The Doorkeepers (19 page)

“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.