The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  At any rate, he thought, it didn’t look like Sophie was going to be able to keep her date with the anarchosocialist potter. Count blessings; gratitude for small mercies. If he was going to be ruthlessly honest with himself, it didn’t really help.

  It was the third goblin that buggered everything up. Looking back, Paul reckoned it must’ve come bouncing into the room without realising something was up. It was about the same size as the spear-carrier, weasel-featured and armed with a broad, curved sword; it bustled in, saw Paul, came to a sudden halt and screamed.

  Immediately, Paul heard himself shout back; bizarrely, what he was shouting was, “Please go away,” but it was obviously the way he said it, not the actual content, that did the trick. All three goblins shrank away from him as if he was the one with all the weapons, and this remarkable show of cowardice set his instincts in motion again. He took a long stride forward, stamped his left foot down hard and shouted: “Boo!” at the top of his voice.

  To a certain extent, it worked like a charm. All three goblins turned and fled, the spear-fancier dropping his spear in the process. This should have been a good thing, but it wasn’t. By now, the other two goblins had reached the doorway; and the spear-fancier, finding itself unarmed and exposed, shrieked in panic and shrank backwards, towards the corner of the room, away from the door. Bugger, Paul thought, and he took another step forward, raising his arms and flapping them in the air, trying to shoo the goblin like a farmer herding sheep.

  He’d overdone it. The goblin screamed horribly, scuttled back and bumped into Sophie, who was just getting up off the floor. The goblin spun round, saw its chance and grabbed her by the hair, hauling her across its body while its other hand produced a knife and held it under her chin.

  In the last split second, Paul managed to stop himself from shouting; just as well, because he was absolutely certain (don’t ask him why) that a shout at that precise moment would have scared the goblin into frantic, violent panic, and Sophie would have been killed then and there. Instead, Paul held absolutely still, his weight on his numb back foot, a breath half-taken in his throat, and let the goblin back away through the door, dragging Sophie with him. It was yet another moment; in this instance, the worst such of Paul’s life.

  Just to make sure, he stayed put and counted to five, as the sound of the goblin’s awkward footsteps died away beyond the doorway. Only then did he dare take the risk of coming back to life.

  Shit? he yelled. Then he lunged forward and grabbed the spear off the floor, where the goblin had dropped it. At this point, his numb foot made its presence felt; he wobbled, nearly stuck himself with the spear under his left armpit, slammed the butt onto the ground and put his weight on it.

  This wouldn’t do at all; so, using the spear as a crutch, he swung towards the door and hobbled out into the corridor. No sign, in either direction; nothing to give him a clue which way they’d gone.

  Paul hesitated. The clever thing to do, he knew, would be to go back into Tanner’s office, throw a chair through the window, and scream for help. But he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, he just knew that going back would be going in the wrong direction, leaving Sophie when he should be following. “Shit and fuck,” he muttered balefully, and looked down the corridor, then up. Which way? No idea; and eeny-meeny-miny-moeing at this juncture simply wasn’t going to cut it, he had to make a decision. “Bugger,” he explained to himself, and turned right.

  Right, of course, meant down the corridor into the computer bay, through the fire doors and down the stairs; at the foot of which he stopped and listened. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear bumps and crashes, like noisy children shifting furniture. Presumably goblins; and he was perfectly well aware of the fact that he was a coward, completely out of his depth, in a locked building containing an unknown but probably substantial number of utterly terrifying and apparently-until-proven-otherwise hostile creatures. But that was about as relevant to the decision-making process as the price of cocoa butter on the New York commodities exchange. The only question was, were those goblins the right goblins, or not?

  No way of knowing. All Paul could think of was getting hold of one of them and hitting it until it made the other one, the one who’d got Sophie, give her back. It was a spectacularly stupid plan, and he knew it, but it was all he could think of. Hating his left foot for having pins and needles in it, he hoppitied down the passageway like Long John Silver running for a bus, and shoved through the fire door into reception.

  He was looking for goblins; he’d found them. He didn’t bother with a meticulous headcount, but there were at least twenty of them, apparently playing some form of rugby football with the large metal waste-paper basket that usually lived under the receptionist’s desk. As soon as Paul barged in, they stopped whatever it was they’d been doing, and froze. They were staring at him, as if—well, as if they were junior clerks in a City of London office, and he was a goblin.

  Oh for God’s sake, not all that again, Paul said to himself; and instead of staring back, he yelled, “Bastards!” at the top of his voice and brandished the spear in as melodramatic a fashion as he could manage with a duff foot and a soaking-wet trouser leg.

  The goblins fled. All, that was, except one.

  One, however, was enough. It was bigger than the others he’d seen—rat-faced, broad across the shoulders and armed with a long, thin knife and a chunky-looking iron club with spikes sticking out of it. For a split second it turned to follow the others; then it screamed horribly, jumped onto the front desk and threw the club at Paul’s head. Paul dropped the spear and ducked as the club sailed past his head, missing it by the width of a cigarette paper. The goblin jumped down, reaching for him with its clawed hand; Paul backed away on his heels like a Cossack dancer, flailing with his arms for balance, and as he retreated down the line of the front desk, his fingers closed on something cold and smooth. Whatever its proper function was, this object had suddenly been upgraded to weapons status; Paul grabbed it and lashed out at the goblin’s claw, rapping it hard across the knuckles. It was at this point that he discovered what the mystery object was. It was the long stapler.

  A table lamp would have suited him better; likewise a length of steel pipe, or an Uzi. But what he’d got was a stapler, and it was better than nothing. The goblin paused for a moment, weighing up the merits of various tactical initiatives, and suddenly hopped forward, swiping at Paul’s face with its claws. Without really knowing what he was doing, Paul intercepted the goblin’s swing with his own left hand, grabbing its arm just above the wrist. Then, hefting the stapler in his right hand, he closed its jaws onto the goblin’s soft, leathery palm and squeezed hard. The stapler went click; the goblin shrieked, dropped its knife and tried to pull away. It succeeded, but not before Paul had stapled it again. Now that, he couldn’t help thinking, was a good moment.

  After that, things started to look up—thanks mostly to

  the goblin, who made the mistake of backing into the bookshelf on the far wall of the little bay where callers waited for their appointments. This shelf supported the considerable weight of one hundred and three bound volumes of the Journal of Meteorological Studies, June 1949 to December 1957 inclusive. In turn, the shelf was secured to the wall by two stout wooden brackets; but not stout enough, it turned out, to survive a direct hit from the spike on the top of a goblin helmet. To be precise, the spike took out the bracket at the end of the shelf nearest to Paul and the front desk. Immediately the shelf dropped forward, and the bound volumes slid off it one by one. June 1949 to September 1951 between them knocked off the goblin’s tin hat; the rest of the collection drummed off its hairy skull like raindrops, until a glancing blow from February 1956 finished it off and dropped it to the ground like the proverbial felled ox. It was an awesome, really quite inspiring sight, and while it was going on, all Paul could do was stand and stare in fascinated admiration. Once the last volume had done its stuff, however, he snapped back into life, pounced on the stricken goblin and grabbed it by one
long, furry ear.

  “Bastard,” he yelled. The goblin stared at him and whimpered, its little red eyes wide with horror. At any other time, Paul would have had to let it go, and probably find it an old blanket and a saucer of bread and milk. Just then, however, he wasn’t in the mood. He hardened his heart, clenched his left fist, and swung it back for a good, hard swing—“What the bloody hell,” said a voice behind him, “do you think you’re playing at?”

  He let go of the goblin’s ear and whirled round so fast he hurt something in his neck. Mr Tanner was standing in the doorway.

  Paul tried to find some words, but only one of them came to hand. “Goblin,” he said. “Goblin.”

  Mr Tanner gave him a look you could have skated on.

  “Actually,” he said, “that’s my mother.”

  EIGHT

  It was one of those moments when the moral high ground opens and swallows you up. Paul looked down at the cowering goblin, buried up to the neck in the Journal of Meteorological Studies, and back at Mr Tanner, and for a short time he forgot all about Sophie and the weirdness and the fact that he’d just fought a giant orc (as he was already thinking of the goblin) to a standstill, armed with nothing but a stapler. He felt like he was ten years old and he’d just been caught trying to hide the shards of the priceless Ming vase he’d used to smash the drawing-room window.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Mr Tanner said.

  “It’s nearly six o’clock—you shouldn’t even be in the building.”

  “Sorry,” Paul said automatically; and then it occurred to him that somewhere about the premises, a horrible hairy creature with a face like a weasel was holding a knife to Sophie’s throat. Somehow, the risk of getting fired didn’t seem quite so important. “Sophie,” he said, “they’ve got her. One of the—” He hesitated. If this one was Mr Tanner’s mother, the knife-wielder might be his cousin, or his aunt. “Grabbed her,” he said, “stuck a knife under her chin. You’ve got to do something.”

  Mr Tanner sighed, as if he’d just been called out of an important meeting to sign a stationery requisition. “I see,” he said. “All right, stay there. And try not to cause any more trouble.”

  He went back through the fire door. Paul noticed that he was still holding the stapler. He put it carefully down on the front desk, then looked round. The goblin—Mr Tanner’s old mum—was still crouching on the floor, watching him with baleful, terrified eyes. “Um, sorry,” he said, and held out a hand to help it up, but it made a tiny, brittle screaming noise, like worn-down brake shoes, and shrank away.

  About a minute later, Mr Tanner came back. Sophie was behind him, with a dazed expression on her face but no blood or anything. Paul wanted to rush over and fold her in his arms, but he had enough sense left to realise that this wouldn’t be a good idea. “Sit down,” Mr Tanner barked at her, and she dropped obediently into the receptionist’s chair. “And you,” he added to Paul. Then he knelt down beside the book-entombed goblin, gently held out his hand and screamed at it, like a monkey in a zoo, or a mynah bird. The goblin screamed back, grabbed his wrist and hauled itself up, taking great and ostentatious care to keep Mr Tanner between itself and Paul. Slowly, tenderly, Mr Tanner walked it across reception, holding it gently by the arm, then opened the door for it. The goblin paused in the doorway, pointed at Paul with a long, wickedly curved claw, and shrieked.

  Mr Tanner nodded and shrugged, then closed the door after it.

  “Right,” he said, turning and facing them.

  It was that last nod and shrug that did it. They’d reminded him of when he was six or seven, at which point in his spiritual development he’d had to put up with weekly visits to Auntie Pauline’s, where he was invariably sent out into the garden to play with his obnoxious five-year-old cousin Gary. Every week it had been the same; as soon as Gary got bored with whatever game they were playing, he’d favour Paul with an evil grin, burst into hot, wet tears and run howling in through the French windows, bellowing ‘Mummy, he hit me’ at the top of his precociously loud voice. Every week, Mum and Dad and Aunt Pauline and Uncle Terry would accept the little bastard’s version without question, and Paul would be spoken to and sent to sit in the car, with nothing to eat or read, till it was time to go home; and every time, as Paul was being led away to solitary confinement, Mum would look at Auntie Pauline and nod and shrug in precisely that way.

  Not this time, Paul decided. He jumped to his feet and yelled, “What the bloody hell is going on?”

  Mr Tanner frowned at him, as though he was a spelling mistake. “Sit down and be quiet,” he said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  “Oh, right,” said Paul, and he perched on the edge of the front desk. But he couldn’t bring himself to let it go at that; he had to ask: “Mr Tanner,” he said. “Was that—was that really your mother?”

  “Yes,” said Mr Tanner.

  “Fine,” Paul said. “So does that mean you’re—”

  Mr Tanner nodded. “A goblin, yes. If you want to be pedantic about it, I’m a quarter human on my father’s side, but that’s really none of your business.”

  Sophie raised her, head and stared at him. She still looked as though she’d followed a large white rabbit with a pocket watch down a hole in the ground, but some colour was starting to return to her cheeks. “Mr Tanner,” she asked quietly, “why are there goblins in this building?”

  Mr Tanner sighed. “They own it,” he said.

  Sophie opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Mr Tanner pulled up a chair from the waiting area, sat down and lit a cigar.

  “I suppose it’s our fault, really,” he said. “Actually, it’s something of a bone of contention in the partnership right now. Some of us feel that when we take on trainees, we ought to put them in the picture right away, to avoid God-awful fuck-ups like this one. Others like to see it as a sort of rite of passage cum intelligence test; if you’re bright enough to work for JWW, you ought to be able to figure it out for yourselves.” He flashed one of his trade-mark unpleasant grins. “Nice idea,” he said, “but with the calibre of the recruits we have to make do with nowadays, probably a bit unrealistic.”

  He drew hard on his cigar and blew a smoke ring. “Anyhow,” he went on. “I think the best way to explain it to you is like this.” He reached in his pocket and took out some folded sheets of paper, handing one each to Sophie and Paul. At first sight, it looked like the firm’s standard letterhead. But then Paul noticed an extra line of fine print just below the company name and logo:

  J.W. WELLS & CO.

  SUPERNATURAL CONSULTANTS, PARANORMAL ENGINEERS, PRACTICAL METAPHYSICIANS

  “Found it?” Mr Tanner said. “Splendid. Now, I’d like you to look at the partner’s names, on the right-hand side, under the By Appointment symbol. After each name, you’ll see a string of letters—qualifications, you don’t need to be told that. Got it?”

  Paul looked across. The list read:

  John W. Wells MAA (Oxon) LLB FIPES Dip.N Humphrey Wells ASTP CHM

  Professor Theodorus Van Spee VULWIT ORE C.N. Suslowicz FSEE AIBG

  The Contessa Judith di Castel’Bianco QF FRICS

  Lt-Col Dietrich Wurmtoter RHG FICDGBI

  Dennis Tanner BA (Plymouth) BG

  “All right,” Mr Tanner said, “let’s start at the top. MAA stands for Master of Arcane Arts. FIPES means Fellow of the Institute of Practical and Effective Sorcerers. Dip.N. is just Diploma in Necromancy—no big deal, you just fill in a form and send them a flyer and you get it in the mail by return. Humphrey Wells, now let’s see:”

  ASTP is Associate of the Society of Thaumaturgical Practitioners; CIIM is something like Confrère de l’Institut International de la Magie—they’re a load of tossers if you ask me, but it impresses the French, and we’re always told we’ve got to think Europe these days. Anyway; I can’t remember what VULWIT stands for and if I could I couldn’t pronounce it—it means Theo Van Spee’s the something-or-other professor of witchcraft at the University of Leiden, which
probably means bugger-all to you two, but take it from me, that’s hot stuff in the trade. The OBE was for services to horticulture, and God only knows how he came to get that. Cas Suslowicz: FSEE is Fellow of the Society of Elemental Engineers, AIBG is just Associate of the International Brotherhood of Giants, he got that just by being born—

  Paul made a choking noise. “Sorry, what was that?”

  “Giants,” Mr Tanner repeated. “Cas Suslowicz is a giant, hadn’t you—? No, I guess not.”

  “But he’s—”

  “He’s a short giant,” Mr Tanner said firmly. “Judy Castel’Bianco, that should be obvious even to you two.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Sophie said dangerously.

  “QF,” said Mr Tanner, “Queen of the Fey. You do know who the Fey are, don’t you? Hint: you’ve got them at the bottom of your garden, and I don’t mean a water feature. Rick Wurmtoter, he’s a Ritter des Heiligen Grals—that’s Knight of the Holy Grail to you—and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Dragonslayers of Great Britain and Ireland. The Lieutenant-Colonel bit is perfectly genuine too, if you count the Riders of Rohan as a proper army. And that’s about it.”

  “What about you?” Sophie growled. “BG.”

  Mr Tanner beamed at her, revealing many unusual teeth. “Boss Goblin,” he said.

  There was a second or so of complete silence. Then Paul asked, “Excuse me, but what does it all mean?”

  Mr Tanner clicked his tongue. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Right, from the top: Humph Wells is a sorcerer; he does mostly commercial and banking these days, but he still keeps his hand in with conjuring and raising spirits, mainly for the Far Eastern market and the States. Theo Van Spee is probably the best wizard currently working in the private sector—space⁄time stuff principally, a lot of consultancy work, and of course the whole of the information technology side. Cas Suslowicz is almost entirely construction and civil engineering, as you’d expect. Judy—well, obviously, she looks after our client portfolio in the entertainment sector. Rick Wurmtoter’s our resident hero, basically he does pest control, mostly dragons—”