The Anubis Gates (18 page)

“It’s the American.”

“Apep eat me. Then why did you shoot at him, you doomed sod?”

Jacky had already snatched a close-mesh fishing net out of a nearby boat, flung it into one of the canoes and was pushing the narrow craft out into the water when she heard Horrabin yell, in a voice made even shriller by fear, “It wasn’t me, damn it, your Worship, I swear! It’s somebody down among the boats here—there he goes now, in a canoe, heading toward you!”

Jacky handled the single oar with speed and grace, and propelled the canoe rapidly out toward the ring of little lights, which was shifting even further east, toward the bridge.
God,
she thought as she panted with the effort,
I’m sorry Tom—I mean Doyle. I was just too eager to kill Dog-Face Joe. I’m sorry, please don’t be killed.

She felt hollow and cold with horror, though, for it had felt like a good shot, and she’d been aiming directly at the center of the dimly seen head.

Her canoe was moving faster than Doctor Romany’s larger boat, and she’d started well to the east of him, so when Doyle’s head burst up out of the water again—again right in the middle of the infallible ring of lights—she was almost a hundred yards closer to him than Romany was.

“Doyle!” she called, profoundly relieved to see him still alive. “It’s Jacky. Wait for me.”

Doyle was so exhausted that he was almost annoyed to hear Jacky’s voice. He’d resigned himself to being captured, and this rescue attempt of Jacky’s sounded as if it would involve further exertions, and likely avail nothing but to anger Doctor Romany.

“Sink straight down as deep as you can, and then come back up,” came Jacky’s voice again, closer now.

Doyle turned his head and, by the light of the candles of his Lilliputian retinue, saw a bearded man in a canoe.

His eyes widened with surprise, but before he could duck under water again the figure in the canoe said, “Wait!” and, reaching up, yanked off the beard. “It is me, Doyle. Now do what I said, and hurry!”

I guess you can’t relax yet,
Doyle told himself wearily as he slid under the surface again and obediently let half the air in his lungs bubble out through his nose, so that he sank easily through the cold black water; then he halted his descent with a scissors-kick when it occurred to him that there wasn’t going to be a pool floor to kick upward from.
What if I’ve sunk so deep, he thought, that I can’t thrash my way back to the surface before my lungs mutiny and suck in river water?
He instantly began clawing and kicking his way up, and he felt a rope loop brush the back of his hand a moment before he burst out into the air.

There was a wild chittering nearby, like a cageful of excited birds, and Jacky, leaning out over the side, was bundling up the wet weight of a fishing net, in among the tangles of which a few little lights still burned. “Get in,” Jacky snapped. “Clamber over the side up front, I’ll balance you from the back. Stay away from that net—those little bastards carry knives. And hurry.”

Doyle took a moment to look upstream—he could see Romany’s boat perhaps fifty yards off, the synchronized knocking of the oars very loud now—and then he heaved himself up and rolled into the canoe. Jacky was crouched in the rear, rigidly holding the oar straight down into the water.

As soon as the canoe had stopped wobbling, Doyle panted, “Step on the gas.”

Jacky began plying the oar desperately. Having come to a full stop and taken on more weight, though, the canoe was reluctant to move.

“I’ve got one more pistol,” called Doctor Romany. “Drop the oar and I won’t fire it.”

“Wouldn’t dare,” gasped Jacky, her arms quivering as she dragged the oar through the motionless water. “Wants you… alive.”

“Not anymore,” said Doyle, sitting up carefully. “A minute ago they were all shooting at me.”

“Thought you… were someone else.”

The canoe was moving now, but slowly. Doyle could distinguish three heads in silhouette in the boat bearing down on them. “Is there a spare oar?” he asked desperately.

“Ever paddled… canoe?”

“No.”

“Shut up then.”

Doyle noticed a long tear in Jacky’s trousers on the outside of the left thigh, exposing a long, rough cut. He opened his mouth to ask about it, then noticed a round hole punched in the fabric of the canoe, toward the stern. “Good God, Jacky, you’ve been shot!”

“I know.” Even by the dim light of the rising crescent moon Jacky’s face was visibly dark with effort and glistening with sweat, but the canoe was now matching the speed of Doctor Romany’s boat. For a minute or two both craft maintained their interval as they knifed and lumbered through the water, and the oarlocks clacked in the same rhythm as Jacky’s desperate panting; then the canoe put on a little more speed and began to leave the clumsier boat behind.

Blackfriars Bridge was looming close in front of them, and when it was clear that they would lose the pursuing boat Jacky sat back and stared ahead at the great stone arches they were being relentlessly propelled toward. “North middle arch,” she gasped, and stabbed the oar into the water on the starboard side. The rocketing canoe heeled over and began cutting a wide arc to starboard across the face of the river.

When they were nearly in line with the arch she’d indicated, and so close that Doyle could see the explosive splashing where the river pounded against the stone pilings, she whipped the oar out of the water and plunged it in on the other side; the craft straightened out, and there was an instant of blackness and roaring water and the awareness of hard stone rushing past on all sides—and a fast rise and drop that almost landed Doyle in the water again—and then they were out on the broad river, on the east side of the bridge now, and Jacky was slouched back, eyes shut and hands hanging limp over the sides, devoting her energy to getting her breath back as the canoe gradually lost speed.

Doyle looked back, and realized that Doctor Romany would not have been able to duplicate the sharp turn to the wider middle arch, and would not dare try shooting the bridge through the narrow arch that lay ahead of him. If he wanted to continue the pursuit he’d have to heel around to a halt and then row to the one the canoe had darted through. “You lost ‘em, Jacky,” he said wonderingly. “By God, you left ‘em behind.”

“Grew up… on a river,” Jacky panted after a while. “Handy… with boats.” After a few more moments of panting, and pushing back sweat-damp hair, Jacky went on, “I thought the Spoonsize Boys were a myth.”

Doyle knew that Jacky must be referring to the little eggshell mariners. “You’ve heard of them?”

“Oh, sure, there’s even a song about ‘em. ‘And the Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys when the cat by the fire is curled, then away they floats in their eggshell boats down the drains to the underground world.’ Goes on and on, blaming all sorts of things on ‘em. People say Horrabin made the creatures—and the things certainly seemed to be obeying him tonight, marking your location all the time. They say he made a bargain with the devil to learn how.”

Doyle’s eyes widened as a thought struck him. “Did you ever see his Punch show?”

“Of course. He is damned clev—oh! Yes… yes, I daresay you’re right. Good God. But the Punch puppets are bigger.”

“The pocketsize boys.”

“And here I was admiring his puppet-working skill.” Jacky picked up the oar and began rowing again. “Better keep moving—he wants you badly.”

“The way everybody was shooting at me—us—it looked like they just wanted me dead. You saved my life, Jacky. How’s your leg?”

“Oh, it stings, but it just tore across the surface. He shot at me three times while you were underwater and I was throwing the net over your little escorts. First time in my life I’ve been shot at. Don’t like it.”

Doyle was shivering. “I don’t like it either. Horrabin’s shot missed my eye by maybe an inch.”

“Well… that’s why I had to row out and get you. You see, it wasn’t Horrabin that shot at you. He knew who you were. It was me.”

Doyle’s first impulse was to get angry, but the sight of Jacky’s wound extinguished it. “Who did you—and Doctor Romany, I guess—think I was?”

Jacky rowed in silence for a few moments, then answered reluctantly, “I guess at this point you’ve earned the right to hear the story. We thought you were a man known as Dog-Face Joe. He—”

“Dog-Face Joe? The murderer who’s supposed to be a werewolf?” He could see Jacky’s eyes widen in surprise. “Who could have told you about him?”

“Oh, I’m just a good listener. So what have you or Romany got against him?”

“He killed a friend of mine. Hell. He—he tricked me into killing a friend of mine. He—I’ve never… talked to anyone about this, Doyle. Not this part of it. God damn it all anyway. You’ve read Colin Lepovre’s poetry—well, Colin was … a close friend, and… do you know how Dog-Face Joe stays alive?”

“I heard he could switch bodies with people.”

“You do know lots more than you let on, Doyle. I wouldn’t have thought there were a half-dozen people in London who knew that. Yes, that’s what he does. I don’t know how, but he can switch with anyone he can manage to spend some time with. And he has to do it fairly frequently, because as soon as he gets into a new body it starts to grow fur… all over it. So after a few days it’s a choice of shave his whole body or go find a fresh one.” Jacky took a deep breath. “Last year he took Colin’s. I think Dog-Face Joe must have poisoned the old body just before he left it. Colin came to me, evidently in great pain”—Jacky’s voice was clearly being controlled only with great effort, and though he was staring toward the dome of St. Paul’s, Doyle could see peripherally the sheen of tears on the youthful cheek—”and it was in the middle of the night. I was in my parents’ house, reading, when he opened the door and hurried toward me, groaning like, I don’t know, a big dog or something, and he was bleeding terribly from the mouth. Damn it, Doyle, he was in the cast-off body, the one Joe had just vacated, and it was covered with fur, like an ape! You understand me? In the middle of the goddamn night! How was I to … possibly… know it was Colin? God damn it to hell?”

“Jacky,” said Doyle helplessly, baffled by the impossible story but recognizing genuine suffering. “You couldn’t have known.”

London Bridge was less than half a mile ahead, and Doyle could see the hulks of grounded coal barges on the Surrey-side shore to his right. Jacky began angling in that direction. “There was a gun,” Jacky went on in a flat voice, “a flintlock pistol—that’s it there, by your foot—it was on the mantle, and when this furry thing came rushing into the house, I leaped up, grabbed the pistol and fired right into its chest. The thing dropped, bleeding all over the place. I went and stood over it, not too close, and it… looked at me for a moment before it sort of shuddered a few times and went limp. There was a mess. But when it looked at me I recognized him—I knew it was Colin. The color of the eyes was different, of course, but I recognized the… not expression, exactly… I recognized him in there.” Past the easternmost of the barges was a pier below a lighted house, and Jacky seemed to be heading for it. The glow from the narrow windows glittered warm gold on the oily black water. “After that I just slept through two weeks. Nobody else could—day and night I was screaming, throwing food and jabbering obscenities so foul that my innocent mother didn’t even understand most of them… but I was asleep. And after I came out of it I set out to kill Dog-Face Joe with the same gun that killed—with which I killed—Colin.” Jacky grinned sourly. “Follow all that?”

“Yes.” Doyle wondered how much of this Lovecraftian fantasy could be true—perhaps one of the mysterious Dancing Ape creatures had broken into Jacky’s house at roughly the same time that Lepovre decided to hit the road—and he wondered too whether he was correct in suspecting that this was more than grief for the death of a close friend. Could his first suspicions about Jacky have been correct? “It’s trite to say, Jacky, but I mean it—I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” Jacky had been slowing the canoe by dragging the oar in the water, and now it slid, hardly moving at all, alongside the pier, and Jacky stopped it by grabbing a rope dangling between the pilings and hanging onto it when the canoe’s weight came onto her arm. “Pull your end around there, Doyle—there’s a ladder that starts about four feet over your head.”

When they’d both climbed up to the narrow pier, Jacky said, “Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you. You can’t come back to Copenhagen Jack’s house—Horrabin will have a dozen spies there watching for you.” They were walking slowly toward the building, which seemed to be some kind of riverfront inn, and Jacky, feet bare, was picking her way carefully over the ragged old timbers. “When does this friend of yours arrive in town? What’s his name, Ashbin?”

“Ashbless. I’ll meet him this Tuesday.”

“Well, the innkeeper here, old Kusiak, has a stable off to the side, and he’s always needing help. Can you shovel horse dung?”

“If there are people who can’t, I’d hate to think I was one of them.”

Jacky pulled open the inn’s dockside door and they stepped into a small room with a fireplace, and Doyle hurried over to it. A girl in an apron appeared, and her welcoming smile faltered a little when she noticed that both guests had evidently fallen into the river, and one was still dripping wet.

“It’s all right, miss,” Jacky said, “we won’t sit on the chairs. Would you tell Kusiak, please, that it’s Jacky from across the river, and a friend, and we’d like two hot baths—in individual private rooms—”

Doyle grinned. Modest little chap, this Jacky.

“—And some clean dry clothes, it doesn’t much matter what sort,” Jacky went on. “And after that two pots of your excellent fish chowder in the dining room. Oh, and some hot coffee with rum in it while we wait.”

The girl nodded and hurried away to check all this with the innkeeper.

Jacky squatted down beside Doyle at the fireplace. “You’re pretty sure this Ashbin character will get you set up in some decent sort of position?”

Doyle wasn’t sure, and was trying to convince himself more than Jacky when he said, a little defensively, “He’s not hurting for money, I believe. And I do know him pretty damn well.”