The Anubis Gates (6 page)

Doyle stared at him suspiciously. “You did?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. They dressed me up like—oh, picture a Ku Klux Klansman who favors metallic robes and doesn’t need eyeholes—and then had me stand on a platform by the fence while they lined up their infernal machinery on the other side of the fence. And then whoosh!—one minute I was here and today, the next I was in a tent in a field near Islington in 1805.”

“In a tent?”

Benner’s smile took on a puzzled quirk. “Yeah, it was weird, I landed in some kind of gypsy camp. The first thing I saw when I ripped off the hood was the inside of this tent, and it was all fumy with incense and full of Egyptian-looking stuff, and there was a cadaverous old bald-headed guy staring at me in extreme surprise. I got scared and ran outside, which wasn’t easy in that robe, and it was English countryside I saw, and no highways or telephone poles, so I guess it really was 1805. There were a lot of horses and tents and gypsy types around, and all the gypsies were staring at me, but the gap came to its end just then—thank God I hadn’t run outside the field—and the mobile hook snatched me back to here and now.” He chuckled. “I wonder what the gypsies thought when I just disappeared, and the robe fell empty without me in it.”

Doyle stared at him for several long seconds. Though always amiable, Benner had never been trustworthy—but this wasn’t how he lied. The man wasn’t a good actor, and this story, especially the note of puzzlement about the old man in the tent, had been told with effortless conviction. He realized dizzily that he believed it.

“My God,” he said in an envious near-whisper, “what did the air smell like? What did the ground feel like?”

Benner shrugged. “Fresh air and grassy ground. And the horses looked like horses. The gypsies were all fairly short, but maybe gypsies always are.” He clapped Doyle on the back. “So stop worrying. The charcoal enemas will keep the guests healthy, and I’m not going to let any of them get away. You still want to call the cops?”

“No.”
No indeed,
Doyle thought fervently.
I want to see Coleridge.
“Excuse me,” he said, “I’ve got to get busy on this speech.”

At twenty after six Doyle decided he had his new speech memorized. He stood up in the little office Darrow had let him use, sighed, and opened the door to the main room.

A number of well-dressed people were milling around at the far end of the room, separated from him by a dozen or so empty chairs and a big central table. The hundreds of candles in the chandeliers were lit, and the soft, gracious illumination gleamed off the polished panelling and the rows of glasses on the table; faintly on the warm air he caught a smell of bell peppers and grilling steak.

“Benner,” he called softly, seeing the tall young man lean tiredly against a wall near the table and, in perfect harmony with the way he was dressed, flip open a snuffbox and bring a pinch of brown powder up to his nose.

Benner looked up. “Damn it, Brendan—
hatchoo!
—damn it, staff’s supposed to be all dressed by now. Never mind, the guests are in the dressing rooms, you can change in a few minutes.” Benner put away his snuffbox and frowned impatiently at Doyle’s clothes as he walked over. “You’ve got your mobile hook on, at least?”

“Sure.” Doyle pulled back his shirt sleeve to show him the leather band, drawn tight and secured with a little lock, around his shaven forearm. “Darrow himself put it on an hour ago. Come listen to my speech, will you? You know enough about—”

“I don’t have time, Brendan, but I’m sure it’s fine. These damn people, each one of them thinks he’s the maharajah of the world.”

A man hurried up to them, dressed, like Benner, in the early nineteenth century style. “It’s Treff again, chief,” he said quietly. “We finally did get him to strip, but he’s got an Ace bandage on his leg and he won’t take it off, and it’s obvious he’s got something under it.”

“Hell, I knew one of them would pull this. Rich people! Come along, Doyle, you’ve got to head in this direction anyway.”

As they strode across the room the imposing figure of Darrow entered through the main door and their paths converged just as a stout, hairy man wearing nothing but an elastic bandage around his thigh stormed out of one of the dressing rooms.

“Mr. Treff,” said Darrow, raising his thick white eyebrows, and his deep voice undercut and silenced all the others, “you have evidently misunderstood the dress requirements.”

At this several people laughed, and Treff’s face went from red to dark red. “Darrow, this bandage stays on, understand? It’s my doctor’s orders, and I’m paying you a goddamn million dollars, and no fugitive from a nut hatch is going to—”

Only because he happened to smile nervously just then at Benner did Doyle see him whip a thin knife out of his sleeve; but everyone saw him when he kicked forward in a graceful full-extension fencer’s lunge and slipped the flat of the blade under the disputed bandage, paused for a theatrical moment, and then flicked it out sideways, cleanly slicing the layers of cloth through from top to bottom.

A good fistful of heavy, gleaming metallic objects thudded onto the carpet. In a quick glance Doyle recognized among them a Colibri Beam Sensor lighter, a Seiko quartz watch, a tiny notebook, a .25 caliber automatic pistol and at least three one-ounce plates of solid gold.

“Planning on buying the natives with glass beads, were you?” Darrow said, with a nod of thanks to Benner, who had straightened back up to his position beside Doyle and slipped the knife away. “As you know, this violates the terms of our agreement—you’ll be getting a fifty percent refund, and right now the guards will escort you to a trailer outside the lot, where you’ll be held in luxurious captivity until dawn. And in a spirit of friendly concern,” he added, with the coldest smile Doyle had ever seen, “I do strongly advise you to leave here quietly.”

“Well, one good result of all that,” said Benner lightly as Treff was led, naked, out the door, “is that a dressing room is now free. In you go, Brendan.”

Doyle stepped forward and, muttering “Excuse me” to several people, went into the newly vacated dressing room. There was a guard on a stool inside, and he looked relieved that this wasn’t Treff coming back in.

“Doyle, aren’t you?” the man said, standing up.

“Yes.”

“Right, then, off with your clothes.”

Sucking in his belly a little, Doyle obediently shed his clothes and hung his suit carefully on a hanger the guard handed him. There was a door in the back of the dressing room, and the guard bustled away through it, taking Doyle’s things with him.

Doyle leaned against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t forget about him. He tried to scratch under the leather band on his forearm, but it was drawn too tight for him to get a finger under it. He gave up, resolving just to ignore the way the carved bit of green stone under the leather made his shaved skin itch. A mobile hook, Darrow had called it, and he’d let Doyle look at the thing before it was covered by the strap that would hold it tightly against him. Doyle had turned the small lozenge of green stone in his fingers, noting the symbols carved on it—they seemed to be a mix of hieroglyphics and astrological notations.

“Don’t look at it so disapprovingly, Doyle,” Darrow had said. “It’s what will bring you back to 1983. When the 1810 gap comes to an end, this thing will pop back to the gap it came from, which is here and now, and as long as it’s in contact with your flesh it’ll take you back with it. If you were to lose it, you’d see us all disappear and you’d be marooned in 1810; which is why it’s to be locked onto you.”

“So we’ll all just disappear from there after four hours?” Doyle had asked as Darrow soaped and shaved his forearm. “What if you’ve miscalculated the length of the gap, and we all disappear in the middle of the lecture?”

“We wouldn’t,” Darrow had said. “You’ve got to be within the gap as well as touching the hook, and the gap is five miles away from the tavern we’re going to.” He laid the stone on Doyle’s arm and wrapped the wide leather band around it. “But we haven’t miscalculated, and we have a comfortable margin of time to get back to the gap field after the lecture, and we’re bringing two carriages, so,” he had said as he drew the strap tight and snapped the little lock onto it, “don’t worry.”

Now, leaning naked against the wall of the dressing room, Doyle smiled at himself in the mirror.
What, me worry?

The guard came back and gave Doyle a set of clothes that presumably wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in 1810; he also gave him directions on how to put them on, and had actually to assist him in tying the little bow at the front of the cravat. “Your hair doesn’t need cutting, sir, the fashion in length is about the same again, but I will just brush it down a bit in front here, so; a bald spot’s nothing to be ashamed of. That’s it precisely, semi-Brutus style. Have a look at yourself now.”

Doyle turned to the mirror, cocked his head and then laughed. “Not bad,” he said. He was wearing a brown frockcoat with two rows of buttons; in the front it came down only to belt level, but in back it swept in a long tail that reached to the backs of his knees. He had on tight tan trousers and knee-high Hessian boots with tassels, and the white silk cravat visible between the high wings of the coat’s collar gave him, he thought, if not an air of rakish handsomeness, at least one of dignity. The clothes had none of the stiffness of brand new garments; though clean, they had clearly been worn before, and this had the effect of making Doyle feel relaxed and comfortable in them, and not as though he’d been shoehorned into some costume for a party.

When he stepped back into the main room the guests were ambling toward the table, on which a colorful profusion of plates and platters and bottles had appeared. Doyle filled a plate and, remembering that he was “staff,” forced himself not to look at the selection of wines and beers but to grab a cup of coffee instead.

“Here you go, Doyle,” spoke up Darrow, indicating an empty chair next to himself. “Doyle,” he explained to the nearest several people, “is our Coleridge expert.”

They nodded and smiled as Doyle sat down, and one white-haired man with humorous eyes said, “I enjoyed The Nigh-Related Guest, Mr. Doyle.”

“Thank you.” Doyle smiled, pleased for the few seconds it took him to realize that the man was Jim Thibodeau, whose massive, multi-volume History of Mankind—written with his wife, who Doyle now noticed sitting on the other side of him—had reflected even just in the chapter on the English Romantic poets a depth of research and a relaxed style Doyle could only admire and envy. But their presence here reinforced the hopeful excitement he’d been feeling ever since hearing Benner describe jumping to 1805. If the Thibodeaus are taking it seriously, he thought, there’s got to be a good chance of it working.

The table and food had been cleared away and the ten chairs were now arranged in a semicircle before a podium. Doyle embarrassedly told Benner to take the podium away, and he replaced it with the chair Treff would have got.

Doyle sat down in it and met the gaze of each guest in turn. Of the nine of them, he recognized five: three, including the Thibodeaus, were prominent historians, one was a distinguished British stage actor, and one, he was fairly sure, was a famous spiritualist and medium. She’d better watch her tricks here in the gap, he thought uneasily, remembering Darrow’s story about the seance on Auto Graveyard Street in 1954.

He took a deep breath and began. “You are probably familiar with the life and works of the man who was the father of the Romantic movement in English poetry, but our outing this evening certainly calls for a review. Born in Devonshire on October 21, 1772, Coleridge early on exhibited the precocity and wide range of reading that he maintained all his life and that made him, among so many other things, the most fascinating conversationalist of an age that included such people as Byron and Sheridan…”

As he went on, touching on the poet’s scholastic career, his addiction to opium in the form of laudanum, his unfortunate marriage, his friendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and the extended trips abroad occasioned by his horror of his wife, Doyle carefully watched his audience’s response. They seemed satisfied on the whole, frowning doubtfully or nodding from time to time, and he realized that his presence here was a gracious detail, like the fine china dishes on which the food had been served when paper plates would have done just as well. Darrow could probably have delivered a talk on Coleridge at least as effectively, but the old man had wanted a sure enough Coleridge authority to do it.

After about fifteen minutes he drew it to a close. Questions followed, all of which Doyle managed to answer confidently, and at last Darrow stood up and walked over to stand beside Doyle’s chair, effortlessly replacing him as the focus of attention. He was carrying a lantern, and he waved it in the direction of the door. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “it is now five minutes to eight, and our coaches await us outside.”

In a tense silence everyone got to their feet and put on hats and bonnets and greatcoats.
A hundred and seventy years,
Doyle thought,
is the distance to 1810. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.
He noted almost disinterestedly that his heart was pounding and that he didn’t seem able to take a deep breath.

They all filed out onto the packed dirt of the lot. Two broughams, each with two horses harnessed to it, had been drawn up to within a few yards of the trailer, and by the light of the flickering coach lamps Doyle could see that the vehicles, like the period clothes they were all wearing, were clean and in good repair but obviously not new.

“There’s room for five in each vehicle with a bit of crowding,” Darrow said, “and since Treff couldn’t attend, I’ll take his place inside. Staff rides up top.”

Benner took Doyle by the elbow as the guests, with a good deal of hat dropping and shawl tangling, began climbing in. “We’ve got the back of the second coach,” he said. They walked around to the rear of the farther coach and climbed up to two little seats that projected from the back at the same height as the driver’s. The night air was chilly, and Doyle was glad of the heat from the left rear lamp below his elbow. From his perch he could see more horses being led in from the north end of the lot.