The Anubis Gates

Darrow was right, though, he thought. What I need is charcoal, a massive dose of it—and fast. I remember reading about a guy who ate a ten times over fatal dose of strychnine, and chased it with powdered charcoal and felt no ill effects at all. What was his name? Touery, that was it. So where am I going to get some? Call room service and ask ‘em to send up about fifteen hundred cartons of that cigarette with the activated charcoal filter.

Wait a moment, he thought. Here I am staring at a fair quantity of it. All these burned-up blocks of wood in the fireplace here. It may not be activated, but it’ll still have billions of microscopic pores, the better to absorb you with, my dear strychnine.

In a moment he had found a bowl and a little round-headed statuette of some dog-headed Egyptian god or other, and was using them as a mortar and pestle to pulverize the black chunks of crunchy incinerated wood. While doing this he noticed that his hands and forearms appeared to have grown a pelt of glossy yellow fur, and this he ascribed, a little nervously, to the hallucinations.

Another explanation of the phenomenon patiently awaited consideration on a back burner of his mind.

Through it all the blood kept dripping from his mouth, often falling into the mound of grainy black powder, but it was tapering off, and he had more important things to worry about. How the devil, he wondered as he sifted the gritty black stuff between his furry fingers, am I going to consume this?

He began by swallowing all the charcoal pieces that were relatively pill-sized. Then, using water from a basin in the corner, he made little balls of the black powder and managed to force down several dozen of these.

Mixed with a little water the stuff was adequately malleable, and after a while he stopped eating the black lumps and began pushing them together to make a little man-shaped figure. His skill surprised him, and he resolved to get some modelling clay at the first opportunity and begin life anew as a sculptor—for he’d only rolled the limb columns between his fingers for a few moments before pinching them onto the trunk lump, but now he noticed that the swell of thigh and bicep and the angularity of knee and elbow were faultlessly done, and the few quick thumbnail scratches he’d made on the front of the head had somehow produced a face like Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He’d have to save this little statue—sometime it would be reverently exhibited at the Louvre or someplace: Doyle’s First Work.

But how could he have thought the face looked like Adam? It was the face of an old, a hideously old man. And the limbs were twisted, shrunken travesties, like the dried worms you find on the sidewalks on a sunny day after rain. Horrified, he was about to crush it when it opened its eyes and gave him a big smile. “Ah, Doyle!” it croaked in a loud, harsh whisper. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”

Doyle screamed and scrabbled back across the floor away from the gleeful thing—with difficulty, for the floor had again begun its rising and falling tricks. He heard a slow, tooth-jarring drumbeat from somewhere, and as huge drops of acid began to form on the walls, break surface tension and trickle down, he realized too late that the entire house was one living organism, and was about to digest him.

* * *

He woke up on the floor, profoundly exhausted and depressed, staring with no interest at the drops of dried blood spattered in front of his eyes. His tongue ached like a split tooth, but he didn’t think it was anything urgent. He knew that he had survived the poisoning and the hallucinations, and he knew that eventually he’d be glad of it.

His face itched, and he brought a hand across to scratch it—then halted. Though the hallucinations had passed, the hand was still covered with golden fur.

Instantly the explanation, the explanation of all this, that had been in the back of his mind came to him, and he knew it was true. It increased his depression a little, for it meant more work for him when he gathered the energy to get up and begin dealing with things. Just to confirm it formally he felt his face. Yes, as he’d suspected, his face too was bushily pelted. All I needed, he thought sourly.