The Doorkeepers (18 page)

“Listen, I'm coming across. I'm coming across and I'm going to take hold of your hand and pull you up.”

The thin young man stared at Josh with his wild blue eyes. “You're going to have to jump right over her,” he said, in horror. “How are you going to do that?”

Josh looked at the roof behind him. There were no tiles left on it, but the rafters were intact and still studded with large rusty nails. He stood up and started to climb the nearest rafter, hand over hand, using the nails for toeholds.

“Josh!” screamed Nancy. “Josh, my hands are slipping!”

Josh climbed halfway up to the apex of the roof. He could see the dogs now: they were scrambling along the narrow gutter with their handlers close behind. The thin young man had picked up a heavy piece of rafter and was swinging it from side to side, ready to defend himself.

Josh turned, and stood up. He was caught by a sudden gust of wind, and for an endless three seconds he was desperately trying to stop himself from falling.

“Come on, Winward!”
He could almost hear his instructor in the Marines, screaming at him in frustration.
“Whatever the fuck you're going to do, don't just stand there – do it
!”

He found his balance, and paused. Then he shouted out,
“Yaaahhhhhhh!”
and ran down the sloping rafter, jumping between the nails like a gazelle. It was mad, but he was running so fast that he didn't fall over. He reached the edge of the roof and gave one last hop, skip and jump, which took him right up into the air. And in that split second he thought: Jesus, I'm not going to make it. The parapet loomed up in front of him, much higher than he had expected it to be.

“Hold on!”
he screamed at Nancy, because he was sure he was going to hit her, and drag both of them down to the flagstones ninety feet below. But he cleared the parapet by less than an inch, his left heel actually clipping it, and he fell heavily on to the gray shingled roof of the building opposite, rolling over and hitting his shoulder on a chimney stack.

Immediately, he stood up and hobbled back to the parapet. He leaned over and took hold of Nancy's hand. “Here! Pull yourself up! Quick!”

He heaved her up, inch by inch, and at last she was able to grip the top of the brickwork and pull herself over.
“God, I thought I was going to meet my ancestors then, for sure!”

Back on the other side, the thin young man was lashing out at the dogs with his nail-studded rafter. One of them managed to dodge around his feet and jump up on to his shoulders, biting at his neck. But he swung the rafter right over his head and hit it in the back with an audible crunch. He twisted the rafter around and the dog dropped over the side of the building and into the yard below.

He climbed up on the edge of the roof, swaying. Josh shouted,
“Jump! I'll catch you
!”

Nancy said, “Why, Josh? He was out to mug us!”

“He helped us escape, didn't he? And he knows a whole lot more about this world than we do. He can help us, Nance. We can't just leave him here!”

Nancy shook her head. But whatever she thought, it was too late, because the thin young man suddenly launched himself toward them, his arms outstretched. At the same instant, one of the dogs jumped after him, and caught his coat in its teeth.

Josh stretched out with both hands and snatched at the young man's wrists as he stumbled against the parapet. The dog, still clinging to the hem of his coat, was thrown against the wall. It didn't yelp, though, or open its jaws.

There was a moment when Josh thought he was going to let the young man fall. He was holding his full weight, as well as the weight of the dog, and the young man's wrists were gradually sliding between his fingers. But then he looked down at the dog, and the dog looked balefully back up at him, and their eyes locked.

“Let go!” Josh ordered.

The dog growled and swung from side to side on the tails of the young man's coat, but it wouldn't release its grip.

“Didn't you hear me, you disobedient mutt? Let go!”

On the edge of the building opposite, the dog-handler shouted out, “Goethe! Hang on! You hear me, Goethe? Hang on, you miserable cur, or I'll have your coddled brains for breakfast!”

“Christ, I'm slipping,” said the thin young man. He glanced
down at the paving stones far below him and then he looked back up at Josh in desperation. “God save me! Please, God, I won't ever steal again.”

At that moment, the dog-handlers started to throw lumps of timber and broken slates at them. One piece of wood hit Josh on the arm, and a slate hit him on the side of the head, cutting his ear. Blood ran down the side of his cheek and dripped on to the young man's face.

A heavy piece of rafter hit the thin young man on the back. He shouted out in pain, and lurched around, and his right hand broke free from Josh's fingers. Josh clawed the air, but he couldn't reach his wrist again. The young man was dangling now from one wrist only, with a dog hanging from his coat, and Josh knew from experience that it could take two men and a crowbar to pry that dog's jaws open.

Josh ducked his head as he was again pelted with slates and lumps of asphalt. Nancy, crouched behind the parapet, said, “Josh! You're going to have to let him go!”

“How can I?” said Josh, one eye closed against the blood. “Jesus, Nance, if I let him go he's going to die!”

He shouted down to the dog again. “Goethe! Are you listening to me, Goethe? You're a great dog, Goethe, you've done real good! Why don't you bark for me, Goethe? How about barking for me? Come on, Goethe! Bark!”

“Goethe! Silence!” his handler retaliated.

But Josh and the dog were staring at each other, and Josh knew that he had captured its complete attention. “Bark, Goethe,” he repeated. “Bark and show me what a good dog you are.”

The dog hesitated, but then it barked, just once – and once was enough. It tried to snap at the thin young man's coat-tails again, but it missed, and it dropped howling all the way to the ground, its paws still scrabbling for something to cling on to. It hit the flagstones with a flat, barely audible thud. Josh saw its blood running across the paving and felt worse than Judas.

He tugged at the young man's wrist, and pulled him up far enough to grab his other hand. Nancy seized his coat collar, and between the two of them they managed to heave him up over
the parapet and on to the roof. He lay on his back for a moment, saying, “God, oh God. I thought I was ready for the cold cook then. I swear it. I really thought I was brown bread.”

“They're breaking into the building downstairs,” said Josh. “We have to get out of here pronto.”

The thin young man sat up, and he was immediately showered in fragments of broken slate and pieces of brick. “Right, then. Let's go. It's not so difficult from here. We'll be in Lincoln's Inn Fields before the Hoodies even reach the second floor.”

Keeping their heads down, they negotiated their way between the chimneys and crossed the roof to the other side. The dog-handlers carried on pelting them with slates and rafters. A dead pigeon came cartwheeling across, thumping against Nancy's back. But when the dog-handlers realized that they were getting away, they turned back from the building's edge. They began to run downstairs again, shouting out to the Hooded Men to hurry.

Josh and Nancy jumped across to the next building, which was lower; and then to the next, and the next. A whole row of rooftops were connected by iron ladders, and then there was some more jumping, and a climb down a fire escape. By the time they reached the corner of Serle Street, the shouting and the drumming were nothing but echoes in another street.

The thin young man led them down the dusty, neglected staircases of another old building, and then they were out in Lincoln's Inn Fields and across the gardens, just as it started to rain.

“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?”