The Anubis Gates

“That’s nearly exactly what you’ll take orders from, clown,” it said. “You’ve done my bidding before, though I can scarcely now remember those evenings of scheming, hanging side by side in the buried bell tower. What I remember more clearly is waiting for your birth. I knew your father when he stood no higher than the table there, and I knew him when he was the tall leader of this thieves’ guild, and then I used to chat with him over a snitched bottle of wine sometimes in the days after you’d shortened him down again so as to have a court jester.” A couple of the creature’s teeth were blown out of its mouth by the vehemence of its speech, and they spun away upward like bubbles rising through oil. “It’s a terrible thing to have to sit through one’s own foolish speeches again, knowing they’re all wrong while you wait for the clock to come around again, but I’ve done it now. I’m the only one in the world that knows the whole story. I’m the only one worth taking orders from.”

“Do as he says,” growled Doctor Romanelli.

“Aye,” said the bobbing creature. “And when you’ve got him, I’ll come along to Cairo with you, and after the Master’s finished with him I’ll kill whatever’s left of him.”

* * *

Having copied out the cover letter to The Courier from memory, Doyle tossed it onto the stack of manuscript pages that lay beside Doctor Romany’s sheathed sword on the desk. It hadn’t even come as too much of a surprise to him when he’d realized, after writing down the first few lines of “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” that while his casual scrawl had remained recognizably his own, his new left-handedness made his formal handwriting different—though by no means unfamiliar: for it was identical W. William Ashbless’. And now that he’d written the poem out completely he was certain that if a photographic slide of this copy was laid over a slide of the copy that in 1983 would reside in the British Museum, they would line up perfectly, with every comma and i-dot of his version precisely covering those of the original manuscript.

Original manuscript? he thought with a mixture of awe and unease. This stack of papers here is the original manuscript … it’s just newer now than it was when I saw it in 1976. Hah! I wouldn’t have been so impressed to see it then if I’d known I had made or would make those pen scratches. I wonder when, where and how it’ll pick up the grease marks I remember seeing on the early pages.

Suddenly a thought struck him. My God, he thought, then if I stay and live out my life as Ashbless—which the universe pretty clearly means me to do—then nobody wrote Ashbless’ poems. I’ll copy out his poems from memory, having read them in the 1932 Collected Poems, and my copies will be set in type for the magazines, and they’ll use tear sheets from the magazines to assemble the Collected Poems! They’re a closed loop, uncreated! I’m just the… messenger and caretaker.

He pushed the vertiginous concept away, stood up and went to the window. Lifting the curtain aside, he looked down at the wide yard of the Swan With Two Necks, crowded with post and passenger coaches. I wonder where Byron is, he thought. He should have been able to find any number of bottles of claret by now. I wouldn’t mind having a few glassfuls of something, so I could postpone considering certain questions… such as what is to become of this Byron ka—he’s got to disappear, for I know there’s no historical record of him, but here he is talking about looking up old friends tomorrow. So how will he vanish? Do kas wear out? Will he die?

Even as he let the curtain fall there was a knock at the door. He crossed to it. “Who’s there?” he asked cautiously.

“Byron, with refreshments,” came the cheery reply. “Who did you suppose?”

Doyle undid the chain and let him in. “You must have gone far afield for them.”