* * *
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.
He’d been eating strychnine.
The water smelled terrible, implying a dead tide clogged with days-old fish corpses and putrid seaweed, but the sidewalk was alive with cheery people in colorful bathing suits, and Doyle was glad to see there wasn’t a line at the Yo-Ho Snack Stand. He lurched up to the narrow window and banged his quarter on the wooden counter to get the man’s attention. The man turned around, and Doyle was surprised to see that it was J. Cochran Darrow in the apron and white paper hat. He finally did go broke, Doyle realized sadly, and now he has to run a damned frozen banana stand. “I’ll have a—” Doyle began.
“All we’re serving today is activated charcoal shakes,” Darrow interrupted. He cocked his head. “I told you that, Doyle.”
“Oh yeah. I’ll have one of those, then.”
“You’ve got to make it yourself. I’ve got a boat to catch—it’s due to sink in ten minutes.” Darrow reached out through the window, grabbed Doyle by the collar and with a powerful heave pulled him in through the window until his shoulders jammed against the sides.
There was no light inside, and a cloud of ashes swirled up and set Doyle choking. He unwedged himself and fell back on the floor and saw that he’d wedged himself head first into the room’s little fireplace. My God, he thought, I’m hallucinating up one side and down the other. Does strychnine cause delirium? Or have I managed to ingest a couple of poisons?
Darrow was right, though, he thought. What I need is charcoal, a massive dose of it—and fast. I remember reading about a guy who ate a ten times over fatal dose of strychnine, and chased it with powdered charcoal and felt no ill effects at all. What was his name? Touery, that was it. So where am I going to get some? Call room service and ask ‘em to send up about fifteen hundred cartons of that cigarette with the activated charcoal filter.
Wait a moment, he thought. Here I am staring at a fair quantity of it. All these burned-up blocks of wood in the fireplace here. It may not be activated, but it’ll still have billions of microscopic pores, the better to absorb you with, my dear strychnine.
In a moment he had found a bowl and a little round-headed statuette of some dog-headed Egyptian god or other, and was using them as a mortar and pestle to pulverize the black chunks of crunchy incinerated wood. While doing this he noticed that his hands and forearms appeared to have grown a pelt of glossy yellow fur, and this he ascribed, a little nervously, to the hallucinations.
Another explanation of the phenomenon patiently awaited consideration on a back burner of his mind.
Through it all the blood kept dripping from his mouth, often falling into the mound of grainy black powder, but it was tapering off, and he had more important things to worry about. How the devil, he wondered as he sifted the gritty black stuff between his furry fingers, am I going to consume this?
He began by swallowing all the charcoal pieces that were relatively pill-sized. Then, using water from a basin in the corner, he made little balls of the black powder and managed to force down several dozen of these.
Mixed with a little water the stuff was adequately malleable, and after a while he stopped eating the black lumps and began pushing them together to make a little man-shaped figure. His skill surprised him, and he resolved to get some modelling clay at the first opportunity and begin life anew as a sculptor—for he’d only rolled the limb columns between his fingers for a few moments before pinching them onto the trunk lump, but now he noticed that the swell of thigh and bicep and the angularity of knee and elbow were faultlessly done, and the few quick thumbnail scratches he’d made on the front of the head had somehow produced a face like Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He’d have to save this little statue—sometime it would be reverently exhibited at the Louvre or someplace: Doyle’s First Work.
But how could he have thought the face looked like Adam? It was the face of an old, a hideously old man. And the limbs were twisted, shrunken travesties, like the dried worms you find on the sidewalks on a sunny day after rain. Horrified, he was about to crush it when it opened its eyes and gave him a big smile. “Ah, Doyle!” it croaked in a loud, harsh whisper. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”
Doyle screamed and scrabbled back across the floor away from the gleeful thing—with difficulty, for the floor had again begun its rising and falling tricks. He heard a slow, tooth-jarring drumbeat from somewhere, and as huge drops of acid began to form on the walls, break surface tension and trickle down, he realized too late that the entire house was one living organism, and was about to digest him.
* * *
He woke up on the floor, profoundly exhausted and depressed, staring with
no interest at the drops of dried blood spattered in front of his eyes. His tongue ached like a split tooth, but he didn’t think it was anything urgent. He knew that he had survived the poisoning and the hallucinations, and he knew that eventually he’d be glad of it.
His face itched, and he brought a hand across to scratch it—then halted. Though the hallucinations had passed, the hand was still covered with golden fur.
Instantly the explanation, the explanation of all this, that had been in the back of his mind came to him, and he knew it was true. It increased his depression a little, for it meant more work for him when he gathered the energy to get up and begin dealing with things. Just to confirm it formally he felt his face. Yes, as he’d suspected, his face too was bushily pelted. All I needed, he thought sourly.
Obviously he was in the latest of Dog-Face Joe’s cast-off bodies; and Joe himself was off God knew where in Doyle’s own.
And whose body, he wondered, was this one I’m in? Why, Steerforth Benner’s, of course. Benner mentioned that he had lunch with old Joe a week ago, and Joe must have fed him whatever mixture of alchemical herbs it is that unscrews the hinges of people’s souls, and then on Saturday made the switch.
So, Doyle reasoned, it was Dog-Face Joe, in Benner’s pirated body, that I met Saturday at Jonathen’s. No wonder he … didn’t seem to be himself. And of course that’s why he was so anxious to have me eat or drink something there—so he could give me a dose of the soul-switch stuff; and when I didn’t want anything, he had to send me outside to look for a doubtless fictitious man so that he could get a cup of tea, fling his filthy leaves into it, and harass me into drinking it.
Despite his weary apathy, Doyle shuddered when it came to him that the red ape that he had seen shot that day had been Benner himself, the poor bastard, carelessly shoehorned into Dog-Face Joe’s last body.
So now, Doyle thought, he’s got my body and is free to go see Darrow and make the deal, without having to cut Benner or me in at all.
Doyle sat up, permitting himself a loud groan. His mouth and nose and throat were crusted and rusty-tasting with dried blood, and he realized with a dull sort of amusement that good old Joe the Ape Man must chew the hell out of his own tongue just before vacating the body, to make sure its new tenant wouldn’t be able, in the short time before the poison hammered him down, to say anything that might make people wonder.
He stood up—a little dizzily because of his new, increased height—and looked around. He was not surprised to find scissors, a brush and straight razor and a cake of gray soap on a shelf by the bed—Dog-Face Joe probably bought a new razor every week. There was also a mirror lying face down on the shelf, and Doyle picked it up and, apprehensively, looked into it.
My God, he thought, as much awed as frightened, I look like the wolf man—or Chewbacca—or the guy in that French movie of Beauty and the Beast—or no, I’ve got it, the Cowardly Lion of Oz.
Thick golden fur billowed in waves down over his chin, and outward across his cheeks to become exaggerated sideburns, and snaked upward along his nose to join the upside down waterfall of luxuriant golden fur that began at the eyebrow ridges and swept in a wild mane right up over the top of his head and hung down shaggily to his broad shoulders. Even his neck and the area under his jaw were thickly furred.
Well, he thought, picking up the scissors and stretching out a lock of his forehead hair, no point in delaying. Snip. There’s one handful of it gone. I hope I still remember how to use a straight razor.
An hour later he had clipped and shaved his forehead—being careful to leave eyebrows—and his nose and cheeks, and he decided, before moving on to the tricky task of shaving his hands, to see how he looked. He leaned the mirror up against the wall at a different angle, stepped back and cocked an eyebrow at it.
His chest was suddenly hollow, so that his quickening heartbeat echoed in there like thumps on a drum. After the initial shock he began reasoning it out, and he almost wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. For of course I did go to the Jamaica Coffee House on Tuesday the eleventh, he marveled, and as a matter of fact I did write—or at least copy from memory—”The Twelve Hours of the Night” there. And I did stay at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane. And this body did shoot one of the Dancing Apes in Jonathen’s Saturday. It hasn’t been an abduction or an alternate 1810 at all.
For Doyle recognized the face in the mirror. It was Benner’s, of course, but with the wild mane of hair and the Old Testament prophet beard, the new, haggard lines in the cheeks and forehead and the somewhat haunted expression of the eyes, it was also, beyond any doubt, the face of William Ashbless.
BOOK TWO—The Twelve Hours of the Night
CHAPTER 8
“He told me that in 1810 he met me as he thought in St. James Street, but we passed without speaking.—He mentioned this—and it was denied as impossible—I being then in Turkey—A day or two after he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way—”there”—said he “is the man I took for Byron”—his brother instantly answered “why it is Byron & no one else.”—But this is not all—I was seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the Enquirers after the King’s health—then attacked by insanity. Now—at this very period, as nearly as I could make out—I was ill of a strong fever at Patras… “
—Lord Byron, in a letter to John Murray, October 6, 1820
Though it had been difficult to find all the little motors and get them correctly wound, and to adjust the air vents around the dozens of concealed candles, the chest-high village Bavarois, as Monsieur Diderac had described the appallingly expensive toy, seemed to be ready to perform. All it needed was for the candles to be lit and the master switch, disguised as a miniature tree stump, to be clicked over to the right.
Doctor Romany sat back and stared morosely at the contraption. Damnable Richard had wanted to start it up so his monkey could see it work before the yags arrived, but Romany was afraid that a thing so complicated mightn’t work more than once, and he refused. He now reached out and gently touched the head of a tiny carved woodsman, and gasped in dismay when the little figure marched several inches down his painted path, swinging his toothpick-hafted axe and making a sound like a clock clearing its throat.
Apep eat me, he thought fretfully, I hope I haven’t broken it. Why have we all had to decline so, anyway? I remember when the yags demanded fine chess sets and sextants and telescopes for their services. And now what? Damn toys.
And they were never as respectful as they ought to be, he reflected ruefully, but now they’re downright rude.
He stood up and shook his head. The tent was murky with incense smoke and he crossed bobbingly to the entrance flap, lifted it away and hooked it to the side, and blinked in the sudden brightness at the heather fields of Islington.
It wasn’t so far from here, he reflected, that, eight years ago, poor old Amenophis Fikee gave himself to the dog-headed god of the gates, lost most of his mind and all of his magic—except that damned body-switching spell—and ran off with a pistol ball in his belly and the mark of Anubis whiskering out all over him … ran off to a dubious career as Dog-Face Joe, the “werewolf” that London mothers threatened badly behaving children with… leaving Romany, a ka that should have been retired long ago, in charge of Fikee’s post, the entire United Kingdom. Well, Romany thought complacently, the Master obviously did a good job of drawing this ka; I don’t think Fikee—or even Romanelli I—could have done any better at the task of maintaining and protecting the Master’s British interests. I suppose he’ll retire me—render me back down to the primal paut—after our coup here this week. I won’t be sorry to go.
Eight years is long enough for a ka.
I do just wish, though, he thought with a narrowing of his predatory eyes, that I could have solved the mystery of that alarmingly well-educated group of magicians that made use of Fikee’s haphazard gates for travel. That one I had, that Doyle, seemed like he would have cracked open nicely if I could have had a
little time with him. I wonder where on earth they came from.
He cocked an eyebrow. But that should be easy to tell, he realized. Just calculate what other gate was open at the same time as the Kensington one. It was obviously one of those that exist in pairs, one big, long gate here and a little quick one over there during the period of the big one. They’re not common, and in such cases I’ve always chosen to monitor the larger one, but they do occur, and this was obviously an instance of it. It would be easy to calculate where they embarked from, and it might be a useful bit of research to leave to my successor.
Turning away from the sunlight, he sat down at his table and began shuffling through the more recent stacks of gate locus calculations. He found the one for the first of September, and frowningly scrutinized it.
After a few moments he bit his lip impatiently, dipped a pen in an inkwell, crossed out a whole section of figures and began laboriously re-working them. “Shouldn’t trust a ka to do high-level mathematics,” he muttered. “Lucky I even plotted the Kensington one accurately… “
His face went blank when he arrived at an answer, though, for the fresh calculations were identical to the ones he’d crossed out. He hadn’t made an error—there really had been only one gap open that evening. The September first gap had not been one of the infrequent twinned ones.
So where, he wondered, did they come from? And the answer came to him so quickly that he grimaced with self-disgust at not having thought of it sooner.
Certainly, the people in the coaches had jumped from one gate to another—but why had he assumed that the two gates had to exist at the same time?
Doyle’s crew of sorcerers had come to September first, 1810, from a gate in another time.
And if they can do that trick, thought Romany excitedly, then so can we. Fikee, your sacrifice may not have been in vain after all! Ra and Osiris, what could we—what couldn’t we do? Jump back and prevent the British from taking Cairo… Or further back, and undermine England so that by this century it isn’t a nation of any consequence! And to think, all Doyle’s party did with this power was come to hear a poet give a speech. We’ll use it more… purposefully, he thought as a rare wolfish grin slowly split his face.