The Dark Door

by Alan Edward Nourse

  3

  At first he thought he was at the bottom of a deep well and he lay quitestill, his eyes clamped shut, wondering where he was and how he couldpossibly have gotten there. He could feel the dampness and chill of thestone floor under him, and nearby he heard the damp, insistent drip ofwater splashing against stone. He felt his muscles tighten as thedripping sound forced itself against his senses. Then he opened hiseyes.

  His first impulse was to scream out wildly in unreasoning, suffocatingfear. He fought it down, struggling to sit up in the blackness, hiswhole mind turned in bitter, hopeless hatred at the ones who had huntedhim for so long, and now had trapped him.

  Why?

  Why did they torture him? Why not kill him outright, have done with it?He shuddered, and struggled to his feet, staring about him in horror.

  It was not a well, but a small room, circular, with little rivulets ofstale water running down the granite walls. The ceiling closed low overhis head, and the only source of light came from the single doorwayopening into a long, low stone passageway.

  Wave after wave of panic rose in Harry's throat. Each time he foughtdown the urge to scream, to lie down on the ground and cover his facewith his hands and scream in helpless fear. How could they have knownthe horror that lay in his own mind, the horror of darkness, of dampslimy walls and scurrying rodents, of the clinging, stale humidity ofdungeon passageways? He himself had seldom recalled it, except in hismost hideous dreams, yet he had known such fear as a boy, so many yearsago, and now it was all around him. They had known somehow and _used itagainst him_.

  Why?

  He sank down on the floor, his head in his hands, trying to thinkstraight, to find some clue in the turmoil bubbling through his mindthat would tell him what had happened.

  He had started down the hallway from his room, to find Dr. Webber andtell him about the other people--

  He stopped short, looked up wide-eyed. _Had_ he been going to Dr.Webber? Had he actually decided to go? Perhaps--yes, perhaps he had,though Webber would only laugh at such a ridiculous story. But thenot-men who had hunted him would not laugh; to them, it would not befunny. They knew that it was true. And they knew he knew it was true.

  _But why not kill him?_ Why this torture? Why this horrible persecutionthat dug into the depths of his own nightmares to haunt him?

  His breath came fast and a chilly sweat broke out on his forehead._Where_ was he? Was this some long forgotten vault in the depths of theOld City? Or was this another place, another world, perhaps, that thenot-men, with their impossible powers, had created to torture him?

  His eyes sought the end of the hall, saw the turn at the end, saw thelight which seemed to come from the end; and then in an instant he wasrunning down the damp passageway, his pulse pounding at his temples,until he could hardly gasp enough breath as he ran. Finally he reachedthe turn in the corridor where the light was brighter, and he swungaround to stare at the source of the light, a huge, burning, smoky torchwhich hung from the wall.

  Even as he looked at it, the torch went out, shutting him into inkyblackness. The only sound at first was the desperation of his ownbreath; then he heard little scurrying sounds around his feet, andscreamed involuntarily as something sleek and four-footed jumped at hischest with snapping jaws.

  Shuddering, he fought the thing off, his fingers closing on wiry fur ashe caught and squeezed. The thing went limp, and suddenly melted in hishands. He heard it splash as it struck the damp ground at his feet.

  _What were they doing to his mind?_

  He screamed out in horror, and followed the echoes of his own scream ashe ran down the stone corridor, blindly, slipping on the wet stonefloor, falling on his knees into inches of brackish water, scraping backto his feet with an uncontrollable convulsion of fear and loathing, onlyto run more--

  The corridor suddenly broke into two and he stopped short. He didn'tknow how far, or how long, he had run, but it suddenly occurred to himthat he was still alive, still safe. Only his mind was under attack,only his mind was afraid, teetering on the edge of control. And thismaze of dungeon tunnels--where could such a thing exist, so perfectlyoutfitted to horrify him, so neatly fitting into his own pattern ofchildhood fears and terrors; from where could such a _very individual_attack on his sanity have sprung? From nowhere except....

  _Except from his own mind!_

  For an instant, he saw a flicker of light, thought he grasped the edgeof a concept previously obscure to him. He stared around him, at themist swirling down the damp, dark corridor, and thought of the rat thathad melted in his hand. Suddenly, his mind was afire, searching throughhis experience with the strange not-men he had learned to detect, tryingto remember everything he had learned and deduced about them before theybegan their brutal persecution.

  They were men, and they looked like men, but they were different. Theyhad other properties of mind, other capabilities that men did not have.

  They were not-men. They could exist, and co-exist, two people in oneframe, one person known, realized by all who saw, the other oneconcealed except from those who learned how to look. They could usetheir minds; they could rationalize correctly; they could use theircurious four-dimensional knowledge to bring them to answers nothree-dimensional man could reach.

  _But they couldn't project into men's minds!_

  Carefully, Harry peered down the misty tunnels. They were clever, thesecreatures, and powerful. Since they had discovered that he knew them,they had done their work of fear and terror on his mind skillfully. Butthey were limited, too; they couldn't make things happen that were nottrue--fantasies, illusions....

  Yes, this dungeon was an illusion. It _had_ to be.

  He cursed and started down the right-hand corridor, his heart sinking.There was no such place and he knew it. He was walking in a dream, afantasy that had no substance, that could do no more than frighten him,drive him insane; yet he must already have lost his mind to be acceptingsuch an illusion.

  Why had he delayed? Why hadn't he gone to the Hoffman Center, laid thewhole story before Dr. Webber and Dr. Manelli at the very first, toldthem what he had found? True, they might have thought him insane, butthey wouldn't have put him to torture. They might even have believed himenough to investigate what he told them, and then the cat would havebeen out of the bag. The tale would have been incredible, but at leasthis mind would have been safe.

  He turned down another corridor and walked suddenly into waist-deepwater, so cold it numbed his legs. He stopped again to force back thetendrils of unreasoning horror that brushed his mind. Nothing couldreally harm him. He would merely wait until his mind finally reached abalance again. There might be no end; it might be a ghastly trap, but hewould wait.

  Strangely, the mist was becoming greenish in color as it swirled towardhim in the damp vaulted passageway. His eyes began watering a little andthe lining of his nose started to burn. He stopped short, newly alarmed,and stared at the walls, rubbing the tears away to clear his vision. Thegreenish-yellow haze grew thicker, catching his eyes and burning like athousand furies, ripping into his throat until he was choking andcoughing, as though great knives sliced through his lungs.

  He tried to scream, and started running, blindly. Each gasping breathwas an agony as the blistering gas dug deeper and deeper into his lungs.Reason departed from him; he was screaming incoherently as he stumbledup a stony ramp, crashed into a wall, spun around and smashed blindlyinto another. Then something caught at his shirt.

  He felt the heavy planks and pounded iron scrollwork of a huge door, andthrew himself upon it, wrenching at the old latch until the door swungopen with a screech of rusty hinges. He fell forward on his face, andthe door swung shut behind him.

  He lay face down, panting and sobbing in the stillness.

  Coarse hands grasped his collar, jerking him rudely to his feet, and heopened his eyes. Across the dim, vaulted room he could see the shadowyform of a man, a big man, with a broad chest and powerful shoulders, aman whose rich voice Harry almost recognized, but whos
e face was deep inshadow. As Harry wiped the tears from his tortured eyes, he heard theman's voice rumble out at him:

  "Perhaps you've had enough now to change your mind about telling us thetruth."

  Harry stared, not quite comprehending. "The--the truth?"

  The man's voice was harsh, cutting across the room impatiently. "Thetruth, I said. The problem, you fool, what you saw, what you learned;you know perfectly well what I'm referring to. But we'll swallow no moreof this silly four-dimensional superman tale, so don't bother to startit."

  "I--I don't understand you. It's--it's true--" Again he tried to peeracross the room. "Why are you hunting me like this? What are you tryingto do to me?"

  "We want the truth. We want to know what you saw."

  "But--but _you're_ what I saw. You know what I found out. I mean--" Hestopped, his face going white. His hand went to his mouth, and hestared still harder. "Who are you?" he whispered.

  "The truth!" the man roared. "You'd better be quick, or you'll be backin the corridor."

  "_Webber!_"

  "Your last chance, Harry."

  Without warning, Harry was across the room, flying across the desk,crashing into the big man's chest. With a scream of fury he fought,driving his fists into the powerful chest, wrenching at the thick,flailing arms of the startled man.

  "_It's you!_" he screamed. "It's you that's been torturing me. It's youthat's been hunting me down all this time, not the other people, you andyour crowd of ghouls have been at my throat!"

  He threw the big man off balance, dropped heavily on him as he fell backto the ground, glared down into the other's angry brown eyes.

  And then, as though he had never been there at all, the big manvanished, and Harry sat back on the floor, his whole body shaking withfrustrated sobs as his mind twisted in anguish.

  He had been wrong, completely wrong, ever since he had discovered thenot-men. Because he had thought _they_ had been the ones who hunted andtortured him for so long. And now he knew how far he had been wrong. Forthe face of the shadowy man, the man behind the nightmare he was living,was the face of Dr. George Webber.

  * * * * *

  "You're a fool," said Dr. Manelli sharply, as he turned away from thesleeping figure on the bed to face the older man. "Of all the ridiculousthings, to let him connect you with this!" The young doctor turnedabruptly and sank down in a chair, glowering at Dr. Webber. "You haven'tgotten to first base yet, but you've just given Scott enough evidenceto free himself from integrator control altogether, if he gives it anythought. But I suppose you realize that."

  "Nonsense," Dr. Webber retorted. "He had enough information to do thatwhen we first started. I'm no more worried now than I was then. I'm surehe doesn't know enough about the psycho-integrator to be ablevoluntarily to control the patient-operator relationship to any degree.Oh, no, he's safe enough. But you've missed the whole point of thatlittle interview." Dr. Webber grinned at Manelli.

  "I'm afraid I have. It looked to me like useless bravado."

  "The persecution, man, the _persecution_! He's shifted his sights!Before that interview, the _not-men_ were torturing him, remember?Because they were afraid he would report his findings to me, of course.But now it's _I_ that's against him." The grin widened. "You see wherethat leads?"

  "You're talking almost as though you believed this story about adifferent sort of people among us."

  Dr. Webber shrugged. "Perhaps I do."

  "Oh, come now, George."

  Dr. Webber's eyebrows went up and the grin disappeared from his face.

  "Harry Scott believes it, Frank. We mustn't forget that, or miss itssignificance. Before Harry started this investigation of his, hewouldn't have paid any attention to such nonsense. But he believes itnow."

  "But Harry Scott is insane. You said it yourself."

  "Ah, yes," said Dr. Webber. "Insane. Just like the others who started toget somewhere along those lines of investigation. Try to analyze thegrowing incidence of insanity in the population and you yourself goinsane. You've got to be crazy to be a psychiatrist. It's an old joke,but it isn't very funny any more. And it's too much for coincidence.

  "And then consider the nature of the insanity--a full-blownparanoia--oh, it's amazing. A cunning organization of men who are_not_-men, a regular fairy story, all straight from Harry Scott's agileyoung mind. But now it's _we_ who are persecuting him, _and he stillbelieves his fairy tale_."

  "So?"

  Dr. Webber's eyes flashed angrily. "It's too neat, Frank. It's clever,and it's powerful, whatever we've run up against. But I think we've gotan ace in the hole. We have Harry Scott."

  "And you really think he'll lead us somewhere?"

  Dr. Webber laughed. "That door I spoke of that Harry peeked through, Ithink he'll go back to it again. I think he's started to open that dooralready. And this time I'm going to follow him through."