The Doorkeepers

Eleven

Josh shouted out, “Nancy! Nance! Wait up, will you! Nance!”

Several passers-by stared at him. He was shouting at a brick wall, after all. Three young secretaries in short skirts looked at him and burst into fits of giggles.

There was nothing left to do. He prayed to God that his faith in the jumping-over-the-candle ritual was as strong as Nancy’s, and jumped.

He landed in the leaves on the other side, holding out his hand to balance himself. Nothing seemed to be different, except that the wall at the end of the niche appeared to be much further away than it was before. He turned around and looked back, and Star Yard was just the same. He could hear the shuffling of feet and the bustle of traffic and he could even feel the warm morning breeze.

He turned back and started to walk to the end of the niche. Nancy was right: there was a turning on the left, which seemed to lead to another dead end, just as it had in his hallucination. But he could hear Nancy’s footsteps through the leaves ahead of him, and when he called out, “Nancy!” she called back, “Hurry up, slowpoke!” and her voice sounded normal once again.

He went to the end of the next section of alleyway, and there was another alleyway, on the right. He went down that, and turned left. As he turned the corner, he made a point of looking up. The sky was uniformly gray, just like his hallucination, and there were scores of pigeons clustered on the window ledges of the buildings on either side. His sleeves brushed against the dirty brickwork.

Nancy was waiting for him at the end of the last section of alleyway, the back of her hand lifted against her forehead. The sun wasn’t shining here. In fact, it looked like rain. But as they stepped out of the niche, they were still in Star Yard, exactly where they had been before. People were still hurrying through it, swinging their briefcases, and at first the noises of a busy day in the City of London sounded just the same.

As he stood and listened, however, Josh gradually became aware of a difference in pitch. The traffic seemed to whine more; with a chug-chugging undertone; and he heard two or three motor-horns make an old-fashioned regurgitating noise, instead of the nasal beep of most modern cars. And there was a mixture of other unfamiliar sounds, too. The rumbling of cartwheels, and the clopping of horses.

Up above the rooftops he heard an abrasive droning, like a circular saw. It grew louder and louder, and he looked up to see a small stubby-winged airplane fly overhead, with a huge, idly rotating propeller, closely followed by another, and then another.

The effect was astonishing. Wonderful, and frightening, both at the same time. Josh took hold of Nancy’s hand. “Jesus, Nance. We’ve done it. We’ve come through, haven’t we?”

He looked back at the niche. It was exactly the same, except that there were no candles burning in front of it. “It’s one of the six doors. No doubt about it. We’re through. This is the parallel world.”

The people who walked past them were dressed in heavy, formal clothes. Everybody wore a hat: the men in bowlers or trilbies or pork pies, the women in berets or cloches. They all wore overcoats. Nobody wore sneakers and it was noticeable how well polished their shoes were.

“Do you think we’ve come back in time?” asked Nancy. Several people slowed down and stared at her, in her fringed buckskin coat, her short white skirt and her knee-high buckskin boots.

“I don’t know. Maybe we have. It doesn’t look like anybody ever even heard of Adidas.”

Nancy glanced anxiously back at the niche. “I just hope we can find our way back OK.”

“We must be able to. If Julia was here, and they dumped her body back in the real world, then the doors must work both ways.”

A young lad with a cloth cap went past, carrying a large basket heaped with loaves of bread. When he caught sight of Nancy he turned around and gave her a piercing wolf-whistle. “’Ere, miss! Left your frock at ’ome?”

“This is so embarrassing,” said Nancy. “Even if we haven’t come back in time, I don’t think anybody’s seen a miniskirt before.”

“You could button up your coat.”

“I have a much better idea. Let’s go back and find some clothes that don’t attract so much attention.”

“We’ll have to find some candles first.”

“What? I thought you bought a whole box.”

“I did, but I left them behind on the sidewalk.”

“God, Josh. You’re a genius. How did you think we were going to get back?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t really believe that we’d get here at all.”

“Well, we must be able to buy some candles.”

They walked down to the bottom of Star Yard. Most of the people who passed them were in too much of a hurry to notice them, but a rowdy group of office girls and their bowler-hatted boyfriends all stopped and stared and said, “Blimey, look at ’er!”

When they reached Carey Street they began to realize what a different world they had walked into. The older buildings were almost all the same, except that they seemed much more heavily blackened with soot. But the road was cobbled, even if the cobbles had been covered over with tarmacadam, and the traffic that snarled it up looked as if somebody had emptied a 1930s motor museum. Rileys, Bentleys, Wolseleys – all with huge chrome-plated headlamps and sweeping mudguards and running-boards.

They made their way down Chancery Lane, past the dark Gothic windows of the Law Society building. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded with people, all dressed in overcoats and hats. Josh was beginning to think that he must be the only person on the planet who wasn’t wearing anything on his head. An old gentleman with a red carnation in his lapel stopped and took off his bowler hat and stared at Nancy with his mouth open, as if Mary Magdalene had just walked past him.

Fleet Street was even more crowded than Chancery Lane. The traffic was at a standstill, all the way down the hill to Ludgate Circus. A steam train crossed the railway bridge on the other side of the circus, chuffing thick brown smoke and orange sparks into the air. Through the smoke Josh could make out the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

They crossed Fleet Street, weaving their way between buses and taxis. On the opposite corner there was a newsstand, with scores of magazines and newspapers on display. The posters for The Evening News announced ZEPPELIN ACCIDENT: SEVEN KILLED and RANGOON RIOTS: REBELS QUELLED. The news-vendor wore a flat cap and a long shabby coat and had a burned-down cigarette stuck to his lower lip. Every now and then, without warning, he whooped out, “‘Orrible hairship haccident, seven day-ead!”

Josh offered him a fifty pence coin and said, “News, please.”

The vendor looked down at the coin as if a pigeon had blessed the palm of his hand. “What’s this, then? Bloody American, is it?”

“It’s a fifty pence piece. A British fifty pence piece.”

The news-vendor turned it this way and that, and then handed it back. “Sorry mate. Tuppence-ha’penny in real money or nothing.”

“This is real money. Look, it has the queen’s head on it.”

“’Oo, the queen of Sheba?”

“The queen of England, of course.”

The news-vendor turned away and served another customer, and then another, tossing their coins into the upturned lid of a biscuit tin. Nancy tugged Josh’s sleeve and gave a meaningful nod of her head toward the money. There were heaps of large brown pennies, as well as small silver coins the size of dimes, and some little gold-colored ones, too, with seven or eight sides. None of them bore a likeness of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

They walked away from the newsstand, past the half-timbered frontage of The Kings Head pub, and the Wig & Pen Club. The traffic noise was so loud that they could hardly hear each other speak. On the opposite side of the road stood the Law Courts, with their wide Gothic arch and their complicated spires. As far as Josh could see, they were the same as the Law Courts in “real” London. But as they walked past, a flood of people came hurrying out, almost as if they had been cued by a movie director, all shouting at each other. Men in trilby hats and long heavy coats; women in a whole variety of hats, with ostrich feathers and veils and trailing ribbons.

A pale-faced woman in an ice-blue suit stood in the center of the crowd, and dozens of photographers clustered around her, taking pictures. They had old-fashioned flashbulbs, which Josh could hear popping, even over the traffic. One man held a heavy cine-camera on his shoulder, while his companion carried a tape recorder the size of a suitcase, and brandished an enormous black microphone.

“We must have traveled back in time,” said Josh. “Look at this place … steam trains, autogiros, disposable flashbulbs, everybody wearing hats. This is more like the 1930s or thereabouts.”

A stray newspaper tumbled across the sidewalk in front of him. He tried to step on it, missed, but then he stepped on it again and caught it, and picked it up. At the top of the page a large headline announced PROTECTOR GREETS PRESIDENT. There was a photograph of a black-suited man with a deathly-white face shaking hands with a tall gray-suited man with bouffant hair. In the background there was a gleaming railroad car and a station sign saying Naseby.

But above the headline was the date March 17, 2001.

“Look at this, we’re still in today, leastways as far as the date is concerned. We’re still in the same place, too, pretty much. But everything’s so out of date. Like the past seventy years never happened.”

Nancy was reading the crumpled-up newspaper. “Listen to this: ‘Lord Pearey of Richmond Forest died at the weekend at the age of thirty-four. He contracted tuberculosis on a visit to Vienna late last year and failed to respond to a convalescence in the Scottish Highlands. His personal physician, Dr John Woollcot, described him as a brilliant young man, full of glittering promise, and called for renewed Government efforts to find a chemotherapeutic cure for tuberculosis as a matter of the gravest urgency.’”

“And look at the headline: KING’S EVIL TAKES PEER. That’s a pretty quaint way of describing TB, wouldn’t you say?”

Josh stopped on the corner of Arundel Street and looked around. He was trying to imagine what Julia was looking for, when she came here. It was noisy and it was smelly and it was old-fashioned but it must have appealed to her for some reason.

“You’re thinking of Julia,” said Nancy.

Josh nodded. “She always did have a quirky sense of humor. Do you know something, when she was a little kid, she used to pretend that she was a puppet and that she was made out of wood, and I had to tie string to her wrists and the bow on top of her head, to make her dance.”

He suddenly pictured Julia’s appearance at Ella’s séance, her feet wildly pedaling frantically in the air. Nancy caught the sudden look of distress on his face and squeezed his hand.

They crossed over the Strand and began to walk westward toward Trafalgar Square, past dark, sour-smelling wine bars and men’s outfitters with faded tropical suits and topis in the window. The sidewalks here weren’t quite as crowded as Fleet Street, but everybody seemed to be walking very fast, and Josh had several irritating collisions with people who refused to deviate from their chosen path.

He found the photographic grayness of the sky more and more oppressive. It was like walking through a 1950s newsreel. The air was so polluted that he had to keep clearing his throat with a sharp, repetitious cough, and he was beginning to develop a headache.

He was struck by how dirty everything was. The “real” London was a grimy city, but this London was even worse. Very few passers-by looked as if they bathed very often. He saw clerks with soiled white collars and pimples and girls with greasy hair pinned up with criss-cross patterns of grips. Whenever they were jostled in tight with a knot of people, Josh could smell sweat and stale tobacco and a cheap, distinctive perfume like lily-of-the-valley. And almost everybody seemed to be smoking. There was no gum on the sidewalks, but the gutters overflowed with cigarette butts.

A third of the way down the Strand they found a red telephone booth, and there were two fat well-thumbed directories hanging inside it. They squashed themselves side by side into the booth and Josh hefted up one of the directories and searched for Wheatstone Electrics. Nancy peered in the mirror and said, “I don’t look any different. But I feel different.”

“Maybe you’re suffering from door lag.”

“Maybe I’m frightened I’m never going to get back home again.”

“Here it is,” said Josh at last, and he was almost sorry that he had found it. “Wheatstone Electrics, Great West Road, Brentford. Julia must have been here.”

“Why don’t you see if Julia’s listed? She was here for ten months, wasn’t she? She might have installed a phone.”

Josh thumbed through residential numbers, under Winward, but there was nothing there. Then he looked up Marmion, of Kaiser Gardens, Lavender Hill, and he found her almost immediately. “She’s here, look. LA Vender Hill 3223. But we don’t have any money to call her.”

“We could try calling collect.”

Josh lifted the receiver and dialed 0 for the operator.

“Number please.”

“I want to place a collect call to LA Vender Hill 3223.”

“You mean a reverse charge call? Who shall I say is calling?” The operator had such a clipped accent she pronounced it “kulling”.

“Mr Josh Winward. No, no – tell them it’s Julia’s brother.”

“Hold the line, please.”

He waited while the phone rang, and rang. Eventually, he heard a quavery woman’s voice say, “’Ullo? ’Oo is it?”

“Is that LA Vender Hill 3223? I have Julia’s brother on the line. Will you accept the charges?”

“Will I what?”

“The caller is asking you to pay for the call.”

“’Oo did you say it was?”

Josh broke in and said, “Tell her it’s urgent, for Christ’s sake. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“I can’t pass on any more information, sir. I’m sorry. Otherwise you could have a whole conversation, couldn’t you, and you wouldn’t be paying for it.”

“Look, I have to speak to this woman. It’s desperately important. My sister’s been murdered, and this is the only way I’m going to find out who did it.”

“Hold on, kuller.”

There was a pause, and then the quavery woman’s voice asked, “Did you say Julia’s brother? Yes … all right. I’ll talk to him. Only for a moment, mind. I’m not made of money.”

Josh said, “Mrs Marmion? Mrs Marguerite Marmion? Yes! This is Josh Winward speaking, I’m Julia Winward’s brother from San Francisco.”

“You are, are you? And ’oo’s Julia Winward, when she’s at ‘ome?”

“You don’t know her? I found your address amongst her belongings.”

“That must’ve been a mistake. I’ve never ’eard of anybody called Julia Winward. I don’t know anybody called Julia.”

Josh was just about to shout at her, Why did you agree to pay for the call, if you don’t know anybody called Julia?, when it dawned on him what Mrs Marmion was trying to tell him. She must have known Julia – otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to talk to him at all. But she didn’t want to admit it over an open telephone line.

“So nobody called Julia ever stayed with you?”

“No. I’ve got a big two-bedroomed flat upstairs in my house. I wouldn’t go renting it out to some chit of a secretary, would I?”

“I guess you wouldn’t. How long has the flat been empty?”

“Ten months, just over.”

“Do you think I could take a look at it?”

“It’s full of stuff. Nobody’s been round to collect it all yet.”

“I see. Do you think I could just come down to Lavender Hill and talk to you, then? I’m pretty interested in renting a flat myself.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. I’m afraid. That’s impossible. I really ’ave to go now. Goodbye.”

Mrs Marmion hung up and Josh was left with a long disengaged tone. He replaced the receiver with a frown.

“What’s the matter?” asked Nancy. A small man with a bristly moustache was standing outside the phone booth glaring at them impatiently.

Josh said, “Julia was staying with Mrs Marmion the whole time she was here. Mrs Marmion said that she didn’t … but she knew that Julia was a secretary. I think she was saying the opposite of everything that was true.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Maybe she suspected that her line was tapped. Maybe she’s frightened. She said the flat was full of stuff, but I think she meant that somebody had been round to clear away all of Julia’s belongings. When I asked her if I could go visit her, she said ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible’. But then she said ‘I’m afraid,’ like she was really afraid. And a pause, and then ‘That’s impossible’.”

“You’re not reading something into this that wasn’t there?”

“She said she didn’t know anybody called Julia. But if that was true, why did she agree to talk to Julia’s brother?”

“So what are we going to do now?” asked Nancy.

“We’re going to go see her, of course.”

“In Lavender Hill? How? It’s miles away, and we don’t have any parallel-Londonish money.”

“I don’t know … maybe I could hock my watch.”

They were still discussing ways to get to Lavender Hill when the man with the bristly moustache rapped a coin very sharply on the window. Josh gave him a wave to show that they were nearly through.

“I still think we ought to go back and change our clothes and work out a way to pay for things,” said Nancy.

“Oh, yes? Supposing we do that, and then we can’t find our way back here, ever again?”

“Josh, this place is real. I can feel it. I can hear it. I can certainly smell it. If it’s real, we can get back to it.”

“What about candles?”

“There’s a church on the way back to Star Yard. They must have candles in there.”

Josh thought for a moment. He knew Nancy was right. They wouldn’t get far without money, or suitable clothes. What would happen tonight, when they needed someplace to stay? And apart from that, he didn’t think it was a good idea for them to look so conspicuous. Whoever had taken all of Julia’s belongings away from her flat at Mrs Marmion’s house obviously didn’t want anybody to discover that Julia had ever been here. And Mrs Marmion was plainly frightened of them.

The man with the moustache rapped on the window again. Finally he tugged open the door and demanded, “Look here! Are you going to make another phone call or not? Some of us have trains to catch.”

“Sure, I’m sorry,” said Josh, and they stepped out of the booth and back into the crowds.

They started to walk back toward Fleet Street. The wind began to rise, and sheets of newspaper blew across the sidewalks, catching against the legs of the passers-by. A speck of grit flew into Nancy’s eye, and they had to stop for a moment while Josh carefully extricated it with the dampened tip of her headscarf.

They walked as far as Kingsway, jostling their way through the crowds. As they reached the zebra crossing, however, they realized that they were the only people heading eastward, and that everybody else was hurrying west. Not just hurrying – they were walking as fast as they could possibly go without actually breaking into a run.

Josh stopped again and turned his head. “What the hell’s going on here? What’s the goddamned rush?”

As they crossed over the road, he looked into the faces of the tide of people coming toward them. They weren’t panicking, but there was a kind of determination on their faces that was even more unsettling than panic. When he was a boy, he had seen an audience trying to escape from a burning movie theater in Santa Cruz, and these people had the same grim look. Me. I have to save me.

Nancy caught hold of Josh’s hand to prevent herself from being jostled away. “This is so weird,” she said. “Where are all these people going?”

Josh was buffeted by a large man in a flapping camel-hair overcoat. “Hey – watch it, fellow!” he called, but the man stared at him and hurried on.

“They definitely know something that we don’t,” said Nancy.

They reached the wide area of paving in front of the Law Courts. Only a few minutes before it had been crowded with reporters and lawyers and curious bystanders. Now it was almost deserted, except for two barristers who were hurrying into its vaulted interior as fast as they could, with their black gowns flapping.

The eastbound traffic was still solid, but dozens of people were making their way between the cars and taxis, their briefcases and umbrellas held high, as if they were wading waist-deep through water. Passengers were abandoning buses, laden with shopping bags and briefcases, and joining the throng on the sidewalks.

“I don’t like this,” said Josh, looking around. “Something has seriously spooked these people. It looks like Godzilla’s arrived in town.”

He tried to catch a man’s sleeve. The man jerked up his arm, as if he expected Josh to start beating him.

“Hey!” Josh demanded. “I’m not going to hurt you! Just tell me why everybody’s running!”

The man fled away without answering, colliding with a young woman pushing a large baby carriage. Josh watched him go, shaking his head. “That’s one terrified dude.”

“Whatever’s happening, we still have to get back to Star Yard. And we still have to find some candles.”

They pushed their way through the crowd until they could see the grimy facade of St Osbert’s Church, which fronted directly on to the street. The traffic was still deafening, but as they came nearer, Josh thought he heard a muffled drumming sound, with a sharper rat-a-tat-tat! on top of it that echoed and re-echoed all the way up Fleet Street.

Nancy reached the church door and twisted the handle. “It’s locked,” she said. “I thought churches were always supposed to be open.”

Josh gave the handle a hefty tug. The door was definitely locked and bolted, and it was made of studded black oak. There was no possible way of forcing it open.

“What do we do now?” asked Nancy.

“I saw a couple of stationery stores around the corner. Maybe they have candles. I don’t know. Maybe we can improvise something out of sealing wax. In any case, I think the best thing we can do is get the hell out of here.”

They had almost reached the lower end of Chancery Lane. The muffled drumming grew louder and louder, and the rat-tat rhythm was bouncing off the windows all along Fleet Street like hailstones. It was then that they saw what everybody was hurrying away from.

It was frightening because it was so solemn, and so out of place, like a funeral being held in the street. A procession of men all dressed in black, old-fashioned clothes, cloaks and britches and tall black hats were making their way up Fleet Street, past the Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, led by two dog-handlers with four black dogs between them, straining at their leads. Behind them came six or seven drummers, also dressed in black, with wide triangular black caps that looked like rooks’ beaks. The larger drums were beating a dead-slow march time, poom and poom and poom. The smaller drums were rattling out an aggressive volley of noise that made it almost impossible to think.

Behind the drummers came a group of ten or eleven men, all wearing tall black hats and black capes that trailed along the sidewalk. They carried drawn swords, which Josh could see glinting in the gray daylight. Their faces looked gray, too, until Josh realized that they were wearing hoods over their heads … hoods with exaggerated black eyes painted on them.

“The Hooded Men,” said Josh. “This may be London, 2001, but they still have those Puritan guys patrolling the streets.”

“Come on, Josh, I think we ought to stay way out of their way.”

“You’re right. Let’s get back to Star Yard. Maybe we won’t need candles for the trip back.”

They jogged up a Chancery Lane whose sidewalks were increasingly deserted. A few spots of rain began to fly in the wind. They reached Carey Street and crossed over to Star Yard.

As they entered it, however, two young men came toward them. One of them was dressed with almost ridiculous elegance in a long gray coat with a black velour collar. The other was much more bulky, with a round brown face that looked half-Burmese.

Josh took hold of Nancy’s arm and drew her to one side of the yard, so that the two young men could pass them. But the thin young man stopped right beside them and the larger one moved himself in front of them so that they couldn’t go any further.

“What is this?” said Josh. “A mugging, or what?”

“Depends what you’ve got to offer, guvnor. We’re always on the lookout for novelties. Especially if they come from over there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The thin young man leaned forward and looked into Josh’s face so closely that he could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. He was elegant, he was so handsome that he was almost beautiful, but he was a wreck.

“Jack be quick?” he ventured. “Now do you know what I’m talking about?”