The Anubis Gates

by Tim Powers

  “They got tea hot in the kitchen?” Carrington growled.

  “Aye, chief,” replied the mystified Jenkin.

  “Fetch a pot and a cup—and sugar.”

  Jenkin rolled his eyes but obeyed. When he got back with it Carrington had him set it on a table, then went to one of the higher shelves and took down a brown glass bottle. He uncorked it and shook several splashes of a sharp-smelling liquid into the tea. “Throw a lot of the sugar in, too,” he whispered to Jenkin.

  Jenkin did, and jerked a thumb inquiringly toward Coleridge.

  Carrington nodded.

  Jenkin drew the thumb across his neck and raised his eyebrows.

  Carrington shook his head and whispered, “No, it’s laudanum. Opium, you know? It’ll just put him to sleep, and then you’ll stash him in Dungy’s old room. And when we’ve got rid of the clown and the wizard we’ll take him down the underground river and dump him by the Adelphi somewhere. He won’t remember where this is. Extra trouble, but after the publicity the papers stirred up over the murder of that Dundee fellow Saturday, we don’t dare kill a well-known goddamn writer.”

  He poured a cup of the tea and carried it across to Coleridge. “Here you go, sir,” he said gently. “A bit of hot tea will help.”

  “Medicine,” Coleridge wheezed. “I need my… “

  “The medicine’s in the tea,” said Carrington reassuringly. “Drink up.”

  Coleridge drank the cup empty in four swallows. “More… please… “

  “That’s plenty for now.” He took the empty cup back to the table. “He’ll sleep till noon with that dose,” he told Jenkin. “I’ll dump the pot before somebody else finds it. Be quick about getting our friend here down to Dungy’s room if you don’t want to carry him there.”

  Jenkin lowered his voice and asked, “When do we… ?”

  “Soon now, though we’re one man short—that Ashbless bastard punched Murphy in the throat, and smashed everything from his chin to his collarbone. Dead before he hit the floor.”

  “Who is this Ashbless?”

  “I don’t know—but it’s luck for us that he seems tough; their lordships will need a bit of time to wreck him. But he won’t last forever and we’ve got to take them while they’re busy with him, so get moving.”

  Jenkin crossed to the swing, helped Coleridge up and hustled him out of the room.

  Carrington, his face looking leaner than ever with tension, took the teapot to the front door and dumped it out on the steps, then bolted the door, tossed the teapot into a chair and glanced around. It certainly wouldn’t do to let any inquisitive police officer see the place like this. He dragged a couple of little rugs over from the hall and flung them over the broken glass and the smeared pool of blood.

  He straightened and shook his head wonderingly, remembering the quickness of Ashbless’ strike at Murphy. Who the hell was the man? And why was he out riding in the mismatched company of an evidently well-known writer and a beggar boy, like Jacky Snapp?

  Some of the color left Carrington’s face, and very carefully he conjured in his mind an image of Jacky Snapp… and then compared it to a face he’d seen six months ago, on the afternoon old Dungy and Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar had tried to kill Horrabin and escape down the underground river.

  Brother and sister? A boy masquerading as a girl? Or just a coincidental likeness? Carrington was going to find out.

  He hurried to the hall, wrenched open the stairwell door and began hastily skipping down the first of the four flights of stairs, each one more ancient than the one above it, that bottomed out in the deep cellars.

  * * *

  Now that it looked pretty certain that she’d be killed before dawn, Jacky’s intended suicide seemed to her like the gesture of a vain and affected lunatic. Maudlin indeed! She was locked in the nearest to the stairs of a row of low-roofed cages, and the sounds made by the occupants of the other cages made her glad that the nearest wall torch was dozens of yards away along the hall, and was kept low fluttering by the cold stale-smelling breeze from the underground watercourse; for though the roars and growls and wails, and the wet slitherings, the rustling of heavy, scaled limbs being shifted and the rattle of claws on the stone floor might have led her to believe she was sharing the accommodations with an exotic menagerie, she also heard, obviously linked with those sounds, quick whispers and muted laughter and, from one of the farther cages, a low voice monotonously reciting nursery rhymes.

  After she’d been sitting in the cage about five minutes she was brought bolt upright by a harsh scream—and as it died away in sobbing and coughing she recognized the voice of William Ashbless. “All right, you bastards,” she heard Ashbless say, spitting the words out like pieces of teeth, “you want it, you can buy it. I’ll tell you—” His voice broke off and the scream was wrenched out of him again. The sound seemed to Jacky to come from some distance to her right, amplified by the tunnels.

  “You’re in the position,” grated a voice, “to buy yourself a quick death. Nothing else. Buy now before we add more tax.”

  “God damn it,” gasped Ashbless, “I’m not going to—”

  Once more the full-throated scream abraded the stones of the tunnel walls.

  The creatures in the neighboring cages were muttering and shifting uneasily, evidently upset by the noise.

  Jacky heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up. A tall man had stepped out of the stairway door and was walking quickly in this direction, and as he passed the mounted torch he yanked it off the wall without breaking stride—and Jacky cowered back in her cage, for the newcomer was Len Carrington.

  She hunched up and hid her face on her crossed arms as Carrington’s boot heels knocked closer and closer. He’s going to check on how they’re doing with Ashbless, she told herself. Keep your head down and he’ll walk right on by.

  Tears began running out of her eyes and she began to sob, very softly, when the knocking steps stopped directly in front other.

  “Hello there, Jacky,” crooned Carrington’s voice. “I’ve got a question or two for you. Look at me.”

  She kept her head down.

  “God damn it, you little sod, I said look at me!” Carrington shouted, shoving the torch in through the bars and whacking the flaming end against Jacky’s shin.

  Burning oil had splashed on her trousers and she had to leap up to slap it out. She wound up on her hands and knees on the floor of the cage, face to face through the bars with Carrington.

  Another scream from Ashbless batted echoes up and down the halls, and when it had died away Carrington chuckled. “Oh, there’s a resemblance, all right,” he said, softly but with cold satisfaction. “Now listen to me, boy—I want to know who that girl was that I met upstairs here, who sent me off to the Haymarket to be nearly killed six months ago.”

  “I swear to God, sir,” gasped Jacky, “I don’t—”

  With a snarl of impatience Carrington thrust the torch through the bars again, but before he could do anything with it, two green, long-fingered hands gripped the bars that divided Jacky’s cage from the next one, and Carrington found himself staring into the wide-mouthed, huge-eyed reptilian face of one of Horrabin’s Mistakes. “Leave her alone,” the thing said very clearly.

  Carrington blinked and withdrew the torch. “Her?” He peered closely at Jacky, who had scooted back to the rear of the cage and was sobbing again. After several seconds, “Oh, well now,” he said in an almost choked voice, as if he’d swallowed a tablespoonful of honey just before speaking. “Oh, yes yes yes.” He dug in his pocket, fumbled out a ring of keys and shoved one into the cage lock, snapped the bolt back and pulled the door open so fast that the ring of keys was set banging against the iron door frame.

  Horrabin’s voice echoed up the hall from the direction of the hospital: “I’m afraid he’s dead, your Worship,” the clown fluted. Carrington grimaced in. frustration and started to close the cage.

  “There’s still a heartbeat,” came Romanelli’s voice. “Get the
ammonia spirits over here, he’s still got a good half hour left in him, and I need some answers.”

  “Hang in there, Ashbless,” Carrington whispered, yanking the door back again. He reached in, grabbed Jacky by the upper arm and dragged her out. She was struggling, and he slapped her across the face hard enough to unfocus her eyes. “Come on,” he said, and marched his dazed captive down another hall and through the arch that led to the wide, downward sloping cellar.

  A dozen armed men waited on the other side of the arch, and one of them sprinted over to Carrington. “Now, chief?” the man asked tensely.

  “What?” snapped Carrington. “No, not yet—there’s still plenty of sand in Ashbless’ hourglass. I’ll be back soon; I’m taking Jacky here to the deep end to collect on a long-standing debt.”

  The man gaped at him.

  Carrington smiled, pinched the corner of Jacky’s moustache and ripped it off. “Old Jacky’s been a girl all along.”

  “Wh—you mean you—not now, chief! Put her back in the cage and save her for dessert! My God, we’ve got things to do here, you can’t—”

  “I’ll be back in plenty of time.” He shoved Jacky forward, out across the floor, and she tripped over the lid of one of the sunken cells, and fell.

  “Please, chief!” the man insisted, catching Carrington’s arm as he went to pick her up. “For one thing, you can’t go down into the deep end by yourself! All the Fugitive Mistakes live down there, and—”

  Carrington dropped the torch, spun and drove his fist into the man’s belly, and the man sat down hard and rolled over on his side. Carrington looked up at the rest of the men. “I’ll be back,” he said, “in plenty of time. Is that clear?”

  “Sure, chief,” a couple of them muttered uncomfortably.

  “Fine.” He picked up the torch and hoisted Jacky to her feet and walked away from the lighted end of the vast chamber, down the increasing incline into the darkness. His torch flickered in a damp breeze from below, and lit only the wet stones of the ancient pavement right around them; whatever walls and ceiling there might have been were lost in the solid blackness.

  After they’d been walking down the slope for several minutes, and each of them had twice slipped on the wet and ever-steeper paving stones and done short, sitting slides, and the wall torches by the entry arch were not even a faint glow over the hump of the floor behind and above them anymore, Carrington tripped Jacky, knelt beside her and shoved the butt of the torch into a wide patch of mud between two of the flagstones.

  “Be nice and I’ll kill you quick afterward,” he said with an affectionate grin.

  Jacky drew her legs back and kicked at him—he blocked it easily with his forearm, but as her heels rebounded they knocked the torch loose; it rolled away downward, picked up speed, began cartwheeling and then abruptly went out far below with a wet sizzle.

  “Want the lights out, eh?” said Carrington in the now absolute darkness. He seized her shoulders and knelt on her knees to hold her down. “That’s fine—I like shy girls.”

  Jacky was weeping hopelessly as Carrington shifted his position above her; he paused for a long several seconds, and then jerked and began making a peculiar muffled groaning. He shifted again, his hand scrabbling weakly at her face, and a moment later he lurched off of her and she heard a sound like a pitcher of water slowly being poured out; and when she caught a smell like heated copper she realized that it was blood splashing on the stones.

  Because she’d been crying she hadn’t heard the things approach, but now she heard them whispering around her. “You greedy pig,” giggled one, “you’ve wasted it all.”

  “So lick the stones,” came the hissed reply.

  Jacky started to get up, but something that felt like a hand holding a live lobster pushed her back down. “Not so fast,” said another voice. “You’ve got to come deeper with us—to the bottom shore—we’ll put you in the boat and push you out, and you can be our offering to the serpent Apep.”

  “Take her without her eyes,” whispered another of them. “She promised them to my sister and me.” Jacky didn’t begin screaming until she felt spidery fingers groping at her face.

  * * *

  What he found in the cages pretty much confirmed Coleridge’s suspicion that he was having another opium dream—albeit an extraordinarily vivid one.

  When the pain of his headache and stomach cramps had receded a while ago he’d found himself in a dark room with no recollection of how he’d arrived there, and when he sat up on the bed and reached for his watch and couldn’t even find the table—and noticed how profoundly dark the room was—he realized he was not at his room at Hudson’s Hotel; and after standing up and blind-man’s-bluffing his way around the tiny chamber, he’d realized he wasn’t in John Morgan’s house either, or Basil Montagu’s, or any other place he’d ever been before. Eventually he’d found the door, and opened it, and for a full minute just stood in the doorway, staring up and down the dimly torchlit stairwell, whose architecture he recognized as debased provincial Roman, and listening to the distant wails and roarings that he didn’t recognize at all.

  This Fuseli-esque scene, together with the familiar—though extra strong this time—balloon-headed feeling and the warm looseness in his joints, made him certain that he had once again taken too strong a dose of laudanum and was hallucinating.

  In Xanadu, he’d thought wryly, did such a morbid dungeon world decree.

  After a while he had wandered out onto the stairwell landing. The folk notion that a house explored in a dream symbolically represented one’s mind had always struck him as having a grain of truth in it, and while in many dreams he had explored the upper floors of his mind house, he’d never before seen the catacombs beneath. The nightmare noises were coming from below, so, bravely curious about what sort of monsters might inhabit the deepest levels of his mind, he carefully picked his way down the ancient steps.

  Despite a moderate apprehension about what he might run into, he was pleased with himself for conjuring up such a detailed fantasy. Not only were the weathered stones of the stairwell done in painstaking chiaroscuro detail, and the scuffing of his shoes producing a faint echo, but the cold air rushing up from below was dank and stale and smelled of mold, mildew, seaweed and—yes, that was it—a zoological garden.

  It had grown darker as he’d descended, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he was in an absolute blackness relieved only by occasional faint flickerings that might have been distant torchlight reflected around more than one corner, or might just have been the random star patterns provided by a bored retina.

  He had walked slowly out across the uneven floor in what seemed to be the direction the groaning and cawing came from, but when he’d still been a few yards short of finding the cages he’d been frozen by an echoing scream that had as much weariness and hopelessness as agony in it. And what was that? he’d wondered. My ambition, fettered and all but starved by my sloth? No, that’s misleading; more likely it’s the embodiment of my duties—not the least of which is talent—ignored by me and imprisoned in this bottommost oubliette of my mind.

  Now he continued forward, and in a moment he felt the cold bars of the nearest cage. Something slapped heavily on the floor within, then there was a sound like a wet mop being slowly dragged over stones, and presently Coleridge realized that the intermittent breeze on his hand was the breath of something.

  “Hello, man,” it said in a profoundly deep voice.

  “Hello,” said Coleridge nervously. After a bewildered pause he said, “You’re locked up?”

  “We are… all locked up,” assented the unseen thing, and there were grunts and chirps of agreement from other cages on each side.

  “Are you, then,” muttered Coleridge, mostly to himself, “vices that I have actually managed to shackle? I wouldn’t have thought there were any.”

  “Free us,” said the thing. “The key is in the lock of the cage at the end.”

  “Or are you,” Coleridge went on,
“as is more likely, strengths, virtues I’ve been too lazy to exercise, warped by long confinement and inattention down here?”

  “I don’t know… these things, man. Free us.”

  “And would not a twisted strength be a thing more to be feared than an atrophied vice? No, my friend, I think I’d be wise to leave you caged. I must have had good reason to make these bars so solid.” He started to turn away.

  “You cannot just ignore us.”

  Coleridge paused. “Can’t I?” he asked thoughtfully. “That might be true. Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error. But surely these cages represent a—rare!—manifestation of my will, my control. I must already have taken you into account.”

  “Free us and be sure.”

  Coleridge stood pondering it in the darkness for a full minute; then, “I don’t see how I can not,” he whispered, and groped his way to the last cage, where Carrington’s key ring still dangled from the lock on the open cage door.

  * * *

  The harsh ammonia fumes dragged Ashbless back to consciousness—and the horrible little mud-floored, torch-lit room—one more time.

  After the last ammonia-enforced revival he’d found that he was able to remove himself from the tortured body tied down on the table, or, more accurately, to sink so far down into the fever dream depths of his head that he felt Romanelli’s desperate surgeries only as distant tugs and jars, the way a deep swimmer can faintly feel agitations on the surface.

  It had been a welcome change, but in this new moment of clarity he realized that he was dying. While none of the injuries Romanelli had inflicted were instantly fatal, Ashbless would have needed the attentions of a 1983 Intensive Care ward to achieve even a qualified recovery.

  He blinked up at the near wall through his good eye, noting without even any wonder the row of four-inch tall toy men along a shelf above the water pump, then rolled his head and stared into the weirdly lit face of Romanelli. I guess this is an alternate world after all, he thought with a cold remoteness. Ashbless dies in 1811 here. Well, he’ll die silent, too. I don’t think, Romanelli, that you could extrapolate the location of a future gap by learning what I know about previous ones—but I’m not going to give you the chance. You can die here with me.