The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  The first box he opened contained something that he took at first to be a pillowcase, except that it was made of a sort of thin, rubbery stuff; he had no idea what it was, but it wasn’t cloth. There was no number or anything on the box, so he spread the thing out on the floor. That left him none the wiser. It was rectangular, and printed on it was the crude outline of a door, with panels, hinges and a little circle for a doorknob. He shrugged, folded it up and put it back, with its very own yellow sticky. In the notebook he wrote down rubber mat; then, since he was feeling just a tad flippant, he rubbed that out with the rubber on the end of the pencil, and wrote in Acme portable door. But that looked silly, so he rubbed it out again and changed it to rectangular flat rubber object, and left it at that.

  Next item was an envelope full of blank sheets of paper. He checked the number in the old red book, but it wasn’t there. Fine, he said to himself, be like that.

  Next item was another bundle of letters, ancient envelopes with Victorian stamps, bound in faded red ribbon. The ink was brown with age and the handwriting was cramped and scruffy, and it hurt his eyes to read it, so he checked the reference number against the red book. 839⁄N—839⁄N; seventeen love letters; property of Paul Carpenter, Esq.

  He looked at the page. Bloody hell, he thought, there’s a coincidence. But the ink in the register was almost as brown as the writing on the letters themselves, and the date for when they’d been booked in was 1877. He shrugged, and started copying the details into the notebook. He’d written down the first two lines of the address before he noticed it was his own.

  Fuck this for a game of soldiers, he told himself.

  The pink ribbon was tightly knotted, and he broke a fingernail untying it. He took the first letter out of the envelope and looked at the date. Three weeks ago.

  Paul closed his eyes, then opened them again. Still three weeks ago. Shit.

  Not fair, he shouted to himself, all I had was two and a

  half pints of rotten lemonade shandy, that’s not enough, surely. Bet Duncan and bloody Jenny don’t go around—Hang about. What sort of letters?

  He looked back at the register, and read the relevant adjective, carefully, four times. Whoever had written the red book, they had clear, precise handwriting. Not lone letters or lore letters or lowe letters or loue letters or bye letters. He put the register down carefully, and frowned.

  Well, he thought. Can’t do any harm, he lied to himself. He laid the first letter flat on the nearest shelf, and started to read.

  My darling Paul —He paused, and stared. Whoever had written this

  letter, he or she had the worst writing ever perpetrated outside of a doctor’s surgery. He squinted at it, but it defied his best efforts. Then he thought of something, and reached out for the spiral-bound notebook, in which Sophie had been writing down the inventory.

  No doubt about it. Same writing.

  Jesus, he thought. He picked up the letter and carried it across the room, until he was standing directly under the single, unshaded light bulb.

  My darling Paul,

  Ever since we met this morning, I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. All I can do is think about you, the way you looked at me, the sound of your voice. I thought I’d never see you again, and suddenly there you were, like you’d stepped out of my daydream.

  I love you so much, I can’t think about anything else. I can’t concentrate on work or anything like that. Oh, you’ve guessed, haven’t you? You must have done. I sit there with that pile of ridiculous spreadsheets in front of me, desperately trying not to look at you across the desk from me, and the last thing in the world I want to think about is shuffling bits of paper. I want to feel the soft warmth of your lips on mine, the burning thrill as your fingers —

  “Bloody hell,” Paul muttered.

  You must know how I feel about you, he read, I can read it in your eyes every time you look at me, and I’m absolutely sure you feel the same way about me, so why don’t you say something? You can’t be afraid, not when I’m sitting next to you burning to death with (however hard he tried, he couldn’t make that word out; it might just possibly be dessert or dishcloth, but he didn’t think so). Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you don’t care and I’m making a complete idiot of myself I don’t care. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before, definitely not that clown Nigel with his stupid amateur dramatics, which is all he seems to care about at the moment. Oh, Paul, please say something quickly, I can’t bear the suspense any longer. I know —

  Footsteps outside the door. Faster than a rat up a conduit, Paul grabbed the letters and stuffed them back on the shelf, as the door opened and Sophie walked in.

  “Hello,” she said. “You still here?”

  Paul knew he must be glowing like a stop sign. “Mphm,” he mumbled. “Didn’t feel like any lunch, thought I’d do a bit more.”

  She frowned at him. “You’re pretty keen all of a sudden,” she said. “All right, where’ve you got to?”

  “Well, actually, I haven’t got terribly far.”

  She came over and flicked through the notebook. “Two entries,” she said. “No, you haven’t, have you?”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. He shrugged. “Well.” She sighed. “We’d better get on with it. What’s next?”

  He pulled down a deed-box and opened it. “How was your mother, by the way?” he asked.

  “Mum? Oh, pretty much the same as when I saw her at breakfast this morning,” she replied. “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. Sorry, right. Well, it looks like a big wodge of Premium Bonds.”

  She was writing in the notebook. “Okay,” she said. “Any name or anything?”

  He rummaged around in the bottom of the box, and found a slip of paper. £5,000 nominal value, property of Mr Paul Carpenter. He shut his eyes tight, then opened them again. “Nope,” he replied.

  “Marvellous,” Sophie sighed. “All right, slap a yellow sticky on and we’ll see what’s next.”

  The next envelope held a sheaf of share certificates.

  Paul didn’t know much about high finance, but even he knew that 20,000 ordinary shares in Kawaguchi Integrated Circuits Inc. had to be worth a lot of money.

  Interesting, since apparently they belonged to him.

  “Share certificates,” he said. “Property of Paul, um, Smith.”

  “Fine,” she said, as he attached a yellow sticky and shoved them hastily back on the shelf. “Next.”

  The further he went on, the harder he found it to keep going. $50,000 in traveller’s cheques; £35,000 in National Savings certificates; the deeds to two semidetached houses in Ewell…

  “This Paul Smith sounds like he’s loaded,” Sophie commented. “All right, got that.” She looked up. “Do you want to swap over for a bit?”

  He dropped the deed-packet. “No, no, that’s fine,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I mean. I’m quite happy doing this.”

  “You sure? You’re getting covered in dust.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Really.”

  She shrugged. “Please yourself. All right, what’s next?”

  He groped for the next envelope. “Paul Smith again,” he said, in a rather hoarse voice. “Post Office savings book, four thousand quid.”

  “He can’t be very bright, this Smith bloke. He’d get much better interest in a building society or something. Well,” she added, tapping the notebook impatiently, “what’s next? More of this Smith character’s ill-gotten gains?”

  “Actually,” Paul said, in a very quiet voice, “I don’t think it did him much good.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Paul folded a piece of paper and put it back in its envelope. “That was his death certificate,” he muttered.

  “Oh. Well, never mind. I was starting to dislike him, anyway.”

  “Me too,” Paul said. “I can’t help feeling sorry for him, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He died young,” Paul replied. “Not much
older than me, as it happens.” Four months, two weeks, three days, to be precise; but he didn’t say anything about that. Nor did he mention the cause of death.

  “That’s sad,” Sophie said. “I suppose. Anyway, none of our business. I’m going for a pee.”

  As soon as she was out of the door, Paul sprang

  across the room and started searching for the bundle of letters he’d hidden away when she came back from lunch. They didn’t seem to want to be found, and he was just beginning to think he’d imagined the whole thing when they turned up, wedged in the crevasse between two fat manila folders. He glanced down at them—My darling Paul —Yes, still there. He crammed them in his jacket pocket; then, not really wanting to one little bit, he fished out the last item with a yellow sticky on it.

  Death certificate. Paul Carpenter. Date and place of birth, address, and cause of death. Decapitation, he thought. Bloody hell.

  It was a very long afternoon.

  “Anyway,” Sophie said, as they walked out through reception at 5:29. “We’re getting there. If we really crack on with it tomorrow, I think we might get it finished.”

  Paul nodded. He wasn’t really listening.

  Out through the door; she was telling him how she couldn’t wait to get back to their rotten little office, after three days in that horrible cold strongroom. They reached the corner; her that way, him this. She stopped.

  “Well,” she said.

  Paul looked up; he’d been staring at his shoes. “Sorry?” A second dragged by. An oak tree could have grown in that second. Paul had the feeling she was waiting for something, but his mind was elsewhere. Decapitation, he was thinking, for fuck’s sake. And seventy grand in the Abbey National, Chelmsford. But I’ve never even been to bloody Chelmsford.

  And then he realised she was looking at him, and for some reason she was furiously angry. “Well, see you tomorrow,” she snapped, and walked away very quickly.

  A better man, or at least a biped with one working brain cell, would’ve chased after her. Paul didn’t. He shook his head, and trudged to the bus stop. Australia, he was thinking; no, not Australia, that’s where they’ve found all that fucking bauxite. Ontario. Surely if he went there, he’d be safe, they’d never follow him all that way. Would they? And besides, who were they, anyhow?

  My darling Paul —He made a decision. What he needed, he decided, was a drink; something fierce and strong and vicious, with teeth and claws, and possibly a cube of ice and a slice of lemon. He drifted across the road to a pub, only remembering as he sat down with his drink that on the last occasion he’d been there, she’d been sitting over by the door, with her pint of Guinness. A large bald man with a thick neck was in her place now. That didn’t seem right, somehow; it was like removing the statue of Eros from Piccadilly Circus and replacing it with a ten-foot plastic Mickey Mouse.

  This being no time for faint hearts or false economies, he ordered a full pint of lemonade shandy, and sat down in a corner where nobody was likely to tread on his feet and break his concentration. Are we sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

  The letters. He took them out, patted the spilled beer off the table top with his sleeve, and put them carefully down. Next he picked out the one he’d started to read earlier, and opened it.

  My dear Philip —He blinked three times, and looked at the envelope. It was addressed, quite clearly in sharp, slanting handwriting, to Lieutenant Philip Catherwood, The Parsonage, Norton St Edgar, Worcs. The postmark was 22 April 1877.

  Fuck, he thought.

  He checked the rest of the letters. All addressed to the same person, in the same handwriting, dating from 22 April 1877 through to 12 January 1879, by which time Lieutenant Catherwood was serving in South Africa. Paul stopped there. He’d spent most of his history lessons at school drawing sheep in the margins of his textbooks, but he’d seen Zulu three times and read articles about the Zulu War in his military modelling magazines. 22 January 1879; British army wiped out at Isandlhwana. Somehow he knew exactly what had happened to Philip Catherwood. Terribly sad; but that wasn’t the point. At least he’d had someone writing love letters to him—(He checked. He felt awful about reading them, and he only flicked through. He was shocked. He had no idea they did stuff like that back in the 1870s, and especially an officer and a gentleman. He put the letters away quickly and hoped nobody had seen him reading them.)

  Think, he ordered himself. Implications.

  If the love letters that had been addressed to him a few hours previously were now somebody else’s, then wasn’t there a decent chance that the rest of the stuff—all that money, and of course the death certificate—maybe all that stuff was somebody else’s too. He shunted his consciousness into serious mode, and considered the alternatives.

  He was hung-over, residual alcohol sloshing through his veins like the Severn Bore, and he’d imagined the whole thing. He was cracking up, and it was starting to get embarrassingly obvious. In his haste, he’d grabbed the wrong bundle of letters, and the Dear Paul stuff was still wedged in the rack in the strongroom. The letters had been written to him when he first looked at them, but now they weren’t. The letters were written to him as long as he was inside the doors of 70 St Mary Axe, but as soon as he stepped over the threshold, they morphed into a slice of tragic Victoriana. The letters were written to him, but on his way out through reception, someone had picked his pocket and replaced them with fifteen instalments of forged nineteenth-century soft porn. She had written the letters but never posted them; instead she’d stashed them in JWW’s safe, and when she saw they’d gone she’d guessed he’d found them, surreptitiously swiped them and replaced them with something vaguely similar she’d found on the shelves, to make him believe he’d imagined the whole thing.

  Paul reviewed these alternatives and decided that, on balance, it’d be better for his mental health to quit speculating and wait till tomorrow, when he’d have a chance to look at all the other stuff. If the bank books and house deeds (and the death certificate) were all still there, that would at least allow him to run a blue pencil through some of the alternatives. (Another explanation: the air in the strongroom was laced with some form of hallucinogenic compound, possibly sewer gas escaping from the building’s medieval plumbing, and he’d imagined the stuff with the letters because he’d been as high as the rate of inflation all the time he’d been down there. It was as plausible as several of the others, and about as much help.)

  He glugged another mouthful of shandy, and the fizz went up his nose, making him sneeze. It wasn’t any good, he told himself, focusing on these damned letters, or the money, or even the death certificate. What he needed to do was address the whole issue of weirdness, which he’d been shying away from for just over a month, partly because he was a coward but mostly because he was in love. Weirdness, he thought; swords and bauxite and men with dragons’ claws on chains round their necks buying him lunch at cosy little Uzbek restaurants. One of the aspects of the human condition that elevates mankind above the lesser primates is the inquiring mind, the urge to find out, to know the essential truth; but there has to come a time when the inquiring mind stops inquiring, finds a late-night travel agency and books a one-way flight to Canada. Another aspect, of course, is romantic love, something that Paul had always reckoned God slipped into the design schematics late on Day Eight, while rubbing His hands together and sniggering. If I quit at J.W. Wells, I may never see her again. Of all the bloody stupid arguments; and yet it was the only one that mattered. Hell, he thought.

  Yes, he said to himself, but the death certificate —And then he put his beer glass down and stared at the darkened window opposite, because he’d suddenly remembered the date on the certificate, the day and month on which he was due to be beheaded. 22 January.

  Oink, he thought.

  Calm down, he thought. In fact, that made perfect sense; because if he’d been imagining things and the letters belonged to the late Philip Catherwood, wasn’t it likely or at least possible that all the other it
ems were Catherwood papers too, and the form his delusions had taken was simply reading his own name every time he saw that of the poor dead subaltern. In which case, assuming he was right about Philip meeting his death in the shadow of the horned mountain, then of course the date would have been 22 January—22 January 1879, the day of the battle. Actually, it was probably even simpler than that. It was dark in the strongroom, right? And the handwriting—well, he could read it all right here, in a well-lit pub, but down there, with a hangover and under a single sixty-watt bulb, wasn’t it at least conceivable that he’d misread Philip Catherwood as Paul Carpenter, and mucked the dates up as well?

  He could feel clenched muscles relaxing all over his body. Of course, he realised, that was all there was to it. Easy enough to figure out how it’d happened; the booze, of course, and the cold, and a certain degree of mental imbalance caused by his addled love for the thin girl, combined with his vivid imagination making mountains out of the molehills of minor weirdness he’d experienced over the last month—and as for them, he was absolutely confident that he’d be able to explain them all, given time and a few extra brain cells. The claw-mark, for instance; so one of the cleaners had a large, boisterous Alsatian, which for some reason she brought to work with her one day, and it got off the lead and scratched some paint. Big deal. The bauxite? Well, maybe he had actually dowsed or scried it; there were little men with hazel twigs who did it for a living, he’d seen TV programmes about it; or else it was just coincidence, exaggerated by his overheated imagination. The round, red eye through the letter box? That Alsatian again. Or Mr Tanner, temporarily bloodshot after smoking a cigar right down to the last knockings of the stub. That really only left the sword in the stone, and he’d been through all that already. In short, there was a simple explanation for every single thing. Probably it was all just something to do with J.W. Wells trying to fiddle its tax bill. Practically anything in the world becomes suddenly credible if you tag the magic words doing it for tax reasons on the end.