The Anubis Gates

Obviously he was in the latest of Dog-Face Joe’s cast-off bodies; and Joe himself was off God knew where in Doyle’s own.

And whose body, he wondered, was this one I’m in? Why, Steerforth Benner’s, of course. Benner mentioned that he had lunch with old Joe a week ago, and Joe must have fed him whatever mixture of alchemical herbs it is that unscrews the hinges of people’s souls, and then on Saturday made the switch.

So, Doyle reasoned, it was Dog-Face Joe, in Benner’s pirated body, that I met Saturday at Jonathen’s. No wonder he … didn’t seem to be himself. And of course that’s why he was so anxious to have me eat or drink something there—so he could give me a dose of the soul-switch stuff; and when I didn’t want anything, he had to send me outside to look for a doubtless fictitious man so that he could get a cup of tea, fling his filthy leaves into it, and harass me into drinking it.

Despite his weary apathy, Doyle shuddered when it came to him that the red ape that he had seen shot that day had been Benner himself, the poor bastard, carelessly shoehorned into Dog-Face Joe’s last body.

So now, Doyle thought, he’s got my body and is free to go see Darrow and make the deal, without having to cut Benner or me in at all.

Doyle sat up, permitting himself a loud groan. His mouth and nose and throat were crusted and rusty-tasting with dried blood, and he realized with a dull sort of amusement that good old Joe the Ape Man must chew the hell out of his own tongue just before vacating the body, to make sure its new tenant wouldn’t be able, in the short time before the poison hammered him down, to say anything that might make people wonder.

He stood up—a little dizzily because of his new, increased height—and looked around. He was not surprised to find scissors, a brush and straight razor and a cake of gray soap on a shelf by the bed—Dog-Face Joe probably bought a new razor every week. There was also a mirror lying face down on the shelf, and Doyle picked it up and, apprehensively, looked into it.

My God, he thought, as much awed as frightened, I look like the wolf man—or Chewbacca—or the guy in that French movie of Beauty and the Beast—or no, I’ve got it, the Cowardly Lion of Oz.

Thick golden fur billowed in waves down over his chin, and outward across his cheeks to become exaggerated sideburns, and snaked upward along his nose to join the upside down waterfall of luxuriant golden fur that began at the eyebrow ridges and swept in a wild mane right up over the top of his head and hung down shaggily to his broad shoulders. Even his neck and the area under his jaw were thickly furred.

Well, he thought, picking up the scissors and stretching out a lock of his forehead hair, no point in delaying. Snip. There’s one handful of it gone. I hope I still remember how to use a straight razor.

An hour later he had clipped and shaved his forehead—being careful to leave eyebrows—and his nose and cheeks, and he decided, before moving on to the tricky task of shaving his hands, to see how he looked. He leaned the mirror up against the wall at a different angle, stepped back and cocked an eyebrow at it.

His chest was suddenly hollow, so that his quickening heartbeat echoed in there like thumps on a drum. After the initial shock he began reasoning it out, and he almost wanted to laugh at the neatness of it. For of course I did go to the Jamaica Coffee House on Tuesday the eleventh, he marveled, and as a matter of fact I did write—or at least copy from memory—”The Twelve Hours of the Night” there. And I did stay at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane. And this body did shoot one of the Dancing Apes in Jonathen’s Saturday. It hasn’t been an abduction or an alternate 1810 at all.