The Anubis Gates

Dundee groped for the stopper and poked it back into the decanter neck. “Yes. You can go back to bed.”

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “Maybe I’ll stay here with you for a little while.”

“I don’t think—” he began hastily, but was interrupted by a knock at the hall door.

A muffled voice asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes, Joe, no problem,” Dundee called. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

“I could bring you a cup of rum coffee if you’d like, sir.”

“No thank you, Joe, I—” Dundee hesitated, glanced at his wife, then said, “Thank you, Joe, yes, that might help.”

Footsteps receded away down the carpeted hall, and Claire stood up.

Knowing she wouldn’t take him up on it now, Dundee raised his eyebrows and said, “I thought you were going to stay here for a bit.”

Claire’s mouth was a straight line. “You know how I feel about Joe.” She strode back into her own room and closed the door.

Dundee stood up, clawed the hair back from his forehead and crossed to the window. He pulled the curtain aside and stared down at the broad curve of St. James Street, the uniformly elegant housefronts all palely lit in amber by the flickering street lights. The sky was less black toward the east—it would be dawn soon, a clear Sunday in March.

Yes, my dear, he thought bleakly, I do know how you feel about Joe. But I certainly can’t explain to you why I need to support him and keep him around. I wish to hell he’d get a new body, though, so I could tell you I fired him and hired this new guy—but he likes Maturo’s body, and I don’t dare try to force him. After all, he’s going to be my partner long, long after you’ve died of old age, my dear… after I’ve taken the best of our sons, and then our grandsons, and then great-grandsons, getting richer and buying more and more during my successive stays in each descendant’s body, until by the time 1983 rolls around again I will be the secret owner of all the world’s important corporations. I’ll own whole cities—whole countries. And after 1983, when old J. Cochran Darrow disappears, I’ll be able to come out of hiding, step out from behind the screen of corporate links and overlaps and figureheads and front men, and I’ll damn well no exaggeration rule the goddamn world.

If I can keep Joe happy.

So you see, my poor bride of two months—during which time I still haven’t been able to consummate the marriage and set to work on the second generation of the Dundee line—you’re replaceable. Joe’s not.

The richest man in London sighed, let the curtain fall back across the window and sat down on the bed to wait for his rum coffee.

In the pantry Joe the butler had climbed up onto the counter—for though he’d been able to touch the ground without pain ever since he ceased practicing high level magic nine years ago, he seemed to be able to think better when slightly elevated—and he was slowly sifting his fingers through a bowl of gray-green powder.

I’ve learned a great deal from the nervous young master, he thought. I’ve learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you’ve got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

He’s got a lot of it. And he’s got a truly beautiful young wife who may as well be his sister, and who hates the way old Joe looks at her… though it seems to me somebody ought to look at her, aye, and do more than look. She’ll turn to vinegar in the cask if she’s not tapped.

Yessir, young Dundee, thought Joe, you’d still be a dying old man if it weren’t for me—and what do I get in return for setting you up? Employment as a butler. It’s not fair as it stands right now. Things aren’t balanced. But I’ve got a solution to everyone’s problems right here in this bowl. Miss Claire’s handsome young husband will become much more affectionate, and poor old butler Joe will commit suicide. Everybody will be happy.

Except, of course, the one who’s in Joe’s body when it hits the pavement.

He reached up to a shelf, took down a jar of ground cinnamon, and shook a lot of it over the powder in the bowl. He put the jar down and stirred the mixture with his fingers, then tapped it all into a big mug, added a hearty slug of rum, and then hopped to the floor, lifted the now ready pot of coffee and filled the mug with the steaming black brew.

He stirred it with a spoon as he walked down the hall and up the stairs. When he rapped quietly at Dundee’s door, Dundee told him to come in and set it on the table. Joe did, and then stepped back respectfully.

Dundee seemed preoccupied, and a faint frown rippled his unlined brow. “You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”

Joe considered it. “Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.”

Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal… stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action. What’s in this?”

“Cinnamon. If you don’t like it I could make another cup without.”

“No, it’s all right.” Dundee stirred it with the spoon and took another sip.

Joe waited for a while, but Dundee didn’t seem to have any further instructions, so he left the room and closed the door quietly.

* * *

“Hey, Snapp? That you?”

Jacky looked around. A stocky little dark-haired man sprinted lightly up to her from the other side of the street.

“Who’s that?” asked Jacky, not sounding interested.

“Humphrey Bogart, remember? Adelbert Chinnie, Doyle.” The man grinned excitedly. “I’ve been walking up and down this damn street for an hour, trying to find you.”

“What for?”

“My body—my real body—I’ve found it! The fellow that’s in it has grown a little moustache and he dresses and walks different, but it’s me!”

Jacky sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Humphrey. The body-switching man was caught and killed three months ago. So even if this person you’ve found really is in your old body—which is damned unlikely; he’d never fail twice in a row to kill the discarded host—there’s no conceivable way you can switch with him. There’s nobody around anymore that knows how to do the trick.” She shook her head wearily. “Sorry. Now if you’ll excuse me … “

The grin had fallen from Chinnie’s face. “He’s dead? Did—did you kill him? God damn it, you promised me —”

“No, I didn’t kill him. A crowd in an East End pub did. I heard about it next day.” She started to walk on.

“Wait a moment,” said Chinnie desperately. “You heard about it, you say. Have many people heard about it?”

Jacky stopped and said, with exaggerated patience, “Yes. Everybody—except you.”

“Right!” said Chinnie, beginning to get excited again. “If I was the body-switching man I’d do the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I went looking for depilatory shops, remember I said I would? Places where they take hair off so it won’t grow back. And I learned that there was one in Leadenhall Street where the people really could do it, something to do with electricity. The place closed down last October, but that doesn’t mean the process was lost. Hell, the body-changer might have bought the place. Anyway, if I was him, and now had the option of being able to stay in a body without turning into an orang-outang, why, I’d let myself be recognized, and caught, and then just as I was falling through the gallows trap, I’d switch into another body. Let ‘em all think they’d killed me so they’d call off the hunt.”