The Doorkeepers (17 page)

“So we can't go back until the same time tomorrow, at least?”

“Not now, guvnor. And if you and your good lady don't want to end up as two matching dogs' dinners, you'd better come along with me and San here, quickish.”

Josh hesitated. With the Hooded Men bearing down on them, he badly wanted to get them both back to the “real” London. But it looked as if they had run out of time. The dogs were barking and the drummers were drumming, and even if the thin young man weren't telling the truth, they still didn't have any candles.

Josh could hear the high excitement in the dogs' voices, and he knew exactly what they were yapping about. These were dogs who could smell that their quarry was close. These were dogs who smelled blood.

“How did they pick up our scent?” asked Nancy.

“Simple, missus. You lot always smell different. I can smell you myself. Soap and scent and death, that's what you lot always smell of. Even the geezers.”

The drums came racketing nearer. The Hooded Men reached the corner of Carey Street and began to ricochet like grapeshot off the Bankruptcy Court buildings.

“Josh,”
said Nancy, urgently.

Without warning the dogs came sliding and snarling around the corner with their handlers barely able to hold them back. As soon as they saw Josh and Nancy and the two youths, however, the handlers let out whistles of encouragement and snapped the dogs off their leads. Josh didn't recognize the breed, but he could see that they had the barrel chests and unlockable jaws of
pit bull terriers. They came bounding across the street barking insanely – spit flying, claws scrabbling on the cobbles. One of them launched itself toward Nancy as if it had been shot out of a catapult. It knocked her down to the sidewalk and started to tear at the fringes of her leather coat.

The Burmese-looking boy turned and ran up Star Yard as fast as he could; but the thin young man stayed where he was, drawing out a triangular-bladed craft-knife and crouching down in front of the dogs, daring them to go for him. “Come on, pooches! Who wants their lights cut out?”

Josh twisted around and seized the collar of the dog that was raging on top of Nancy. He wrenched it clear off the ground and slapped it across the side of the head, twice. The dog went into a frothing fury, snarling and clawing and whipping its body from side to side, but Josh raised it right up to eye level and pointed his finger at it and said,
“Stop.”

He had no idea if his usual dog hysteria management was going to work. Most of the dogs that he had dealt with before had been the neurotic pets of frustrated middle-aged women from Marin County. They hadn't been trained to rip people's hearts out, the way this animal obviously had, and he had never in his life encountered any animal in such a rage.

“Stop,”
Josh told it. But the dog kept on snarling and twisting and trying to take a bite out of Josh's forearm.

“Stop!”
Josh yelled at it; and quite unexpectedly, it stopped, even though it was still swinging around in the air and half-strangling in its collar.
“Stop,”
Josh said again, much more quietly. He turned around, stretching out his right hand, and pointed one by one at the jumping, barking animals.

“Listen to me!”
he yelled at them.
“You are going to be calm!”
Then, as their barking diminished, “You are going to be calm. You are going to be reasonable. Listen to me.
Don't move.
You are going to think this through.”

The thin young man came backing toward him, his knees bent, still waving his craft-knife from side to side. He glanced at Josh but he obviously couldn't think of anything to say. The eight attack dogs were now milling around in front of them, their tongues hanging out like red neckties, confused. Their
handlers were walking across the street now, their black capes billowing, snapping their leads.

The drummers beat a long, savage roll and then they were silent. They opened their ranks so that the Hooded Men could walk between them, with their swords raised.

“Go on, Max!” shouted one of the dog-handlers; and the other one shouted too, and whipped his dogs across their backs with his lead.

Josh kept his hand raised. In spite of the noise, in spite of the confusion, he tried to radiate calm, as if he were the center of all tranquility. “You are going to stay where you are until I tell you to move. You feel happier, being calm. You feel much more fulfilled.”

Strangely, he could feel the same rapport that he felt with the overfed lapdogs of Marin County, but this was even stronger, in a way. These were
real
dogs, little more than wild, and they had never been treated as if they were human – as if they were capable of thinking for themselves. It was a new experience for them, and they were bewildered.

“They're bewildered,” he told Nancy.

“They're
bewildered?” said the thin young man. “I'm bleeding
mystified.”

Josh dropped the dog that had attacked Nancy and it shook itself and trotted back toward its handler. The man threw back the hood of his cloak. He was shaven-headed and scarred, with a heavy gray moustache, and half of one of his ears was missing. Without taking his eyes off Josh, he reached down and looped the dog's lead around its neck, and twisted it tight. Then, with a grunt, he started to throttle it.

The dog made a thick choking noise and struggled wildly, but the handler kicked it in the stomach. He kicked it again and again, until the animal was limp, and then he picked it up by its hind legs, swung it over his head, and smashed its skull against the granite curb. There was a hollow
crack!
and bright red blood and bright beige brains were spattered all over the other dogs, who visibly flinched. “Go!” the handler screamed at them,
“Go!
Or the same thing's going to happen to you!”

The dogs hesitated, confused, yipping and yapping and thrashing their tails.

“Go!” screamed the handler; and it was now that the Hooded Men approached, their sackcloth faces blank and threatening, their swords held high.

“Take them!”
ordered a harsh, thick voice. Josh couldn't tell who it was, but one of the Hooded Men kicked the dog's carcass to one side and deliberately stepped on its shattered head, so that its one remaining brown eye was squeezed out of its socket.

The thin young man took two or three steps back. “I hope you're light on your feet, missus,” he told Nancy.

“Let's just get out of here, shall we? You direct us, we'll follow.”

“They'll have you, if they catch you. You'll wish you was dead, believe me.”

The Hooded Men were beginning to circle them now, but they were playing their attack very cautiously. Their swords were very long, thin-bladed, with plain cruciform handles, and they looked extremely sharp. Because of their hoods, their faces seemed even more threatening, like scarecrows that had come to life, to seek their revenge.

One of them said, in a muffled voice, “In the name of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth you are detained for trespass. Come quiet, and you will have nothing to fear, so help me God. Resist, and your fate will be the talk of all damnation.”

Josh kept his hand raised and his eye on the dogs. Their handlers were whipping them now, and cursing them, and he knew that he couldn't control them for very much longer. “When I say ‘run',” said Josh, “don't even think about it – go like hell.” He paused for two or three seconds, and then he shouted,
“Run
!
”

Nancy galloped up Star Yard with her buckskin fringes flying, and even though she was wearing high-heeled boots Josh found it almost impossible to keep up with her. The thin young man was right behind him, his coat whirling up. The dogs were so close that they were almost biting
at their heels, barking hysterically, but all the barking and the shouting of their handlers and the jingling of swords and scabbards were drowned out by a shattering drumbeat.
Ratta-tatta-ratta-tatta-tat!

As they rounded the first corner, the thin young man said, “In here!” and pushed open a flaking, black-painted door. Nancy had run so far ahead that Josh had to give her a sharp dog-whistle to call her back.

The thin young man slammed the door behind them and jammed it with a broken chair. “Where does this lead?” asked Josh, as he stumbled along a hallway stacked with faded rolls of floral wallpaper, paint-caked buckets and stepladders.

“Upstairs, guvnor,” panted the thin young man. “Upstairs and over the roof. Dogs can't follow you through thin air.”

Gasping for breath, they climbed up one bare-boarded flight of stairs after another. There was a strong smell of damp and mildew in the building and as they climbed higher, Josh could see that half of the slates were missing, and the attic was open to the sky. On either side they passed derelict rooms with no floorboards, still decorated with faded wallpaper, their fireplaces clogged with ash.

Four floors below them, they heard the front door being kicked open, and the wild barking of dogs. The thin young man said, “Follow me,” and led them up a narrow staircase into the attic. Again, all of the floorboards were missing, and they had to cross the attic by balancing from one joist to the next, taking care not to catch their feet on any protruding nails. They could look down and see the rooms two and even three floors lower down, and hear the clattering of dogs coming up the stairs.

The far side of the roof was already stripped of tiles, and the wind made gusty, fluffing noises through the rafters. The thin young man led them out on to the narrow parapet, ninety feet above Chancery Lane. “Oh God, Josh,” said Nancy. “You know how much I hate heights.”

“You climbed up Spirit Rock, didn't you?” Josh reminded her. “That was three times higher than this.”

“That was different. I had my ancestors around me then, to catch me if I fell.”

Josh gripped her hands and kissed her forehead. “I'll catch you, if you fall.”

They stepped out on to the parapet, one after the other, with the thin young man leading the way. There was nothing between them and the street below except for a low wall of sooty bricks, and they didn't look very safe. They could see the tops of buses and taxis and people hurrying along the sidewalk. Although it was such a pearly, overcast day they could see right over the rooftops of the Public Record Office toward the misty dome of St Paul's, and the twin Gothic towers of Tower Bridge. Josh was surprised to see that there were no tall buildings in the City – no NatWest building, no Canary Wharf.

“Hurry up,” snapped the thin young man. “We ain't got time for seeing the sights.”

He balanced along to the very end of the parapet, and Josh and Nancy followed him, their arms spread wide. “Eat your heart out, Blondin,” said Josh, his heart thumping. Nancy gave a nervous, hysterical laugh.

When the thin young man reached the corner of the building, he crouched down behind the parapet and beckoned them to join him. They looked over the edge and saw the Hooded Men gathered in Star Yard, directly below them. A few curious people were standing around, but only a few, and when the Hooded Men turned their heads toward them they covered their faces with their hands and hurried off.

“Who
are
these characters?” asked Josh. “Are they like cops, or what?”

“Cops?”

“Policemen. Bobbies. Is that what they are?”

The thin young man didn't answer him, but stood up, and pointed to the parapet of the building opposite. It was about a foot higher than the building on which they were standing, and it had a curved coping on top of it, encrusted with pigeon-droppings. In fact there was a matronly pigeon sitting on it not far away, blinking at them with suspicion.

“We've got to jump,” said the thin young man.

“You're kidding me,” Josh retorted.

“It's the only way, guvnor. It's jump, or give yourself up to
the Hoodies. Do you know what they do? They eat the pancreas out of you, while you're still alive. Or else they make you play the Holy Harp.”

“The Holy Harp? What the hell's that?”

“I'll give you the SP later, guvnor. But, believe me, you don't really want to find out. Not first-hand, anyway.”

Nancy gripped Josh's arm. “I can't do this, Josh. I can't jump across there. It's much too far.”

They heard shouting inside the derelict building, and the noise of doors being broken and loose floorboards tossed aside. And above it all, the dogs barking. Josh could hear that their handlers had worked them up into a frenzy of fear and anger. They knew that if they didn't catch their quarry, they would be beaten or even killed. They were hunting for their own survival and nobody could pacify them now.

“Come on, Nance. Those dogs are going to rip us apart.”

“Can't we just give ourselves up? We haven't
done
anything, after all.”

“Ha, ha,” said the thin young man. “You don't think that you have to
do
anything, do you? The Hoodies will carve you up, guilty or innocent.”

“Nance,” Josh urged her. “You have to make this jump, whether you're scared out of your mind or not.” He lifted his finger to her. “Concentrate. That's all you have to do. Concentrate on the wall at the other side.”

She stood up on top of the parapet, on the very edge. The wind lifted her hair and made her bandanna flutter. Josh heard a banging sound inside the attic, and a handler appeared with two dogs shrieking for breath on the end of a leash.

“Jump!”
he shouted at Nancy. She stumbled in her boot-heels and jumped. She managed to catch the top of the parapet opposite, but only just, and she almost lost her grip altogether.

“Josh
!
”
she screamed.

Josh shouted, “I'm coming! Find yourself a toehold!”

“What toehold?” she said, her boots scrabbling at the brickwork. “Josh, there isn't a toehold!”