The Anubis Gates (28 page)

“All right. Let’s line up this channel.”

Romanelli turned to the metal loop, which was firmly moored to a block of hard wood, and with a little metal wand he struck it. It produced a long, pure note, which was answered a moment later by a note out of the flame.

The answering note was higher, so he slid the wooden bead an inch farther up the loop and struck again; the sounds were similar now, and for a moment the ball of flame seemed to disappear, though it glowed again when the notes diminished away.

“I believe we have it,” he said tensely. “Again now.”

The two notes, one struck in London and one in Greece, rang out again, very nearly identical—the flame turned to a dim, churning grayness—and as the struck metal was still singing he gingerly touched the bead, moving it a hairbreadth further. The notes were now identical, and where the flame had been was now a hole in the air, through which he could see a tiny section of a dusty floor. As the double ringing faded away to silence the peculiar sphere of flame reappeared.

“Got it,” said Romanelli excitedly. “I could see through clearly. Strike again when I tell you, and I will send him through.”

He picked up the lancet and a dish, and turning to the unconscious man in the bed he lifted a limp hand, sliced a finger with the blade and caught the quick drops of blood in the dish. When he’d got a couple of spoonfuls he dropped the hand and the scalpel and faced the candle again.

“Now!” he said, and struck the loop with the wand. Once more the note was answered, and as the candle flame again became a hole he dropped the wand, dipped his fingers into the dish of blood and flicked a dozen red drops through.

“Arrived?” he asked, his fingers poised ready to try it again.

“Yes,” answered the voice from the other side as the ringing faded out and the flame waxed bright. “Four drops, right in the tub.”

“Excellent. I’ll let him die as soon as I hear it’s succeeded.” Romanelli leaned forward and blew the candle out.

He sat back and stared reflectively at the unquiet sleeper on the bed. Finding this young man had been a stroke of luck. He was perfect for their purposes—a peer of the British realm, but with a background of obscurity and near poverty, and—perhaps because of his lameness—shy and introverted, with few friends. And during his days at Harrow he had obligingly published a satire that managed to offend quite a number of influential people in England, including his sponsor, Lord Carlisle—they would all be willing to believe that he had committed the shocking crime that Romanelli and his British ka would make it appear that he had committed.

“Doctor Romany and I are going to propel you out of obscurity,” Romanelli said softly. “We’re going to make your name famous, my lord Byron.”

Under the remarkably placid smile on the face of the severed head of Teobaldo, which had been set in a niche high in the wall, the clown Horrabin and Doctor Romany stared into the coffin-sized tub of dimly glowing paut in which the drops of blood had blackened, solidified, sunk to the mid-level and were now beginning to sprout networks of fine red webs, connecting one to another.

“In twelve hours it will be recognizably a man,” said Romany softly, standing so still that he didn’t bob at all on his spring-soled shoes. “In twenty-four it should be able to speak to us.”

Horrabin rearranged his stilts under himself. “A genuine British lord,” he said thoughtfully. “The Rat’s Castle has had a number of distinguished visitors, but young Byron here will be the first,” and even under his caked make-up Romany could see him sneer, “peer of the realm.”

Doctor Romany smiled. “I’ve led you into elevated circles.”

There was silence for a few moments, then, “You’re certain we have to do this no-sleep project tomorrow night?” said the clown in a whining tone. “I always have to have ten hours in the hammock or I get terrible back pains, and since my damned father,” he waved at the dried head, “knocked me onto the ground, the pains are twice as bad.”

“We’ll each take turns, getting four hours sleep out of eight,” Doctor Romany reminded him wearily. “That ought to be enough to keep you alive. Pity him,” he added, nodding at the tub of paut. “He’ll stay awake and be shouted at the whole time.”

Horrabin sighed. “Some time day after tomorrow we’ll quit?”

“The evening, probably. We’ll hammer at him by turns all tomorrow night and all the day after. By evening he won’t have any will of his own left, and after letting him be visible for two days we’ll give him his instructions, and that midget pistol, and turn him loose. Then my gypsies and your beggars will go to work, and about an hour after my man in the Treasury announces that a fifth of all the gold sovereigns in the country are counterfeit, my captains will start a run on the Bank of England. And then when our boy Byron does his trick, the country should be virtually on its knees. If Napoleon is not in London by Christmas I’ll be very surprised.” He smiled contentedly.

Horrabin shifted on his stilt-poles. “You… are certain that’ll be an improvement? I don’t mind giving the country a whipping, but I still question the wisdom of killing it outright.”

“The French are easier to manage,” said Romany. “I know—I’ve dealt with them in Cairo.”

“Ah.” Horrabin heeled toward the doorway but paused to stare into the tub, where the red threads had now coalesced into a sketch of a human skeleton. “God, that’s disgusting,” he remarked. “Picture being born out of a tub of slime.” Shaking his carnival-tent head, he stumped out of the room.

Doctor Romany too stared into the glowing tub. “Oh,” he said quietly, “there are worse things, Horrabin. Tell me in a month whether or not you’ve found that there are worse things.”

On the morning of Tuesday the twenty-fifth of September Doyle stood over the line of tobacco jars at Wassard’s Tobacconist Shop, trying to find a smokeable blend in these days before humidification and latakia, and he was slowly becoming aware of the conversation going on next to him.

“Well of course he’s a genuine lord,” said one of the middle-aged merchants standing nearby. “He’s pig-drunk, ain’t he?”

His companion chuckled, but replied thoughtfully, “I don’t know. He looked more sick—or crazy, yes, that’s it.”

“He sure do dress dainty.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean, it’s like he’s an actor costumed up to play a lord in a penny gaff show.” He shook his head. “If it weren’t for all those gold sovereigns he’s flinging about that’s what I’d guess it was—a prank to spark interest in some damned show; and you say you’ve heard of this Lord… what’s his name? Brian?”

“Byron. Yes, he wrote a little book making fun of all the modern poets, even Little, who I’m partial to myself. This Byron’s one of them university lads.”

“Snotty, putting-on-airs little bastards.”

“Exactly. Did you see his moustache?”

Doyle, puzzled by all this, leaned forward. “Excuse me, but do you mean to say you’ve seen Lord Byron? Recently?”

“Oh, aye, lad, us and half the business district. He’s at The Gimli’s Perch in Lombard Street, disgracefully drunk—or crazy,” he allowed, nodding to his companion, “and buying round after round of drinks for the house.”

“I may have time to go and partake,” said Doyle with a smile. “Has either of you a watch?”

One of the men fished a gold turnip from his waistcoat and eyed it. “Half past ten.”

“Thank you.” Doyle hurried out of the shop. An hour and a half yet before I meet Benner, he thought; that’s plenty of time to check out this Byron impostor and try to guess what kind of dodge he’s working. Byron’s not a bad identity for some con artist to assume, he reflected, for the real Byron is still fairly unknown in 1810—it’ll be the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, two years from now, that’ll make him famous—and so the man in the street wouldn’t know that Byron is touring Greece and Turkey right now. But what kind of dodge is so big that it’s worth “flinging about” gold sovereigns just to set it up?

He made his way south to Lombard Street, and had no difficulty picking out The Gimli’s Perch—it was the tavern with a crowd of people blocking the street in front of it. Doyle sprinted up to it and tried to see over the heads of the crowd.

“Back off, now. Jack,” growled a fat man beside him. “You’ll take your turn like everybody else.”

Doyle apologized and edged around to one of the windows and, cupping his hands around his eyes, peered inside.

The tavern was packed, and for half a minute all Doyle could see was clamoring drinkers, all busy at either draining filled cups or waving empty ones at the harried waiters and bartenders; then through a chance parting in the crowd he saw a dark, curly-haired young man limp up to the bar and smilingly drop a stack of coins onto the polished surface. A cheer went up that Doyle could hear right through the thick glass, and the young man was lost to view behind a forest of waving arms.

Doyle fought his way back to the street and leaned against a lamppost. Though the surface of his mind was calm, he could feel a chilly pressure expanding deep within him, and he knew that when it nosed like a surfacing submarine up into his consciousness it would be recognizable as panic—so he tried to talk it down. Byron is in Turkey or Greece somewhere, he told himself firmly, and it’s only a coincidence that this lad looked—so damnably!—like all the portraits of him. And either this impostor is coincidentally lame too, or he so thoroughly studied his model that he’s added the detail of Byron’s lameness… even though nearly no one in 1810 would know to expect it. But how can I explain the moustache? Byron did grow a moustache when he was abroad—you can see it in the Phillips portrait—but even if an impersonator could somehow know that, he’d hardly use it in deceiving people who, if they’d seen the original Byron at all, had seen him clean-shaven. And if the moustache is just an oversight, something the impersonator didn’t know Byron lacked when last seen in England, then why the accurate detail of the limp?

The panic, or whatever it was, was still building. What if that is Byron, he thought, and he isn’t in Greece at all, as history will claim? What the hell is going on? Ashbless is supposed to be here but isn’t, and Byron isn’t supposed to be but is. Did Darrow shoot us back to some alternate 1810, from which history will develop differently?

He was feeling dizzy, and glad of the support of the lamppost, but he knew he had to get into that tavern and find out whether or not that young man was the real Byron or not. He pushed himself out onto the sidewalk and took a couple of steps and he suddenly realized that the fear building up within him was too primal and powerful to be caused by something as abstract as the question of what time stream he was in. Something was happening to him, something his conscious mind couldn’t sense, but which was churning up his sub-conscious like a bomb detonated at the bottom of a well.

The crowd and the building in front of him suddenly lost all their depth and most of their color and clear focus, so that he seemed to be looking at an impressionist painting of the scene done only in shades of yellow and brown. And someone’s snapped the volume knob down, he thought.

Just before light and sound flickered away altogether and, unsupported now, he fell into unconsciousness like a man falling through the trap door of a gallows, he had an instant in which to wonder if this was how it felt to die.

Sometimes hopping, but more often crawling on one foot and two hands like a half-stomped cockroach because his left leg had a new, grating joint in it, Doyle scuttled retching and gasping across the rain-slick asphalt, not even seeing the oncoming cars bow their front ends down close to the pavement as their brakes took hold and the tires began barking and squealing.

He could see the crumpled figure lying, in the random attitude of carelessly tossed things, on the gravel shoulder, and even though he was torturing himself toward her to see if she was all right, he knew she would not be—for he’d already lived through this event once in real life and several times in dreams; though his mind was incandescent with anxiety and fear and hope, he simultaneously knew what he’d find.

But this time it happened differently. Instead of the remembered porridge of blood and bone and bright-colored helmet fragments exploded across the pavement and freeway pillar, the figure’s head was still whole and attached to the shoulders. And it wasn’t Becky’s face—it was the beggar boy Jacky’s.

He sat back in surprise, and then saw, somehow without surprise, that he wasn’t on a freeway shoulder at all—he was in a narrow room with filthy curtains flapping stiffly in an unglassed window. The window kept changing its shape; sometimes it was round, swelling and contracting like some architectural sphincter from the size of a peep-hole in a door to the size of the rose window at Chartres Cathedral, and at other times it elected to warp itself through all the shapes that could be called rectangular. The floor too was capricious, at one moment swelling so that he had to crouch to avoid bumping the ceiling, at the next sagging like a dis-spirited trampoline, leaving him in a pit, looking up to watch the belly-dancing window. It was an entertaining room, all right.

His mouth was numb, and though the dentist, who wore two surgical face masks so that his glowing eyes were all Doyle could see, ordered him not to touch it, Doyle did surreptitiously drag a furry-gloved hand across his lips, and was terrified to see bright blood matting the golden fur., Some dentist, he thought, and though he forced himself out of that vision and back into the little room, he was still wearing the fur gloves and blood was still dripping energetically from his mouth. When he hunched over, huddling himself against another stomach cramp, the blood spattered the plate and knife and fork that someone had left on the floor.

It made him mad that whoever it was hadn’t picked up their dishes, but then he remembered that these were the remains of his own dinner. Had it caused the numbness and bleeding? Had there been broken glass in it? He picked up the fork and stirred the bits of food still on the plate, fearfully watchful for any hard gleamings. After a while he decided there wasn’t any glass in it.

But what was it, anyway? It smelled vaguely like curry, but seemed to be some kind of cold stew made of leaves and something that looked like kiwi fruit, but smaller and harder and more furry. His mind stuck on the rhyme of curry and furry—like a coin banging around in the intake hood of a vacuum cleaner, the evident relation of the two words held his attention and prevented consideration of anything else—but he finally got past it and experienced a moment of cold lucidity when he recognized the unusual fruit. He’d seen them before, in the Foster Gardens of Nuuanu in Hawaii, on a tall tree whose scientific name he still remembered: Strychnos Nux Vomica, the richest source of raw strychnine.