The Anubis Gates Read Online Free PDF

was the man who had pioneered more fields of scientific research than Doyle could probably even spell, and, out of a small-town sheet-metal factory, built a financial empire that made J. Pierpont Morgan look merely successful.
    “You’re Doyle, I hope,” he said, and the famous deep voice had not deteriorated at all.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Good.” Darrow stretched and yawned. “‘Scuse.me, long hours. Sit down, any space you can find. Brandy?”
    “Sounds fine to me.” Doyle sat down on the floor beside a knee-high stack of books on which Darrow a moment later set two paper cups and a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessey. The old man sat down cross-legged on the other side of the stack, and Doyle was mortified to note that Darrow didn’t have to suppress a grunt in lowering himself to the floor. Lots of push-ups and sit-ups, he vowed.
    “I imagine you’ve speculated on the nature of this job,”
    Darrow said, pouring the cognac, “and I want you to ditch whatever conclusions you’ve come up with. It’s got nothing to do with any of them. Here.” He handed Doyle a cup. “You know about Coleridge, do you?”
    “Yes,” Doyle answered cautiously.
    “And you know about his times? What was going on in London, in England, in the world?”
    “Reasonably well, I think.”
    “And by know, son, I don’t mean do you have books at home on these things or would you know where to look ‘em up in the UCLA library. I mean know ‘em in your head, which is more portable. Answers still yes?”
    Doyle nodded.
    “Tell me about Mary Wollstonecraft. The mother, not the one who wrote Frankenstein.”
    “Well, she was an early feminist, wrote a book called, let’s see, A Vindication of the Rights of Women , I think, and—”
    “Who’d she marry?”
    “Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law. She died in childb—”
    “Did Coleridge really plagiarize Schlegel?”
    Doyle blinked. “Uh, yes. Obviously. But I think Walter Jackson Bate is right in blaming it more on—”
    “When did he start up on the opium?”
    “When he was at Cambridge, I think, early 1790s.”
    “Who was the—” Darrow began, but was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. The old man swore, got up and went over to the phone and, lifting the receiver, resumed what was obviously an argument in progress about particles and lead sheathing.
    Both from politeness and lack of interest, Doyle made a show of being curious about a nearby book stack—and a moment later his interest became wide-eyed genuine, and very carefully he lifted the top volume.
    He opened it, and his half-incredulous suspicion was confirmed—it was the Journal of Lord Robb, which Doyle had been vainly begging the British Museum for a xerox copy of for a year. How Darrow could have got actual possession of it was unguessable. Though Doyle had never seen the volume, he’d read descriptions of it and knew what it was. Lord Robb had been an amateur criminologist, and his journal was the only source of some of the most colorful, and in many cases implausible, crime stories of the 1810s and 20s; among its tales of kill-trained rats, revenges from beyond the grave, and secret thief and beggar brotherhoods, it contained the only detailed account of the capture and execution of the semi-legendary London murderer known as Dog-Face Joe, popularly believed to have been a werewolf, who reputedly could exchange bodies with anyone he chose but was unable to leave behind the curse of lycanthropy. Doyle had wanted to link this story somehow with the Dancing Ape Madness, at least to the extent of the kind of speculative footnote that’s mainly meant to show how thoroughly the author has done his homework. When Darrow hung up the phone Doyle closed the book and laid it back on the stack, making a mental note to ask the old man later for a copy of the thing. Darrow sat down again beside the book stack with the cups and bottle on it, and picked up right where he’d left off. For the next twenty minutes he