The Anubis Gates

“A good Decayed Gentleman, and the best shaker I’ve seen in years—you should have seen the fit he threw to show us his style. Astonishing. And how fares Dumb Tom?”

Doyle winced. “Am I really stuck with that?”

“If you stay you are. What’s this story about Horrabin being after you?” The captain tilted the bottle up and took a liberal swig from the neck of it.

Jacky spoke up. “It’s Horrabin’s master, Doctor Romany. He thinks Dumb Tom here knows a lot of sorcerous stuff, and he’s mistaken, but he’s offered a huge reward, and so every mongrel from Horrabin’s rat-warren will be looking for Brendan Doyle.” He turned to Doyle. “Face it, man, your Dumb Tom role is purely a survival tactic.”

The captain laughed. “And be grateful I don’t conduct my business the way Horrabin’s father did.”

Jacky laughed too, and then seeing Doyle’s uncomprehending look, explained. “The clown’s father was a St. Giles beggar master too, and he wouldn’t run a fake—all of his blind men really were blind, and his crippled children didn’t carry crutches just for effect. All very commendable, one would say, until you learn that he’d recruit healthy people and then alter them for the trade of begging. He had a hospital in reverse under London somewhere, and developed techniques for turning robust men, women and children into creatures tailored to evoke horror and pity.” The smile had worn off Jacky’s face during his speech.

“So if old Teobaldo Horrabin had decided you ought to be Dumb Tom,” said the captain, “why he’d cut out your tongue and then have a game try at making you genuinely simple-minded by knocking in one corner of your head or smothering you just long enough for your brain to die. Like Jacky said, he was an expert at it.” He sucked some more brandy out of the bottle’s neck. “They even say he went to work on his own son, and that Horrabin wears those baggy clothes and that face paint to conceal the deformities his father gave him.”

Doyle shuddered, remembering the startling appearance of the clown’s face as he’d seen it in the back of the puppet booth. “So what happened to Horrabin pere?”

Jacky shrugged. “It was all before my time.”

“Some said he died and then Horrabin fils took over,” said the captain. “Others said he killed old Teobaldo in order to take over. I’ve even heard that old Teobaldo is still alive down there … and I’m not sure he wouldn’t rather be dead.” He caught Doyle’s questioning look. “Oh, old Horrabin was very tall, and any tight places, even a crowded corridor, used to upset him.”

“One loss we suffer in running this lad as a mute,” said Jacky, snagging the bottle from the captain long enough to refill the two glasses, “is that he can read.”

The captain glanced at Doyle with more interest than he’d shown in anything all evening. “Can you really? Affluently?”

Guessing that he meant fluently, Doyle nodded.

“Excellent! You can read to me. Literature is perhaps my main interest in life, but I’ve never been able to wring the sense out of the marks on the pages. Do you know any poems? By heart?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Give us one.”

“Uh… all right.” He cleared his throat, and then began,

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me…”

The captain and Jacky both sat raptly listening during Doyle’s recitation of the entirety of Gray’s Elegy. When he finished the captain applauded, and himself launched into verse, a section from Samson Agonistes. Jacky was next. “Tell me what you think of this,” he said, and then recited,

“These cold and tangled streets, that once were gay

With light and drink, now echo to my tread

As I pass by alone. Night breezes thread

Through dusty rooms their solitary way

And carry out, through broken windowpanes,

Into the street, old thoughts and memories.”

Jacky paused, and Doyle automatically completed the octave:

“The lad is far away who cherished these,

And nothing of his spirit now remains.”

After he’d recited it Doyle tried to remember where he’d read it. It was in a book about Ashbless, but it wasn’t by him… Got it, he thought—it’s one of the damn few works of Colin Lepovre, who was engaged to Elizabeth Tichy before she became William Ashbless’ wife. Lepovre disappeared in, let’s see, 1809 it was, a few months before the wedding was to have occurred; he was twenty, and left behind him only a thin book of verses that got few and unsympathetic reviews.