The Anubis Gates (7 page)

The carriage rocked on its springs when two of the guards hoisted themselves up onto the driver’s seat, and hearing metal clink close by, Doyle glanced toward Benner and saw the butts of two pistols sticking out of a leather pouch slung near Benner’s left hand.

He heard reins snap and hooves clop on the dirt as the first carriage got moving. “Where are we going?” he asked as their own carriage got under way. “Spatially speaking, I mean.”

“Over to the fence there, that section where the curtain isn’t up. Do you see that low wooden platform? There’s a truck pulled up right to the edge of the fence just outside.”

“Ah,” said Doyle, trying not to sound as nervous as he felt. Looking back, he saw that the horses he’d noticed being led up were now harnessed to the two trailers and were pulling them away toward the north end.

Benner followed his glance. “The lot, the gap field, has to be completely cleared for every jump,” he explained.

“Anything that’s within it goes back with us.”

“So why didn’t your tents and gypsies come back here?”

“The whole field doesn’t come back on the return, just the hooks and whatever they’re touching. The hook works like the rubber band on one of those paddleball things—energy’s required to swat the ball away, and if a fly’s in the way he’ll go too, but only the ball comes back. Even these coaches will stay there. In fact,” he added, and there was enough light from the lamps for Doyle to see his grin, “I noted on my own jaunt that even one’s clothes stay there, though hair and fingernails somehow stay attached. So Treff got in on at least part of the fun.” He laughed. “That’s probably why he’s only getting a fifty percent refund.”

Doyle was glad now of the tarpaulin curtain around the lot. The two coaches drew up to the fence, and through the chain links Doyle could see the truck, its wide side panel slid all the way open. A wooden stage, only about a foot high but more than a dozen yards long and wide, had been set up on the patch of dirt next to the truck but just inside the fence, and it boomed and rattled like a dozen drums when the drivers goaded the horses to pull the coaches up onto it. A number of men, already looking anachronistic in 1983 jumpsuits, quickly set up aluminum poles and draped a stiff and evidently heavy cloth over them, so that the two coaches were in a large cubical tent. The fabric of the tent gleamed dully in the contained lamplight, and Doyle leaned way out of his seat to brush it with his fingers.

“A mesh of woven steel strands sheathed in lead,” Benner said, his voice sounding louder in the enclosed space. “The same stuff my robe and hood were made of this afternoon,” he added more quietly. “The truck’s tented too, on three sides.” Doyle was trying not to let Benner see his hands trembling.

“Is there an actual blast?” he asked, forcing his voice not to quaver. “Will we feel any concussion?”

“No, you don’t really feel anything. Just… dislocation.”

Doyle could hear people whispering in the carriage below him, and from the other one he heard Darrow’s laugh. One of the horses echoingly stamped a hoof.

“What are they waiting for?” Doyle whispered.

“Got to give those men time to make it to the gate and get outside.” Even though the coaches were halted, Doyle still felt sick, and the oil and metal smell of the peculiar tent was becoming unbearable.

“I hate to say it,” he whispered, “but that smell is—”

Abruptly something shifted, violently but without motion, and the sense of depth and space was extinguished from everything he could see, leaving only a flat dimness in front of his eyes splashed with patches of meaningless light; the roof rail he was clutching was the only bearing he had—there was no north and south, or up and down, and he found himself back in the dream the stewardess had awakened him from last night, feeling the old Honda shift horrifyingly sideways on the wet pavement and then spill him into a horizontal tumble of shocking velocity, hearing Rebecca’s scream end instantly at the first punching impact of the asphalt …

The wooden platform had dropped away from beneath them a short distance, and it shattered when the four horses and two coaches came down on it. The ground was no longer flat, and the poles toppled inward, burying everything a moment later under the heavy folds of the lead-sheathed fabric.

Doyle welcomed the pain when one of the falling poles rebounded from the coach roof and banged his shoulder, for it established the here and now for him. If it hurts it’s got to be the real world, he thought dazedly, and he shook off the vivid memory of the motorcycle crash. The smell he so disliked was very intense, for a section of the collapsed tent was pressing his head down onto the coach roof. And, he thought, probably nothing unites you with surrounding reality more thoroughly than being wringingly sick.

Just when he thought he had gathered the energy, though, the lead curtain was hauled off him, and the fresh night air he found himself breathing made the whole idea of vomiting seem self-indulgent and affected. He looked around at the moonlit field the coaches stood in, bordered by tall trees.

“You okay, Brendan?” Benner said for, Doyle realized, the second time.

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine. Jesus, what a jump, huh? Is everybody else okay? How about the horses?” Doyle was proud of himself for asking such unruffled, businesslike questions, though he wished he could talk more quietly and stop bobbing his head.

“Take it easy, will you?” Benner said. “Everything’s fine. Here—drink.” He unscrewed the top of a flask and handed it to Doyle.

A moment later Doyle was reflecting that liquor was even more effective than pain—or, probably, throwing up—in reconciling one to reality. “Thanks,” he said more quietly, handing it back.

Benner nodded, pocketed the flask, vaulted to the broken platform, and strode off it to where four of the six other guards were spading up a patch of earth and, with gloved hands, folding up the lead tent cloth; in so short a time that Doyle knew they must have practiced it they had buried the folded-up bale of fabric and scrambled back up to their places on the coaches. “You should see the platform,” Benner remarked, hardly panting. “A good three inches was sheared off the bottom of it when we jumped. If we hadn’t been up on it the horses would have lost their hooves and the wheels would each have a section gone.”

The drivers snapped the reins and the coaches moved unevenly forward off the crumpled boards and onto the grass. At a slow pace they began to make their way across the field.

In a few minutes they had reached a stand of willows that screened them from the road, and one of the guards jumped to the ground and sprinted ahead. Crouching, he glanced right and left, and made a patting, keep-your-head-down gesture; a few moments later an open carriage rattled past from left to right, headed for the city. Doyle stared after it in fascination, awed to think that the cheery-looking couple he’d glimpsed through the willow branches would very likely be dead a century before he was born.

The reins flapped and harnesses jingled as the horses advanced to the ditch and, with some effort and backsliding, pulled the coaches across it and onto the road. Wheeling around to the right they set off, and in a minute were rocking along at a good speed east, toward London. The coach lamps, which had fluttered and flickered during the jiggling passage across the ditch, settled down now to a regular back and forth sway on their hooks, casting yellow highlights on the horses’ backs and the brightwork on the coaches, but otherwise dimmed by the moonlight that frosted the trees and made the road glow like a track of palest ashes.

If your heels be nimble and light,
Doyle thought,
you may get there by candle-light.

“I am borne darkly, fearfully afar…”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Above the crowded sidewalks the windows of the stately, balconied buildings of Oxford Street were all aglow with lamplight on this young Saturday evening; elegantly dressed men and women were to be seen everywhere, wandering arm in arm, silhouetted by shop windows and open doorways, stepping into or alighting from the hansom cabs that jostled one another for positions at the curb. The air was clamorous with the shouting of the cab drivers, the whirring clatter of hundreds of coach wheels on the cobblestones, and, a little more pleasantly, the rhythmic chanting of street vendors who had strayed west from the weekly fair in Tottenham Court Road. From his perch Doyle could smell horses, cigar smoke, hot sausages and perfume on the chilly night breeze.

When they turned right onto Broad Street Benner pulled one of his pistols—a four-barrelled thing, looking all spidery with its multiple flintcocks and flashpan covers—completely out of the leather sack and leaned his elbow on the coach roof with the gun very evident, pointed at the sky. Looking up front, Doyle saw that all the guards had done the same.

“We’re entering the St. Giles rookery,” Benner explained. “Some very rough types about, but they won’t interfere with a body of armed men.”

Doyle looked around with a wary interest at the narrow alleys and courts that snaked away from the street, most of them dark, but a few lit by reflections of some smoky light around a corner. There was much more street-selling here, on the main street at least, and the coaches passed dozens of coffee stalls, old clothes stands, and crates of vegetables watched over by formidable old women who puffed clay pipes and watched the crowd through narrowed eyes. A number of people shouted things at the two coaches, in so thick an accent that Doyle could catch only an occasional “damn” or “bloody,” but their tone seemed more jocular than threatening.

He looked behind, and then touched Benner’s arm. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said quickly. “That wagon back there—behind the potato cart—the thing that looks like a Conestoga wagon. It’s been behind us ever since we got onto the Bayswater Road.”

“For God’s sake, Brendan, we’ve only made one turn since then,” Benner hissed impatiently. He did turn around, though. “Hell, that’s just…” Suddenly he looked thoughtful. “I believe it’s a gypsy wagon.”

“Gypsies again,” said Doyle. “They didn’t use to—I mean they don’t usually come into big cities much, do they?”

“I don’t know,” Benner said slowly. “I’m not even sure it is a gypsy wagon, but I’ll mention it to Darrow.”

The street narrowed and darkened as they rattled down St. Martin’s Lane and passed the tall old church, and the groups of men that watched their passage from low, dimly lit doorways made Doyle glad of Benner’s weapons; then it broadened out into light and festivity again when they came to the wide boulevard that was the Strand. Benner worked his complicated gun back into its sack.

“The Crown and Anchor’s just around the corner,” he said. “And I haven’t seen your gypsy wagon for the last several blocks.”

Between two buildings Doyle got a quick view of the river Thames, glittering in the moonlight. It seemed to him that a bridge wasn’t there that he’d seen there on his 1979 visit, but before he had time really to orient himself they’d turned into a little street and squeaked to a halt in front of a two-storied half-timbered building with a sign swinging over the open doorway. The Crown and Anchor, Doyle read.

Drops of rain began pattering down as the guests stepped out of the coaches. Darrow moved to the front, his hands buried in a furry muff. “You,” he said, nodding at the man who’d driven the forward coach, “park the cars. The rest of us’ll be inside. Come on, all.” He led the party of seventeen into the warmth of the tavern.

“Good God, sir,” exclaimed the boy who hurried up to them, “all of you for dinner? Should have let us know in advance, they’d have opened the back banquet room. But see if there’s enough chairs to settle on in the taproom, and—”

“We haven’t come for dinner,” said Darrow impatiently. “We’ve come to hear Mr. Coleridge speak.”

“Have ye?” The boy turned and shouted down a hall, “Mr. Lawrence! Here’s a whole lot more people that thought it was this Saturday that the poet fellow was to speak here!”

Every bit of color left Darrow’s face, and suddenly he was a very old man dressed up in ludicrous clothes. The muff fell off his hands and thumped on the hardwood floor. No one spoke, though Doyle, beneath his shock and disappointment, could feel a fit of hysterical laughter building up to critical mass inside himself.

A harried-looking man, followed by a pudgy old fellow with long gray hair, hurried up to them. “I’m Lawrence, the manager,” he said. “Mr. Montagu set up the lecture for next Saturday, the eighth of October, and I can’t help it that you’ve all come tonight. Mr. Montagu isn’t here, and he’d be upset if—”

Doyle had glanced, and was now staring, at the chubby, ill-seeming man beside Lawrence, who blinked at them all apologetically while the manager was speaking. In his mounting excitement Doyle raised a hand so quickly that the manager halted in mid-sentence, and he leaned forward and said to the man beside Lawrence, “Mr. Coleridge, I believe?”

“Yes,” the man said, “and I do apologize to you all for—”

“Excuse me.” Doyle turned to Lawrence. “The boy indicated that there is a banquet room not in use.”

“Well, yes, that’s true, but it hasn’t been swept and there’s no fire… and besides, Mr. Montagu—”

“Montagu won’t mind.” He turned to Darrow, who was recovering his color. “I’m sure you must have brought suitable cash to cover emergencies, Mr. Darrow,” he said. “And I imagine that if you give this fellow enough of it he’ll have a fire built and provisions brought to us in this banquet room. After all, Mr. Coleridge clearly thought it was to be this evening, and so did we, so why should we listen to him out on the street when there are taverns about with unused rooms? I’m sure,” he said to Lawrence, “even Mr. Montagu can’t fault the logic of that.”

“Well,” said the manager reluctantly, “it will mean taking several of our people away from their proper duties… we will all have to take extra pains… “

“A hundred gold sovereigns!” cried Darrow wildly.

“Done,” choked Lawrence. “But keep your voice down, please.”

Coleridge looked horrified. “Sir, I couldn’t permit—”