The Anubis Gates

She had no way to strike a light even if she’d dared to, so she reconnoitered the room by feel, following the wall around all four sides of the little room back to the door again, and then making a cautious diagonal across the middle of the floor. There was a narrow bed, neatly made, a dresser with a couple of books on it, a table on which Jacky’s gently groping hands felt a bottle and a cup—she sniffed the cup: sharp gin—and, in the corner, a chair on which were draped—and Jacky thanked God as she fumblingly identified the objects—a short dress, a wig, a make-up kit, and an ancient pair of ladies’ leather slippers.

It’s an absolute miracle that these clothes should be laid in my path, she thought. Then she remembered that old Teobaldo had said he’d been ordered to do a full-dress performance tonight—this must be his room, and he must have laid the costume out before, as he’d put it, deciding to die. Though she couldn’t see, she glanced curiously around the room, and wished she could know what the books on the dresser were.

* * *

Len Carrington sat down right in the front room and had a long sip from his pocket flask, not caring who might see him. Why was it, he’d have liked to know, that he was suddenly appointed the clown’s second in command, and simultaneously expected to mollify the angry Doctor Romany, evaluate the unsatisfactory reports being run back every few minutes from the team that was trying to catch the two fugitives, and assure the raging Horrabin—who was moaning in a hammock, evidently with bad burns all over himself—that every step was being taken to remedy the situation? Carrington didn’t even understand what the situation was. He’d heard that the dancing dwarf had tried to kill the clown and had then fled down the underground river with a Hindoo, for God’s sake, but if that was so, why was Doctor Romany only interested in talking to the Hindoo?

Someone was trotting up the stairs from the basement. Carrington considered, and then rejected, the idea of standing up.

It proved to be, of all things, a woman. Her hair looked like some sort of rodent’s nest and her dress fit her like a tarpaulin tied around a hatrack, but her face, under a lot of powder and rouge, was pretty. “They told me to look for Horrabin downstairs,” she said, as calmly as if a woman in Rat’s Castle was not as unprecedented a thing as a horse in Westminster Cathedral. “I didn’t see him.”

“No,” said Carrington, scrambling to his feet. “He’s… under the weather. What the devil are you doing here?”

“I’m from Katie Dunnigan, who runs all the accommodation houses around Piccadilly. I’m supposed to arrange a conference—evidently this Horrabin fellow wants to buy in.”

Carrington blinked. So far as he knew the clown had not branched out into prostitution, but it was certainly his sort of thing. And it was inconceivable that a young girl would come to this place without some such reason. He relaxed—she certainly had nothing to do with the two fugitives. “Well I’m afraid you can’t see him now. You’d better leave—and tell this Dunnigan woman to send a man next time! You’ll be lucky if you’re raped less than a dozen times before you get out of this building.”

“Loan me a knife, then.”

“Wha—why should I?”

Jacky winked. “You ever get out to Piccadilly?” A slow smile built on Carrington’s face, and he reached out and slipped an arm around her.

“No no, not me,” she said hastily. “I, uh, have—a disease. But we’ve got clean girls in Piccadilly. Shall I give you the password that’ll get you one gratis, or not?” Carrington had recoiled from her, but now grudgingly reached under his coat and pulled out a knife in a leather sheath. “Here,” he said. “What’s the password?”

Jacky said the filthiest compound noun she’d ever heard. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s it. Just walk into any of those places, go up to the bouncer by the front door and whisper that to him.”

Jacky walked unhurriedly out of Rat’s Castle, ostentatiously cleaning her fingernails with the knife.

CHAPTER 7

“Youth, Nature, and relenting Jove

To keep my lamp in strongly strove,

But Romanelli was so stout

He beat all three—and blew it out.”

—Lord Byron, in a letter from Patras, October 3,1810

Doyle awakened on his straw pallet Saturday morning and realized that he’d come to a decision; the prospect of what he intended to do dried his mouth and set his hands trembling, but it was the clean jumpiness of a difficult course resolved upon, and it came as a relief after a week of murky indecision.