The Anubis Gates

Doyle hadn’t spoken during the ten-minute ride from Heathrow airport, but now nervousness overcame his reluctance to admit how little he knew about his situation. “I, uh, gathered from the two men who originally approached me in Fullerton—California, that is—that this job has something to do with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” he said diffidently as the two of them plodded toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Do you know… what it is, exactly?”

“Mr. Darrow will explain it fully, I’m sure,” said the driver, who seemed much more relaxed now that his own part in the relay race was almost over. “Something to do with a lecture, I believe.”

Doyle stopped. “A lecture? He rushed me six thousand miles overnight, to London”—and offered me twenty thousand dollars, he added mentally—”just to give a lecture?”

“I really don’t know, Mr. Doyle. As I say, he will explain—”

“Do you know if it has anything to do with the position he recently hired Steerforth Benner for?” pressed Doyle.

“I don’t know of Mr. Benner,” said the driver cheerfully. “Do come along now, sir, this is all scheduled rather tightly, you know.” Doyle sighed and resumed walking, and he wasn’t reassured when he noticed the coils of barbed wire strung along the top of the fence. Looking more closely, he saw little scraps of scribbled-on paper, and sprigs of what might have been mistletoe, tied on at intervals along the wire strands. It was beginning to seem likely that the rumors he’d read about Darrow Interdisciplinary Research Enterprises—DIRE—were true. “I probably should have mentioned it before,” he called, only half joking, to the driver, “but I can’t work a Ouija board.” The man put the suitcase down on the dirt and pressed a button on the gatepost. “I don’t think that will be necessary, sir, “he said.

On the other side of the fence a uniformed guard was hurrying toward them. Well, you’re in it now, Doyle told himself. At least you get to keep the five thousand dollar retainer check even if you decline his offer… whatever it turns out to be.

Doyle had been grateful, an hour earlier, when the stewardess woke him to tell him to fasten his seat belt, for he’d been dreaming about Rebecca’s death again. Always in the first part of the dream he was a stranger with foreknowledge, trying desperately to find Brendan and Rebecca Doyle before they got on the bike, or at least before Doyle could gun the old Honda up the curling onramp from Beach Boulevard onto the Santa Ana Freeway—and always he was unsuccessful, screeching his car around the last corner only in time, tormentingly, to see the old bike speed up, lean into the curve and disappear around the landscaped bend. Generally he was able to force himself awake at that point, but he’d had several scotches earlier, and this time he might not have been.

He sat up and blinked around at the spacious cabin and the people in the other seats. The lights were on, and only speckled blackness showed beyond the little window—it was night again, though he remembered seeing dawn over icy plains only a few hours ago. Jet air travel was disorienting enough, it seemed to Doyle, without doing it in over the pole jumps that left you unable to guess what day it was. The last time he’d been to England there had been a stopover in New York, but of course DIRE was in too much of a hurry for that.

He stretched as well as he could in his seat, and a book and some papers slid off the fold-down tray in front of him and thump-fluttered to the floor. A lady across the aisle jumped, and he smiled in embarrassed apology as he leaned over to pick the stuff up. Sorting it out and noting the many blanks and question marks he’d scrawled, he wondered bleakly if even in England—for he was certainly going to take advantage of this free trip to try and pursue his own researches—he would be able to dig up some data on the poet whose definitive biography he’d been trying to write for two years. Coleridge was easy, he thought as he tucked the papers back into the briefcase between his feet; William Ashbless is a goddamn cipher.

The book that had fallen was Bailey’s Life of William Ashbless. It had landed open and several of the age-browned pages were broken. He laid them back in carefully, closed the book gently and brushed dust off his fingers, then stared at the unhelpful volume.

It would be an understatement, he reflected disconsolately, to say that Ashbless’ life was scantily documented. William Hazlitt had written a brief evaluation of his work in 1825, and incidentally provided a few details about the man, and Ashbless’ close friend James Bailey had written the cautious biography that was, for lack of anything else, considered the standard account. Doyle had managed to supplement the narrative with a few illuminating letters and journals and police reports, but the poet’s recorded life was still flawed by many gaps.