The Anubis Gates

When he opened the door and stepped outside, the cold instantly burned his face and hands into numbness. His lungs retreated from the first breath he took, and he thought his nose must start bleeding just from the passage of the savagely frigid air. Jesus, he screamed in his mind as the door banged shut behind him, what is this? This can’t be England—the son of a bitch must have jumped us to some damned outpost in Tierra del Fuego or somewhere.

If everyone in the inn hadn’t been laughing at him he’d have turned around and gone back inside; as it was he pressed on, his stinging hands thrust into the pockets of his too-thin coat, and sprinted forward along the narrow, dark street, vaguely hoping to catch up with Romany and terrify the wizard into finding a warm place where he could just sit down for a while.

He didn’t find Romany, but Sammy did, and Doyle came upon Sammy curled up in a narrow alley mouth about a block and a half from the inn; in the ashy moonlight Doyle might not have seen him, but he heard his hopeless sobbing. Frozen tears had attached Sammy’s cheek to the brick wall, and there was a faint crackling when Doyle crouched and gently lifted the young man’s head up.

“Sammy!” said Doyle, loudly so as to break through the boy’s obsessive grief. “Where did he go?” Getting no answer, he shook him. “Which way, man?” The steam of his breath plumed away upward like smoke.

“He…” the young man gasped, “he showed me the… snakes inside me. He told me, ‘Look at yourself,’ and I did, and I seen all them snakes.” Sammy began sobbing again. “I can’t go back yonder, or home either. They’d get inside of everyone.”

“They’re gone,” Doyle told him firmly. “You understand me? They’re gone. They can’t stand the cold, I saw every one of them crawling away to die when I got here. Now where did the bastard go?”

Sammy sniffed. “Be they gone? And dead? Certes?” He glanced fearfully down at himself.

“Yes, damn it. Did you see where he went?”

After patting and prying at his clothes with diminishing dread, the young man began shivering. “I m-must get back,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Devilish cold. Oh, aye, ye wanted to know where he went.”

“Yes.” Doyle was almost tap-dancing on the cobblestones in a fit of shivering. His right ankle was numb, and he was afraid that the trailing chain would freeze solid with his skin.

Sammy sniffed again. “He leapt over the house there into the next street.”

Doyle cocked his head to hear better. “What?”

“He jumped over that house, like a grasshopper.” Sniff. “He had metal coils on the bottoms of his shoes,” Sammy added by way of explanation.

“Ah. Well… thank you.” Obviously Romany hypnotized this boy with both barrels, Doyle reflected. And in only seconds! Better not let the fact that he seems to be afraid of you make you overconfident if you run into him. “Oh, by the way,” he said as the boy began shuffling away, “where are we? I’m lost.”

“Borough High Street. Southwark.” Doyle raised his eyebrows. “London?”

“Well of course London,” the boy said, beginning to jog in place impatiently.

“Uh, and what’s the year? The date?”

“Lord, mister, I don’t know. It’s winter, that’s certain.” He turned and hurried away back toward the inn.

“Who is king?” Doyle called after him.

“Charles!” came the over the shoulder reply.

Charles the whichth, thought Doyle. “Who was king before him?” he shouted after the disappearing figure.

Sammy chose not to hear him, but there was the snap and creak of a window being pushed open above him. “Oliver the Blessed,” called a man’s voice irritably, “and when he ruled, there beed not such street clamors at night.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Doyle hastily, turning his cold-stung eyes upward and trying to spot which one of the dozen small paned windows was slightly open. “I’m suffering from a,” why not, he thought, “from a brain fever, and I’ve lost my memory. I have nowhere to go. Could you let me sleep until dawn in the kitchen, or toss me down a more substantial coat? I—”

He heard the window bang closed, and the latch scritch tight, though he still hadn’t spotted which one it was. Typical Cromwellian, he thought, heaving a sigh that sailed away as a small cloud. So, he thought as he slouched onward, I’m somewhere between, uh, 1660 and—what? When did Charles II die? Around 1690, I think. This is worse still. At least in 1810 I had the chance of finding Darrow’s men and going home with them, or, failing that, to accept what fate seemed to have groomed me for and live out my life in fair comfort as William Ashbless. (Damnation, it’s cold.) You idiot—why didn’t you do that? Just write out Ashbless’ poems from memory, visit Egypt, and let the modest fame and fortune—and pretty wife, even—roll in. But no, instead you had to go bothering sorcerers, and so now history’s deprived of William Ashbless, and you’re stuck in a damn century when nobody brushed their teeth or took baths, and a man is middle-aged at thirty.