The Doorkeepers

Fourteen

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.”

“San? Of course I do. He was a good sort, San. Believed in something, unlike you.”

He looked past Simon to Josh and Nancy, and blew out a very long stream of smoke. “So who are these two? Purgatorials, are they? You’re punching above your weight, Cutter, mixing with Purgatorials. No wonder the Hoodies are after you.”

Josh stepped forward, into the light. “Josh Winward – and this is Nancy Andersen. You must be John Farbelow.”

“That’s right, Josh. Pleased to make your acquaintance. This is quite a novelty, meeting a pair of Purgatorials that Cutter and his ilk haven’t robbed and cobblestoned, or the Hoodies taken off for their own particular requirements.”

“Well, the fact of the matter is that we didn’t really come from Purgatory,” said Josh. “We came from London … only it’s kind of a different London.”

“Oh, I know that,” grinned John Farbelow. “Only children and idiots believe in the Purgatory story. You found one of the six doors; and you found out how to jump through it. People do, from time to time. Scholars, usually, who think they’re the first people who ever found out what the nursery rhyme referred to. Or people looking for somewhere to hide, because of something rascally they’ve done in that different London of yours. Which are you two then – scholars, or rascals?”

“Neither. We’re looking for the people who murdered my sister. We think she was strangled here and then taken back through one of the doors and her body dumped in the Thames.”

“Well, that kind of thing happens,” said John Farbelow, with a casual wave of his hand. “Unfortunately, you can’t legislate from one world into the other.”

“I still want to know who killed her.”

“You’re taking a very considerable risk, you know. The Hoodies won’t hesitate to do their worst with you, if they catch you. They’d do some nasty things to all of us here, if they ever caught us.”

“What’s their beef with you?”

John Farbelow sucked deeply at his cigarette, and then crushed it out. “You’ll forgive me, but I don’t know who you are, and I think I’ve already said more than it’s prudent to say.”

“They’re bona, guvnor,” put in Simon. “I can vouch for them myself. Up on the roof at Carey Street, they saved my bacon when the dogs were on me. They didn’t have to, and if I had been them, I would’ve let me drop, and scarpered.”

“I see,” said John Farbelow. “But how do I know that the Hoodies haven’t paid you to bring these two here? How do I know that San is really dead, and that you’re not just stringing me a line?”

“Because I’m the famous Simon Cutter, and everybody knows that the famous Simon Cutter would rather poke his eyes out with a pin than run errands for the Hoodies.”

There was a very long pause. Then John Farbelow took out another cigarette and said, “Your older brother, wasn’t it? Caught breaking into a television shop.”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“They made him play the Holy Harp, didn’t they? And he grassed up all of his friends. Seven people hanged because of him, and eight more in prison.”

“Why are you asking me, if you know?”

“Because I want to look in your squinty little eyes and see that you’re not deceiving me. The Hoodies can make anybody turn. I think they could even make me turn, if they ever caught me – which I hope to God they never will.”

Josh said, “Listen, for what it’s worth, we’re just two people looking for someplace safe to sleep tonight. If you don’t want to confide in us, it’s fine by me. Tomorrow we’ll be out of here early and you won’t have to see us again.”

“So what are you doing tomorrow?” asked John Farbelow, lighting his cigarette with a shocking-pink butane lighter that must have been brought into this world by some unfortunate Purgatorial.

“First, I’m going to visit the house in Lavender Hill where my sister was lodging. Then I’m going to go to Wheatstone Electrics where she used to work.”

“Wheatstone Electrics? You’re not talking about Frank Mordant?”

“That’s the man. He was the one who offered my sister a job.”

John Farbelow slowly shook his head. “Frank Mordant… there’s a man I’d like to see again. Nailed to the floorboards, preferably.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes, I know him. He’s a Purgatorial, like you. Well, let’s not use the word Purgatorial any more, but he came through one of the six doors, like you. He’s been here for years, running various little enterprises.”

“How come the Hoodies leave him alone?”

“Because like all of his kind, he’s come to some kind of arrangement with them. I imagine that he supplies them with all manner of goods and services which the rest of this godforsaken world have to do without. He comes and he goes, from your world to ours, wheeling and dealing. There are six or seven like him, that I know of, but he is definitely the slimiest of all of them.”

Nancy said, “Did he hurt you, personally?”

John Farbelow waved the clouds of smoke away from his face. “Well, well. You’re the perceptive one.”

“My grandmother taught me how to read people’s auras. When you started to talk about Frank Mordant, yours grew very dark.”

“You can read my mind?”

“No, but I can see your sorrow. It’s all around you. You look like you’re wearing a muddy cloak.”

“A muddy cloak … That’s poetic. But yes, you’re right. I do bear Frank Mordant a very great deal of ill will.”

“It’s to do with a woman, am I right?”

The young people in the room began to shuffle restlessly in their chairs. They weren’t bored: they were showing their support for John Farbelow; and that they didn’t approve of any questions that might hurt or embarrass him.

John Farbelow turned to a pretty gipsylike girl sitting closest to him and said, “It’s all right, Siobhan. Don’t get upset about it. These people may need our help.” Then he turned back to Nancy and said, “Why don’t you sit down? You look tired, both of you. What about a cup of tea, or something a little stronger?”

“A glass of water would be fine.”

John Farbelow nodded to Siobhan and she went off to fetch them a drink. Simon dragged over a sagging couch and an armchair and they all sat down. A gray cat suddenly appeared, and jumped up on to Josh’s knee. It peered up at him, sniffing, and purring as loudly as a wooden rattle.

“That’s not the same cat we saw in Star Yard, is it?” asked Nancy.

“Couldn’t be,” said Josh. But the cat rubbed its head against him and kept patting his hand with its paw as if it was encouraging him to stroke it.

John Farbelow said, “That animal seems to have taken a shine to you, Josh.”

“Animals always go for Josh,” said Nancy. “He treats them like human beings, that’s why.”

“You think they have souls?”

“Sure,” said Josh. “Just because they have fur and fishy breath, that doesn’t make them any less spiritual than we are. I know a lot of old women with fur and fishy breath, and nobody ever suggests that they shouldn’t go to heaven.”

“That’s Ladslove. She used to be Winnie’s cat. Winnie was the woman that I have such a muddy aura about.”

“What happened?” asked Nancy. Josh had heard her use this tone of voice before: calm, coaxing, and oddly dreamy. She had used it on him when they first met, and it had cast a spell over him immediately. It was like having your temples lightly massaged.

John Farbelow said, “I met her on a number fifteen bus, of all places. I was going to work. I used to be respectable then. Conformist. Collar-and-tie. She was bright-looking. So bright. I remember she was wearing a red coat with bright gold buttons. But she couldn’t work out her bus fare. It was only 7½d, but she was like a child, or a foreigner. She just held out a handful of coins and asked the bus conductor to pick out the right money.

“She spoke in a normal South London accent, but right from the beginning there was something about her that struck me as strange. She used peculiar words, and odd sentence constructions, and when she talked she would make references to things that I had never heard of.

“I met her again the next day, and we carried on talking where we’d left off the day before. I loved listening to her. She’d be chattering on about something perfectly ordinary, like her holiday, and then she’d suddenly drop in something so – fantastic – that you couldn’t believe your ears. I don’t know … something like ‘I went to France last year. I love Calais. I don’t like the Channel Tunnel, though. I keep thinking about all that water up there.’

“It was breathtaking. I thought she must be suffering from some kind of brain damage. But I didn’t interrupt her. I let her prattle on about famous actors that I didn’t know and television comedies that I had never heard of. It was like talking to a madwoman except that everything was so logical. No matter what questions I asked her, she always had an answer. She kept talking about ‘Princess Di’ and saying. ‘Wasn’t it sad?’ as if I was supposed to know who Princess Di was, and all about this sad thing that happened to her.

“I asked her where she came from, and she said Bromley. Her mother had died of cancer and her father had committed suicide two weeks later. She had suffered from terrible depression herself. Then she answered an advertisement in the paper for a new job somewhere completely different. Escape, that’s what it said. If your life is getting you down, come and work somewhere completely fresh. New job, new friends, new place to live. And that’s when she met Frank Mordant.

“She didn’t talk much about Frank Mordant. Eventually – after a great deal of persuasion – she told me that one of the conditions of her job was that she didn’t tell anybody how she had got it and where she came from. But … she and I saw each other every day on the bus, and then every evening after work and then we fell in love.

“And one night, in a hotel on the Hog’s Back, in Surrey, after we had made love for the first time, she told me where she came from.”

“Purgatory,” said Josh.

“Well, the Hooded Men want us to believe that it’s Purgatory, to discourage us from trying to visit it, and to give them an excuse for capturing and killing everybody who accidentally makes their way through. It’s a mystical explanation for a place that actually exists. Not in the mind. Not as a myth, or an ancient legend. It’s a parallel world, similar but critically different, that actually exists. As I now believe that heaven does, and hell. They exist. They can be reached. They are other worlds, so close to our own that we can reach out and touch them.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Josh. “What you’ve done is … taken the words right out of my mouth. Similar but critically different.”

John Farbelow lit yet another cigarette. “I felt as if I had been struck down by a thunderbolt. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. How could there be another world where people went by train under the Channel and people flew to New York in three hours and there was color television and cures for tuberculosis and almost everybody was connected to almost everybody else by computer? And much more than that, another world where people were free to worship in any way they chose? Or not at all, if they didn’t want to?

“I couldn’t take it in. It almost drove me out of my mind. Winnie told me that it wasn’t all nice and that there was pollution and wars and overcrowding, but I knew that I had to go there, I had to see it. I felt as if I had spent my whole life inside the grounds of a lunatic asylum, never realizing that there was a world beyond the walls. A world where men weren’t hunted down with dogs because they wanted to worship with the Book of Common Prayer, or because they believed in the power and the purity of the Holy Virgin, or because they lit candles to Shiva.”

“So what did you do?” asked Josh, stroking Ladslove’s ears. The cat looked up at him as if he should have known already.

“I couldn’t go back to work, could I? I was working for Hoover, selling vacuum cleaners. And Winnie told me that where she came from, there were vacuum cleaners made of light colored plastic that were fifty times more powerful and didn’t need bags. Knowing that, how could I possibly go back to work? What was I going to tell my customers?

“Maybe it sounds ridiculous to you. But once I knew that better things existed, I couldn’t pretend that they didn’t. There was a cure for TB, for God’s sake! There were cures for cancer! Apart from that – much more serious than that – I knew that if men and women were free to worship somewhere in this universe, then they should be free to worship everywhere.”

Nancy reached out and – uninvited – touched his hand. Josh glanced at her with a slight tinge of jealousy, but she gave him a tiny shake of her head to indicate that John Farbelow needed closeness now, and personal warmth, if he was going to tell them what had happened to Winnie, and why he hated Frank Mordant so much.

“I went to Winnie’s flat early the next morning. She wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in. I went to Wheatstone Electrics and asked to see her. Frank Mordant came down himself and told me that Winnie had left Wheatstone’s of her own accord; and that she had left no forwarding address; and that nobody had any idea where she was.

“I stood and I looked him in the eye and said, ‘What about the Channel Tunnel?’ And he knew then that I knew what he had done; and who he was; because all he said was, ‘What about the Commonwealth? And what about the Hooded Men?’

“I knew then that my life was in danger, and I left as quickly as I could. I stayed with some friends in Kennington for a few days, and then I came here. To study.”

“Did you find out anything about the Hooded Men?”

“The Doorkeepers, yes. As you have plainly discovered, there are six doors between one London and the next. Into infinity. There are more Londons than you could ever imagine; and more New Yorks; and more Los Angeles. Some of them are so similar that you could never tell them apart, except for the color of their taxis and certain inflections in their speech. One London is flooded, and has gondoliers, like Venice. Another London is like a garden, with nothing but pagodas and summer houses, and firework displays almost every night.

“The Hooded Men guard the doors between these different Londons and patrol them and control any traffic between them. They keep them secret, of course, from the general populace. In this London, if anybody tries to say that they have come through the doors, the Hooded Men simply say that they must be dead people, returned from Purgatory, rejected by God and rejected by Satan. Nobody questions them. After all, they learned it all at school.”

“A Child’s Book of Simple Truth” said Josh, and John Farbelow bowed his head in acknowledgement.

“Some people in the other Londons have discovered the existence of the doors and tried to trade with the Hooded Men. After all, the doors are ideal for all kinds of illegal trafficking: whatever one London lacks, another London can supply. Drugs, women, antibiotics, luxury goods. The Hooded Men are very murderous and will travel through the doors to find anybody who crosses them or tries to cheat them.

“The only real answer is to close the doors, and to close them for ever.” John Farbelow paused, reflective.

Josh took a sip of water. “Can that be done?”

“I believe so. The doors are not a physical phenomenon. They are a psychic phenomenon. I am convinced that the six doors in London were created by somebody with exceptional psychic powers, and that they have been kept open for centuries by a succession of people of equal psychic ability – each one, perhaps, trained by the one before.”

“So if you find the person who’s keeping them open …?”

“Exactly,” said John Farbelow. “You kill that person, and the doors vanish.”

“Do you know who first opened the doors?” asked Josh.

“I believe that the doors were first opened in AD 61, in London, by Queen Boudicca. Also known as Boadicea. She was the wife of King Prasutagas who ruled over the Iceni people in East Anglia, during the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. When Prasutagas died, he made their daughters joint heirs to his property, along with the Roman emperor Nero. He probably had the mistaken idea that this would save them at least some of his possessions.

“But the imperial agent seized everything. Boudicca was flogged and her daughters were raped. Because of this insult, and because of Roman oppression, the Iceni rebelled against the Romans and Boudicca led an armed uprising against Suetonius Paulinus and his legions. The Iceni slaughtered the Roman garrisons in St Albans and Colchester, and then they attacked London and razed it to the ground.

“Boudicca had six or seven Druid advisers – one of them a very mystical senior Druid whose name nobody knows. In AD 61 the Romans were hunting down and killing the last of the Druids and these Druids had come to Boudicca looking for protection. They were very educated, the Druids. They had a written language and they believed in the immortal soul.

“Boudicca’s Druid advisers predicted by the entrails of their victims and by the flight of ravens that she and her army would be annihilated. So the senior Druid taught Boudicca how to open up doors to other existences.”

“How do we know this?” asked Josh.

“Because one of the Druids wrote it down. They wrote something like, ‘Boudicca lit three tapers. She consumed henbane and passed into another world.’”

“That sounds more like suicide to me.”

“That’s what historians have always assumed. After all, henbane is even more poisonous than opium. But the Druidic word for ‘consumed’ is almost the same as the word ‘burned’. And we know that the Druids used to burn henbane and breathe in the fumes to put them into a hallucinatory trance. In the Middle Ages, dentists used to burn henbane to dull their patients’ toothache. It’s very dangerous indeed. But it seems to have worked for Boudicca. It put her into a trance and she opened the six doors, so that she and the Druids and some of the Iceni could escape into the next reality.”

Josh said, “I have to tell you, this is a pretty hard story to swallow.”

“Why? You’ve been through a door yourself. The doors don’t obey any of the laws of space and time. They’re not a place, they’re a sustained state of mind, and for that state of mind to be perceptible, somebody somewhere has to be experiencing it.”

Josh put down his cup. “What about the Hooded Men? Where do they come into it?”

“They were the elite of the Puritan army which defeated the royalists. Over the centuries – in this particular London – they developed into something very much more than religious enforcers. They became what they are today. In your reality, I suppose you would describe them as a kind of Gestapo.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Somebody will have to find the person who is keeping the doors open, enter that building and make sure that the doors are closed for ever.”

“Like an assassin, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s all very well, but your assassin is going to be trapped in this reality for ever, isn’t he? Once the doors are closed, he can never come back.”

“This is our home, Josh. We aren’t going anywhere else.” He looked around at all of the young people sprawled on their chairs, and smiled. “This lot didn’t know anything about parallel worlds when I first arrived. They were all brought up on A Child’s Book of Simple Truth. But they knew that something was wrong with the world they lived in, even if they didn’t understand what. So I told them as much as I had discovered, and here we are. A sort of fledgling resistance movement, I suppose, although I didn’t mean to tell you that, not at the start.”

“And Winnie?” asked Nancy, in a voice as soft as a rubbed-out word.

John Farbelow shrugged. “Winifred Thomas. I never found out what happened to her. I pray that she didn’t meet the same fate as your sister, Josh; but I suspect very much that she might have done.” He was silent for a moment. His mouth puckered and his eyes filled with tears.

“Do you know something?” he said. “I don’t even have a picture of her. Not one. And I’m beginning to forget what she looked like.”