The Doorkeepers Page 14

Nancy said, “Why, Josh? He was out to mug us!”

  “He helped us escape, didn’t he? And he knows a whole lot more about this world than we do. He can help us, Nance. We can’t just leave him here!”

  Nancy shook her head. But whatever she thought, it was too late, because the thin young man suddenly launched himself toward them, his arms outstretched. At the same instant, one of the dogs jumped after him, and caught his coat in its teeth.

  Josh stretched out with both hands and snatched at the young man’s wrists as he stumbled against the parapet. The dog, still clinging to the hem of his coat, was thrown against the wall. It didn’t yelp, though, or open its jaws.

  There was a moment when Josh thought he was going to let the young man fall. He was holding his full weight, as well as the weight of the dog, and the young man’s wrists were gradually sliding between his fingers. But then he looked down at the dog, and the dog looked balefully back up at him, and their eyes locked.

  “Let go!” Josh ordered.

  The dog growled and swung from side to side on the tails of the young man’s coat, but it wouldn’t release its grip.

  “Didn’t you hear me, you disobedient mutt? Let go!”

  On the edge of the building opposite, the dog-handler shouted out, “Goethe! Hang on! You hear me, Goethe? Hang on, you miserable cur, or I’ll have your coddled brains for breakfast!”

  “Christ, I’m slipping,” said the thin young man. He glanced down at the paving stones far below him and then he looked back up at Josh in desperation. “God save me! Please, God, I won’t ever steal again.”

  At that moment, the dog-handlers started to throw lumps of timber and broken slates at them. One piece of wood hit Josh on the arm, and a slate hit him on the side of the head, cutting his ear. Blood ran down the side of his cheek and dripped on to the young man’s face.

  A heavy piece of rafter hit the thin young man on the back. He shouted out in pain, and lurched around, and his right hand broke free from Josh’s fingers. Josh clawed the air, but he couldn’t reach his wrist again. The young man was dangling now from one wrist only, with a dog hanging from his coat, and Josh knew from experience that it could take two men and a crowbar to pry that dog’s jaws open.

  Josh ducked his head as he was again pelted with slates and lumps of asphalt. Nancy, crouched behind the parapet, said, “Josh! You’re going to have to let him go!”

  “How can I?” said Josh, one eye closed against the blood. “Jesus, Nance, if I let him go he’s going to die!”

  He shouted down to the dog again. “Goethe! Are you listening to me, Goethe? You’re a great dog, Goethe, you’ve done real good! Why don’t you bark for me, Goethe? How about barking for me? Come on, Goethe! Bark!”

  “Goethe! Silence!” his handler retaliated.

  But Josh and the dog were staring at each other, and Josh knew that he had captured its complete attention. “Bark, Goethe,” he repeated. “Bark and show me what a good dog you are.”

  The dog hesitated, but then it barked, just once – and once was enough. It tried to snap at the thin young man’s coat-tails again, but it missed, and it dropped howling all the way to the ground, its paws still scrabbling for something to cling on to. It hit the flagstones with a flat, barely audible thud. Josh saw its blood running across the paving and felt worse than Judas.

  He tugged at the young man’s wrist, and pulled him up far enough to grab his other hand. Nancy seized his coat collar, and between the two of them they managed to heave him up over the parapet and on to the roof. He lay on his back for a moment, saying, “God, oh God. I thought I was ready for the cold cook then. I swear it. I really thought I was brown bread.”

  “They’re breaking into the building downstairs,” said Josh. “We have to get out of here pronto.”

  The thin young man sat up, and he was immediately showered in fragments of broken slate and pieces of brick. “Right, then. Let’s go. It’s not so difficult from here. We’ll be in Lincoln’s Inn Fields before the Hoodies even reach the second floor.”

  Keeping their heads down, they negotiated their way between the chimneys and crossed the roof to the other side. The dog-handlers carried on pelting them with slates and rafters. A dead pigeon came cartwheeling across, thumping against Nancy’s back. But when the dog-handlers realized that they were getting away, they turned back from the building’s edge. They began to run downstairs again, shouting out to the Hooded Men to hurry.

  Josh and Nancy jumped across to the next building, which was lower; and then to the next, and the next. A whole row of rooftops were connected by iron ladders, and then there was some more jumping, and a climb down a fire escape. By the time they reached the corner of Serle Street, the shouting and the drumming were nothing but echoes in another street.

  The thin young man led them down the dusty, neglected staircases of another old building, and then they were out in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and across the gardens, just as it started to rain.

  Thirteen

  “If I can trust you with my life,” said the thin young man, lighting the gas under a battered kettle, “I think I can probably trust you with my name.” He came back into the junk-filled living room and held out his hand. “Simon Cutter. The famous Simon Cutter, of the Clerkenwell Cutters. Like, if you get into an occasional spot of bother anywhere in Clerkenwell, or Holborn, or Finsbury Park, all you have to do is say the magic words, ‘I’m a mate of the famous Simon Cutter,’ and all your problems will melt away like …” He thought for a moment, his hand still extended, and then he said, “Margarine.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” said Josh. “But I’m doing my best not to get into any spots of bother anyplace at all. Even occasional spots of bother.”

  “Ah, but you never know, do you? Bother is one of those unpredictable things. Like you’re walking along the street minding your own business, tooty-too, tooty-too, and whallop!”

  Josh looked around the room. “You lived here long?”

  “Three years. I’ve been wanting to move, but you know … it’s all my stuff.”

  From Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Simon had led them through the backstreets to a two-bedroomed apartment on top of a brown-painted furniture shop in Gray’s Inn Road. It was a gloomy, crowded place to live, its windows covered with amber blinds and its floors stacked with every conceivable kind of clutter: suitcases, chairs, empty fishtanks, umbrellas, typewriters, stags’ heads, gramophones, boxes of gramophone records and teetering stacks of books. There was more bric-à-brac in the bedrooms, including a mahogany washstand and the front wheel from a penny-farthing bicycle. In the bathroom there was a stuffed ocelot and a Zulu spear. The kitchen overlooked a shadowy ventilation shaft, where, against all odds, a sycamore tree had managed to grow out of a crevice in the bricks, twenty-five feet above the ground. Every available shelf and counter in the kitchen was crammed with jars and pots and coffee percolators and cheese graters and extraordinary patent devices for coring apples.

  San was there, too, standing in the corner in a bronze satin bathrobe with dragons embroidered on it, ironing a black silk shirt and listening to the radio, which was turned down to a mutter, interspersed with occasional bursts of laughter.

  “You’re quite a collector,” said Josh, picking up one of the books and leafing through it. A British Traveller’s Guide To Far-Flung Destinations, published 1971.

  “Well, yes, but I don’t collect it conscious-like. It just a-coomalates. Every time I walk out the door I seem to a-coomalate more and more stuff. I’ve just got so much … a-coomalated stuff.”

  “So, what, you’re a dealer?”

  “You could say that. Somebody wants something, I can usually oblige. And they’re always crying out for anything from Purgatory. Watches, pens, perfumes. They’ll even buy those mobile phones, not that they ever work.”

  “Excuse me? What did you say? Purgatory?”

  Simon looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. I know you people don’t call it that.”r />
  Nancy said, “You think we came from Purgatory?”

  Simon gave her a cautious shrug.

  “You think we’re dead? You think we’re spirits, who didn’t quite make it to heaven?”

  Simon shrugged again, and in the kitchen the kettle began to whistle like a crushed canary. Nancy lifted Simon’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Do I feel dead to you?”

  “I don’t know. I never really touched nobody from Purgatory before. Not intimate-like.”

  “But we’re walking around and talking to you,” said Josh. “Dead people don’t normally do that, do they?”

  “Ah! Yes! But there’s dead, ain’t there, and then there’s gone beyond. You people from Purgatory, you’re not the same as your run-of-the-mill cold meat, are you? You’ve been sent back to give it another go. Too bent for heaven and too straight for hell, that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s a great idea. I only wish it was true. The trouble is, that particular description would fit seventy-five percent of the population of Marin County.”

  Simon took the kettle off the gas. “So you didn’t come from Purgatory? You look like all the other people I’ve seen, what come from Purgatory. Same kind of clothes.”

  “Have you seen many others?”

  “Not a lot. Six or seven every year. Sometimes only one or two. One year none. And if I’m not sharpish, the Hoodies get to them first, and then they scuttle them off before I get the chance to … well, you know. Before I get the chance to say ‘how-d’you-do’.”

  “You mean before you get the chance to rob them?”

  “I take umbrage to that, guvnor. I’m a collector, not a foin.”

  “Oh, a collector. I see. But is that what the Hoodies tell you, that these people come from Purgatory?”

  “The Hoodies don’t tell nobody nothing. The Hoodies is the Hoodies. Everybody learns about Purgatory, from school. A Child’s Book of Simple Truth.”

  “So you’ve always believed that people who come through the door come from Purgatory? Since you were small?”

  Simon poured out tea, and nodded.

  “Haven’t they ever told you any different? The people themselves?”

  “I never talked to a Purgatorial before. Not conversational.”

  “You mean you just robbed them and that was it?”

  “Be fair, guvnor, I didn’t have time for the finer points of parlary, did I? It was touch-and-go to fleece them before the Hoodies showed up. And oftener than not, the Hoodies got there first. Or some other chancer.”

  “Tell me something about the doors. Is there any way that you can tell that somebody’s just about to come through?”

  “It’s like dowsing for water, guvnor. You got to have the feel for it.”

  “So you can tell? And that means you can be lying in wait for anybody who steps out?”

  “It’s possible, yes, guvnor. There are ways and ways. But it ain’t all that easy. The only guaranteed way to catch the Purgatorials one hundred percent is to stand by the door twenty-four hours through the day and never get no kip. But – if you know what you’re looking for, you can see the door change. Something in the substance of it, like that wobbly air you get, when the roads are hot. You came through it: you must have seen it for yourself. Me and San, we walked through the Yard today, and we saw the door was different-like, just the faintest of wobbles, and that’s when we knew that somebody had opened it. That’s why we was hanging around, waiting for you. Purgatorials generally come back to the door they come through, given an hour or two, although I never know why.”

  “The Hooded Men … were they aware that we had come through, too?”

  “Oh, yes. They always know. That’s why they was coming after you. Don’t ask me how they know. But nobody comes through them doors without the Hoodies being there in five or ten minutes at the most. Then phwwitt! that’s it, they’re catched and off to wherever they take them.”

  “But if the Hoodies don’t want us here,” said Nancy, “why don’t they simply close the doors off? Brick them up, so nobody can get through?”

  “Because bricking them up wouldn’t make no difference. The doors is always there, even if you build a church on top of them. I know for a fact that one of the doors is right slap bang in the middle of the river these days, even though it must have been on dry land, when it was first opened up.”

  “You know where all the other doors are?” asked Josh.

  “I wish I did. There’s one at Southwark, I do know that, on the corner of Bread Street and Watling Street. My old china Crossword Lenny looks after it, so to speak. I heard there was some up west, too, but as for their precise whereabouts, you’d have to ask an expert on doors and their precise whereabouts, if there is such a person.”

  They cleared books and magazines out of the seats of the huge sagging armchairs and sat back and sipped their tea out of thick British Railways cups. Josh was beginning to feel exhausted – not only from their chase across the rooftops of Chancery Lane, but because this world in which he and Nancy had found themselves was so familiar, and yet so disturbingly different. It felt different. There were different noises, different smells, different sounds; and when Simon and San talked together, they used words that Josh had never heard of, and referred to events that had never happened. Not in the “real” world, anyhow. He thought, even if you went to Beijing, you could say “McDonald’s!” or “Julia Roberts!” and people would know what you were talking about. Here, they simply didn’t exist, and never had.

  “What if I said to you, ‘the Beatles’?” Josh asked Simon.

  Simon looked uneasy. “The beetles? I don’t understand.”

  “The Beatles. The 1960s pop group.”

  “Pop? Group? What’s that?”

  “You’ve never heard of the Beatles?”

  “Never.”

  “The Rolling Stones? Glenn Campbell? Hootie and the Blowfish? The Doors?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Nancy said, “All right … let me ask you something more serious. What is the name of the current President of the United States?”

  “The United States of what?”

  “The United States of America, of course.”

  “Oh, America! Well, America doesn’t have a president. They have a Lord Protector, like us.”

  “No President? No White House?”

  Simon was completely bemused. “Why don’t you have some more tea?” he asked them.

  “Don’t you British have royalty any more?” Josh wanted to know. “What about the Queen and Prince Charles and the Duke of Edinburgh?”

  “The last king was Charles I. Sixteen-something. Chopped his bonce off, didn’t they?”

  “So who ruled England after him?”

  “The same people that run it now. The Commonwealth.”

  “And America is being run by the Commonwealth?”

  “Of course.”

  Josh said, “What about World War Two?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “You’ve never heard of World War Two? When America and Britain got together and fought against the Germans?”

  “We never fought the Germans,” said Simon, as if the very idea of it was totally ridiculous.

  “What about the Japanese? Did you ever hear of Pearl Harbor? How about Hiroshima, and the atom bomb?”

  “Sorry, guvnor.”

  “All right, then, let’s go back a bit. World War One? No? Fighting in the trenches? No? How about the Titanic? No? You must have heard of the American Civil War, north versus south. You must have heard of Abraham Lincoln.”

  “No … I don’t think so. I’ve heard of Lincoln cars, they’re American, aren’t they?”

  Josh sat back. “OK, tell me. What was the most important worldwide event of the past decade? In your opinion?”

  Simon sucked in his breath. “Whooo … that’s a tough one.”

  “You know what it was?” put in San, still meticulously ironing, and hanging up his shirt. �
��It was Miss Burma, winning the Miss World Competition.”

  “Listen to him!” said Simon, in mock disgust. “No … I reckon the most important thing that happened was them two geezers flying round the world in a Zeppelin. It won’t be long before anybody can fly practically anywhere they like.”

  “How about that?” said Josh, turning to Nancy. “No World War One … no World War Two. I guess that’s why everything’s sixty years out of date. No jet engines. No antibiotics. There’s nothing like a war to speed up new inventions.”

  “It’s all wars, is it, where you come from?” said Simon.

  “Not entirely. There hasn’t been a major war in over half a century. And at least we don’t have Hooded Men.”

  “You don’t? What do you do about the Catholics?”

  “We don’t do anything about the Catholics. Being a Roman Catholic isn’t a crime, where we come from.”

  “Blimey.” Simon rummaged in his coat pocket and took out a small cream-colored pack of Player’s Weights cigarettes. He lit one and blew a series of smoke rings. “Seems like a bloody dodgy kind of place to me. All wars and popery.”

  Josh looked down at the dog-torn hemline of Simon’s overcoat. “Depends on your definition of bloody dodgy.”

  San finished his ironing and went into the kitchen. “I hope everybody’s hungry,” he said; and without waiting for an answer he started chopping onions.

  “You’d better kip here tonight,” said Simon. “The Hoodies’ll be out looking for you still. Tomorrow you can go back through the door and find yourselves some decent clobber. Bring me some pens and some watches and anything else that you can think of and I’ll get you some dosh and anything else you need. Maps, tube passes, little black books.”

  “Little black books?”

  Simon reached in his pocket and produced a small, worn-out, leather-bound book. “The Sayings of Oliver Cromwell. Everybody has to carry one. Do you know what my favorite saying is? ‘Necessity hath no law’. In other words, guvnor, what you has a need of, you furnishes yourself with.”

  “Tomorrow I want to go to Kaiser Gardens and Wheatstone Electrics,” said Josh. “Maybe you’d like to come along and help us. You know, act as our scout.”