* * *
“Ha ha?” came the high, birdy voice of the clown. “Now where’s my old pal Dumb Tom?” There was a slow knocking of wood on wood as Horrabin moved back and forth on the boardwalk. The only other sounds were the fitful breeze in the rigging of the fishing boats moored nearby, and the lapping of the water around the pier pilings.
Doyle, sitting behind the box at the end of the pier, didn’t even breathe, and he wondered how long he could hold out before leaping to his feet and shouting, Get it over with, here I am, as you very well know! For there was a teasing note in the clown’s voice, as if it did know.
He heard more slow thumping as the clown moved this way and that. My God, Doyle thought, if that thing starts stumping down this pier toward me I’ll be into the water and swimming for Lambeth before he’s three steps out. Then he imagined the clown following him into the black water, imagined seeing over his shoulder that grinning painted face moving at him with impossible speed as he tried to swim with his stiffening shoulder. His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.
“Horrabin!” came a cry from away to Doyle’s right. “Where is he?”
Doyle realized with horror that it was Doctor Romany’s voice.
The clown giggled, a sound like a hundred manic crickets, and then called, “Right here.” The knocking of the stilts moved out onto the pier. With an explosive shriek that appalled even himself, Doyle dove off the pier end, barely getting a breath before plunging into the cold water. He thrashed to the surface and began swimming frantically. “What was that?” Romany’s voice carried clearly across the water. “What’s going on?”
Horrabin had ladder-walked to the end of the pier. “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.” He whistled, a shriller and more complicated whistle than the one he’d summoned the beggars with in the Strand, and then he waited, looking up and down the river shore.
* * *
As soon as the boat had emerged from the tunnel, and just before it passed through the Adelphi Arches and out into the river, Jacky unhooked her numbing fingers and let the craft recede away from her. Just in time, she had told herself, for a moment later one of the beggars had stepped back and grabbed the tiller and the other had lifted a pair of oars from the bottom of the boat and begun fitting the thole pins into the oarlocks. Doctor Romany had shouted a question, and she’d heard a faint answer, but she’d been swimming half underwater and hadn’t caught any of the words. Then there had come a scream, short but so loud that nobody within a mile could have missed it. Faintly she’d heard Horrabin’s voice say, afterward, “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.”
She heard the first clattering stroke of the oars just as she reached the bank and pulled herself out of the water.
* * *
Doyle, forty feet out now, calmed down a little and began to dog paddle silently. If anything, he thought, any boat or swimmer comes near me, I’ll surface dive and go as far as I can under water, and then try to let my head emerge slow and breathe quietly. Hell, with any luck I should be able to elude them … And, with a good deal more luck, get back to shore somewhere before my strength gives out. The current was carrying him to his left, away from Doctor Romany.
He heard a new sound—oarlocks clacking rhythmically behind him to his right.
Horrabin smiled, for a dim glow had appeared under the second pier to his left, and as it moved out from under the overhang it could be seen to be a shotgun pattern of dozens of tiny lights whirling across the face of the dark water. The clown pointed out toward where he’d last heard Doyle splashing, and the cluster of tiny lights scudded out into the river as quick as the wind-blown petals of some luminous flower.
“Follow the lights, Doctor Romany!” Horrabin called merrily.
What lights? Doyle wondered. The nearest lights are across the river. Sure, Doctor Romany, follow them while I drift east.
He quietly treaded water with his legs and right arm, giving his left shoulder a rest. Staying afloat was no problem; he had discovered that by taking turns with his dog paddle, floating on his back and slowly treading water he was able to keep his face out of water with no strenuous use of any one set of muscles. The current was taking him toward Blackfriars Bridge, and he was cautiously confident that he’d be able to climb up on one of the pilings and, once his pursuers had decided he’d drowned, make a segmented swim from piling to piling to the shore.
Suddenly he learned what lights Horrabin had meant, for what seemed to be a couple of dozen little floating candles were skimming across the surface straight toward him. He yanked his head under water and, with just a kick-splash to mark where he’d been, swam away under water in a direction at right angles to the course the lights had been taking.
His tenuous confidence was gone. This reeked of sorcery—hadn’t Jacky said Doctor Romany was a magician? Evidently Horrabin was too—and he felt like a man who, limbering up for a fistfight, sees his opponent snap the loaded cylinder closed on a revolver.
He frog-kicked along as far as he could and still expect to surface without gasping, and then he let his head float up and break the surface of the water. Slowly he lifted a hand and pushed the soaked flap of hair away from his eyes.
For a moment he just hung stunned in the water, for the lights had followed him and now surrounded him, and staring at the nearest couple he saw that they were eggshell halves, equipped with tiny torches, straw masts and folded paper sails, and—and it didn’t even occur to him to ascribe it to fever delirium—a tiny man, no bigger than his little finger, crouched in each one, twisting the toy mast deftly in the breeze to hold his diminutive craft in position.
Doyle screamed and flung his arm around in an arc to capsize them, then without waiting to see the effect drew a sobbing breath and dived again.
When his lungs were heaving at his clenched shut throat and he thought he must be about to crack his head against the stones of the bridge pilings, Doyle again let himself bob to the surface. The tiny eggshell mariners were again grouped in a ring around him when he surfaced. They didn’t approach nearer than two arm’s lengths, and in spite of the kalunk… kalunk… kalunk of Doctor Romany’s boat drawing ever closer he paused, thrashing weakly in the water, to get his breath back. Something slapped the water, hard, an inch from his left cheek, and the spray stung his eye. A moment later he heard the boom of a gunshot roll across the water from the shore. It was instantly followed by a shot from Romany’s boat, but because the boat was moving the shot was badly aimed and kicked up spray among the lighted eggshells, sending one spinning through the air.
God, I’m being shot at from all sides, Doyle thought despairingly as he once more filled his lungs and pushed himself under. They don’t even want me alive anymore.
Horrabin had glanced down to his left when a gunshot went off down there among the fishing boats, then his head snapped back up when there was a shot from Doctor Romany’s boat. The clown saw the tiny light spring up from the surface and go out when it came down again, and he realized the gypsy chief was shooting at the man in the water.
Horrabin quickly cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “I thought you wanted him alive!”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Romany’s voice echoed across the water. “Isn’t this Dog-Face Joe?”
“It’s the American.”
“Apep eat me. Then why did you shoot at him, you doomed sod?”
* * *
Jacky had already snatched a close-mesh fishing net out of a nearby boat, flung it into one of the canoes and was pushing the narrow craft out into the water when she heard Horrabin yell, in a voice made even shriller by fear, “It wasn’t me, damn it, your Worship, I swear! It’s somebody down among the boats here—there he goes now, in a canoe, heading toward you!”
Jacky handled the single oar with speed and grace, and propelled the canoe rapidly out toward the ring of little lights, which was shifting even further east, toward the bridge
. God, she thought as she panted with the effort, I’m sorry Tom—I mean Doyle. I was just too eager to kill Dog-Face Joe. I’m sorry, please don’t be killed.
She felt hollow and cold with horror, though, for it had felt like a good shot, and she’d been aiming directly at the center of the dimly seen head.
Her canoe was moving faster than Doctor Romany’s larger boat, and she’d started well to the east of him, so when Doyle’s head burst up out of the water again—again right in the middle of the infallible ring of lights—she was almost a hundred yards closer to him than Romany was.
“Doyle!” she called, profoundly relieved to see him still alive. “It’s Jacky. Wait for me.”
Doyle was so exhausted that he was almost annoyed to hear Jacky’s voice. He’d resigned himself to being captured, and this rescue attempt of Jacky’s sounded as if it would involve further exertions, and likely avail nothing but to anger Doctor Romany.
“Sink straight down as deep as you can, and then come back up,” came Jacky’s voice again, closer now.
Doyle turned his head and, by the light of the candles of his Lilliputian retinue, saw a bearded man in a canoe.
His eyes widened with surprise, but before he could duck under water again the figure in the canoe said, “Wait!” and, reaching up, yanked off the beard. “It is me, Doyle. Now do what I said, and hurry!”
I guess you can’t relax yet, Doyle told himself wearily as he slid under the surface again and obediently let half the air in his lungs bubble out through his nose, so that he sank easily through the cold black water; then he halted his descent with a scissors-kick when it occurred to him that there wasn’t going to be a pool floor to kick upward from. What if I’ve sunk so deep, he thought, that I can’t thrash my way back to the surface before my lungs mutiny and suck in river water? He instantly began clawing and kicking his way up, and he felt a rope loop brush the back of his hand a moment before he burst out into the air.
There was a wild chittering nearby, like a cageful of excited birds, and Jacky, leaning out over the side, was bundling up the wet weight of a fishing net, in among the tangles of which a few little lights still burned. “Get in,” Jacky snapped. “Clamber over the side up front, I’ll balance you from the back. Stay away from that net—those little bastards carry knives. And hurry.”
Doyle took a moment to look upstream—he could see Romany’s boat perhaps fifty yards off, the synchronized knocking of the oars very loud now—and then he heaved himself up and rolled into the canoe. Jacky was crouched in the rear, rigidly holding the oar straight down into the water.
As soon as the canoe had stopped wobbling, Doyle panted, “Step on the gas.”
Jacky began plying the oar desperately. Having come to a full stop and taken on more weight, though, the canoe was reluctant to move.
“I’ve got one more pistol,” called Doctor Romany. “Drop the oar and I won’t fire it.”
“Wouldn’t dare,” gasped Jacky, her arms quivering as she dragged the oar through the motionless water. “Wants you… alive.”
“Not anymore,” said Doyle, sitting up carefully. “A minute ago they were all shooting at me.”
“Thought you… were someone else.”
The canoe was moving now, but slowly. Doyle could distinguish three heads in silhouette in the boat bearing down on them. “Is there a spare oar?” he asked desperately.
“Ever paddled… canoe?”
“No.”
“Shut up then.”
Doyle noticed a long tear in Jacky’s trousers on the outside of the left thigh, exposing a long, rough cut. He opened his mouth to ask about it, then noticed a round hole punched in the fabric of the canoe, toward the stern. “Good God, Jacky, you’ve been shot!”
“I know.” Even by the dim light of the rising crescent moon Jacky’s face was visibly dark with effort and glistening with sweat, but the canoe was now matching the speed of Doctor Romany’s boat. For a minute or two both craft maintained their interval as they knifed and lumbered through the water, and the oarlocks clacked in the same rhythm as Jacky’s desperate panting; then the canoe put on a little more speed and began to leave the clumsier boat behind.
Blackfriars Bridge was looming close in front of them, and when it was clear that they would lose the pursuing boat Jacky sat back and stared ahead at the great stone arches they were being relentlessly propelled toward. “North middle arch,” she gasped, and stabbed the oar into the water on the starboard side. The rocketing canoe heeled over and began cutting a wide arc to starboard across the face of the river.
When they were nearly in line with the arch she’d indicated, and so close that Doyle could see the explosive splashing where the river pounded against the stone pilings, she whipped the oar out of the water and plunged it in on the other side; the craft straightened out, and there was an instant of blackness and roaring water and the awareness of hard stone rushing past on all sides—and a fast rise and drop that almost landed Doyle in the water again—and then they were out on the broad river, on the east side of the bridge now, and Jacky was slouched back, eyes shut and hands hanging limp over the sides, devoting her energy to getting her breath back as the canoe gradually lost speed.
Doyle looked back, and realized that Doctor Romany would not have been able to duplicate the sharp turn to the wider middle arch, and would not dare try shooting the bridge through the narrow arch that lay ahead of him. If he wanted to continue the pursuit he’d have to heel around to a halt and then row to the one the canoe had darted through. “You lost ‘em, Jacky,” he said wonderingly. “By God, you left ‘em behind.”
“Grew up… on a river,” Jacky panted after a while. “Handy… with boats.” After a few more moments of panting, and pushing back sweat-damp hair, Jacky went on, “I thought the Spoonsize Boys were a myth.”
Doyle knew that Jacky must be referring to the little eggshell mariners. “You’ve heard of them?”
“Oh, sure, there’s even a song about ‘em. ‘And the Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys when the cat by the fire is curled, then away they floats in their eggshell boats down the drains to the underground world.’ Goes on and on, blaming all sorts of things on ‘em. People say Horrabin made the creatures—and the things certainly seemed to be obeying him tonight, marking your location all the time. They say he made a bargain with the devil to learn how.”
Doyle’s eyes widened as a thought struck him. “Did you ever see his Punch show?”
“Of course. He is damned clev—oh! Yes… yes, I daresay you’re right. Good God. But the Punch puppets are bigger.”
“The pocketsize boys.”
“And here I was admiring his puppet-working skill.” Jacky picked up the oar and began rowing again. “Better keep moving—he wants you badly.”
“The way everybody was shooting at me—us—it looked like they just wanted me dead. You saved my life, Jacky. How’s your leg?”
“Oh, it stings, but it just tore across the surface. He shot at me three times while you were underwater and I was throwing the net over your little escorts. First time in my life I’ve been shot at. Don’t like it.”
Doyle was shivering. “I don’t like it either. Horrabin’s shot missed my eye by maybe an inch.”
“Well… that’s why I had to row out and get you. You see, it wasn’t Horrabin that shot at you. He knew who you were. It was me.”
Doyle’s first impulse was to get angry, but the sight of Jacky’s wound extinguished it. “Who did you—and Doctor Romany, I guess—think I was?”
Jacky rowed in silence for a few moments, then answered reluctantly, “I guess at this point you’ve earned the right to hear the story. We thought you were a man known as Dog-Face Joe. He—”
“Dog-Face Joe? The murderer who’s supposed to be a werewolf?” He could see Jacky’s eyes widen in surprise. “Who could have told you about him?”
“Oh, I’m just a good listener. So what have you or Romany got against him?”
“He killed
a friend of mine. Hell. He—he tricked me into killing a friend of mine. He—I’ve never… talked to anyone about this, Doyle. Not this part of it. God damn it all anyway. You’ve read Colin Lepovre’s poetry—well, Colin was … a close friend, and… do you know how Dog-Face Joe stays alive?”
“I heard he could switch bodies with people.”
“You do know lots more than you let on, Doyle. I wouldn’t have thought there were a half-dozen people in London who knew that. Yes, that’s what he does. I don’t know how, but he can switch with anyone he can manage to spend some time with. And he has to do it fairly frequently, because as soon as he gets into a new body it starts to grow fur… all over it. So after a few days it’s a choice of shave his whole body or go find a fresh one.” Jacky took a deep breath. “Last year he took Colin’s. I think Dog-Face Joe must have poisoned the old body just before he left it. Colin came to me, evidently in great pain”—Jacky’s voice was clearly being controlled only with great effort, and though he was staring toward the dome of St. Paul’s, Doyle could see peripherally the sheen of tears on the youthful cheek—”and it was in the middle of the night. I was in my parents’ house, reading, when he opened the door and hurried toward me, groaning like, I don’t know, a big dog or something, and he was bleeding terribly from the mouth. Damn it, Doyle, he was in the cast-off body, the one Joe had just vacated, and it was covered with fur, like an ape! You understand me? In the middle of the goddamn night! How was I to … possibly… know it was Colin? God damn it to hell?”