The Anubis Gates

“Right now an average of nine hundred pounds, but it’s an upward geometrical progression—the more I’ve got, the more I get. By the end of 1811 there’ll be no way to calculate it—the time it would take to do all the math would make the figures hopelessly obsolete before you got them.”

“What a wizard it is I’m marrying!” the girl exclaimed with a smile in her voice. There was some cooing and giggling, and then she added teasingly, “Not very affectionate, though.”

Dundee’s laugh sounded, to the man smirking in the dark hall at any rate, forced, and there was no conviction in his voice when he said, “There’ll be plenty of that when we’re married, Claire. We’d be—betraying the trust your father has in us if we were to … misbehave now, here.”

The man in the hall stepped quietly back to the stairs, tramped a number of times with increasing force on the top step, then clumped up to Dundee’s door and knocked on it.

“Uh… yes?” said Dundee. “Who is it?”

The man opened the door and walked in, nodded to Dundee and smiled broadly at the slim blonde girl. “It’s Sizzlin’ Stan the Immortal Man,” he said cheerfully.

Dundee stared bleakly at the tall, burly intruder. He’d never seen this ruddy face before, with its flinty eyes and wiry gray hair, but he knew who it was. “Oh—hello,” he said. “I see it all… went well.”

“Aye, no problem atall atall—matter of fact, I’ve been doing sprints and bounds on the way here, and I’ve decided this one has it points—I think I’ll stay here a while, your electro-hair-killer devices permitting. And who is this lovely creetur?”

He made a flailing, theatrical bow.

“Uh, Joe,” said Dundee, standing up from the couch, “this is Claire Peabody, my fiancée. Claire, this is… Joe, a business associate.”

Joe bared his even white teeth in a grin. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Claire.”

Claire frowned uneasily, not pleased by the undivided attention this man was giving her. “Pleased to meet you, Joe,” she said. Suddenly aware that he was staring at her bosom, she frowned more deeply and threw a pleading glance at Dundee.

“Joe,” the young man said, “perhaps you could—”

“Isn’t that nice,” Joe interrupted, smiling more broadly than ever, “we’re both… pleased.”

“Joe,” repeated Dundee, “perhaps you could wait in your room. I’ll speak with you there presently.”

“Sure, Jake,” said Joe, turning toward the door. He paused. “Merry Christmas, Miss Claire.” There was no reply, and he chuckled almost noiselessly as he closed the door.

* * *

Jacky paid her penny at the bar and joined the queue, and after a few minutes, during which she moved one step at a time closer to the back door and the man outside who was periodically shouting, “All right, you’ve seen it, give someone else a chance,” it was her turn to go through the door and join the crowd in the back lot. The snow was all trampled to slushy mud.

Jacky couldn’t see anything but the broad back of the man in front of her, but the line was moving, and before long she filed with everyone else through a ragged gap in the brick wall into a larger, paved yard. She could see the crane and the rope now. On the next street over someone was singing snatches of Christmas carols in a drunken baritone.

So what do I do now? she wondered. Go home? Back to the little house in Romford, and school, and eventually some earnest, promising young bank clerk for a husband? Yeah, I suppose so. What else? The thing you came to London to do has been done, though by someone else. Is that what’s got you feeling so… useless and unmoored and—yes, face it—scared? Yesterday you had a purpose, a reason for living this way, and today you don’t. You’ve got no reason to be Jacky Snapp anymore, but you’re not quite Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy anymore, either. What’s to become of you, girl?

She rounded the last loop of the line, and got at last a clear view of the scene. A rope had been tied to the crane boom, and from the end of it swung in the chilly breeze a sack-headed dummy with patches of moth-eaten fur sewn onto the face, hands and feet.

“Yes, friends,” said the barker in a hushed voice, “this is where the dreaded man-wolf Dog-Face Joe was brought to justice at last. The effigy you see before you was carefully constructed so as to let you all see exactly the scene the police found here last night.”

“The way I heard it,” quietly commented the man in front of Jacky to his companion, “he simply had whiskers all over him, like a two-day beard.”