The strident whistling seemed to be coming from somewhere only a dozen yards ahead. Summoning all his nerve, and relying on the probability that his captors wanted to keep him alive, Doyle yelled, “Cut out that damned noise! Some of us are trying to sleep!”
Several of the whistles ceased instantly, and the rest faltered into silence a few moments later, and in spite of himself Doyle shivered to hear a voice that was almost Doctor Romany’s say, “You—no, you stay here; you—go shut him up. The rest of you idiots keep playing. If a mere man shouting distracts you, how do you expect to keep it up when the Shellengeri arrive?”
The eerie whistling started up again, and in a minute or so Doyle, still resolutely at the window, saw a disorienting thing—a tiny old man, bundled up in a tarred canvas coat and a leather hat, was pulling himself along the waist-high rope toward Doyle, but his legs trailed away upward; it looked like he was moving underwater. When the weightless crawler had bumped against the bulkhead and peered in through the little window, Doyle saw the half-face and single eye and realized that this was the same street lunatic who had once promised to take him to a time gap and then had only led him to a vacant lot and shown him some old charred bones.
“Shout all you… please when these… people are through, Lou,” the crawler said, “but if you do it again now, you won’t get fed for the rest of the voyage. And you want to keep up your strength, right, Dwight?” Then the thing shoved its awful face right at the bars and snarled, “I recommend you eat—I want there to be some tooth left in you when the Master’s done and turns you over to me for disposal.”
Doyle had let go of the fog-wet bars, and now he actually stepped back, startled by the raw hatred blazing out of that single eye. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, “take it easy. What did I ever do to—” Then he halted, struck by a grisly suspicion that instantly became a certainty. “My God, it was the same lot on the Surrey-side, wasn’t it?” he whispered. “And you couldn’t have known I escaped through the cellar… for all you knew it was my own skull you were showing me, right? God. And so you survived Burghard’s shot of mud… but I had that paper that worked as a mobile hook… Jesus, you must have simply lived your way back here!”
“That’s right,” chittered the thing that had been Doctor Romany. “And this is my homeward voyage—kas were never meant to survive nearly this long, and damn soon I’ll take that last boat ride through the twelve hours of the night—but before I do, you will be, finally and certainly, dead.”
Not unless you’re the one who’ll meet me in the Woolwich marshes on the twelfth of April in 1846, thought Doyle. “What do you mean, the twelve hours of the night?” he asked cautiously, wondering if this creature had read the poem he’d written out last night.
The thing clinging to the rope grinned. “You’ll see it before I do, Stu. It’s the course through the Tuaut, the underworld, that the dead sungod Ra follows every night on his dark voyage from sunset to sunrise. Darkness becomes solid there, and hours are a measurement of distance, like sailing on an uncoiled clock face.” The thing paused and emitted a thunderous belch that seemed to diminish its body mass by half.
“Quiet down there!” came a shout from out of the fog, loud enough to be heard over the skirling whistles.
“And the dead cluster along the banks of the underworld river,” Romany went on in a whisper, “and beg passage on the sungod’s boat back to the land of the living, for if they could get aboard they’d share in Ra’s restoration to youth and strength. Some even swim out and grab on, but the serpent Apep stretches out… oh, very far!… and snatches them off and devours them.”
“That’s what he—I—was referring to in the poem, then,” said Doyle quietly. He looked up and forced a confident smile. “I’ve already travelled on a river whose milestones are hours,” he said; “taken two very long voyages, in fact, and survived. If I wind up on your Tuaut river, I’ll bet I pop out the dawn end good as new.”
This statement angered Doctor Romany. “You fool, nobody—”
“We’re headed for Egypt, aren’t we?” Doyle interrupted.
The single eye blinked. “How did you know that?”
Doyle smiled. “I know all sorts of things. When will we arrive?”
The Romany thing went on frowning for a moment, then it seemed to forget its anger, and it said, almost confidingly, “In a week or ten days, if the gang on the poop deck there manages to raise the Shellengeri—wind elementals, like what Aeolus gave Odysseus.”
“Oh.” Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to peer through the fog in the direction of the stern. “Anything like those fire giants that went berserk at Doct—I mean, your camp?”
“Yes yes!” cried the thing, clapping with its bare feet. “Very good. Yes, the two races are cousins. And there are others, the water and earth ones. You should see the earth ones, huge moving cliffs—”
A deafening, air-cleaving whistle—scream, rather, though out of no physical throat—hit the ship with a palpable impact, making every loose board vibrate to blurriness; Doyle leaped away from the window, certain for one unthinking moment that some massive jetliner, a 747 or something, was for some reason attempting a water landing at full throttle very nearby, possibly right on top of them; then he was flung back against the door again as a wall of wind struck from astern, snapped all the sails taut and burst several like a giant punching fist, and the ship’s bow went far down and then up again and the vessel surged powerfully forward.
In the few seconds before the ship and all its contents shifted and adjusted to the new velocity, the stern bulkhead pressing against Doyle’s back seemed more floor than wall, and when his coffin box clattered across the deck toward him he just lifted his legs away from the deck—no hop required—and let it slam end on where his ankles had been, Then gravity swung back to normal and he pitched forward onto his hands and knees in the box. Over the screaming wind he heard the first high-flung bow wave crash back across the decks.
He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the window bars and, squinting against the steady blast of icy air, peered around for the Romany remnant, but the creature was gone. I hope he went right overboard, he thought—though I guess he wouldn’t sink, just come paddling along after us like a big beetle. The ship was slamming along like a bus racing over a plowed field, but Doyle managed to hold onto the window long enough to glimpse a few figures huddled on the poop deck, evidently trying to get down. At least it’s dispelled the fog, he thought dazedly as he let go of the bars and slid down to a sitting position, blinking his wind-stung and watering eyes.
As time passed, bringing no abatement of the racket or the cold or the continual bouncing, Doyle was thankful that he was in Benner’s body—Doyle’s own had been prone to seasickness—though even in this one he was glad he hadn’t managed to eat any of the lobster salad poor Byron had bought.
At what must have been about noon a couple of things were pushed through the window bars: a paper-wrapped package, which thumped to the floor and proved to contain salt pork and hard black bread, and a lidded can that fell a few inches and then swung from a little hooked chain; this contained weak beer. Having been snatched away from the food at the Swan, and not eaten before that since lunchtime yesterday, which was longer ago for Doyle than the twenty-four hours that had passed here, he devoured it all with genuine pleasure, even licking the paper wrappings afterward.
About six hours later the procedure was repeated and again he consumed it all. Soon after, it began to get dark—though the wind and the bashing progress of the ship slacked not at all—and he had just gotten around to wondering how he’d sleep, when a couple of blankets were stuffed through the bars.