The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  He finished his drink and stood up. All that panic and fuss over a silly misunderstanding.

  In which case, Paul asked himself as he sat in the bus, what about me and Sophie? Well, now there was no more weirdness to worry about, there was no reason to quit the job, so that was all right. But if there was no weirdness, then—He frowned so ferociously that the woman sitting next to him got up and moved to the back of the bus. If there was no weirdness, then by implication all that stuff that Professor Van Spee had told him was just guesses, from someone who fancied himself as a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, and accordingly unreliable at best, most likely worthless. A similar line of argument could be used to dispose of the Gilbert and Sullivan thing. In which case, she probably didn’t love him after all.

  Oh, he thought.

  For crying out loud, he told himself. Life wasn’t like that. Your cake, to have and to eat, from this day forward, in weirdness and in health. You couldn’t decide to keep the nice bits of the crazy stuff, and take the rest of it back to the shop for a refund. Anyhow: wasn’t it better to be living in a universe where things worked like they were meant to, where claw-marks were made by big dogs, hung-over idiots misread old, faded letters in dark rooms, good-natured employers took new trainees out to lunch on their first day, and girls didn’t fall in love with pathetic wimps with no redeeming features whatsoever?

  Well, yes, he said to himself. Of course, naturally. I suppose.

  But then he remembered something that had been lurking at the back of his mind. It can’t be too bad, he told himself. (And if he was smirking a little, so what? There was nobody to see.) She can’t absolutely hate the sight of me, or she wouldn’t have agreed to go out with me tonight…

  Pause. Rewind. Delete smirk. Shit!

  Well, at least that explained why she’d stomped off in a huff when they’d parted outside the office door. She—against all the odds, she’d actually said yes when he’d asked her out, thereby giving him an option on being the happiest man on earth and having all his dreams come true; choirs of angels were waiting in the wings, blue skies were lurking at the edges of clouds all over the western hemisphere, Berkeley Square was knee-deep in nightingales practising scales and arpeggios, and he’d forgotten. A stupid, trivial little thing like the fear of death had been enough to flush it out of his mind, and now here he was, conclusively and comprehensively stuffed in perpetuity. Idiot. Tea-bag memory. Of all the bloody stupid things…

  It was raining when Paul got off the bus, and his coat was back in St Mary Axe. He pulled his jacket lapels round his face, like he’d seen them do in the movies, but it didn’t do any good at all. The hallway of the house was pitch dark—the bulb had gone, and nobody could be buggered to replace it. He was wet through, and his suit smelt of rain. He opened the door of his bedsit, groped for the light switch and stumbled in.

  No light switch. Either that or some clown had moved it. But people don’t break into houses and move the electric fittings around, or at any rate not in Kentish Town. Feeling annoyed and stupid, he stood in the doorway, pawing at the wall, but he couldn’t seem to locate the bloody thing. For a moment he wondered if he’d blundered into someone else’s room by mistake—but that wasn’t possible, he could distinctly remember unlocking the door, and here was his keyring, still in his hand.

  But still he couldn’t find the goddamned light switch. Nothing for it; on the mantelpiece, he knew for a fact, right in the middle between the 2p-coin jar and the petrol-station carriage clock his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday, there was a candle. He lit it occasionally for ambience, though it generally went out after thirty seconds or so. Next to it there should be a box of matches, for lighting the gas fire. He headed for it, remembering to sidestep where the sword in the stone should be, and traced the wall with his fingertips. Sure enough: mantelpiece, candle, matches, precisely where he’d left them. He struck a match and lit the candle.

  Oh, he thought.

  It wasn’t his room. Well, it was the same room he lived in, because this was his candle, there was the stupid bloody sword, there were the window and the bed, there was the table, there was the damp patch on the wall that looked like a map of Turkey drawn by Salvador Dali. But it wasn’t his room. He thought about it, and about various other things, including several stately homes he’d been taken to as a child, picture postcards from the Victoria & Albert museum, and various bits of the Antiques Roadshow he’d sat through at various times, waiting for Star Trek Voyager to come on. It was, he decided, the way the room he lived in would probably have looked a hundred or so years ago.

  Fuck this, he thought, and turned round, heading for

  the door, which wasn’t there any more.

  §

  SEVEN

  Not that it wasn’t a perfectly nice room. If anything, it was an improvement; instead of the knackered old gas fire there was a merry blaze in the fireplace, its glow reflected in the polished brass of the coal scuttle. The light from the handsome cut-glass oil-lamps was softer and more soothing than the glare of the lonely hundred-watt bulb. The furniture was polished wood and sumptuous fabric, none of your flat-pack melamine junk. It was cosy, warm and friendly, in a homely sort of a way. But it didn’t have a door.

  Which sort of raised the question: how were you supposed to get in and (more pertinent still) out of it? Well, there was the window; but when Paul tried to lift the sash it wouldn’t budge; furthermore, the glass was frosted so he couldn’t see out of it, and when he hefted the heavy bronze bust of Prince Albert that stood proudly on the mantelpiece and hurled it with all the force at his disposal, it bounced off the window-pane and nearly broke his arm.

  Christ, he thought. Then he banged on the wall where the door had been, and yelled for help at the top of his voice.

  Clouting walls with your fists gets pretty tedious after a while, especially if you’re naturally clumsy and catch your little finger on a picture hook. Nobody answered, of course. He stood for a while, sucking his crushed finger; then he pulled back the rug, just in case it covered a trapdoor. It didn’t. Besides, it was his room. All he’d done was walk into it. There had been a door there just a few minutes ago, or how had he got in?

  Theory; what sort of room doesn’t have a door? A room you aren’t meant to get out of. Suppose he’d gone mad, and they’d locked him up, and this was his cell. Possibly they’d got him muddled up in the list of patients with someone who believed he was Gladstone or Sherlock Holmes, hence the decor, by way of humouring him. By this stage, though, he’d had a bellyful of rational explanations. Besides, he didn’t feel mad. Surely you’d know it if you’d gone off your rocker—you’d have a headache, or angel voices would be urging you to chuck the English out of Aquitaine. It was about time he got over this inferiority thing, whereby he naturally assumed that if things weren’t as they should be, it had to be his fault or something wrong with him. He made a resolution; until he got proof to the contrary, he was going to work on the assumption that he was perfectly normal and everything else was up the pictures.

  Paul thought about that. Maybe he had gone potty, after all.

  No, he asserted furiously, I’m not falling for that one again. That’s not right. That’s what they want you to think.

  Now he was beginning to scare himself, so he made an effort and froze his mind: intense calm, deep breathing, om and all that crap. Accept that something really, profoundly, deeply weird was going on. Now, then; one step at a time.

  First thing he had to determine; was he in any obvious danger? Well, no. If he fell asleep in the chair and a stray spark jumped off the fire and set the rug ablaze, things might get a bit ugly; that aside, the most immediate threat was starvation. He looked over at where his cooker used to be. It wasn’t there any more, but there was a large earthenware jar on a marble-topped stand that turned out to contain a fresh, sweet-smelling cottage loaf, and the butter dish held a pound of rich yellow butter; also there were pots of jam, and a tea caddy full of tea, and a crock contai
ning bacon and sausages; the kettle and the grid were over by the fireplace, and there was water in a tall crockery jug. Talking of crockery, he could just see a blue-and-white chamber pot under the bed, which more or less answered his next question. (Yuck, he thought.) Since he’d missed lunch and was hungry, he sawed off the crust of the loaf with the bread knife he found in the drawer under the stand, daubed on some butter and ate the result. It tasted like real bread and real butter; but when he looked back at the loaf, it had contrived to heal itself; there stood a pristine loaf and an untouched butter pat. He repeated the experiment, with the same results. Further meticulous investigation revealed that the same self-replenishing effect occurred with the water, the tea, the small jug of milk, the sugar bowl, the bacon and the sausages. In fact, as far as the bare necessities were concerned, there was no reason why a bloke couldn’t live here indefinitely.

  That thought scared Paul more than anything else.

  Another point occurred to him, and he looked at his watch. It wasn’t there; but at some point he’d apparently sprouted a waistcoat, perfectly matching the jacket and trousers he was wearing but had never seen before in his life, and in the waistcoat pocket he found a handsome silver watch on a gold chain. It read a quarter past six. It wasn’t ticking. It had stopped.

  “Help?” he muttered. Silence. Not even traffic noises in the road below. Amazing, the extent to which he missed them, now he’d noticed they weren’t there. The only sounds he could hear were those he made himself. Maybe I’m dead, he thought.

  (“No, no, no, he told himself, we’ve already been into all that—well, not me, but Plato and Descartes and all that lot, the cogito-ergo-sum and does-a-tree-falling-in-a-forest-make-a-noise-if-nobody-hears-it brigade; so you can skip all that.)”

  Eventually, after a bit more wall-pounding and help-yelling, and another round of bacon sandwiches, he flopped down in the really very comfortable armchair next to the nice warm fire, propped his feet on the embroidered footstool, and sat staring into the fire for a while, trying to figure out whether the coal in the grate was diminishing and turning into ashes as it burned. The answer was yes, so he added some more from the scuttle, which refilled itself as soon as he took his eye off it for a second.

  Well, here I am, he thought.

  Gradually he started to feel sleepy; his eyes didn’t want to stay open, and his chin slid down onto his chest.

  Something told him that he ought to stay awake. (Or was that concussion victims?) But the effort was too much. Nothing to stay awake for, after all. Eventually he let go, and started to dream.

  It was the sort of dream that sneaks up on you. He was in the nice comfy chair by the nice cosy fire, but now he wasn’t alone. Two young men in Victorian clothes were sitting opposite him; they were smoking clay pipes, very relaxed and friendly, and he supposed he must know them from somewhere. They were chatting, but he was too sleepy to pay attention to what they were saying; he caught an occasional word, but nothing that made sense. Then one of them leaned forward, tapped him on the knee with the stem of his pipe, and asked him what he thought.

  He lifted his head and opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I think I was dropping off.”

  The two young men laughed. “I should say,” one of them said. “But look here, don’t you think it’s gone on quite long enough? After all, you’ve only been here—what, a couple of hours? Hardly that; but already you’ve had enough of it, and no blame to you. It’s confoundedly dull, with nothing to read and only us for company.”

  Paul tried to keep his eyes open, but the lids were too heavy. “It’s not that,” he assured them. “I’m rather weary, that’s all. Be a good fellow and let me take a nap.”

  “Of course,” said the curly-haired young man. “But you will help us, won’t you? After all, you know where it is now, it’d be no great matter for you to slip it in your pocket and bring it away with you. And we’ve been here—oh, how long is it now, Pip?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five years,” the other man said. “Give or take a week or so.”

  “Goodness,” Paul heard himself say, though what he really meant was Jesus or Fucking hell. “My poor fellow, what a dreadful thing. But I’m still not sure what it is that you expect me to do.”

  “Perfectly simple,” said the curly-haired man. “Take it and bring it here. At least, this place will do as well as any other. Then we can go that way—” and he pointed at the back wall, where the fireplace was. “And once we’ve gone, you can go back the other way, and we’ll all be right as rain, you’ll see. Now, is that too much to ask of an old friend?”

  Put like that, it did seem perfectly reasonable. “I’m terribly sorry,” Paul yawned, “but I still don’t quite catch your drift. What is it you want me to take, and from where?”

  The two men looked at each other, as if they were the ones who weren’t quite sure what was going on. “Steady on, old chap,” said the one called Pip. “A joke’s all very well, but this is hardly the time.”

  “Honestly,” Paul said, “I don’t know. Tell me, and—”

  “That’s not funny, you know,” the curly-haired man said quietly. “Fun’s fun and all, but that ain’t, if you see what I mean.”

  “No, really. If you’d just tell me—”

  “For Heaven’s sake.” The curly-haired man was getting annoyed. “This is rather serious for us, you know. This isn’t the time or the place for any of your humour.”

  It occurred to Paul that he didn’t want to get them angry. “I promise you,” he said. “Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll see to it that it’s done. I give you my word.”

  The one called Pip stood up. “That’s enough,” he said. “Obviously you know, or how else could you have come here? There’s no door,” he added sourly. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  Paul knew that unless he calmed them down, they were going to do something horrible to him. He was supposed to get them out of here, that was clear enough. Whether they ought to be allowed out was another matter entirely. “Forgive me,” he said, as pleasantly as he could. “You’re right, it wasn’t funny. I’ll see to it straight away.”

  Pip looked at him, then sat down. “That’s quite all right, then,” he said. “First thing tomorrow?”

  “First thing,” Paul assured him. “You just leave it to me.”

  The curly-haired man grinned. “You and your humour, Jack,” he said. “For a moment, you had me fooled completely. Now then, let’s have another drink, and say no more about it.”

  He stood up and grabbed Paul by the wrist, and suddenly he was awake, sitting up in bed, in his pyjamas. For a moment, he thought he could still see the curly-haired man standing over him; but it was only the sword in the stone, silhouetted against the window.

  “Door,” he said aloud, and jumped out of bed.

  The door was where it ought to be. Furthermore, when he turned the latch, it opened, and when he pushed it, it clicked shut. He did this several times, just to make sure. Never had the operation of a simple mechanical device given him more satisfaction.

  “Bloody hell,” he said aloud, and looked at his wrist. His watch was back, and it told him the time was a quarter past three; in the morning, because it was dark outside the window, with the amber glow of the street light seeping through. He flipped the light switch, and looked round. There was his room, the scruffy epitome of his life, just as it had been when he’d left for work that morning. There was his suit, lying across the chair next to the bed, with his shirt on the floor and his tie on top of it. An unwashed plate on the table showed that he’d had cheese on toast (the stale Tesco’s Canadian Cheddar, left over from the weekend) and baked beans for supper, which probably explained a great deal.

  Paul’s mouth was dry and furry, so he made himself a cup of tea. Sitting on the edge of the bed with the tea mug in his hands, he very nearly managed to persuade himself not to go to work the next day, or any day thereafter; to find another job and forget about Sophie, and get all the w
eirdness out of his life for good. But that was just three in the morning talking. He remembered reading something about three o’clock in the morning, how it was the time when most suicides happened, something to do with chemical imbalances in the brain caused by the sleep cycle, or something equally plausible and scientific. Anyhow; he knew that if only he could get to sleep, things would seem a whole lot less urgent and desperate when he woke up. He finished his tea, cut the light and lay on his back, staring into the darkness where the ceiling had to be. He was sure he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep now, and he was right.

  He put the light back on, fished in his jacket pocket and found the letters. It was important, he felt, that they were still addressed to Lieutenant Philip Catherwood, and they were. He started reading them; and, in spite of the lurid nature of their contents, they sent him to sleep faster and surer than a general anaesthetic or the collected works of Martin Amis. That would have been fine; except that as soon as he was asleep he was back in the Victorian room; he was still reading the letters, but they weren’t written to Philip Catherwood any more. On the contrary; they were written to him and signed, With all my love, Sophie. One thing he hadn’t noticed before; on the envelope, she’d written Paul Carpenter, but the letters now started off, My darling Pip. Still, at least this time he knew it was nothing more than a bad dream, the fault of some careless or malicious Canadian dairy farmer, so that was all right.

  §

  Next day, they finished off the rest of the strongroom. He had to wait till eleven o’clock, when Sophie went off to get a cup of coffee, before he had a chance to put the letters back and check the other stuff—the bank books, title deeds, death certificate. As he’d suspected and hoped, the name on all of them was Philip Catherwood. Hallebloodylujah, he said to himself.