The Doorkeepers (20 page)

“So what now?” said Josh.

“Nothing in particular,” said Simon. “If he goes back to
Burma, he'll be hung up by his heels and his tongue cut out. If he stays here, he'll have to keep away from the Hoodies and go on scavenging for a living with yours truly. Not a pretty choice. But I think he'd rather scavenge than swing, wouldn't you, San?”

San smiled, and nodded. He had such grace that Josh found it hard to believe that anybody would want to persecute him.

“I'll tell you something,” said Simon. “He's got the lightest fingers that I've ever seen. He could be halfway to Holland Park with your best braces before your trousers fell down.”

“You must miss your family so badly,” said Nancy.

“Love always brings pain,” San told her, with candle flames shining in his dark brown eyes. “If a thing doesn't hurt, then what is its value?”

By the time they had finished their meal, it was growing dark outside, and the small square of sky that Josh could see from the kitchen window was the color of royal blue ink. San washed the plates and Nancy dried them, while Josh and Simon talked about tomorrow. Josh was worried that once they had gone back through the door to find themselves some suitable clothes, they wouldn't be able to find their way back again.

“You still don't believe this is really real, do you, guvnor?” said Simon. His pronunciation was almost Dickensian – “veely veel”.

Josh leaned back in his armchair. He was so tired that he felt that he was hallucinating. “No … I guess that's the problem. It's more like a dream. I keep thinking that I'm going to wake up and none of this has happened.”

“You wait till you find the toe-rag that killed your sister. Then it won't seem like a dream.”

They were still talking when they heard dogs barking outside; and doors slamming; and windows slamming, too.

“What's the matter?” asked Josh. San went to the window and peered through the split-bamboo blind.

“I can't see nothing. Whoever it is, they're staying well out of sight.”

There was more banging, more barking. Then suddenly,
within the building, they heard the tearing, creaking sound of a door being forced off its hinges, and glass breaking, and men shouting. Footsteps came running upstairs. Another door broke, and Josh heard a flat, uncompromising bang as it dropped to the floor.

“They've found us,” said Simon. “God knows how, but they have.”

“How the hell did they find us here?”

“Grasses,” said Simon, contemptuously. “The Hoodies only have to offer them a couple of quid, and they'll sell their maiden aunts.”

San said, “I'll hold the door. You get out on the roof.”

The access to the skylight was tiny: a small window not more than two feet square, in the center of the living-room ceiling. Simon dragged the coffee table underneath it and then balanced a chair on top. He mounted the chair and banged at the tiny window with his clenched fist until he managed to dislodge it. A shower of rust and leaves came down, as well as a tiny fledgling, no more than two days old, already green with decay.

“You first,” said Simon, taking Nancy's hand. “Climb out on the roof and keep your head down. Wait by the chimney stack.”

Josh said, “You don't have to come with us, either of you. You haven't done anything wrong, have you?”

“You're joking, guvnor. San's a political fugitive and I've got a drum full of other people's property. They'll Holy-Harp us without a blink.”

Heavy footsteps reverberated on the landing outside. San locked and bolted the door and stood with his back to it. Nancy climbed on to the coffee table, and then on to the chair, and climbed awkwardly out of the skylight, her boots kicking behind her. There was a violent knocking on the door, and the handle was shaken so furiously that it dropped off on to the floor.

“Open up, in the name of the Commonwealth
!”

“Hurry,” Simon urged; and Josh climbed out on the roof, too. Nancy was already waiting by the chimney stack, but he
knelt down beside the skylight and held out his hand to help Simon climb up after him.

There was a devastating crash as the Hooded Men tried to force down the door – then another, and another. The door frame cracked and plaster sifted on to San's shoulders. He kept his back pressed against the woodwork, his knees braced, and there was a look of grim determination on his face.

Josh climbed up on to the coffee table. “Come on, San! Before they break the whole goddamned door down!”

“Just go!” San told him.

There was another crash as the Hooded Men kicked against the door panels, and one of the lower panels split. San stood with his arms outspread, his teeth gritted, his heels digging into the threadbare carpet.

“Come on, San!” Simon shouted at him. “You can't hold them back for ever!”

San braced himself, ready to abandon the door and make his escape through the skylight. But as he did so, the point of a brightly shining sword came darting out of the middle of his chest. Another came out of his left shoulder, and a third penetrated his right thigh. He opened his mouth wide, as if he were going to scream, but before he could do so, another sword-blade leaped out from between his lips, like a shining steel tongue.

Two more swords came through the door – one of them jabbing out of San's stomach and the second out of his upper arm.

San stared up at Simon and Josh in helpless agony, the sword-blade still sticking out of his mouth, with blood dripping from the tip of it. “Aaarrghhh,” he gargled, and reached out with one hand, but that was all he could manage.

Simon shouted, “Hold on, San! I'm coming to get you!”

“Are you out of your mind?” said Josh.

“He's my mate,” said Simon, his face gray and his eyes aglitter with shock.

“Simon – there's nothing you can do. He's as good as dead already.”

San stared back at them, unable to move. The door shook again, and again, and San's knees began to buckle.

“Sod this, I can't just watch him die!” said Simon, and swung his legs back down into the skylight.

Josh seized his arm. “Don't! You'll only make it worse!”

“What could be worse than watching this? Tell me? What in the whole of God's creation could be worse than watching this?”

The door repeatedly shook as the Hooded Men kicked and battered against it, and with each shake, San sank a little lower. His bathrobe was covered in rapidly widening maps of blood, and blood was running down his ankles and spreading across the carpet.

“Simon, we ought to go,” Josh persisted. “I've got Nancy to think of now.”

Suddenly, the door burst open, and San was temporarily
swung out of their view. The dogs came bursting in, followed by the dog-handlers, and close behind the handlers came four or five Hooded Men. For a moment, Josh could see the handles of their swords protruding from the other side of the door. He couldn't even guess what unnatural strength it had taken for them to drive their blades more than ten inches through an inch of solid pine, even if they were incredibly sharp.

The door swung back again, revealing San's body pinned to the paneling. Two of the Hooded Men saw the coffee table and the chair balanced on top of it and the open skylight, and one of them immediately shouted, “Here! They've escaped to the roof!”

Josh dragged Simon away.

They made their way around the chimney stack, down a fire escape, and across the flat asphalt roof of a primary school building. By the time the Hooded Men were out on the roof of Simon's flat, they were nearly half a mile away, well hidden by a forest of chimney pots. They came down to street level by Gray's Inn itself.

“Where do we go now?” asked Josh.

Simon still looked waxy and shocked. He held on to the wrought-iron railings for support and he had to take five or six deep breaths before he could answer. “I know some people at the British Museum. They don't like me much, but they don't like the Hoodies, either, so they'll probably give us a letty for the night.”

They walked by a devious route to the British Museum, mostly using backstreets and alleyways. It was a warmish night, but there was a light breeze blowing from the south-west, and clouds kept smudging the moon. Bloomsbury was almost deserted, except for an occasional bus. Every now and then they heard dogs barking in the distance, but Simon was confident that the Hooded Men would have lost the scent. They saw two or three police cars – navy-blue Wolseley saloons with shining chromium bells on their front bumpers – and when they did they stayed well back in the shadows.

“I don't get it,” said Josh. “You have cops here, but you have the Hooded Men, too.”

“Simple, guvnor. The police take care of natural criminals. The Hooded Men take care of
unnatural
criminals.”

“Such as?”

“Catholics and Muslims and anybody else who's got funny ideas about who to pray to. They sniff out faith-healers, too, and mediums, and spiritualists.”

“And they make sure that no Purgatorials come through the ‘six doors', unless they want them to.”

“That's right, guvnor.”

“Do they ever put people on trial?”

“Trial? You must be joking. Once they've got you, they've got you. They're judge and jury, both, and nobody dares to cross them. They don't even answer to Parliament. It was Oliver Cromwell who brought them together; and the saying is that Oliver Cromwell is the only man who can ever disband them, and he's been dead for three hundred years.
Hooded Men! Hooded Men!/Hide in cupboard, hide in bed/Old Noll will only pay them when/He sees them playing with your head.”

“So who appoints them? I mean, supposing
I
wanted to be one? Kind of an odd career move, I know, but supposing I did?”

“You couldn't, you're a tourist.”

“What's wrong with being a tourist?”

“Too bloody high church, ain't you? The Hoodies hate your lot.”

“I'm a tourist who tours around. A traveler.”

“Oh! In that case, beg your pardon, guvnor. Thought you meant you came from the Church of Tours. But I still don't know what you'd have to do, to be a Hoodie. Maybe John will know.”

“Who's John?”

“John Farbelow. You're just about to make his acquaintance.”

“He's your friend at the British Museum?”

“Um, ‘friend' isn't exactly the word that I'd use. Let's say we dislike each other so much we almost enjoy it.”

*        *         *

They reached the basement of the British Museum by way of a narrow iron staircase in Montague Street. Simon knocked at a dark green door with a small window in it, and waited. At last a pale face appeared and stared at them for a while. Then the door opened a little way.

“I need a place to kip,” said Simon.

“Who've you got with you?”

“Omee and a donah. Couple of Purgatorials. The Hoodies were after them.”

“Hold on.”

They waited even longer. A blind man came tapping along the sidewalk next to them. He stopped quite close to the staircase, as if he were listening. Josh and Nancy and Simon stayed perfectly still, suppressing their breath.

“Somebody's there,” said the blind man. “I can hear somebody alive down there.”

“No, mate,” said Simon. “We're all deader than doornails.”

The blind man thought about that for a while, and then said, “God have mercy on your souls, then,” and went tapping on his way. Josh was uncomfortably reminded of Blind Pew, especially when three or four horses suddenly burst around the corner from Gower Street, dray horses, being run to their stables.

The basement door opened wider and they were admitted by an unsmiling girl with black curly hair. She looked partly Chinese, especially since she was wearing a plain black satin dress with a Mao collar. She was smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder. “How's May, then?” Simon asked her, as she closed the door behind them. “What about a smile for your old mate Simon?”

The girl contemptuously turned her back and led them along a gloomy corridor stacked with wooden crates, her shoes tapping on the concrete floor. There was a strong smell of cleaning fluid and varnish, and something else. A bitter, herbal scent that put Josh in mind of something, but he couldn't think what it was that he was trying to remember.

They reached another dark green door. The girl opened it up and led them through. They found themselves in a large
windowless room filled with a fog of cigarette smoke. A motley collection of couches and chairs had been gathered together beneath a single naked light in the center of the room, and in these sprawled a number of pale young people, all of them overdressed in overcoats and embroidered vests and sweaters and scarves and baggy pants. Some of them wore hats and one or two of them wore knitted mittens, too. Josh got the picture immediately: these were the hippies of parallel London, the young rebels, the new Bohemians.

In the largest armchair with one leg slung over the side of it sat a big round-faced man with white hair that stuck up on top of his head like a king's crown made of thistledown. He had probably been handsome once, but now he had bags under his eyes and his jowls had thickened. He was dressed in a black fur-lined coat of the type that used to be called an Immensikoff, and a gray three-piece suit, and a black silk cravat that had been tied to make an enormous bow the size of a dahlia.

“Well, well,” he said, coughing and lighting a cigarette. “Look what the cat's dragged in. Haven't seen you for a very decent interval, Cutter.” His voice was very deep and suave, like George Sanders with a head cold.

“Didn't want to trouble you, guvnor,” said Simon. “But the Hoodies turned over my drum on the Gray's Inn Road. San's dead. You remember San. The Burmese geezer.”