The Anubis Gates

“There’s still a heartbeat,” came Romanelli’s voice. “Get the ammonia spirits over here, he’s still got a good half hour left in him, and I need some answers.”

“Hang in there, Ashbless,” Carrington whispered, yanking the door back again. He reached in, grabbed Jacky by the upper arm and dragged her out. She was struggling, and he slapped her across the face hard enough to unfocus her eyes. “Come on,” he said, and marched his dazed captive down another hall and through the arch that led to the wide, downward sloping cellar.

A dozen armed men waited on the other side of the arch, and one of them sprinted over to Carrington. “Now, chief?” the man asked tensely.

“What?” snapped Carrington. “No, not yet—there’s still plenty of sand in Ashbless’ hourglass. I’ll be back soon; I’m taking Jacky here to the deep end to collect on a long-standing debt.”

The man gaped at him.

Carrington smiled, pinched the corner of Jacky’s moustache and ripped it off. “Old Jacky’s been a girl all along.”

“Wh—you mean you—not now, chief! Put her back in the cage and save her for dessert! My God, we’ve got things to do here, you can’t—”

“I’ll be back in plenty of time.” He shoved Jacky forward, out across the floor, and she tripped over the lid of one of the sunken cells, and fell.

“Please, chief!” the man insisted, catching Carrington’s arm as he went to pick her up. “For one thing, you can’t go down into the deep end by yourself! All the Fugitive Mistakes live down there, and—”

Carrington dropped the torch, spun and drove his fist into the man’s belly, and the man sat down hard and rolled over on his side. Carrington looked up at the rest of the men. “I’ll be back,” he said, “in plenty of time. Is that clear?”

“Sure, chief,” a couple of them muttered uncomfortably.

“Fine.” He picked up the torch and hoisted Jacky to her feet and walked away from the lighted end of the vast chamber, down the increasing incline into the darkness. His torch flickered in a damp breeze from below, and lit only the wet stones of the ancient pavement right around them; whatever walls and ceiling there might have been were lost in the solid blackness.

After they’d been walking down the slope for several minutes, and each of them had twice slipped on the wet and ever-steeper paving stones and done short, sitting slides, and the wall torches by the entry arch were not even a faint glow over the hump of the floor behind and above them anymore, Carrington tripped Jacky, knelt beside her and shoved the butt of the torch into a wide patch of mud between two of the flagstones.

“Be nice and I’ll kill you quick afterward,” he said with an affectionate grin.

Jacky drew her legs back and kicked at him—he blocked it easily with his forearm, but as her heels rebounded they knocked the torch loose; it rolled away downward, picked up speed, began cartwheeling and then abruptly went out far below with a wet sizzle.

“Want the lights out, eh?” said Carrington in the now absolute darkness. He seized her shoulders and knelt on her knees to hold her down. “That’s fine—I like shy girls.”

Jacky was weeping hopelessly as Carrington shifted his position above her; he paused for a long several seconds, and then jerked and began making a peculiar muffled groaning. He shifted again, his hand scrabbling weakly at her face, and a moment later he lurched off of her and she heard a sound like a pitcher of water slowly being poured out; and when she caught a smell like heated copper she realized that it was blood splashing on the stones.

Because she’d been crying she hadn’t heard the things approach, but now she heard them whispering around her. “You greedy pig,” giggled one, “you’ve wasted it all.”

“So lick the stones,” came the hissed reply.

Jacky started to get up, but something that felt like a hand holding a live lobster pushed her back down. “Not so fast,” said another voice. “You’ve got to come deeper with us—to the bottom shore—we’ll put you in the boat and push you out, and you can be our offering to the serpent Apep.”

“Take her without her eyes,” whispered another of them. “She promised them to my sister and me.” Jacky didn’t begin screaming until she felt spidery fingers groping at her face.

* * *

What he found in the cages pretty much confirmed Coleridge’s suspicion that he was having another opium dream—albeit an extraordinarily vivid one.