The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  “You’d think so,” Duncan replied. “The thing about work is, it cuts into your free time. Jerked out of bed in the middle of the night, and no afternoon telly. Still, lots of people swear by it.” Duncan, Paul remembered, had recently been promoted to assistant deputy software wizard, and was now earning more than Paul’s father had been making when he’d retired. Bastard, Paul thought. “Apart from that,” Duncan went on, “what’s it like? I take it they haven’t fired you yet.”

  Paul grinned. “They’d have to notice I exist first,” he said.

  “Pretty boring?”

  Paul thought about the red eye through the letter box and the claw-mark and Professor Van Spee; then he thought about photocopying the spreadsheets. “Yes,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Well,” Duncan said, and launched into a tirade about Microsoft, which was only abated when Jenny came back with a tray and three pints of murky brown beer. One good thing about the Duncan⁄Jenny axis was that the mere rumour of her approach made his old friend stop talking about computers.

  “So,” Jenny said, distributing the beer glasses, “how’s work?”

  “Fine,” Paul muttered. Suddenly he felt he really didn’t want to discuss it with anybody (anybody else, he actually meant), let alone this insufferable pair of lovebirds. “And how about you? How’s showbiz?” Jenny was some sort of accountant at the BBC.

  “Don’t change the subject,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye that made him want to leave the building. “So, what’s her name? Gory details.”

  Paul couldn’t be sure he’d gone bright red, as there was no mirror handy. “Sorry? What are you talking about?”

  Jenny grinned at him. “Confess. I was down your way the day before yesterday, just after one; in fact, I rang your office on my mobile to see if you were there and wanted to come out to play, but the switchboard must’ve been down, nobody answered. And then I saw you marching off down the street with the mystery female. I waved but you pretended you hadn’t seen me. So then of course I knew.”

  Paul blinked. “I didn’t see you,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” Jenny assured him, “I understand. The last thing you wanted right then was Other Women swooping down on you like hunting kestrels. But come on, tell us all about it. Names. Places. Progress reports.”

  “She’s just—”

  “Ah!” Jenny said, beaming.

  “—Just someone I work with,” Paul muttered, scowling. “That’s all. Really.”

  “Sure.” Jenny’s grin was threatening to unzip her head at the back. “Of course, I only saw the back of her head, because you were in the way. Is she nice? Attractive? Gullible?”

  “No,” Paul replied.

  “Liar. She must be nice, or you wouldn’t be glowing like a nuked beetroot. It’s like I’ve been telling you all along, you can run but you can’t hide. Sooner or later there’s an arrow with your name on it.”

  Paul looked at her, and Duncan sitting next to her, silent but clearly acquiescing in this deplorable breach of good taste; and he thought, Will the day come when I’ll be like this? Two of Two, subunit of unimatrix zero-one, assimilated without trace into a two-handed collective, hell-bent on infecting the entire world with its own warped vision of perfect happiness? He sighed softly. Chance’d be a fine thing. “Sophie,” he said wearily. “She’s the other junior clerk, she lives with her parents in Wimbledon somewhere, she’s just broken up with her boyfriend, and she treats me like I’m something she trod in on a dark night.”

  “Well, she would,” Duncan said reasonably.

  “Bollocks,” Jenny said daintily. “If she’s cooped up in the office with you all morning and then goes out to lunch with you, obviously you’re on to something. The snotty thing is obviously just a front. Primeval female strategy, take my word for it.”

  Paul shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but obviously in this Mills-and-Boon alternative universe you live in, the idea of men and women just being friends—”

  “Ah, friends,” Jenny crowed, like a vampire barrister, “a minute ago she couldn’t stand the sight of you.”

  This was starting to get on Paul’s nerves. Unfortunately, Jenny had clearly smelt blood in the water, so changing the subject was out of the question, at least until she’d heard what she wanted to hear. “All right, then,” he said. “You’re right, I really like her a lot. In fact, she’s the only reason I haven’t packed the job in.”

  Duncan sneered. “That sounds more like it,” he said. “You just don’t like working for a living.”

  At least it was a change of subject. “True,” Paul admitted. “But really, the whole place is as weird as a wellyful of beetles.”

  Duncan shook his head. “You don’t know you’re born,” he said. “Weird as a wellyful of beetles is just a synonym for office. You’ve got to get used to it, that’s all.”

  For a moment, Paul seriously considered telling them all about it; the whole deal, from the bizarre interview through the claw-marks and the sword and Gilbert and Sullivan and the eye and the nutty stuff in the strong-room and the disappearing stapler and Mr Tanner going apeshit when he’d shown up five minutes early, right down to Professor Van Spee, his lecture and the photograph. But he decided against it, because they wouldn’t believe him. Or, even worse, they might believe him, in which case there was a grave risk he might end up believing it himself.

  “Yes, Dad,” he mumbled, therefore. “But at least they pay me. Same again?”

  He’d hardly touched his beer, which tasted like rotten eggs whisked in creosote, but their glasses were empty. “Ventcaster for me,” Duncan said; Jenny wrinkled her nose and said she’d give the Cross Marston a try.

  On his way back from the bar, a pint glass in each hand and a half of lemonade shandy braced between his thumbs, he reconsidered his decision. After all, it’d be great to tell someone, after a month of trying to deal with it on his own. And maybe, just possibly, they’d laugh at him and call him a stupid prat, and explain (because they were grown-ups, Big People who Knew about the World; and they might be able to point out the screamingly obvious explanation, which everybody else in the universe knew about except him). At the very least they’d say he was out of his tree and had imagined the whole thing, and they could be very convincing when they wanted to be. He’d like to believe he’d imagined the whole thing, it’d be a comfort.

  Yes, but he hadn’t.

  “This one’s the Ventcaster,” he said, apportioning the glasses. “Fancy a game of cards?”

  So they played nomination whist for two hours, Duncan winning one game and Jenny all the rest; and if Jenny couldn’t resist pointing out that Paul was obviously in love, because only someone whose brain was addled with sweet longings would have bid three on a heap of shit like that; and if Duncan and Jenny kept pausing at crucial moments to rub noses and nibble each other’s faces; still, it was wonderfully refreshing to be doing something normal again, like playing cards in a pub with an old friend (or an old friend and his fiendlike queen, which amounted to the same thing). Three halves and a pint of lemonade shandy helped, of course, though in the back of his mind he knew he was going to regret that aspect of the evening’s entertainment come seven o’clock next morning. Furthermore, he couldn’t help noticing a slight change in their attitude towards him, a small but palpable upwards reassessment of his status; he’d gone from being poor, funny Paul who still hadn’t got a job or a girlfriend, to a lowly junior apprentice with the mighty enterprise of Life, Inc—still out of sight below themselves, of course, but part of the same outfit, one of us rather than a homeless refugee from childhood.

  But.

  But it occurred to him, while they were playing cards, and later while they were gorging themselves on greasy battered cod on the Embankment, and later still as he was joggled dyspeptically homewards on the night bus, that there was something wrong with this picture; and after a certain amount of savagely honest introspection, he figured out what it was.

  Th
at he was in love, there could be no possible doubt. The strange yet all too familiar feeling, something like a hangover, something like acute carsickness, that he felt every time he saw her confirmed that. But then he compared two mental images; one of the evening he’d just spent, and one of an imaginary evening out with Sophie, all brittle silences, minefields and measureless caverns of ice. And then he asked himself the appalling question:

  Just what do you see in her?

  It wasn’t a question he’d even considered asking himself before. She was a girl, unattached, and she’d held still for more than five minutes without walking away or smacking him round the face. That was enough; what mattered was the other side of the coin—what could she possibly ever see in him? Yes, but, he asked himself. Yes, but pigeonholing that for just a second; answer the question. Why do you love this girl?

  And he thought about it; and the more he thought, the more he realised that the only answer was that good old mountaineer’s standby: Because she’s there. Because she might possibly like me. Because she hasn’t said she can’t stand the sight of me yet.

  Bad answer, he thought; because if his dreams came true, if he uncorked a super-whizzo hypergenie and got his One Wish, there wouldn’t be any cosy, cheerful, relaxed evenings in pubs playing nomination whist, none of this decadent, self-indulgent being-himself nonsense. He suddenly remembered something she’d said, on Gilbert & Sullivan night on the exotic rialto of Highgate—neither of us was being ourselves, so we could never really be us—while afar off in the distance, like the faint horns of Elfland, the ghost of Groucho Marx whispered its famous line about not wanting to belong to a club that’d have someone like him as a member.

  But, he assured himself.

  But that was so much beside the point that it was practically coming out round the back of it. Where the hell was the point in speculating about whether you wanted True Happiness when you stood about as much chance of getting it as Jeffrey Archer had of winning the Booker prize? Besides, if True Happiness was no more than this, playing cards and drinking shandy in a pub with two degenerates, then he couldn’t help thinking that the fish who’d crawled on their fins out of the primeval oceans to follow the long, hard trail of evolving into him had probably been wasting their time. He considered the pursuit of happiness, and above all it reminded him of the relentless, futile persecution of Bugs Bunny by Elmer Fudd.

  At least, he thought as he unlocked his door and flipped the light switch and saw the light bounce back at him off the blade of the sword in the stone, at least it helps me keep all this shit in perspective. Life at J.W. Wells & Co. might be deeply weird, but it was peanuts compared with the fathomless craziness of being human. Now if he’d tried to explain that to a couple of old friends, they wouldn’t have laughed in his face; they’d have held him down till the ambulance arrived with the handcuffs and the jacket that did up at the back.

  §

  Next morning, Paul had a headache.

  Unfair, he thought. Duncan and Jenny had been swilling the stuff down in pailfuls, but you could bet next year’s rent they weren’t feeling as though Tennessee hillbillies were dynamiting trout in the murky green pools behind their eyes; nor would they be afflicted with heartburn, indigestion and severe flatulence. He hacked two ragged slices off the stub of his stale loaf, and crammed them clumsily into the toaster. Then, purely from habit, he fumbled the radio on.

  It’s seven-thirty, the radio yelled at him, and here’s the news. His mind tuned out instinctively. He didn’t want to know about the latest political crisis, or the latest God-awful little war, or the latest unspeakable murder; callous and irresponsible of him, maybe, but none of it was his fault, and he’d rather it left him alone and spoilt someone else’s breakfast. He scraped rock-hard butter over his brittle toast, while the radio burbled excitedly about further rises in inflation, escalating tension in the Balkans, floods in Minnesota and drought in Somalia, corruption, lies, famine, war, pestilence and death, plagues of rats in the tunnels of the Bakerloo Line, urban foxes spreading mange through the lush kennels of Surrey, and the twelfth reported sighting of goblins in the sewers under the City of London.

  The traffic on the way to work was in a playful mood; for some reason it wasn’t where it usually was, which meant that he arrived in Houndsditch at twenty minutes to nine, seventeen minutes earlier than usual. He knew better than to head for the office, so he limped into a café sort of place, bought himself a cup of tea, and sat down. An earlier occupant of his seat had left a chunk of his newspaper behind, but it was just the business pages. Paul didn’t bother picking it up, but over the rim of his teacup he caught sight of a headline: Major New Australian Bauxite Finds Threaten Commodity Prices. He put his cup down and picked up the paper. Apparently, some busy little bee had found vast new deposits of bauxite in the Australian desert, which meant that pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to give the stuff away, and it was costing the mining cartels untold billions.

  Bauxite, he thought, and he carefully tore out the page and folded it away in his pocket. Then he finished his tea and went to work. His head was slightly better, but not much. All in all, he felt like a slug in a salt cellar.

  The receptionist greeted him with a cheerful chirrup that made his teeth ache. He mumbled some sort of a reply, and shuffled up the stairs to his office. Empty; then he remembered that he was on strong-room sorting duty, and he hadn’t brought his scruffy pully. He hung his coat behind the door (no scratch marks) and went back down the stairs, feeling every step distinctly.

  “Hello,” Sophie called out as he opened the door, and the cold hit him like a slap with a wet fish. “God, you look awful.”

  He nodded. “I’m not feeling all that great,” he admitted.

  “You should’ve stayed in bed.”

  Paul shrugged. “Oh, I thought I’d better come in.”

  “Suit yourself. Right, let’s get started, then.” There’s this to be said for being hung over; if you’ve got a job to do that involves substantial levels of ambient weirdness, it helps, because you can’t be bothered to notice stuff that under other circumstances would come close to frying your synapses. Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O’Hara’s birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker’s guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn’t remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll’s-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from the North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew’s Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E.A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board 0-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969—85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute- books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling For Pleasure & Profit by J.R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2109; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck’s—“Bloody hell,” he said.

  Sophie looked up. “What?”

  “Come over here.”

  He flipped back the lid of the long wooden box so that she could see what was inside. They both studied it in silence for a moment or so.

  “Yes, it’s pretty much the same as mine,” Sophie said ev
entually. “Only the wire binding on the handle of mine is a sort of dull grey.”

  Paul knelt down for a closer look. “No, mine’s the same colour as this one,” he said. “Like that brass wire you buy for hanging pictures from. I think on mine—what’s that round bit on the end called?”

  “Pommel.”

  “The pommel on mine may be a tad smaller, but I can’t be sure. That aside, though, I’d say it’s pretty well identical. Except,” he added, “it’s missing the chunk of stone on the end.” He stood up, still gazing at the sword in the box. “Take a look in the old register,” he said.

  “776⁄J.”

  Sophie leafed through the big red book for a minute or so. “It just says Windsor,” she said.

  “Oh well,” Paul replied. He closed the lid and shoved the box back into its dark corner. He noticed that he’d forgotten about his headache; but noticing made it come back.

  “Five to one,” Sophie announced.

  “Ah, right.” It was another moment. “Do you fancy—?”

  “I’d better be going,” Sophie said. “I’m meeting my mum for lunch at five past.”

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Right. See you later, then.”

  As it happened, he didn’t really mind too much, what with the headache and the anguished bowels and everything; the last thing he wanted, he realised, was food of any description, while trying to make impressively light, brilliant conversation was plainly beyond him. In fact, he couldn’t really be bothered to move from where he was. It was pleasantly cool down there, and quiet, and he couldn’t face the stairs. He sat down on a trunk, leaned his back against the shelves, and closed his eyes.

  When Paul woke up, his watch told him it was twenty past one, and he felt considerably better. The dwarves had stopped drilling out the back of his head, and his eyes didn’t hurt quite so much. He still had a stomach like a car battery, but he could live with that, so long as he avoided putting anything in it. He stood up and looked around. They weren’t getting on too badly, he realised; another day and a half, two days, and they ought to be through here. It occurred to him that since he had nothing better to do, he might as well press on and do a bit more on his own. He had the feeling she’d approve of that, though he wasn’t sure why.