Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

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.

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.”