The Anubis Gates

She came out of it instantly, and allowed herself to be led by the elbow out of the room.

“Benner,” said Darrow. “Oh, sorry, carry on. Mr. Doyle—would you please go tell Clitheroe to bring the coaches around front?”

“Certainly.” Doyle paused in the doorway to take a last look at Coleridge—he was afraid he hadn’t paid enough attention, hadn’t got as much out of the evening as, say, the Thibodeaus—and then he sighed and turned away.

The hall was dark, and the floor uneven, and Benner and the unhappy medium were not in sight. Doyle groped his way around a corner, but instead of the entry hall found himself at the foot of a staircase, the bottom few steps of which were lit by a candle in a wall cresset. It must be the other way, he thought, and turned around.

He started violently, for a very tall man was standing directly behind him; his face was craggy and unpleasantly lined, as if from a long lifetime of disagreeable expressions, and his head was as bald as a vulture’s.

“God, you startled me,” Doyle exclaimed. “Excuse me, I seem to have—”

With surprising strength the man seized Doyle’s hand and, whirling him about, wrenched it up between his shoulder blades, and just as Doyle gasped at the sudden pain a wet cloth was pressed over his face so that instead of air he inhaled the sharply aromatic fumes of ether. He was off balance anyway, so he kicked backward with the strength of total panic, and he felt the heel of his boot collide hard with bone, but the powerful arms that held him didn’t even flinch. His struggles made him gulp in more of the fumes in spite of his efforts to hold his breath. He could feel a warm bulk of unconsciousness swelling in the back of his head, and he wondered frantically why someone, Darrow, Benner, Coleridge even, didn’t round the corner and shout an alarm.

With his last flicker of bewildered consciousness it occurred to him that this must be the “cadaverous old bald-headed guy” that Benner had startled in his tent in Islington in 1805, five years or a few hours ago.

* * *

The evening’s ride, which Damnable Richard had been enjoying as a respite from the sweaty labor of melting down more of an apparently endless supply of Britannia metal spoons, had now been spoiled for him by Wilbur’s description of how their quarry had appeared in that field. “I sneaked out and followed the old man,” Wilbur had whispered to him as they waited on the driver’s bench of the wagon for their chief to return, “and he went through the woods slow, by stops and starts, carrying a couple of his weird toys—he had that clay pot with acid and lead in it, you know, that stings you if you touch the two metal buttons on top? He kept stopping to touch it, the Beng only knows why, and I could see his hand jump back every time when it stung him. And he had that telescope thing with rutter pictures in it.”

Richard knew he meant the sextant; Wilbur could never understand that it was not called the sex-tent, and so he’d always assumed the chief was looking at dirty pictures when he peered through it. “And he stopped a lot of times to look through it—to keep his blood flowing quick, I judge. So I watched him from behind a tree as he started out across that field, looking at his tit pictures and then stinging himself, like maybe he was sorry. Then one time he touched the pot and his hand didn’t jump back. He looked at it and shook it and touched it again, and he didn’t jerk, so I knew it was broken. Right after that he ran back to the trees quick, no stops this time, and I flattened out, afraid he’d see me. He didn’t, though, and when I peeked up he was behind a tree maybe fifty yards away from me, staring hard at the empty field. So I did too, more than a little scared, because whatever he was up to had even him acting jumpy.”