The Anubis Gates

Doyle screamed and scrabbled back across the floor away from the gleeful thing—with difficulty, for the floor had again begun its rising and falling tricks. He heard a slow, tooth-jarring drumbeat from somewhere, and as huge drops of acid began to form on the walls, break surface tension and trickle down, he realized too late that the entire house was one living organism, and was about to digest him.

* * *

He woke up on the floor, profoundly exhausted and depressed, staring with no interest at the drops of dried blood spattered in front of his eyes. His tongue ached like a split tooth, but he didn’t think it was anything urgent. He knew that he had survived the poisoning and the hallucinations, and he knew that eventually he’d be glad of it.

His face itched, and he brought a hand across to scratch it—then halted. Though the hallucinations had passed, the hand was still covered with golden fur.

Instantly the explanation, the explanation of all this, that had been in the back of his mind came to him, and he knew it was true. It increased his depression a little, for it meant more work for him when he gathered the energy to get up and begin dealing with things. Just to confirm it formally he felt his face. Yes, as he’d suspected, his face too was bushily pelted. All I needed, he thought sourly.

Obviously he was in the latest of Dog-Face Joe’s cast-off bodies; and Joe himself was off God knew where in Doyle’s own.

And whose body, he wondered, was this one I’m in? Why, Steerforth Benner’s, of course. Benner mentioned that he had lunch with old Joe a week ago, and Joe must have fed him whatever mixture of alchemical herbs it is that unscrews the hinges of people’s souls, and then on Saturday made the switch.

So, Doyle reasoned, it was Dog-Face Joe, in Benner’s pirated body, that I met Saturday at Jonathen’s. No wonder he … didn’t seem to be himself. And of course that’s why he was so anxious to have me eat or drink something there—so he could give me a dose of the soul-switch stuff; and when I didn’t want anything, he had to send me outside to look for a doubtless fictitious man so that he could get a cup of tea, fling his filthy leaves into it, and harass me into drinking it.

Despite his weary apathy, Doyle shuddered when it came to him that the red ape that he had seen shot that day had been Benner himself, the poor bastard, carelessly shoehorned into Dog-Face Joe’s last body.

So now, Doyle thought, he’s got my body and is free to go see Darrow and make the deal, without having to cut Benner or me in at all.

Doyle sat up, permitting himself a loud groan. His mouth and nose and throat were crusted and rusty-tasting with dried blood, and he realized with a dull sort of amusement that good old Joe the Ape Man must chew the hell out of his own tongue just before vacating the body, to make sure its new tenant wouldn’t be able, in the short time before the poison hammered him down, to say anything that might make people wonder.

He stood up—a little dizzily because of his new, increased height—and looked around. He was not surprised to find scissors, a brush and straight razor and a cake of gray soap on a shelf by the bed—Dog-Face Joe probably bought a new razor every week. There was also a mirror lying face down on the shelf, and Doyle picked it up and, apprehensively, looked into it.

My God, he thought, as much awed as frightened, I look like the wolf man—or Chewbacca—or the guy in that French movie of Beauty and the Beast—or no, I’ve got it, the Cowardly Lion of Oz.

Thick golden fur billowed in waves down over his chin, and outward across his cheeks to become exaggerated sideburns, and snaked upward along his nose to join the upside down waterfall of luxuriant golden fur that began at the eyebrow ridges and swept in a wild mane right up over the top of his head and hung down shaggily to his broad shoulders. Even his neck and the area under his jaw were thickly furred.

Well, he thought, picking up the scissors and stretching out a lock of his forehead hair, no point in delaying. Snip. There’s one handful of it gone. I hope I still remember how to use a straight razor.

An hour later he had clipped and shaved his forehead—being careful to leave eyebrows—and his nose and cheeks, and he decided, before moving on to the tricky task of shaving his hands, to see how he looked. He leaned the mirror up against the wall at a different angle, stepped back and cocked an eyebrow at it.

His chest was suddenly hollow, so that his quickening heartbeat echoed in there like thumps on a drum. After the initial shock he began reasoning it out, and he almost wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. For of course I did go to the Jamaica Coffee House on Tuesday the eleventh, he marveled, and as a matter of fact I did write—or at least copy from memory—”The Twelve Hours of the Night” there. And I did stay at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane. And this body did shoot one of the Dancing Apes in Jonathen’s Saturday. It hasn’t been an abduction or an alternate 1810 at all.

For Doyle recognized the face in the mirror. It was Benner’s, of course, but with the wild mane of hair and the Old Testament prophet beard, the new, haggard lines in the cheeks and forehead and the somewhat haunted expression of the eyes, it was also, beyond any doubt, the face of William Ashbless.

BOOK TWO—The Twelve Hours of the Night

CHAPTER 8

“He told me that in 1810 he met me as he thought in St. James Street, but we passed without speaking.—He mentioned this—and it was denied as impossible—I being then in Turkey—A day or two after he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way—”there”—said he “is the man I took for Byron”—his brother instantly answered “why it is Byron & no one else.”—But this is not all—I was seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the Enquirers after the King’s health—then attacked by insanity. Now —at this very period, as nearly as I could make out—I was ill of a strong fever at Patras… “

—Lord Byron, in a letter to John Murray, October 6, 1820

Though it had been difficult to find all the little motors and get them correctly wound, and to adjust the air vents around the dozens of concealed candles, the chest-high village Bavarois, as Monsieur Diderac had described the appallingly expensive toy, seemed to be ready to perform. All it needed was for the candles to be lit and the master switch, disguised as a miniature tree stump, to be clicked over to the right.

Doctor Romany sat back and stared morosely at the contraption. Damnable Richard had wanted to start it up so his monkey could see it work before the yags arrived, but Romany was afraid that a thing so complicated mightn’t work more than once, and he refused. He now reached out and gently touched the head of a tiny carved woodsman, and gasped in dismay when the little figure marched several inches down his painted path, swinging his toothpick-hafted axe and making a sound like a clock clearing its throat.

Apep eat me, he thought fretfully, I hope I haven’t broken it. Why have we all had to decline so, anyway? I remember when the yags demanded fine chess sets and sextants and telescopes for their services. And now what? Damn toys.

And they were never as respectful as they ought to be, he reflected ruefully, but now they’re downright rude.

He stood up and shook his head. The tent was murky with incense smoke and he crossed bobbingly to the