stumbled, and everyone was tumbling down the increasingly steep slope, and the last thing Ashbless glimpsed before losing consciousness one more time puzzled him even through his death-fog: he saw Jacky’s face, streaked with tears and shorn of its moustache, staring at him in surprise as he rolled past.

The sparking, flickering thing that tumbled against Jacky collided with the Eyeless Sisters too and sent them spinning away into the darkness, chittering in disappointment, and Jacky scrambled to her hands and knees in time to see that the blue-flashing thing was a man, and that William Ashbless, evidently dead, was sliding down the slope right behind him; then Jacky ducked her head and dug her fingers and toes into the mud between the stones, for a rush of barking and mewling forms, invisible in the darkness, spilled heavily past and over her, closely followed by a horde of what felt and sounded like large locusts. A few moments later the Hell’s circus rush was receding below her, and she began crawling back up the slope.

There were noises from above too, faint screams and shouts and maniacal laughter that echoed weirdly through the cavern, and she wondered dazedly what madness had struck Rat’s Castle this night.

After many minutes she felt the floor level out beneath her, and looking up she saw the distant torches and the archway. Carrington’s men no longer lurked there and whatever the action was, it was taking place somewhere else, so Jacky got up and ran madly toward the light.

When she’d got there she crouched panting for several minutes in the semicircle of wonderful yellow light, enjoying the delusion of safety it gave her, like the King’s X in the games of tag she’d played not that many years ago, and it was with reluctance that she finally got up and stepped through the arch and into darkness again.

She could hear nervous voices from the direction of the dock, so she padded silently up the corridor that led to the ascending stairway, but halted when she heard voices there too.