The Doorkeepers (15 page)

“It's here!”
she called. Her voice sounded even more distorted.
“There's another alleyway, here to the left!”
She
lifted her arm and pointed and her hand disappeared from sight, right into the brick.
“It's here, you can make your way through!”
With that, she took a step sideways and disappeared too.

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”.