Outside, in the street, Abraxas sat patiently on the sidewalk, while Ella lay spreadeagled on the railings, and the hazy afternoon air was filled with the whooping of ambulances and police cars.
Twenty-Four
Josh and Petty ran down Kingsway, their footsteps echoing against the derelict buildings. Fires were still burning in the offices all around Aldwych, and they could hear the ringing of fire-engine bells and the crackling of broken glass. All the same, they could still hear the penetrating tattoo of the drums that were following them; and the yapping of the dogs.
“Down here,” said Petty, and they turned left into Sardinia Street. In the open gardens of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, six or seven air-raid wardens were battling with a punctured barrage balloon, which filled up almost the whole square like a maddened but half-deflated elephant. They were tugging at ropes and trying to tie it down. “Your end, Reg! What the ‘ell are you up to? Pull your end!”
They reached Carey Street and turned into Star Yard. “Listen,” said Josh. “If we go through the door now, we’re going back to the world of the Hooded Men. Another London, nothing like this.”
More anti-aircraft guns coughed in the distance, over by the Surrey Docks. “There can’t be anywhere as bad as this,” said Petty. “And if we don’t go, they’ll catch us, won’t they, and kill us?”
“All right,” Josh agreed. He put his arms around her and gave her a hug.
They walked up Star Yard to the niche in the wall. Josh took three candles out of his pocket and set them on the ground.
“Is this all you have to do?” asked Petty.
“You have to recite a Mother Goose rhyme, too,” said Josh, touching each candle with his butane lighter, his hand shielding the wicks until they were all well alight.
“A Mother Goose rhyme? What’s that?”
Josh stood up. “You Brits call them nursery rhymes. Like Humpty Dumpty. This is a real old one, one of the oldest. ‘Six doors they stand in London Town …’” And then he said, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick …”
Petty stared at him in growing disbelief. “That’s if! And that gets you through to this other London?”
“Try it,” said Josh.
Petty held back. Exhausted and grimy and shocked as she was, this was enough. She couldn’t cope with madness as well.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“You saw the Hooded Man. You saw his face.”
Petty covered her eyes with both hands. “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to have nothing to do with it. I don’t want to stay. I don’t want to go. I don’t know what I want to do.”
Josh put his arm around her plump shoulders, in her cheap satin dress.
“Petty, I can’t make you any promises. If we go through this door now, it may be worse. But right now these guys are after me here and because of me they want you too.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Petty wept, and the tears poured down her cheeks and made dirty streaks in the dust.
But it was then that they heard the crackling noise of side drums, only two or three streets away. “It’s them,” Josh told her. “They won’t give up, not until they track us down. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? How do you think I feel? Why did I bloody well have to meet you, of all people?”
The three candles were burning strongly now. There was very little wind in Star Yard, and the flames scarcely nodded at all. They reminded Josh of the candles that used to burn in church, when he was a boy. “Maybe you met me because you were always meant to,” he coaxed her. “Come on, Petty, these things happen. Some people get together whether they like it or not.”
“Oh, I see. You were always meant to save me from a life on the streets, were you? By frightening the shit out of me with that man’s face. You knew he looked like that, didn’t you? You knew! That’s why you cut his hood off, you bastard.”
“Petty, I swear to you I didn’t know. I never saw one of those guys without his hood, ever. Not without his hood.”
The drumming was nearer now, and much more frantic. The Hooded Men were probably turning into Carey Street. They knew where he was going. They knew that he was trying to escape. Underneath those harsh hessian hoods they could probably sense everything that he was thinking.
“Petty, if we don’t haul ass out of here now …”
Petty lifted her face to the sky, and pressed her hands in front of her in prayer. Although she was so grimy, and her dress was so torn, Josh thought that she looked beautiful. More than beautiful, almost divine.
The drums racketed closer and closer but she kept her eyes closed and her hands pressed together. “Amen,” she said at last, and crossed herself; but when she turned to him her face was wild with worry. “I bet it doesn’t work.”
“If you think it doesn’t work, why did you pray?”
“I wasn’t praying for me. I was praying for all the poor sods we’re leaving behind.”
“So you’ll give it a try?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to die, that’s all.”
Josh recited the rhyme again, just to make sure. The drums were very close now, and he could see the flickering lights of lanterns on the buildings opposite: shadows that jumped and danced like devils.
“Go,” he told Petty. “Jump over the candles, that’s all you have to do.”
“That’s all I have to do? Jump? But there’s nothing there!” she suddenly panicked. “Only a wall!”
“Come on, you just said you were going to do it.”
“But it’s only a bloody wall!”
Josh gripped hold of her dress and stared her wildly in the eyes. “Remember that face? Remember what that thing looked like, when I cut off its hood? There are more of them coming! They’re going to be here before you can count to ten, and then we won’t have any options at all!”
“But his face . . .”
Josh, tired as he was, bent his knees and picked her up and practically threw her over the line of candles. With a screech of Cockney indignity, she landed on her bottom on the other side. He glanced to his left and saw four dogs pelting toward him, four of the Hoodies’ dogs, their tongues flapping and froth flying out of the sides of their mouths. He heaved himself over the candles, rolling over into the rubbish. He climbed to his feet, blew out the candles and took hold of Petty’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out of here fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come after us.”
“Hey … there’s a way through here!” Petty exclaimed. “I didn’t see that before!”
“You have to look, that’s all.”
“What? Meaning I’m blind, as well as stupid?”
“Meaning you have to look, that’s all.”
They hurried through the dark, dripping passageway between the buildings. Pigeons fluttered from the windowsills high above their heads. From time to time, Josh glanced back worriedly, but it seemed as if the Hooded Men had chosen not to follow them. Not today, anyhow. But he had no illusions that they wouldn’t go on hunting him down until they found him.
“Slow down,” he panted. His teeth were aching so much that he could hardly think, and every wound that had been inflicted by the Holy Harp was prickling with pain. Petty slowed down, and leaned against the wall, trying to catch her breath.
“They’re not coming after us, are they?”
Josh shook his head. “Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe they’re waiting for us in this world.”
They turned the next corner in the passageway. Petty said, in bewilderment, “We’re back where we started from.”
“That’s right. That’s the way the doors work. You’re not going from one place to another. You’re going from one reality into another.”
They stepped out into Star Yard. It was raining hard and there was almost nobody around. Josh took Petty to the derelict building in which he and Nancy had first escaped from the dog-handlers, and they hid themselves in a corner office, listening all day and all night to the rain beating on the ceil
ing above their heads, and cascading down the stairs.
Petty fell asleep, her head resting against Josh’s shoulder, one clogged-up nostril whistling. Josh was exhausted, reality-lagged, but he still found it almost impossible to sleep. He kept thinking of the Hooded Man’s head, when he had torn his hood open. The sight had overwhelmed him. More than that, it had dropped open a trapdoor beneath his feet, so that he could no longer be sure of what was believable and what wasn’t. It was just as if his father and mother had suddenly dragged latex masks off their heads when he was thirteen years old, and shown themselves to be two hideous-looking strangers.
Petty stirred and touched his shoulder. “What time is it?” she asked him, without opening her eyes.
“Seven and a half hours to go. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”
An hour later, he heard drums rattling. The Hooded Men, on patrol. They came up Chancery Lane toward Holborn, but they didn’t stop. If Josh knew anything about dogs, they wouldn’t have stopped to sniff them out, not in this weather. All they wanted was a dry kennel and a bowl of food.
The rain stopped. Josh fell asleep at last, with his head tilted back. He woke up at five o’clock in the morning with a raging sore throat and a crick in his neck.
“Have we got any food?” asked Petty.
Twenty-Five
Nancy opened her eyes and was aware at once of the utter silence. Complete, flawless silence. She was lying on an iron-framed bed in a hospital room with cream-painted walls and a light green dado. She knew it was a hospital room because it smelled of hospitals: antiseptic and boiled vegetables. The only other furniture was an oak-veneered nightstand with a glass of water on it, an oak-veneered closet, and a green armchair. For some inexplicable reason, she felt that somebody had recently been sitting in the green armchair, watching her.
Her head felt thick, as if she had been drinking too much red wine. She tried to lift her head but she felt swimmy and nauseous, so she lay back on the pillow again. It was a big pillow, with a starched pillowcase, and it reminded her of staying in hospital when she was a child. Homesick, and alone.
She turned toward the window. Outside, she could see the upper branches of some tall elm trees, and some angular rooftops, and chimneys. Even if she had been familiar with London, she wouldn’t have been able to tell where she was. The sky was clear blue, with only a few high clouds in it, unraveling themselves in the upper atmosphere like skeins of white cotton. And it was silent. She couldn’t even hear any traffic.
She tried to think what had happened to her. The last moment she could remember was Frank Mordant hitting her. After that, all she could recall was a jumble of voices and a kaleidoscope of faces.
An hour went past. The sun moved across the window. Still there was silence. She tried to keep her eyes open but she couldn’t, and she slept. She had a dream that she was walking along a desolate seashore, with the tide gradually coming in. It was foggy, and she knew that it was getting late, and that it was time for her to turn back. But up ahead of her she could see a hooded figure, and felt that she had to catch up with it, and ask it if it could tell her where Josh was. She was deeply afraid of it, this figure, the way it walked through the fog with its robes curling and flapping, but she knew that there was no alternative. She hurried across the hard, ribbed sand, even though the water was already starting to surge across her shoes.
The figure stopped. She slowed down, and cautiously circled around it, until she was facing it.
“I know what you want,” the figure said, in a hollow whisper. “I know what you’ve always wanted.”
It reached inside its robes and drew out a yard-long poker, the tip of which was red-hot and crackling with tiny sparks. “You want the Five Holy Cauterizations, don’t you? Eyes, tongue, and ears – the greater to seal your purity.”
She wanted to turn and run, but she couldn’t. All she could do was sink slowly to her knees in the chilly seawater as the figure slowly approached her, the poker held aloft. She could actually smell the overheated iron.
“The supplicant always has a choice,” the figure whispered. “You can decide which cauterization you will enjoy first, and which last. You’d be surprised how many leave the tongue till last, so that even when they’re deaf and blind, they can still curse the Lord that made them.”
The figure was standing right over her now, its robes stirring in the breeze. The seawater swilled around her knees. She lifted her head and stared defiantly into the blackness of its hood. “You can do whatever you damn well like,” she told it.
“Well, that’s jolly generous of you,” said another voice. She opened her eyes. She wasn’t on the seashore at all, but lying in her hospital bed. Frank Mordant was standing not far away, his hands in his pockets, beaming. Two other men stood much closer, both of them dressed in starched white collars and black coats and gray pinstripe pants, like bankers. One of them had wiry gray hair and gold pince-nez that were perched on a bulbous, port-wine-colored nose. The other was young, with a neck like a heron and a dark, downy moustache.
“What am I doing here?” asked Nancy, thick-tongued. She tried to sit up but the older man gently reached out and pushed her back on to the pillow.
“You ought to rest,” he told her, with an avuncular smile. “Conserve your energy.”
“I want to get out of here, that’s all. I want to go back to where I came from.”
“You did go back to where you came from,” said Frank Mordant, still beaming. “But then you decided to return, didn’t you, and make a nuisance of yourself. Your choice, darling. You can hardly put the blame on me. We all have to cover our asses – as you Yanks put it – don’t we?”
“So what are you going to do? Are you going to murder me, the way you murdered Julia?” She turned to the two men in black coats. “Did you know that? Did you know that he was a murderer? He admitted it to me. He confessed.”
Frank Mordant stepped forward and laid one hand on each of the men’s shoulders. “Perhaps I ought to introduce you, Miss Andersen. This is Mr Brindsley Leggett, senior surgeon here at the Puritan Martyrs Hospital, and this is Mr Andrew Crane, his junior.”
“He confessed to me,” Nancy insisted. “He told me that he’s been hanging women and making goddamned videos while they die!”
“Come on, now,” said Mr Leggett. “You’ve been through a very disturbing experience. I’m not at all surprised that you’ve been suffering from misapprehensions. My goodness, if it had happened to me …!”
“You’re trying to say that I’m sick? If there’s anybody who’s sick around here, it’s Frank Mordant! He’s a killer, I tell you! I can prove it!”
“You can prove it, can you? Now, how can you do that?”
“If you let me take him back to where I come from, I have DNA evidence.”
Mr Leggett shook his head. “DNA evidence? What’s that, when it’s at home?”
“Irrefutable scientific proof that Frank Mordant killed a woman called Julia Winward.”
“And where did you say this evidence was? Do the police have it? Or the Doorkeepers?”
“It’s back in the other London. It’s back through the door.”
Mr Leggett turned to Frank Mordant and shook his head. “Poor dear. The other London.’ What a way to speak of Purgatory.”
“I didn’t come from Purgatory, you superstitious asshole!” Nancy shouted at him. “It isn’t Purgatory on the other side of those doors! It’s another London, that’s all – just like this London, only different. It has people and houses and hospitals and cars. It’s real – not some goddamned medieval never-never-land!”
Mr Crane looked quite pale. “I’ve never seen a Purgatorial so … deluded.”
“Well, she’s certainly the liveliest we’ve ever had,” said Mr Leggett. “Mr Mordant usually sends us those who are so close to meeting their Maker as makes no difference; and the Doorkeepers have usually been having a bit of a chat with the others.”
“The Doorkeepers wanted this o
ne kept as she is,” said Frank Mordant. “They have their reasons, apparently.”
Nancy said, “If you’re not going to believe me, then I just want out of here.”
“Oh, you can’t go,” said Mr Leggett, benignly. “We have plans for you, after the Doorkeepers have done whatever they want to do. You want to make a contribution to society, don’t you, before you finally make your peace with God?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Nancy demanded.
Mr Leggett laughed. “This is so interesting, isn’t it? I wish they could always send me Purgatorials in this condition! From the way she talks, though, I don’t know whether she’s going up …” he pointed to the ceiling, “or you know where …” and pointed to the floor.
He turned to Frank Mordant and shook his hand. “Very good to meet you again, Mr Mordant. I particularly enjoyed that brandy you brought me the other day. Where did you say you found it?”
“Oh … just on one of my business trips,” smiled Frank Mordant.
Mr Leggett and Mr Crane left the room. Nancy was left on the bed, frustrated and enraged. Frank Mordant came over and stood beside her, but he wasn’t smiling any longer.
“I’ll tell you something, darling, you made a serious error coming after me. I’ve got too many contacts in too many different realities. Too many friends in high and low places.”
“Why won’t you let me go?”
“Because you’re wanted by the Hoodies, that’s why. Do you know what the Hoodies would do to me, if I sprung you from here? I was tempted, I must admit. I think you’re a very lovely girl, and I wouldn’t like to see anything … you know, ugly happen to you. But then you had to blurt it out that you had evidence against me. So you can see that I wasn’t quite so tempted after that.”
“You bastard.”
“Sorry, darling. You should have stayed where you were, and forgotten about Julia, and that would have been the end of it. But as it is …”
“What do the Hooded Men want me for?”
“They wouldn’t say. But my guess is, they want that boyfriend of yours, and you’re the Judas goat. That’s why they wanted you alive and well; and that’s why they haven’t touched you so far – although they probably will.”
The Doorkeepers Page 28