The Doorkeepers (40 page)

“Come on,” he said, and climbed the stairs, and Abraxas came bounding up after him.

He walked along the third-floor corridor, looking for 313. The corridor was decorated with Regency-striped wallpaper, maroon and cream, and it smelled like a stuffy, second-rate hotel. There were crystal wall-lights all the way along, but two out of three of them had broken, or needed new bulbs, and so the corridor was filled with occasional pools of darkness.

Room 309, Room 311 … He turned the corner and it was only then that he realized what a fool he had been. Right ahead of him, silhouetted against the next wall-light, were three Hooded Men and two dog-handlers. Another man was standing behind them, right under the light – pale-faced, with greased-back hair, wearing a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons. He laughed out loud as Josh appeared.

“Look at this! Didn't I tell you! Here he is! Aren't the Yanks the stupidest race on earth! He trusted Simon Cutter! He bloody well trusted him! And here he is!”

The Hoodies' dogs jumped against their chains and barked at Abraxas in hysterical fury. Abraxas barked angrily back, tugging Josh forward. But Josh managed to heave him back, and grab hold of his collar, and pull his head back.

“I'm going to let you off the leash,” he said. “You're going to run, and you're going to save yourself. Now, go!”

Just then, he heard the steel-sliding sound of a sword being drawn, right behind him. A sharp point jabbed into the back of his neck.

“You are under arrest,” said one of the Hooded Men. “You are charged with heresy, treason, murder, conspiracy to murder, subversion and insurrection.”

Josh didn't move, but he unbuckled Abraxas' collar, and before the Hooded Man could stop him, Abraxas went tearing off along the corridor with his claws scrabbling on the floor.

“Send a dog after it?” asked one of the dog-handlers, his own dog straining at the chain so hard that it was standing up on two legs, and whining like an acute asthmatic.

“Forget it,” said the Hooded Man. “We have what we wanted – don't we, Mr Winward?”

“Screw you,” Josh retorted. “You don't have any jurisdiction over me or anybody else who doesn't live in this screwed-up London of yours. I want to see Nancy. I want to see her now. If you've hurt her – by God, even if you've even
touched
her. I don't care what you do to me, I'm going to murder all of you, one by one.”

“I think you're being a little optimistic, don't you?” asked the Hooded Man. “There are many of us, and there is only one of you. And besides, this is
our
world, not yours. You have nowhere to run to. No friends, no hiding places. Ella Tibibnia is dead – we killed her. John Farbelow is dead – we killed him. Fifteen more subversives were eliminated on the very same day. Mrs Marmion's mother, Ranjit Singh – many, many more. We rule all of these different existences, Mr Winward, and we keep very good order.”

“I want to see Nancy,” Josh insisted. He felt hopeless and exhausted and his teeth ached furiously, but his sole purpose was to find Nancy. Even if she were dead already.

The man in the blue blazer came up to him and offered his hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. Frank Mordant. You and I could do business together.”

“What?” Josh retorted. “You've got your fucking nerve. You murdered my sister. You personally murdered my sister!”

“Oh, come on, Mr Winward, it wasn't like that at all. We were fooling around a little. You know what it's like, the boss-secretary relationship? She said she wanted to try this restricted breathing thing.”

“I don't believe a goddamned word of it. You murdered her.”

“I'm sorry. I know you don't want to believe it, but it's true. One minute we were going at it hammer and tongs. The next minute, she went all blue and I had to call the ambulance. Dead on arrival, I'm afraid.”

“You're out of your mind. Julia would never try anything like that.”

“I know she was your sister, and you knew her very much better than I did. But our brothers and sisters don't always tell us everything about their private inclinations, do they?”

“So who mutilated her? Who emptied her out?”

“It was all in a very good cause,” said Frank Mordant, taking his arm. Josh immediately twisted himself free. “When your sister Julia died, another was able to carry on living.”

“You took all of her organs without any kind of permission, and then you just dumped her body in the river.”

“Actually, no permission was required. Living here, in
this
London, she was subject to all of our laws. Vital organs can be taken from the dead at the discretion of the surgeon in charge. It's quite humane, when you think about it. And don't tell me it doesn't happen in
your
world, too.”

“You think it was humane to throw her in the Thames?”

“That was undignified, I'll admit. But we wanted you to have her body back. There can't be anything worse than losing somebody and never discovering what happened to them.”

They walked together along the stuffy corridor with the Hooded Men and the dog-handlers following close behind them. One of the Hooded Men caught up with Josh and said, “I want you to call that mongrel of yours.”

“I can't. He's not even mine.”

“If you don't call it, I'm going to send our own dogs after it, and have them rip it apart right in front of you, and eat it.”

“I can't call him. He just won't answer. And he could be anyplace by now.”

The Hooded Man turned to the dog-handlers and said, “Let them off the leash. I want that animal found and destroyed.”

“Yes, sir,” they said, and unclipped their animals' leads so that they could follow Abraxas' scent.

The dogs immediately ran off, but they were only thirty feet
down the corridor when Josh called out,
“Hey!”
and gave them a piercing birdlike whistle. Both dogs skidded to a stop and turned around and stared back at him in expectation.

“What are you waiting for?” one of the dog-handlers screamed at them. “Go and track down that other damned dog! Kill!”

Josh said, “There's no point in yelling at them. You should appeal to their better nature.”

The dog-handler had a blue-shaved head and his face was scarred like a patchwork quilt. “None of my dogs has a better nature.”

“Yes, they do,” said Josh. He put out his hands and the dogs came trotting up to him. He rubbed their heads and tugged at their ears. The dog-handler was furious and astounded at the same time.

“Did you ever hear of the Montenotte Method?” Josh asked.

“No, I didn't.”

“The Montenotte Method says that you can teach a dog to be aggressive by appealing to its sense of loyalty.”

“This dog is aggressive because I'll strangle him if he isn't.”

Josh rubbed the dogs' muzzles and let them go. They walked uncertainly toward the staircase, paused, and looked back at their handlers, bewildered.

“
GO
!” screamed the bald handler.
“Kill, or I'll feed your bollocks to the cats!”

The dogs scampered off down the stairs and out of sight.

“I see you have a very special talent, Mr Winward,” said Frank Mordant.

“Anybody who cares about animals can do it,” Josh told him. “And I care enough about Abraxas to buy him a little more time to get away.”

Frank Mordant smiled. Then he said, “You wanted to see Miss Andersen? Come along, and I'll show you.”

He stood beside Nancy's bed and he hardly knew what to say. She was pale and drugged, and her eyes were puffy, but he could see that they hadn't hurt her.

“Josh,” she whispered, reaching out her hand for him. “I'm so sorry. I thought I could find Frank Mordant for you … I really thought I could do it.”

He took a step closer to the bed, but the Hooded Man said, “That's near enough.”

Frank Mordant said, “As you can see, she's a little sleepy, but we've kept her in the best of health.”

“What are you going to do with us?” asked Josh.

“Me, personally, nothing. I'm only a minion, I'm afraid. I brought Nancy here because the Doorkeepers had a warrant out for her arrest, and yours, and I really didn't have a choice. If it had been up to me, I would have let her go. My conscience is clear about Julia, I promise you. She died by accident. But Miss Andersen came after me, and you came after her, so what was I to do?”

The Hooded Man said, “Tomorrow at noon you will hear the judgement of the Masters of Religious Observance; and then you will know what punishment you will suffer.”

“You can't do this. You don't have any right.”

“I wouldn't worry about it too much, old man,” put in Frank Mordant. “They'll probably decide to exile you, that's all – on pain of imprisonment if you ever come back.”

“Oh, you think so? If that's what they're going to do, why don't they let us go now?”

“It's all a question of ritual. You know. Keeping up appearances.”

“Follow me,” ordered the Hooded Man, and led him out of the room. Josh turned back just in time to see Nancy raising her hand to him in the Modoc sign meaning
Hope.

The Hooded Man locked Josh in a bare room with a view of the hospital lawns. In the distance he could see the glittering lights of London, with autogiros swarming over it like fireflies. He lay on the iron-framed bed without undressing and tried to rest, but his mind was teeming with fear and worry.

At eleven o'clock a burly male nurse unlocked the door of his room and escorted him along the corridor to the toilet.

“What if I try to make a run for it?” he asked, as he stood in front of the urinal.

The male nurse let out a sharp, humorless bark of laughter.

Josh was allowed to pour himself a Bakelite beaker of water, and then he was escorted back to his room. “Breakfast at seven,” the male nurse told him. “Don't let the bed bugs bite.”

He sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. He almost felt that if he squeezed his eyes tight enough, he would open them again and find himself back in Mill Valley, in his own bedroom, with the wind-chimes tinkling on the verandah outside. He tried to wish this world into disappearing, by the power of mind alone. If somebody had wished the six doors into existence, maybe he could wish that he had never heard of them, and that time could turn backward.

He was still sitting there when he felt something nudging his left leg. Something alive. Instantly – shocked – he opened his eyes. It was Abraxas, with his eyes bright and his tail slapping wildly against the frame of the bed.

“Abraxas! How the hell did you get in here?” But then he remembered that the male nurse had left his door ajar while
they went along to the head. There wouldn't have been any point in him locking it, after all – he wouldn't have imagined that anybody wanted to get
in.

“How're you doing, boy? Hungry? I don't have any food, sorry. But here, you can have a drink of water.”

Abraxas thirstily slurped from Josh's beaker, and then he shook himself and sat down beside him, as if he were waiting to be told what to do next.

“You're a good dog, you know that. You must have the best-tuned nose I ever came across. A Stradivarius of noses. And you didn't let those mangy hounds find you, did you?”

Abraxas gave a whine of appreciation in the back of his throat.

Josh said, “I'll tell you what I'm going to do now. I'm going to teach you the Montenotte Method. I'm going to teach you how to be fearless and brave and a little bit crazy. I'm going to teach you to fight your way out of here. You're going to be the fiercest dog that ever was. That's the least that Ella deserves.”

He started to stroke the top of Abraxas' smooth, well-boned head. “Now you listen to me,” he began. “This is the last time I'm going to stroke you like this, because you and me, we're equals.” He pressed one hand flat against his chest, and then he pressed it against Abraxas' chest in exactly the same way. “We see with the same eyes,” he said, pointing to his own eyes, and then to Abraxas' eyes. “We hear with the same ears, and we feel with the same heart. You wait. By the end of tonight, you and I are going to be so physically and mentally attuned to each other, you'll be wondering why I'm wearing pants and you're not. We're going to be symbiotes, you got it? And more than that, we're going to be friends.”

All through the night, until a ghostly gray dawn began to reveal the trees and the lawns and the hospital buildings, and the streetlights began to wink out, Josh talked and touched and trained Abraxas to understand everything he was thinking and everything that he needed from him.

It was almost a dreamlike experience for both of them, a Zen
master and his pupil, and Josh found that he could ask Abraxas to do things that he had never asked of a dog before, such as growling to order, and walking around the room seven times, and jumping in the opposite direction whenever he jumped himself.

He taught him more than tricks, though. Josh taught Abraxas to look at him and know what he wanted him to do next. Sometimes he needed the slightest of winks, or an almost-imperceptible nod of the head, but by morning he was sitting and lying down just because Josh was thinking
sit
and
lie.

At five after seven, the male nurse came into his room with a tray. He set it down on a folding table, and gave Josh a Bakelite knife and fork. “There you are. Better make the most of it.”

Josh lifted the aluminum cover off his plate. Underneath lay four rashers of fatty bacon, two sausages, two fried eggs, and two soggy slices of fried bread.

“Is this the punishment? Execution by cholesterol?”

“Very funny,” said the male nurse, as he walked back toward the door.