In the fog the street lamps were just shifting yellow blurs, and tiny drops of moisture began to collect on Dundee’s little moustache. He scratched it irritably. You’re awfully short-tempered these days, he told himself. That poor devil you shouted at in the conference room back there probably won’t do business with you now, and those patents and factories he has to sell will be damn useful in a decade or two. Oh hell—wait and buy ‘em from his heirs.
He paused when he turned into the service alley. Well, he thought, as long as you’re sneaking, you may as well do it right. He took off his boots, held them both in his left hand and then padded noiselessly down the dim alley. His right hand rested on the knob grip of one of the Egg pistols.
Suddenly Dundee froze—he’d heard whispering up ahead. He drew the pistol out of its little holster and tiptoed forward, probing the fog with the two-inch barrel.
Two floors overhead someone rattled a window latch and Dundee nearly fired—and then nearly dropped—the gun, for abruptly, totally and without any warning he had remembered the last part of his recurring nightmare, the part he’d never been able to recall after he woke up. With photographic clarity he’d seen the thing that in the dream had made the random knocking sound in the fog overhead, the thing the corpse-figure of Doyle had pointed up at.
It was the body of J. Cochran Darrow dangling from a rope tied around its neck, its booted feet knocking against the wall like the devil’s own wind chime, and its head, twisted into a posture exclusive to hanged men, staring down at him with a rictus grin that seemed to bare every single one of the yellow teeth.
His gun hand was shaking now, and he was more aware of the clammy chill of the air, as though he’d shed an overcoat. Ahead he could see a brightening stain of yellow light, for he was nearly through to the St. James sidewalk, and a street lamp stood only a few yards from the alley mouth.
There was more whispering from in front of him, and now he could see two vague silhouettes standing just inside the alley.
He raised the gun and said, clearly, “Don’t move, either of you.”
Both figures exclaimed in surprise and leaped out onto the sidewalk. As Dundee stepped forward out of the alley to keep them both covered he let his boots clop to the pavement and drew his other pistol. “Jump like that again and I’ll kill both of you,” he said calmly. “Now I want an explanation, fast, of what you’re doing here and why you’ve—”
He’d been looking at the younger of the two ragged lurkers, but now he glanced at the other.
And the color drained from his features and was instantly replaced by sweat as cold as the fog, for he recognized the man’s face. It was Brendan Doyle’s.
At the same instant Chinnie realized who it was behind the pistols. “Face to face at last,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “We’re going to change places, you and I…” He took a step toward Dundee.
The gunshot had a flat sound in the thick fog, like someone slapping a board against a brick wall. Dundee began sobbing as Adelbert Chinnie stepped back and then sat down on the sidewalk. “God, I’m sorry, Doyle!” Dundee wailed. “But you should stay dead!”
The other gun wobbled toward Jacky, but before it could train on her she lunged forward and brought the chopping edge of her hand down hard on Dundee’s wrist. The little gun clattered onto the pavement and she dove for it.
Dundee, jolted out of his hysteria by the sharp pain in his wrist, was right on top of her.
Jacky grabbed the gun just as Dundee’s weight slammed her onto her knees and his right forearm hooked around under her chin; his free hand was scrabbling at her wrist, but weakly—her blow must have numbed it. From the opposite side of the street came the sound of a window breaking, but both of the gasping combatants were too busy to look up; Jacky was fighting to get her legs under her and keep air passing through her constricted throat, and Dundee was striving with considerably more strength to prevent those things. Jacky couldn’t raise the gun without pitching face down onto the pavement. The pulse in her head sounded to her like labored strokes of a pickaxe through frozen topsoil.
“Lead the dead back to me, will you, boy?” Dundee was whispering harshly. “I’ll send you across that river yourself.”
In a last desperate gambit Jacky suddenly bent her arm and rolled hard to the left. For a moment her gun hand was free, and she swung the barrel toward Dundee, who had fallen back and now snatched for the gun, missed it, and instead grabbed her shirt collar and kneed her with all his strength; but the blow that he thought would jackknife his opponent in oblivious agony only jolted Jacky, and didn’t prevent her from pressing the stubby barrel of the pistol against the bridge of Dundee’s nose, and pulling the trigger.
The shot was even more muffled than the previous one had been. Dundee relaxed his hold on Jacky’s collar, evidently in order to give his full attention to doing a sort of gargled imitation of a rattlesnake. A moment later he was limp, staring at her with two bulging eyes, between which a neat round hole had been punched. A gleaming crescent of blood collected on the lower edge, then spilled in a line across the forehead.
“All of ye smug bastards!” came a loud cry from across the street. Jacky sat up. “Ye’ve won, ye heartless sons of bitches,” shouted the voice from the fog, and it seemed to Jacky to be coming from higher than street level. “Ye’ve driven old Joe to the point where he’d rather be dead than take yer smarmy ways any longer. May it trouble what shreds of conscience—”
“Joe!” called a quiet voice. “Are you drunk? What the devil are you shouting about? Stop it this instant!”
Jacky knew she should run away before the racket attracted a police officer, but besides being very shaky she was curious about the invisible drama across the street.
“I broke this here window. Miss Claire,” said the man’s voice. “And I reckon it’ll cost ye something to get the front walkway cleaned tomorrow. Write up a bill for it all and send it to me in hell, ye teasing bitch!”
“Joe,” said the lady’s voice, louder now. “I order you to—oh my God?”
Jacky wondered. Did he jump? an instant before she heard the solid crack and thudding of something impacting hard onto the pavement.
Then Jacky’s attention was distracted by Dundee’s corpse. It had sat up.
The blind eyes were blinking, and an expression of abysmal horror was forming on the blood-streaked face. One of Dundee’s hands wobbled up, awkward as a rusty hinge, and groped at his punctured face. For a moment it seemed to be trying to get up; then it shuddered and collapsed, and its last exhalation seemed to go on forever.
Jacky got up and ran.
CHAPTER 15
“He whispered, ‘And a river lies Between the dusk and dawning skies…’”
—William Ashbless
Though the lightermen and bargemen on the Thames had another half hour of April sunlight to work in, the inhabitants of the St. Giles rookery had seen the sun set an hour ago behind the tall, ragged old buildings that were their drab and stultifyingly close horizon, and nearly every one of the unmatched windows of Rat’s Castle glowed with light.
Standing out in the alley by one of the building’s side doors, Len Carrington impatiently answered one more objection from the party of six men that was about to leave for Fleet Street. “You’ll do it because it’s the very last suth errand you’ll ever run for them, and because if you didn’t it would tip them off, and we want to hit them with no warning—and also because once you fetch this fellow for them they’ll be so absorbed with him that we’ll be able to kill them both with no trouble.”
“Is by any chance this lad we’re going to fetch the same one that pitched Norman out the window at the Swan With Two Necks?” asked one of the men.
Carrington pursed his lips, for he’d hoped they wouldn’t make that connection. “Yes—but you mishandled that abduction.”
“And they seem to have mishandled hangin’ onto him,” the man added.
“—And this time you’ll take him quiet,??
? Carrington went I on sternly. Then he grinned. “And if we all do our parts correctly, there’ll be a real celebration in Rat’s Castle tonight.”
“Amen to that,” whispered another of the men. “Let’s off—he’ll be at his silly book meeting by now.”
The six men padded away down the alley and Carrington went back inside. The huge old kitchen was empty at the moment, and lit only by the dull red glow of the hearth. He dragged the door closed behind him and the room was quiet, except for the faint sound of distant wailing and grunting. He sat down on a bench and hooked a jug of cool beer down from a shelf.
He took one long swallow, then, re-corked the jug, put it back and stood up. He’d better be getting back to the front room; it wouldn’t do to let the clown wonder what had delayed him.
As he walked toward the inner door he passed the drain, and the wailing and groaning were louder. He paused and peered with distaste down into the black hole that led to the deep cellars and the subterranean river. I wonder, he thought, what’s got Horrabin’s Mistakes so riled up this evening. Maybe old Dungy was right, and the things are able to read minds a little, and they’re aware of our imminent mutiny tonight. He cocked his head, listening for the basso profundo voice of Big Biter, who was the only one of the Mistakes anyone would pay any attention to, but he didn’t hear him. Good boy, Carrington thought nervously—if you sense any part of our plans, keep it behind the portcullis of your appalling teeth.
He groped around for the wooden plug, found it under a pile of potato peelings, and fitted it over the drain hole, effectively silencing, up here at least, the noise from the deep cellars.
He opened the door to the hallway just as Horrabin’s fluty voice called from the front room, “Carrington! Where in hell are you?”
“Right here, yer Worship,” Carrington said, striding forward and forcing his voice to sound relaxed. “Just stopped in the kitchen for a sip of beer.” He stepped unhurriedly into the room.
The clown, looking like a huge spider perversely made of ribbon candy, was penduluming rapidly back and forth in his swing, while Romany or Romanelli or whatever his name was this week was reclining in his high wheeled cart that looked like nothing so much as a baby’s perambulator, the snapping glow of St. Elmo’s Fire flickering around his tortured frame even more brightly now than it had five minutes ago.
“I assume they’re off?” asked Horrabin.
“They are.”
“And instructed not to bungle it this time?” put in Romanelli.
Carrington gave the man a cold look. “They got him for you that time and they’ll get him for you this time.”
Romanelli scowled, then made his face relax, as though he just didn’t have the spare energy to resent the insubordination. “Go downstairs to the old hospital,” he said. “Make sure they’ve got everything ready.”
“Aye aye.” Carrington hurried out of the room and his boots could be heard clumping along the hall and then tapping down the long flight of stone steps.
“Why don’t you go too?” croaked Romanelli to the clown.
“I just got here!” the clown protested. “And there’s a couple of things you and I have to straighten out. Now I had an agreement with your ka: I was to—”
“He’s dead and you have no agreement with me. Go.”
After a pause Horrabin reached out and snared his stilts, thrashed out of his swing and onto them, and stood wobbling in the center of the floor. “You’re pretty damn sure of—”
“Go,” Romanelli repeated. He had closed his eyes, and his face looked like a thin rag that someone had draped over some stones to dry in the sun and forgotten forever. The knocking of Horrabin’s stilt-poles receded away. Romanelli’s mouth fell open and a deep sigh echoed in and out of his chest.
His time was getting damned short—he only weighed thirty pounds now, but he knew he wasn’t as strong as the Master had been; he would lose his hold on the unnaturally maintained components of his body, and simply break down or fly to bits, long before the zero gravity point was reached. There’d be no big dive to the moon for him.
He shuddered, trying to remember how many sorcerers had been both strong enough and contra-natural enough—the two qualities were tremendously difficult to hold onto at the same time, like trying to press the positive ends of two lodestones together—to build up that weird lunar attraction which in extreme cases, such as the Master’s, could become a fiercely drawing force far, far greater than could be explained by the actual physical gravity of the moon. There had been that Turk, Ibrahim, who had finally had himself encased to the knees in solid stone in a high-walled courtyard several miles outside of Damascus, and used to charge fortunes to tell fortunes—he’d only do it when the moon was overhead, and his hair and arms were dangling straight up, an effect that mightily impressed his customers—until one man, not pleased with his augury, had drawn a scimitar and chopped right through both of Ibrahim’s knees, and the truncated screaming body had shot away upward into the sky. And there was a brief mention in one of the lost books of the apocryphal Clementine Recognitions of a very old magician who had just floated off the ground one afternoon in Tyana, and was visible in the sky for days, gesticulating and crying, before he drifted too far away to be seen anymore. Obviously there was some truth in the very old stories of the once inhabited moon having become, through some long-forgotten but transcendent perversity, the monument and archetype and fitfully living embodiment of desolation.
Romanelli remembered that he had been overseeing the disagreeable task of clearing out the street below the Bab-el-Azab when he’d heard the hollow knock of a cannon shot from away to the south. He had tensed, ready to call out the Albanians to repel a revenge raid by sons of the murdered Mameluke Beys, but there were no further sounds of gunfire, and when he climbed to the battlements he hadn’t seen any troops massing on the darkening plain. It wasn’t until later that night that he heard one of the fellahin talking about an old man who had been seen by many to fly over the old quarter of Cairo just at dusk… He’d rushed back to the Master’s house and found it broken, and empty except for some damaged ushabtis and the injured doorkeeper…
From the doorkeeper he’d learned that the man who had done this was the Brendan Doyle who’d escaped from them back in October, and the next day he’d discovered that Doyle had left Egypt aboard the England-bound Fowler, having booked passage under the name William Ashbless. Romanelli had abandoned his post as Mohammed Ali’s physician and taken the next ship for England and, by whistling on the stern until his lips were numb and the very captain had ordered him to stop it, several times managed to summon a couple of the Shellengeri for a few hours—the voyage wasn’t nearly as quick as the trip south in the Chillico had been, but Romanelli did manage to step off his ship onto a London dock on Sunday, the day before yesterday, while this Ashbless-Doyle person’s ship hadn’t arrived until this morning.
And Doctor Romanelli had kept busy during his forty-eight hours of lead time. He’d learned that under the Ashbless name his quarry was expected to appear at, of all things, a literary gathering in the offices of the publisher John Murray, and Romanelli had browbeaten the sorcerer-clown Horrabin into having some of his swinish thugs follow Ashbless everywhere he went, and to abduct him and bring him back here to Rat’s Castle after he left Murray’s offices.
And when they’ve brought him here, thought Romanelli as the weary breaths trudged up and down his throat, I will simply wring him dry. I’ll learn from him enough about the time jumping to do it myself, and I’ll jump back to when I was healthy and tell my younger self how to do things differently, so that on Monday the second of April, 1811, I am not a trembling, bleeding, far overextended wreck.
He opened his bloodshot eyes and glanced up at the clock that sat on a doll-crowded shelf just below the niche where old Dungy’s head was perched. Quarter to nine. In another hour or so, he told himself, Horrabin’s hoodlums will bring Ashbless to me, and we’ll adjourn to the subterranean hospital.
br /> * * *
As the cab rattled past St. Paul’s Cathedral, William Ashbless peered out at the dark square on the west side of the huge church and remembered begging there as Dumb Tom. I never, he thought, get to use my voice. Dumb Tom was mute, and so of necessity was Eshvlis the cobbler, and though William Ashbless will be a voluble poet, he’ll only be copying from memory poems he read and memorized long ago.
His mood was a blend of relief, anticipation and vague disappointment. It was certainly pleasant to be back in England again, free at last of all that hellish magic, and able to look forward to meeting, as he knew he would, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and the rest of the gang—but now that he was, irrevocably, Ashbless, and had wandered back into the scope of the Bailey biography, there could be no more major surprises for him; he’d already read his own life story.
He still half wished that the test he’d thought up during the month-long voyage of the Fowler had turned out negative. It had occurred to him that if the universe was dead set on his being Ashbless it would have to get busy and do two things. It would have to have seen to it that the manuscript of “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” which he’d last seen on the desk in that room at the Swan With Two Necks, was somehow conveyed to the Courier office in time to have been published in December; and it would have to make sure the Fowler arrived in London in time for him to attend the gathering at John Murray’s, and meet Coleridge again, on the second of April. Both were unalterable facts in the life of the Ashbless he’d studied, and if either one didn’t happen, then he might still be able to be his own man, with the capacity for chosen action, able to feel hope and fear.
But when he’d gone to the Swan this afternoon and asked them if they were holding any mail for William Ashbless, they’d told him he owed postage on three items. These had proven to be a letter of acceptance from the Courier, together with a check for three pounds; the December 15 issue of the paper, with the poem printed in it; and a letter from John Murray, dated the twenty-fifth of March, inviting Ashbless to an informal gathering at the publisher’s office a week later—tonight.