The Anubis Gates

He heard more slow thumping as the clown moved this way and that. My God, Doyle thought, if that thing starts stumping down this pier toward me I’ll be into the water and swimming for Lambeth before he’s three steps out. Then he imagined the clown following him into the black water, imagined seeing over his shoulder that grinning painted face moving at him with impossible speed as he tried to swim with his stiffening shoulder. His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.

“Horrabin!” came a cry from away to Doyle’s right. “Where is he?”

Doyle realized with horror that it was Doctor Romany’s voice.

The clown giggled, a sound like a hundred manic crickets, and then called, “Right here.” The knocking of the stilts moved out onto the pier. With an explosive shriek that appalled even himself, Doyle dove off the pier end, barely getting a breath before plunging into the cold water. He thrashed to the surface and began swimming frantically. “What was that?” Romany’s voice carried clearly across the water. “What’s going on?”

Horrabin had ladder-walked to the end of the pier. “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.” He whistled, a shriller and more complicated whistle than the one he’d summoned the beggars with in the Strand, and then he waited, looking up and down the river shore.

* * *

As soon as the boat had emerged from the tunnel, and just before it passed through the Adelphi Arches and out into the river, Jacky unhooked her numbing fingers and let the craft recede away from her. Just in time, she had told herself, for a moment later one of the beggars had stepped back and grabbed the tiller and the other had lifted a pair of oars from the bottom of the boat and begun fitting the thole pins into the oarlocks. Doctor Romany had shouted a question, and she’d heard a faint answer, but she’d been swimming half underwater and hadn’t caught any of the words. Then there had come a scream, short but so loud that nobody within a mile could have missed it. Faintly she’d heard Horrabin’s voice say, afterward, “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.”

She heard the first clattering stroke of the oars just as she reached the bank and pulled herself out of the water.

* * *

Doyle, forty feet out now, calmed down a little and began to dog paddle silently. If anything, he thought, any boat or swimmer comes near me, I’ll surface dive and go as far as I can under water, and then try to let my head emerge slow and breathe quietly. Hell, with any luck I should be able to elude them … And, with a good deal more luck, get back to shore somewhere before my strength gives out. The current was carrying him to his left, away from Doctor Romany.

He heard a new sound—oarlocks clacking rhythmically behind him to his right.

Horrabin smiled, for a dim glow had appeared under the second pier to his left, and as it moved out from under the overhang it could be seen to be a shotgun pattern of dozens of tiny lights whirling across the face of the dark water. The clown pointed out toward where he’d last heard Doyle splashing, and the cluster of tiny lights scudded out into the river as quick as the wind-blown petals of some luminous flower.

“Follow the lights, Doctor Romany!” Horrabin called merrily.

What lights? Doyle wondered. The nearest lights are across the river. Sure, Doctor Romany, follow them while I drift east.

He quietly treaded water with his legs and right arm, giving his left shoulder a rest. Staying afloat was no problem; he had discovered that by taking turns with his dog paddle, floating on his back and slowly treading water he was able to keep his face out of water with no strenuous use of any one set of muscles. The current was taking him toward Blackfriars Bridge, and he was cautiously confident that he’d be able to climb up on one of the pilings and, once his pursuers had decided he’d drowned, make a segmented swim from piling to piling to the shore.

Suddenly he learned what lights Horrabin had meant, for what seemed to be a couple of dozen little floating candles were skimming across the surface straight toward him. He yanked his head under water and, with just a kick-splash to mark where he’d been, swam away under water in a direction at right angles to the course the lights had been taking.

His tenuous confidence was gone. This reeked of sorcery—hadn’t Jacky said Doctor Romany was a magician? Evidently Horrabin was too—and he felt like a man who, limbering up for a fistfight, sees his opponent snap the loaded cylinder closed on a revolver.