The Anubis Gates (22 page)

The hammer came down on a fold of cloth, knocking open the flashpan cover but producing no sparks. Desperately she wrenched away the cloth and, as the man was shouting, “Christ, a gun, grab him!” she cocked it one-handed and again pulled the trigger. There was a spray of sparks but all the powder had spilled out of the open pan and the gun didn’t fire, and an instant later a hard fist slammed into Jacky’s stomach and a nimble boot kicked the gun out of her hand.

The gun clanked on the paving stones, and the piggyback child, evidently deciding to take the cash in hand and waive the rest, hopped to the ground, seized the pistol and scampered away. The two men picked up the jackknifed, gasping Hindoo Beggar—”Lightweight bugger, ain’t he?”—and carried her inside.

Horrabin had returned to the Castle only a few minutes earlier, and he had just relaxed in his swing—Dungy was wheeling away the folded-up Punch stage—when they carried Ahmed into the room. “Ah!” exclaimed the clown. “Good work, my lads! The fugitive Hindoo at last.” They set Jacky down on the floor in front of the swing, and Horrabin leaned forward and grinned down at her. “Where did you take the American on Saturday night?”

Jacky could still only gasp.

“He pulled a pistol on us, yer Honor,” one of the men explained. “I had to give him a thump in the turn.”

“I see. Well, let’s—Dungy! Bring me my stilts!—let’s lock him up in the dungeon. It’s Doctor Romany that’ll have the most questions for him, and,” the clown added with a giggle, “the most motivating questioning techniques.”

It was an odd little parade that descended four flights of stairs and walked a hundred yards down a subterranean corridor that could have been pre-Roman—the hunched dwarf Dungy limping along in the lead, carrying a flaring torch over his head, followed by the two men who frog-marched between them the chintz-curtain-robed Ahmed, whose face behind the false beard and moustache and walnut stain was gray with fear, and Horrabin, bent way over forward to avoid brushing his hat against the roof stones, bringing up the rear on his stilts.

Eventually they passed through an arch into a wide chamber; Dungy’s torch illuminated the ancient, wet stones of the ceiling and near wall, but the far wall, if indeed there was one, was lost in the absolute blackness. To judge by the echoes, the chamber was very large. The procession paused after a few paces into it, and Jacky could hear water dripping and, she was certain, faint but excited whispering.

“Dungy,” said Horrabin, and even the clown sounded a little uneasy, “the nearest vacant guest room—hoist the lid. And hurry.”

The dwarf limped forward, leaving the others in darkness. Twenty feet away he stopped and lifted a little metal plate away from a hole in the floor, and squatted down, trying to get his head and the torch both next to the hole without setting his greasy white hair on fire. “Nobody home.” He set the torch upright in a hole between the stones, hooked the fingers of both hands around a recessed iron bar in the floor, carefully rearranged his feet, and then tugged upward. A whole stone slab lifted up, evidently on hinges, exposing a circular hole three feet across. The slab came to rest at a bit more than a ninety degree angle and Dungy stepped back, wiping his brow. “Your chamber awaits, Ahmed,” said Horrabin. “If you hang by your hands and then drop, it’s only six feet to the floor. You can do that or be pushed in.”

Jacky’s captors led her forward and, when she was standing in front of the hole, let go of her and stepped back. She forced herself to smile. “When’s dinner? Will I be expected to dress?”

“Make any preparations you please,” said Horrabin coldly.

“Dungy will drop it in on you at six. Get in now.”

Jacky eyed the two men who’d escorted her, calculating whether she could break away between them, but they caught the look and stepped back, moving their arms out from their sides a little. Her gaze fell hopelessly back to the hole at her feet, and to her own humiliation she felt close to tears. “Are—” she choked, “are there rats… down there? Or snakes?”
I’m just a girl!
she wanted to yell, but she knew that revealing that would only add to the ordeals in store for her.

“No, no,” Horrabin assured her. “Any rats and snakes that make their way down here are devoured by other sorts of creatures. Sam, he doesn’t want to do it himself; push him in.”

“Wait.” Jacky carefully crouched and sat down on the edge of the hole, her sandalled feet dangling in the darkness. She hoped the others wouldn’t see how badly her legs were shaking under the chintz robe. “I’m going, I don’t need your… kind help.” She leaned forward and gripped the opposite edge. She paused to take a deep breath, then hiked her rump off the rim and swung down into the hole so that she hung by the grip of her hands. She looked down and could see nothing, just the most solid blackness she’d ever stared into. The floor could believably have been three inches below her toes, or three hundred feet.

“Kick his hands,” said Horrabin. She let go before anyone could. After a long second of free fall she landed on flexed knees on muddy ground, and managed not to let either kneecap clip her chin as she sat down hard. Something scurried away from her across the mud floor. Looking up, she saw the underside of the stone slab appear for one instant lit by the red torchlight, and then, with a shocking, eardrum-battering crash, fall back into place; for a few more moments there was a tiny square of dim red light above her, but then someone replaced the metal plate over the peek-hole and she was in featureless, disorienting darkness.

Though as tense as an over-wound clock, she didn’t move, just breathed silently through her open mouth and listened. When she’d dropped in, the close echoes of her fall had convinced her that the sunken room could be no more than fifteen feet across, but after a thousand silent breaths she was certain that it was far wider, in fact not a room at all but a vast subterranean plain. She seemed to hear wind in faraway trees, and every now and then a faint echo of distant singing, some sad chorus wandering far out across the plain … She grew doubtful of her memory of the stone roof above her—surely it was just the eternal black sky, in which any stars seen were—perhaps had always been—just meaningless flashes on the individual retina…

She was just beginning to wonder whether the sound of the surf had always simply been the soft roar of her own breathing projected onto a certain sort of agitation of water—and she knew that there were even more fundamental doubts and losses to be discovered—when an actual noise brought her out of her downward spiralling introspection. The noise, only a tiny grating and a clink, was startlingly loud in that hitherto silent abyss, and it brought the dimensions of her cell back to her original estimate of about fifteen feet across.

It had sounded like the peek-hole cover being removed, but when she looked up she couldn’t see anything, not even a square of lesser darkness. After a moment, though, she could hear breathing, and then sibilant but indistinct whispering.

“Who’s there?” asked Jacky cautiously.
It’s got to be only Dungy with my dinner,
she insisted to herself.

The whispering became quiet, aspirated giggles. “Let us in, darling,” came the whisper clearly. “Let my sister and me in.”

Tears were running down Jacky’s cheeks and she crawled to a wall and braced her back against it. “No,” she sobbed. “Get out of here.”

“We’ve got gifts for you, darling—gold and diamonds that people lost down the sewers since the long ago times. They’re all for you, in exchange for two things you won’t ever need again, like yer dollies after you growed up into a young lady.”

“Your eyes!” came a new, harsher whisper.

“Yes indeed,” hissed the first speaker. “Just your eyes, so that my sister and I can each have one, and we’ll climb up all the stairs there are and take a ship to the Haymarket and dance right under the sun.”

“Soon,” croaked the other.

“Oh yes, soon, darling, for the darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones.”

“Not in it,” put in the harsh voice.

“No, not in it, we mustn’t have my pretty sister and me caught forever in the stones that are hardened night! So open the door.”

Jacky crouched in her corner weeping almost silently, and hoping that when the stone slab had fallen into place it had jammed solidly, and couldn’t ever be opened.

Then there was a faint shuffling from far away, and the two voices chittered in consternation. “One of your brothers comes,” said the first voice. “But we’ll be back… soon.”

“Soon,” assented the other gravelly whisper. There followed a sound like leaves scuttering across pavement, and then Jacky could see, through the uncovered peek-hole, a waxing red glow, and she could hear Dungy nervously whistling the idiotic song Horrabin always made him sing.

After a few moments the torch and Dungy’s ravaged face appeared in the little hole. “How’d you move the cover aside?” the dwarf asked.

“Oh, Dungy,” said Jacky, getting to her feet and standing directly below, for at this point any human company was welcome, “I didn’t. Two creatures who claimed to be sisters moved it, and offered me treasures in exchange for my eyes.”

She saw the dwarf straighten and peer uneasily around; and remembering the extent of the chamber above, she knew how useless such an inspection was. “Yeah,” he said finally, “there are such things down here. Unsuccessful experiments of Horrabin’s—hell, there may even be some of mine still around.” He looked down into the pit again. “Doctor Romany and Horrabin think you’re a member of some group working against them. Is that the case?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Still, it’s enough if Horrabin does.” The dwarf hesitated. “If I… let you out, will you help me kill him?”

“I’d be delighted to, Dungy,” said Jacky sincerely.

“Promise?”

The dwarf could have asked nearly any price and Jacky would have paid it. “I promise, yes.”

“Good. But if we’re going to work together you’ve got to stop calling me Dungy. My name is Teobaldo. You call me ‘Tay.’”

The dwarf’s face disappeared, and Jacky heard a grunt of effort and then the stone slab lifted away from above her. He peered down through the wider hole, and she could see that he held a stout stick with a length of rope knotted around the middle of it and trailing away out of sight. “I hope you can climb a rope,” said Teobaldo.

“Of course,” said Jacky.
We’re about to find out whether I can or not,
she thought.

The dwarf laid the stick across the hole and pushed the rope into the pit. Excess loops piled up on the muddy ground at Jacky’s feet. She took a deep breath, stepped up to the dangling rope, locked her hands onto it as high as she could reach, and then began yanking herself up, hand over hand. In two seconds she had one hand, and a moment later both hands, locked on the stick.

“Grab the coping,” said Teobaldo, “and then I’ll move the stick and you can pull yourself out.”

Jacky discovered that she could also chin herself and scramble out of a hole with no footholds. When she’d got to her feet she stared somberly at her rescuer, for she remembered now where she’d heard the name Teobaldo. “You used to be in charge here,” she said quietly.

The old dwarf gave her a sharp glance as he hauled up the line and quickly coiled it around his palm and elbow. “That’s right.”

“I… heard you were tall, though.”

The dwarf set down the coiled rope and stood on the edge of the hole opposite from the stone lid. He flexed his arms and then said, reluctantly, “Push that down, will you? I’ll try to catch it and lower it into place quietly. I’m supposed to be bringing you your dinner, and I’d just have pitched it in through the peek-hole, so if they hear the slab fall they’ll all come running.”

Jacky braced herself against the block, wedged her sandalled feet into a channel between two paving stones, and heaved.

The dwarf caught it against his outstretched palms and let it fold him down to a low crouch. He took several deep breaths and then heaved it up a little, got out from under it and caught the descending edge in his hands. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of extreme effort, and Jacky could see sweat popping out on his forehead as he lowered it, his arms trembling; then he let go and leaped back. The slab dropped into place with a sound like a heavy door slamming.

Tay sat on the floor panting. “That’s… good,” he gasped. “They’ll… not have heard that.”

He got painfully to his feet. “I was tall once.” He pulled the torch out and looked across the slab at Jacky. “Can you do magic?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, we’ll trick him. I’ll go back upstairs now and tell him you want to talk—but not to Doctor Romany, who would only kill you. I’ll say you want to buy your freedom by telling Horrabin so much that he’ll be equal to—hell, stronger than—Romany. You’ve got Words of Power, I’ll say. He’s become a fair sorcerer, Horrabin has, in the eight years he’s been Romany’s right-hand man, but he’s always trying to get the old man to give him a Word of Power or two. Romany’s never done it. And we’ll say that your group knows all about Romany’s plans in Turkey; ‘cause that’s another thing that bothers Horrabin, that Romany won’t tell him anything except stuff he needs to know to run the London end of things. Yeah,” said the old man bleakly, “he’ll bite that hook. He’ll ask why you let yourself get captured if you’re such a whizzo witch, but I’ll just tell him that you said—I don’t know—that the stars are crooked for that stuff right now. Does that sound good?”

“I guess so, but why the complicated story?” Jacky asked nervously, already wishing she hadn’t promised to help him in this perilous undertaking.

“To get him down here alone,” snapped Tay, “without his guards. He wouldn’t want them to hear the Words of Power, or even be aware that he was making deals with Doctor Romany’s enemies.”

“And what will we do when he comes down here? Just kill him?” Though glad to be out of the pit, Jacky was feeling tense and distinctly ill. “Do you have a gun?”

“No, but a gun’s no good against him anyway. One of the spells Doctor Romany gave him is a bullet-deflecting charm. I’ve seen a pistol fired straight into the middle of his chest but the ball never touched him, just broke a window off to the side. And I’ve twice seen hard-thrust daggers simply jerk to a stop inches away from him, and shatter, as if he’d been wearing a suit of thick clear glass. The only time I’ve ever seen him cut was a couple of years ago when he went to Hampstead Heath to explain city ways to the gypsies—for at the time they thought the gypsies might be useful in organized burglary—and a gypsy that didn’t fancy the idea said Horrabin was the Beng, they tell me that means devil, and this gypsy leaped up, yanked a tent spike out of the ground and slammed it into the clown’s thigh. And it wasn’t deflected and it didn’t stop inches away from him—it tore right through, and the clown was bleeding like a ripped wineskin and almost fell off his stilts, and if the gypsy’d been able to get a second swing he’d have put Horrabin right out of the picture.”