Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

“I couldn’t leave him wandering the streets like that.”

“So what are you going to do with him? You can’t keep him here, can you? And if you’re going away tomorrow, don’t expect me to look after him. I don’t like dogs.”

“Look, I’ll take him with me, if I have to.”

“That’s all right, then.” She lit a cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke. “So you’re going to be staying here tonight, after all?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I, now that my friend’s been killed.” “Well, don’t expect any hanky-panky. Not with that dog in the room.”

Josh couldn’t help smiling. He was exhausted and he couldn’t think about anything else but Nancy, caught by the Hooded Men – but he was still amused by Petty’s unshakable conviction that men were only interested in one thing. Hanky-panky? he thought. You wish.

It was another gusty day, and Josh had difficulty in lighting the candles. Abraxas stood beside him, patiently panting. Josh had made a lead for him out of a suitcase strap. One or two passers-by stopped to watch him, and one old woman asked him if he was making a shrine.

He told her yes; and in a way he was. This niche in the wall was a shrine to Julia, and to Ella, and all of those who had been killed or tortured at the hands of the Hoodies.

At last the candles were burning strongly. Josh hefted Abraxas up in his arms and recited the words of the Mother Goose rhyme. There was hardly anybody around – only a girl with a basket of sandwiches walking up from Carey Street – and so he stepped over the candles and into the niche. Abraxas barked three or four times as they turned the corner out of this Star Yard and made their way through the passageway.

The other Star Yard was almost deserted. Josh peered around the corner of the niche, to make sure that there were no Hoodies or Watchers waiting for him. Then he tugged at Abraxas’ lead and said, “Come on, boy. Let’s go find Nancy.”

He had almost reached Carey Street when a hand seized his left shoulder. “’Ere! Don’t go beetling off! I’ve been waiting for you for days!”

It was Simon Cutter, although Josh could hardly recognize him. His face was swollen and scratched, both his eyes were black, and his two front teeth were missing. His right arm was wrapped in filthy bandages and held up in a sling. His long coat was covered in mud and straw and the lining dragged along the paving stones.

“God almighty, what happened to you?” Josh asked him.

“The Hoodies gave me a going-over, didn’t they? They wanted to know all about John Farbelow and the rest of his subversives. They wanted to know all about you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them nothing. What could I tell them, I didn’t know nothing. They were going to scrag me, and then they were going to transport me, but in the end the reeve said that since I’d lost my hook and feeler, that was punishment enough.”

“Where’s Nancy?”

Simon took hold of Josh’s arm and pulled him back up Star Yard. “I heard from one of my street arabs that they took her to the Puritan Martyrs Hospital in the City. That’s not a hospital for sick people, guvnor. It used to be a plague hospital, so they say, but it’s closed these days. The windows are always lit up at night, and there’s coming and going, but nobody ever says what goes on there.”

“Can we get in there, do you think?”

“Why do you think I sent you that note? It so happens that I know a lad who works in the kitchens at the Puritan Martyrs. Me and him used to do a little business together. Leather goods.” He hesitated for a second, and then he added, “Wallets, purses, that kind of thing. He can let us in through the scullery, ten o’clock sharp.”

“OK … do you know someplace we can stay until then?”

“There’s a room up over the Old Cat & Ninepence. We can use that.”

The Old Cat & Ninepence was a seventeenth-century pub wedged in the corner of Gough Square, between two glass and concrete office buildings. Outside, it was tile-hung, with a crazily tilting chimney. Inside it was all dark paneling and tobacco-stained plaster, and the ceiling beams were so low that Josh had to duck his head as they went in through the front door.

Simon led the way up a flight of narrow, sloping stairs, and then along to the back of the building, where there was a small sitting room with a chintz-covered sofa and two armchairs, a large radio set, and a magazine rack stuffed with yellowing copies of Radio Times and The People’s Friend.

“We’ll be snug enough here,” said Simon, easing himself stiffly into one of the chairs. “The Hoodies may have sensed somebody coming through the door, but they won’t think to look in a gaff like this.”

Josh went to the window. It was made up of small octagonal panes of yellowish glass, with bubbles and inclusions in them, so that when the sun shone through it on to his face he looked as if he were suffering from leprosy. Abraxas sat down at his feet and yawned.

“You’re sure you don’t have any idea why the Hoodies might have taken Nancy to the hospital?”

“Search me, guvnor.”

“You see, what worries me is that Julia was mutilated. When they found her body in the Thames it was empty, all of her internal organs taken out. And apparently it had been done by experts. Frank Mordant may have hung her, but what happened after that?”

Simon coughed, holding his right arm close to his chest.

“You sound pretty sick,” said Josh.

“It’s my stump, isn’t it? It’s infected. I kept it in a bowl of salty water but that still didn’t stop it from turning rotten.”

“Can’t you ask your doctor to prescribe you some antibiotics?” Josh asked him, but remembered almost at the same time that this was a world that was medically equivalent to the 1930s, before penicillin had been discovered.

Simon coughed again, and this time he brought up a handful of blood. “I’m bloody dying,” he said. “You don’t know what those bloody Hoodies did to me.”

Josh said nothing. He couldn’t quite understand why, but he felt uneasy. Why had the Hooded Men let Simon go so readily? After all, they had slaughtered all of John Farbelow’s people, in revenge for Master Thomas Edridge’s murder. And if they were holding Nancy prisoner, they must have guessed that he would come looking for her. So why hadn’t they been keeping a constant watch on the doors?

Unless they wanted to be absolutely sure that they had him trapped, where he didn’t have any chance of escape whatsoever. Josh remembered Ella’s tarot card with the man snaring songbirds. “You’re not setting me up, are you?”

Simon looked up at him, the whites of his eyes still stained with blood, like a broken vampire. “You can trust me, guvnor. You know that.”

Josh sat down next to him and pointed a finger directly at his nose. “If this is a trap, I swear to God that I will kill you first.”

Twenty-Six

Josh and Simon reached the rear of the Puritan Martyrs Hospital through a narrow alleyway that led from the side of a parade of shops on Bunhill Row. On the far side of an overgrown allotment stood a high corrugated-iron fence with its top cut into serrated saw-blade points. There was a gate in the middle of it, but it was locked.

“How do we get over this?” Josh demanded.

Simon checked his watch, and at the same time the bells of a nearby church struck ten o’clock. “Whippy should be here any second. He’s always dead reliable, Whippy.”

Abraxas was snuffling around the weeds, searching for interesting smells. He was still whuffling when they heard a padlock clanking, and the sound of bolts being drawn back. The gate was opened, and a short, stocky young man appeared, with black curly hair and a Roman nose and eyes as bright as a badger’s. He was wearing a long white apron and he was carrying a large bowl of vegetable peelings.