The Anubis Gates (16 page)

“Ah, Dumb Tom,” exclaimed Marko softly as Doyle once again sidled into the alley where he waited. He held out his sack and Doyle dug handfuls of change out of his pockets and tossed them into it. “Yer doin’ splendid, lad. Now listen, I’m movin’ over to Malk Alley by Bedford Street this time, and I’ll be there for the next half hour. Got it?”

Doyle nodded.

“Keep up the good work. And cough sometimes. You do a stunning cough.”

Doyle nodded again, winked, and moved back out into the street.

This was his sixth day of begging, and he was still surprised at how good at it he’d proved to be, and how relaxed a life it was. He was even coming to terms with the idea of getting up at dawn and walking a dozen miles a day—covering both sides of the river west of London Bridge—for the appetite he worked up was always lavishly sated by the dinners at Copenhagen Jack’s house in Pye Street, and the captain had no objection to his beggars stopping at public houses for the occasional pint, or taking short naps on disused street to street rooftop bridges or between coal barges on the shore by Blackfriar’s Bridge.

The make-up around his eyes was making his skin break out, though. It had been Jacky’s idea to exaggerate Doyle’s already pale complexion to the point of looking consumptive by having him wear a white cloth around his head like a toothache sling, with a black cap above and a red scarf around his neck—to make his face seem very blanched by contrast—and applying some pink make-up around his eyes. “Makes you look more smitten,” Jacky had said as he’d smeared the smelly stuff into Doyle’s eye sockets, “and if Horrabin should happen to see you, let’s hope it’ll keep him from recognizing you.”

Jacky puzzled Doyle. The boy sometimes struck him as effeminate in certain spontaneous gestures and word choices, and he certainly had no apparent interest in young ladies, but Wednesday after dinner, when a floridly handsome Decayed Gentleman beggar had cornered Jacky in the hall, calling him his little hot cross bun and trying to kiss him, Jacky had reacted not just with a firm refusal but with disgust, as if he considered all that sort of thing distasteful. And Doyle couldn’t understand why a young man of Jacky’s intelligence would settle for begging as a means of earning a living, even in such a relatively pleasant operation as Captain Jack’s.

Doyle himself certainly didn’t intend to stay with it for very long. Three days from now, on Tuesday the eleventh of September, William Ashbless was going to arrive in London, and Doyle had resolved to meet him, strike up a friendship with the poet and then somehow get Ashbless—who had never been noted as hurting for money—to help set him up with some decent sort of job. He knew that the man would arrive at the London Dock on the frigate Sandoval at nine in the morning, and at ten-thirty would write the first draft of his best-known poem, “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” in the front room of the Jamaica Coffee House. Doyle intended to save some begging money, buy a passable suit, and meet Ashbless there. Having studied the man so thoroughly Doyle already felt that he knew him pretty well.

He wasn’t letting himself consider the possibility that Ashbless might be unable, or unwilling, to help him.

“My God, Stanley, will you look at that poor creature!” said a lady as she stepped to the pavement from a hackney cab. “Give him a shilling.”

Acting as if he hadn’t heard, Doyle resumed gnawing the piece of dirty bread Captain Jack had equipped him with six days ago; Stanley was complaining that if he gave Doyle a shilling he wouldn’t have enough for a drink before the show.

“You value your filthy liquor more than the salvation of your soul, is that it? You make me sick. Here, you with the bread or whatever that thing is! Buy yourself a decent dinner with this.”

Doyle was careful to wait until she’d approached closer, and then he looked up sharply as if startled, and touched his mouth and ear. She was holding a bracelet out toward him.

“Oh, will you look at that, Stanley, on top of it all he can’t hear nor speak. Low as a dog the poor fellow is.”

She waved the bracelet at Doyle, and he took it with a grateful smile. The couple moved on toward the theater, Stanley grumbling, as Doyle dropped the heavy bracelet into his pocket.

And then,
he thought as he shambled on,
once Ashbless has helped me get on my feet in this damned century, if I decide—as I imagine I will—that I’d rather go home to the time when there are paramedics and anesthetics and health inspectors and movies and flush toilets and telephones, I’ll cautiously get in touch with the fearsome Doctor Romany and work out some sort of a deal whereby he’ll tell me the location of one of the upcoming time gaps. Hell, I could probably trick him into letting me be within the field when the gap closed! I’d have to be sure he wouldn’t find and take away the mobile hook, though. I wonder if it’s too big to swallow.

The tickling itch had been building in his throat over the last few minutes, and an elegantly dressed couple was approaching at an unhurried pace, so he unleashed his much admired cough; he tried not to let himself do it too often because it tended quickly to change from a simulated ordeal into a genuine lung-wrenching paroxysm, and in the last few days it had been getting worse. He supposed glumly that he had picked it up from his midnight dip in the chilly Chelsea Creek a week ago.

“Holy Mother of God, James, that walking corpse is about to cough his livers right out onto the pavement. Give him something to buy himself a drink with.”

“Be wasted on that sod. He’ll be dead before dawn.”

“Well… perhaps you’re right. Yes, you certainly seem to be right.”

Two men leaned against the iron palings of the fence that flanked the wings of the theatre. One of them tapped ash from a cigar and then drew on it, making a glowing red dot in the shadows. “I asked somebody,” he said softly to his partner, “and this boy is a deaf-mute called Dumb Tom. You’re sure it’s him?”

“The boss is sure.”

The first man stared across the street at Doyle, who had pulled himself together and was lurching away, again pretending to gnaw the bread. “He sure doesn’t look like a menace.”

“Just the fact of him is a menace, Kaggs. He’s not supposed to be here.”

“I guess so.” Kaggs slipped a long, slim knife from his sleeve, absently tested the edge with his thumb and then slipped it away again. “How do you want to do it?”

The other man thought for a moment. “Shouldn’t be hard. I’ll bump him and knock him down, and you can act like you’re helping him up. Let your coat hang forward so nobody’ll see, and then slip the knife all the way in just behind his collarbone, blade perpendicular to the bone, and rock it back and forth a little. There’s a big artery down there that you can’t miss, and he ought to be dead in a few seconds.”

“All right. Let’s go.” He tossed his cigar onto the street and they both pushed away from the fence and strode after Doyle.

Red-rimmed eyes peered out of the face colorful with grease paint, and Horrabin took two knocking steps forward. “They were watching him, and now they’re going after him,” he said in a growling whisper quite different from his fluty voice. “You’re certain they’re not ours?”

“I’ve never clapped eyes on ‘em before, yer Honor,” said one of the men standing on the pavement below him.

“Then never mind waiting until this crowd’s inside,” hissed the clown. “Get Dumb Tom now.” As the three men sprinted away after Doyle and his two pursuers, Horrabin pounded a white-gloved fist against the brick wall of the alley and whispered, “Damn you, Fairchild, why couldn’t you have remembered yesterday?”

I’ve got to get back to 1983 before this cough kills me, Doyle thought unhappily. A shot of penicillin or something would clear it up in a couple of days, but if I went to a doctor here the bastard would probably prescribe leeches. He felt the throat tickle building up again, but resolutely resisted it. I wonder if it’s developed into full-blown pneumonia yet. Hell, it doesn’t even seem to be good for business anymore. Nobody wants to give anything to a beggar who looks like he’ll be dead in ten minutes. Maybe the captain would—

Someone thrust a leg in his way and before he could step aside he was heavily shoulder-bumped, and he pitched straight forward onto the cobblestones, abrading the palms of his hands. The person who’d tripped him walked on, but someone else crouched beside him. “Are you all right?” the newcomer asked.

Dizzily Doyle started to make his deaf-mute gesture, but all in an instant the man slapped one hand over Doyle’s face, holding his jaw shut with the heel of his hand, and with the other drove a blade down at Doyle’s shoulder. Doyle caught a glimpse of the knife and thrashed backward, so that it cut through his coat and skin but was deflected outward by his collarbone. He tried to yell but could only produce a sort of loud hum with his mouth still held shut; his assailant knelt on Doyle’s free arm and drew the knife up for another try.

Suddenly something from behind collided hard with the man and he
oomphed!
and did a quick forward somersault as his knife clattered away across the cobbles. Three men now stood above Doyle, and two of them quickly hooked hands under his arms and hoisted him up. “Saved yer life. Tommy,” panted one. “Now you come with us.”

Doyle allowed himself to be marched at a trot back the way he’d come, for he assumed these were some of Copenhagen Jack’s beggars who had come to his rescue; then he saw the upright grasshopper figure of Horrabin waiting in the alley ahead, and realized that Doctor Romany had found him.

He extended one arm and then slammed the elbow back into the stomach of the man who held his left arm, and as the man crumpled Doyle drove his left fist into the throat of the man on his right. He too went down and then Doyle was running south with the boundless energy of pure panic, for he remembered Romany’s cigar so well that he could almost feel the heat of it on his eye. He could hear the footsteps of the third man pounding close behind him.

He was off the main street and pelting down an alley now, and the racing pursuer’s footsteps echoed terrifyingly close, so when he saw a stack of boxes full of vegetable peelings against one wall he reached out as he ran past and yanked the stack out; Doyle spun with the momentum of the action, lost his footing and fell heavily, skidding on his hip and then on his cut shoulder, but the boxes had toppled directly into the path of Horrabin’s man and he had tangled his feet in them and done a resounding belly-flop onto the round stones of the pavement. He lay motionless face down, the wind and maybe the life knocked out of him, and Doyle got to his feet, whimpering, and limped as fast as he could on down the alley.

He crossed two narrow streets and followed his alley through one more block and then found himself on the brightly lamplit sidewalk of the Strand, only a few blocks east of the Crown and Anchor. All the running had started him coughing again, and he made a shilling and fourpence from the awed passersby before he got it under control. When he could get a breath again he began walking west on the Strand, for it had suddenly occurred to him that this was the Saturday night Coleridge had been scheduled to speak, and that Coleridge, while not now in any position to grant substantial aid to anyone, might at least be able to help Doyle get back to Captain Jack’s house unseen.
Hell,
Doyle thought,
he might even remember me from a week ago.

Oblivious to the bright store and restaurant windows he passed, he hurried down the sidewalk, hunched over to relieve the pain of the stitch in his side, limping, and breathing with fast asthmatic wheezes. He saw a woman recoil from him in actual fear, and it came to him how grotesque he must look with his make-up, tattered clothes and crippled cockroach gait; abruptly self-conscious, he straightened up and walked more slowly.

The crowd that parted hastily in front of him seemed no more composed of individuals than a plywood theatrical flat representing a bus-line, but he did notice when a startlingly tall figure stepped out of an alley into his path. A white conical hat topped a head like a decorated Easter egg, and Doyle gasped, spun around and ran, hearing the knocking of the pursuing stilts on the pavement.

Horrabin ran easily on the stilts, taking bobbing ten foot strides even as he wove through the sidewalk traffic, and as he ran he emitted a succession of piercing high-low-high-low whistles. To the terrified Doyle it sounded like the Nazi Gestapo sirens in old movies about World War Two.

The whistle was rousing certain beggars and drawing them out of alleys and doorways; they were silent, powerful-looking creatures, and two of them plodded toward Doyle while another was working his way over from across the street.

Looking over his shoulder, Doyle caught a freeze frame glimpse of Horrabin only a giant pace away, his face grinning maniacally like a Chinese dragon and one white claw extended. Doyle leaped sideways into the street; he tumbled, rolling with only inches to spare out from under the hammering hooves of a cab horse, and then he scrambled to his feet and sprang up onto the step of a carriage and braced himself there with one hand on the window sill and one on the roof rail.

The carriage’s occupants were an old man and a young girl. “Please speed up,” Doyle gasped, “I’m being chased by—”

The old man had angrily picked up and poised a lean walking stick, and now with all the force of the first breaking shot of a pool game drove the blunt end at Doyle’s chest. Doyle flew off his perch as if he’d been shot, and though he managed to land on his feet he instantly fell onto his hands and knees and then rolled over a couple of times.

The ruin-faced, one-eyed old creature huddled in a doorway giggled and clapped his papier-mache hands silently. “Ah, yes yes! Now into the river, Doyle—there’s something I want to show you on the other side,” chittered the Luck of the Surrey-side beggars.

“God save us, he’s been shot!” shouted Horrabin. “Get him while he’s still got any breath in him, you dung beetles!”

Doyle was on his feet now, but every breath seemed to spread a crack in his chest, and he thought that if he started coughing now he’d die of it. One of his pursuers was only a few paces away, advancing with a confident smile, so Doyle dug into his pocket, fetched out the heavy bracelet and pitched it with all his strength into the man’s face, then without pausing to see what effect it had he turned and hobbled to the far curb, crossed the sidewalk and disappeared into an alley.