The Doorkeepers

Thirteen

“If I can trust you with my life,” said the thin young man, lighting the gas under a battered kettle, “I think I can probably trust you with my name.” He came back into the junk-filled living room and held out his hand. “Simon Cutter. The famous Simon Cutter, of the Clerkenwell Cutters. Like, if you get into an occasional spot of bother anywhere in Clerkenwell, or Holborn, or Finsbury Park, all you have to do is say the magic words, ‘I’m a mate of the famous Simon Cutter,’ and all your problems will melt away like …” He thought for a moment, his hand still extended, and then he said, “Margarine.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” said Josh. “But I’m doing my best not to get into any spots of bother anyplace at all. Even occasional spots of bother.”

“Ah, but you never know, do you? Bother is one of those unpredictable things. Like you’re walking along the street minding your own business, tooty-too, tooty-too, and whallop!”

Josh looked around the room. “You lived here long?”

“Three years. I’ve been wanting to move, but you know … it’s all my stuff.”

From Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Simon had led them through the backstreets to a two-bedroomed apartment on top of a brown-painted furniture shop in Gray’s Inn Road. It was a gloomy, crowded place to live, its windows covered with amber blinds and its floors stacked with every conceivable kind of clutter: suitcases, chairs, empty fishtanks, umbrellas, typewriters, stags’ heads, gramophones, boxes of gramophone records and teetering stacks of books. There was more bric-à-brac in the bedrooms, including a mahogany washstand and the front wheel from a penny-farthing bicycle. In the bathroom there was a stuffed ocelot and a Zulu spear. The kitchen overlooked a shadowy ventilation shaft, where, against all odds, a sycamore tree had managed to grow out of a crevice in the bricks, twenty-five feet above the ground. Every available shelf and counter in the kitchen was crammed with jars and pots and coffee percolators and cheese graters and extraordinary patent devices for coring apples.

San was there, too, standing in the corner in a bronze satin bathrobe with dragons embroidered on it, ironing a black silk shirt and listening to the radio, which was turned down to a mutter, interspersed with occasional bursts of laughter.

“You’re quite a collector,” said Josh, picking up one of the books and leafing through it. A British Traveller’s Guide To Far-Flung Destinations, published 1971.

“Well, yes, but I don’t collect it conscious-like. It just a-coomalates. Every time I walk out the door I seem to a-coomalate more and more stuff. I’ve just got so much … a-coomalated stuff.”

“So, what, you’re a dealer?”

“You could say that. Somebody wants something, I can usually oblige. And they’re always crying out for anything from Purgatory. Watches, pens, perfumes. They’ll even buy those mobile phones, not that they ever work.”

“Excuse me? What did you say? Purgatory?”

Simon looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. I know you people don’t call it that.”

Nancy said, “You think we came from Purgatory?”

Simon gave her a cautious shrug.

“You think we’re dead? You think we’re spirits, who didn’t quite make it to heaven?”

Simon shrugged again, and in the kitchen the kettle began to whistle like a crushed canary. Nancy lifted Simon’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Do I feel dead to you?”

“I don’t know. I never really touched nobody from Purgatory before. Not intimate-like.”

“But we’re walking around and talking to you,” said Josh. “Dead people don’t normally do that, do they?”

“Ah! Yes! But there’s dead, ain’t there, and then there’s gone beyond. You people from Purgatory, you’re not the same as your run-of-the-mill cold meat, are you? You’ve been sent back to give it another go. Too bent for heaven and too straight for hell, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s a great idea. I only wish it was true. The trouble is, that particular description would fit seventy-five percent of the population of Marin County.”

Simon took the kettle off the gas. “So you didn’t come from Purgatory? You look like all the other people I’ve seen, what come from Purgatory. Same kind of clothes.”

“Have you seen many others?”

“Not a lot. Six or seven every year. Sometimes only one or two. One year none. And if I’m not sharpish, the Hoodies get to them first, and then they scuttle them off before I get the chance to … well, you know. Before I get the chance to say ‘how-d’you-do’.”

“You mean before you get the chance to rob them?”

“I take umbrage to that, guvnor. I’m a collector, not a foin.”

“Oh, a collector. I see. But is that what the Hoodies tell you, that these people come from Purgatory?”

“The Hoodies don’t tell nobody nothing. The Hoodies is the Hoodies. Everybody learns about Purgatory, from school. A Child’s Book of Simple Truth.”

“So you’ve always believed that people who come through the door come from Purgatory? Since you were small?”

Simon poured out tea, and nodded.

“Haven’t they ever told you any different? The people themselves?”

“I never talked to a Purgatorial before. Not conversational.”

“You mean you just robbed them and that was it?”

“Be fair, guvnor, I didn’t have time for the finer points of parlary, did I? It was touch-and-go to fleece them before the Hoodies showed up. And oftener than not, the Hoodies got there first. Or some other chancer.”

“Tell me something about the doors. Is there any way that you can tell that somebody’s just about to come through?”

“It’s like dowsing for water, guvnor. You got to have the feel for it.”

“So you can tell? And that means you can be lying in wait for anybody who steps out?”

“It’s possible, yes, guvnor. There are ways and ways. But it ain’t all that easy. The only guaranteed way to catch the Purgatorials one hundred percent is to stand by the door twenty-four hours through the day and never get no kip. But – if you know what you’re looking for, you can see the door change. Something in the substance of it, like that wobbly air you get, when the roads are hot. You came through it: you must have seen it for yourself. Me and San, we walked through the Yard today, and we saw the door was different-like, just the faintest of wobbles, and that’s when we knew that somebody had opened it. That’s why we was hanging around, waiting for you. Purgatorials generally come back to the door they come through, given an hour or two, although I never know why.”

“The Hooded Men … were they aware that we had come through, too?”

“Oh, yes. They always know. That’s why they was coming after you. Don’t ask me how they know. But nobody comes through them doors without the Hoodies being there in five or ten minutes at the most. Then phwwitt! that’s it, they’re catched and off to wherever they take them.”

“But if the Hoodies don’t want us here,” said Nancy, “why don’t they simply close the doors off? Brick them up, so nobody can get through?”

“Because bricking them up wouldn’t make no difference. The doors is always there, even if you build a church on top of them. I know for a fact that one of the doors is right slap bang in the middle of the river these days, even though it must have been on dry land, when it was first opened up.”

“You know where all the other doors are?” asked Josh.

“I wish I did. There’s one at Southwark, I do know that, on the corner of Bread Street and Watling Street. My old china Crossword Lenny looks after it, so to speak. I heard there was some up west, too, but as for their precise whereabouts, you’d have to ask an expert on doors and their precise whereabouts, if there is such a person.”

They cleared books and magazines out of the seats of the huge sagging armchairs and sat back and sipped their tea out of thick British Railways cups. Josh was beginning to feel exhausted – not only from their chase across the rooftops of Chancery Lane, but because this world in which he and Nancy had found themselves was so familiar, and yet so disturbingly different. It felt different. There were different noises, different smells, different sounds; and when Simon and San talked together, they used words that Josh had never heard of, and referred to events that had never happened. Not in the “real” world, anyhow. He thought, even if you went to Beijing, you could say “McDonald’s!” or “Julia Roberts!” and people would know what you were talking about. Here, they simply didn’t exist, and never had.

“What if I said to you, ‘the Beatles’?” Josh asked Simon.

Simon looked uneasy. “The beetles? I don’t understand.”

“The Beatles. The 1960s pop group.”

“Pop? Group? What’s that?”

“You’ve never heard of the Beatles?”

“Never.”

“The Rolling Stones? Glenn Campbell? Hootie and the Blowfish? The Doors?”

“I don’t understand.”

Nancy said, “All right … let me ask you something more serious. What is the name of the current President of the United States?”

“The United States of what?”

“The United States of America, of course.”

“Oh, America! Well, America doesn’t have a president. They have a Lord Protector, like us.”

“No President? No White House?”

Simon was completely bemused. “Why don’t you have some more tea?” he asked them.

“Don’t you British have royalty any more?” Josh wanted to know. “What about the Queen and Prince Charles and the Duke of Edinburgh?”

“The last king was Charles I. Sixteen-something. Chopped his bonce off, didn’t they?”

“So who ruled England after him?”

“The same people that run it now. The Commonwealth.”

“And America is being run by the Commonwealth?”

“Of course.”

Josh said, “What about World War Two?”

Simon shook his head.

“You’ve never heard of World War Two? When America and Britain got together and fought against the Germans?”

“We never fought the Germans,” said Simon, as if the very idea of it was totally ridiculous.

“What about the Japanese? Did you ever hear of Pearl Harbor? How about Hiroshima, and the atom bomb?”

“Sorry, guvnor.”

“All right, then, let’s go back a bit. World War One? No? Fighting in the trenches? No? How about the Titanic? No? You must have heard of the American Civil War, north versus south. You must have heard of Abraham Lincoln.”

“No … I don’t think so. I’ve heard of Lincoln cars, they’re American, aren’t they?”

Josh sat back. “OK, tell me. What was the most important worldwide event of the past decade? In your opinion?”

Simon sucked in his breath. “Whooo … that’s a tough one.”

“You know what it was?” put in San, still meticulously ironing, and hanging up his shirt. “It was Miss Burma, winning the Miss World Competition.”

“Listen to him!” said Simon, in mock disgust. “No … I reckon the most important thing that happened was them two geezers flying round the world in a Zeppelin. It won’t be long before anybody can fly practically anywhere they like.”

“How about that?” said Josh, turning to Nancy. “No World War One … no World War Two. I guess that’s why everything’s sixty years out of date. No jet engines. No antibiotics. There’s nothing like a war to speed up new inventions.”

“It’s all wars, is it, where you come from?” said Simon.

“Not entirely. There hasn’t been a major war in over half a century. And at least we don’t have Hooded Men.”

“You don’t? What do you do about the Catholics?”

“We don’t do anything about the Catholics. Being a Roman Catholic isn’t a crime, where we come from.”

“Blimey.” Simon rummaged in his coat pocket and took out a small cream-colored pack of Player’s Weights cigarettes. He lit one and blew a series of smoke rings. “Seems like a bloody dodgy kind of place to me. All wars and popery.”

Josh looked down at the dog-torn hemline of Simon’s overcoat. “Depends on your definition of bloody dodgy.”

San finished his ironing and went into the kitchen. “I hope everybody’s hungry,” he said; and without waiting for an answer he started chopping onions.

“You’d better kip here tonight,” said Simon. “The Hoodies’ll be out looking for you still. Tomorrow you can go back through the door and find yourselves some decent clobber. Bring me some pens and some watches and anything else that you can think of and I’ll get you some dosh and anything else you need. Maps, tube passes, little black books.”

“Little black books?”

Simon reached in his pocket and produced a small, worn-out, leather-bound book. “The Sayings of Oliver Cromwell. Everybody has to carry one. Do you know what my favorite saying is? ‘Necessity hath no law’. In other words, guvnor, what you has a need of, you furnishes yourself with.”

“Tomorrow I want to go to Kaiser Gardens and Wheatstone Electrics,” said Josh. “Maybe you’d like to come along and help us. You know, act as our scout.”

“Fair enough. So long as you make it worth my while.”

Josh took off his gold-plated Polo wristwatch and handed it over. “How about this, for a down payment?”

Simon held it to his ear. “It ain’t going to croak on me, is it? Some of them do, and you can’t wind them up.”

“The batteries probably ran out. I’ll bring you some spares.”

Simon stood up and climbed through the junk like a mountain goat. He noisily dragged the top drawer out of an antique bureau, and carried it over to the table in the center of the room. “You must tell me how this works,” he said, and produced a Nokia mobile phone. “I know it’s a telephone, of sorts, but I can’t get a squeak out of it.”

Josh shook his head. “It won’t work here. It needs a communications satellite, and I don’t suppose you have communications satellites, do you?”

Simon looked baffled. Josh pointed to the ceiling and said, “In orbit? In space? You’ve never sent up rockets or anything like that? You’ve never sent men to the moon?”

Nancy was sifting through the contents of the drawer. “Look at this stuff, Josh. How many missing people do you think this represents?”

The drawer was crammed with credit cards, driving licenses, checkbooks, passports, letters, pens, diaries, theater tickets, restaurant receipts, combs, buttons and photographs of children. Josh picked up an ID card from the University of Michigan. A podgy, bespectacled face stared up at him. David L. Burger, Professor of Applied Physics. How had he wandered into this parallel London, and where was he now?

Josh held the passport up so that Simon could see it. “When did this guy come through?”

Simon shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Roughly when?”

“I don’t know, six months ago, something like that.”

“He came through the Star Yard door?”

Simon looked shifty, and shrugged again.

“Come on, Simon. You must know which door he came through. Jesus, you were waiting there to jump on him!”

“We wasn’t. We bumped into him round the back of Oxford Street, that’s all. We didn’t even know he was a Purgatorial, until we rooked him.”

“So you don’t know how he got here, or how long he’d been here, or which door he used?”

“No, guvnor.”

Josh carefully laid the ID card back in the drawer, as if he were laying Professor Burger to rest. “So what happened to him afterwards? After you ‘rooked’ him?”

“How should I know? He hit his head on the curb and there was lots of ketchup. I never heard no more about him. The Hoodies got him, more than likely.”

“How come they hadn’t got him before?”

“I can’t guess, guvnor.”

In the kitchen, San was busy chopping and frying, and the flat was filled with the aromatic smell of chicken and garlic and lime leaves.

Nancy picked up Professor Burger’s passport, too. “What are you getting at, Josh?”

“How does a professor in applied physics from the University of Michigan find out how to pass through to a parallel world in London, England? And when he does find out, why does he do it? And when did he do it?”

“What does ‘when’ matter?”

“If he’s been here only a matter of minutes, or hours, then he’s simply been lucky, and the Hooded Men haven’t caught up with him yet. But what if he’s been here longer? Like days, or weeks, or even longer than that? Supposing he’s been here ten months, like Julia? How come the Hooded Men haven’t picked him up? How come they didn’t pick her up?”

“I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“Suppose he’s been here for months, how does he survive? What does he live on? If he’s openly walking around Oxford Street, presumably he’s not too worried about being caught. He must be here by arrangement, like Julia. He must have a job of some kind. My guess is that some people stray here by accident, or because they find out about the Mother Goose rhyme, the way we did. But other people come here by invitation, like Julia. And maybe like Professor Burger, too. For all we know, there could be hundreds of people from the ‘real’ London living here. People who just wanted to escape, the same way Julia did. People looking for another chance.”

San cleared a space on the coffee table and set out four plates of Burmesc fried chicken and rice, with chunks of canned pineapple and dandelion-leaf salad with a chili dressing. They all sat cross-legged on the floor and ate with an assortment of spoons. Josh’s had a horn handle and a silver Scottish crest on it. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he actually started to eat.

Nancy said, “This parallel world could explain so much. It could explain where people disappear to. You know, like those schoolgirls in Picnic at Hanging Rock.”

“That was in Australia.”

“Sure … but who’s to say that there aren’t hundreds of doors, all over the world? I’ll bet you if you look into every single mythology there’s some kind of reference to parallel worlds, and how to get through to them. There are so many references to ‘spirit gates’ and ‘ways through’ in Modoc legend; and the Irish have their land of the fairies, don’t they?”

Josh helped himself to more rice. “I don’t know what to think. Right now I feel like I’m right on the edge of going crazy. If I wasn’t sitting here, eating this chicken, I wouldn’t believe it, any of it.”

Nancy said, “You’ve cooked a great meal, San.”

“Thank you,” said San, bowing his head politely. “My mother taught me. She believed that every man who calls himself a man should learn to cook.”

“My compliments to your mother. Is she still out in Burma?”

San nodded. “My family, too. My sisters, my cousins. But I don’t hear from them any more.”

“Is there some kind of trouble in Burma?” Josh asked him. “Where we come from, Burma isn’t called Burma any more. It’s called Myanmar, and it’s run by a bunch of generals.”

“Burma is still Burma, but Burma is British. The Puritans tried to convert the Buddhists to Christianity, and there was bad fighting. Much ketchup. Many Burmese martyrs. That was why I came here, to London. I thought that I could talk to the Puritans. I thought that I could persuade them to change their minds, and let us worship Buddha in our own way.”

“And?”

“And he nearly got skinned alive for being an impertinent wog and he ended up with me,” Simon explained.

“So what now?” said Josh.

“Nothing in particular,” said Simon. “If he goes back to Burma, he’ll be hung up by his heels and his tongue cut out. If he stays here, he’ll have to keep away from the Hoodies and go on scavenging for a living with yours truly. Not a pretty choice. But I think he’d rather scavenge than swing, wouldn’t you, San?”

San smiled, and nodded. He had such grace that Josh found it hard to believe that anybody would want to persecute him.

“I’ll tell you something,” said Simon. “He’s got the lightest fingers that I’ve ever seen. He could be halfway to Holland Park with your best braces before your trousers fell down.”

“You must miss your family so badly,” said Nancy.

“Love always brings pain,” San told her, with candle flames shining in his dark brown eyes. “If a thing doesn’t hurt, then what is its value?”

By the time they had finished their meal, it was growing dark outside, and the small square of sky that Josh could see from the kitchen window was the color of royal blue ink. San washed the plates and Nancy dried them, while Josh and Simon talked about tomorrow. Josh was worried that once they had gone back through the door to find themselves some suitable clothes, they wouldn’t be able to find their way back again.

“You still don’t believe this is really real, do you, guvnor?” said Simon. His pronunciation was almost Dickensian – “veely veel”.

Josh leaned back in his armchair. He was so tired that he felt that he was hallucinating. “No … I guess that’s the problem. It’s more like a dream. I keep thinking that I’m going to wake up and none of this has happened.”

“You wait till you find the toe-rag that killed your sister. Then it won’t seem like a dream.”

They were still talking when they heard dogs barking outside; and doors slamming; and windows slamming, too.

“What’s the matter?” asked Josh. San went to the window and peered through the split-bamboo blind.

“I can’t see nothing. Whoever it is, they’re staying well out of sight.”

There was more banging, more barking. Then suddenly, within the building, they heard the tearing, creaking sound of a door being forced off its hinges, and glass breaking, and men shouting. Footsteps came running upstairs. Another door broke, and Josh heard a flat, uncompromising bang as it dropped to the floor.

“They’ve found us,” said Simon. “God knows how, but they have.”

“How the hell did they find us here?”

“Grasses,” said Simon, contemptuously. “The Hoodies only have to offer them a couple of quid, and they’ll sell their maiden aunts.”

San said, “I’ll hold the door. You get out on the roof.”

The access to the skylight was tiny: a small window not more than two feet square, in the center of the living-room ceiling. Simon dragged the coffee table underneath it and then balanced a chair on top. He mounted the chair and banged at the tiny window with his clenched fist until he managed to dislodge it. A shower of rust and leaves came down, as well as a tiny fledgling, no more than two days old, already green with decay.

“You first,” said Simon, taking Nancy’s hand. “Climb out on the roof and keep your head down. Wait by the chimney stack.”

Josh said, “You don’t have to come with us, either of you. You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”

“You’re joking, guvnor. San’s a political fugitive and I’ve got a drum full of other people’s property. They’ll Holy-Harp us without a blink.”

Heavy footsteps reverberated on the landing outside. San locked and bolted the door and stood with his back to it. Nancy climbed on to the coffee table, and then on to the chair, and climbed awkwardly out of the skylight, her boots kicking behind her. There was a violent knocking on the door, and the handle was shaken so furiously that it dropped off on to the floor.

“Open up, in the name of the Commonwealth!”

“Hurry,” Simon urged; and Josh climbed out on the roof, too. Nancy was already waiting by the chimney stack, but he knelt down beside the skylight and held out his hand to help Simon climb up after him.

There was a devastating crash as the Hooded Men tried to force down the door – then another, and another. The door frame cracked and plaster sifted on to San’s shoulders. He kept his back pressed against the woodwork, his knees braced, and there was a look of grim determination on his face.

Josh climbed up on to the coffee table. “Come on, San! Before they break the whole goddamned door down!”

“Just go!” San told him.

There was another crash as the Hooded Men kicked against the door panels, and one of the lower panels split. San stood with his arms outspread, his teeth gritted, his heels digging into the threadbare carpet.

“Come on, San!” Simon shouted at him. “You can’t hold them back for ever!”

San braced himself, ready to abandon the door and make his escape through the skylight. But as he did so, the point of a brightly shining sword came darting out of the middle of his chest. Another came out of his left shoulder, and a third penetrated his right thigh. He opened his mouth wide, as if he were going to scream, but before he could do so, another sword-blade leaped out from between his lips, like a shining steel tongue.