The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  “Dragons,” Paul repeated.

  “Dragons. Even you’ve heard of dragons.”

  “Yes, but they don’t—”

  “Dragons,” said Mr Tanner wearily, “are attracted to accumulations of wealth. These days, that’s mostly museums, art galleries and, of course, banks. This week he’s off dealing with a nasty infestation in the vaults of the Credit Lyonnais, they’re hoping he can get shot of the buggers before the Euro goes into free fall on Wall Street. And I’m a goblin,” he added, with a smirk. “But you know that already.”

  Paul knew Mr Tanner was waiting for one of them to ask; he reckoned it might as well be him. “Um, what do goblins do?” he said.

  “Ah.” Mr Tanner stubbed out his cigar on the leg of his chair and lit another. “Goblins live in the bowels of the earth, digging vast tunnels that go down to the outer skin of the magma core. In other words,” he went on, “minerals. Which means, where I come from in New South Wales, bauxite. Which,” he added with a particularly nasty grin, “is why I hired you.”

  Paul’s mouth flopped open. “Me?”

  “You. You’re a natural scryer, as you’ve just proved. Ninety per cent success rate, that’s really very good.”

  Paul didn’t know what to say. “You mean, those photos of bits of desert—”

  Mr Tanner nodded. “You looked at them, and instinctively you knew where the bauxite deposits were. Don’t go getting ideas, though, that’s what we’re paying you for. You, on the other hand,” he went on, looking at Sophie, “Theo Van Spee reckons you’ve got what it takes to be a seer. Coming from him, that’s a real compliment, and don’t you forget it.”

  “I’m honoured,” Sophie grunted. “But I don’t think I want to, thanks.”

  “You don’t want to,” Mr Tanner repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  Mr Tanner’s face stretched into an enormous toothy grin; and Paul, staring at it in horrified fascination, reckoned he could definitely see the family resemblance. “Tough,” Mr Tanner said. “It’s not up to you.”

  “Isn’t it?” Sophie replied.

  “No. You signed a contract.”

  Sophie laughed. “Fine,” she said. “Sue me. I’ve got sixty pounds in the bank and fifteen pounds and some pennies in the Post Office; oh yes, and a Premium Bond. You can have the lot for all I care, but I’m not coming back here again, not ever.”

  Mr Tanner shook his head. “Never sign a legal document without reading it,” he said. “Clause 3, paragraph five, I can’t remember the exact wording but the gist of it is, if you try and quit, we can force you to work for us, any way we choose.” His eyes flashed red, just like his mother’s. “You really don’t want to find out how we do that.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Really.” Mr Tanner shrugged. “Then you leave me no choice, I’m delighted to say. Now then. When I snap my fingers three times, you’re going to take all your clothes off and dance the Dying Swan. Ready?” He clicked his fingers, once, twice, three times. At the third click, the expression on Sophie’s face suddenly changed, from grim defiance to total and unspeakable horror. Her fingers spread like starfish, as she fought to keep her hands by her sides, then they were at her throat, and she slowly undid the top button of her blouse.

  “No,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Mr Tanner laughed. That was too much for Paul; he jumped up and reached for the stapler, but Mr Tanner turned his head and looked at him. At once, Paul felt an unbearable pain in his arm, as if someone had caught it in a huge pair of red-hot tongs and was pulling it towards his face. He watched as his index finger straightened and started to move inexorably towards and then up his left nostril. He could feel it reaming and twisting. “All right,” he gasped, “all right. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Mr Tanner said indulgently, and he snapped his fingers again. Simultaneously, Paul and Sophie felt their arms relax and flop to their sides. “And that’s me being nice,” Mr Tanner added. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood. Sometimes I can be a bit of an old crosspatch, and I don’t think you’d like that. Oh, and while I think of it; if you were toying with the idea of trying to involve the police, or the industrial tribunal, or the newspapers or the Esther Rantzen show, I wouldn’t bother if I were you. Even if you managed to tell them about what you think just happened here, they won’t believe you. But it wouldn’t come to that, because the moment you opened your mouth or tried to post the letter or send the e–mail, you’d find yourself crouched on the floor with your thumb in your mouth singing ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’. I take the view that being a really evil bastard isn’t just a job, it’s a vocation.”

  Up to that point, if asked, Paul would have told you he knew perfectly well what being scared felt like; he knew scared from nothing, thank you very much, in fact he could write a postgraduate thesis on it: fear of heights, spiders, flying, getting beaten up, getting caught, being late, being laughed at, earwigs, loud noises, pretty well anything you cared to name except Mary Poppins and breakfast cereal. As he sat on the front desk and stared at Mr Tanner, however, he realised that hitherto he’d known about being scared the way a bumble-bee knows about flying to Andromeda. A quick sideways glance told him that Sophie was thinking along much the same lines. Under other circumstances, finding something they had in common would have pleased him no end. On this occasion, it didn’t seem all that significant.

  “And anyhow,” Mr Tanner went on, “you may think you want to pack it in, but you’re wrong. Once you’ve got over this daft little culture-shock thing, you’ll realise you’ve lucked in to the most fantastic career anybody could ever wish for. Think about it, will you? You’re going to be wizards, you’re going to learn to do magic. There’s a hundred million kids from Saigon to Greenland who’d give their PlayStation for a chance like you’ve got. So,” Mr Tanner continued, smiling agreeably, “let’s have less of the long faces and more of the cheerful enthusiasm. Are we happy? Because if we aren’t,” he added, “we soon will be. Well?”

  “We’re happy,” Paul and Sophie mumbled in unison.

  “Are we excited? Looking forward to a whole galaxy of thrilling new opportunities?”

  They nodded.

  “That’s all right, then.” Mr Tanner stood up. “Sorry if I’ve cut into your free time, but I think this exercise has been useful. Now bugger off and I don’t want to see you back here till nine sharp Monday.” He crossed to the door and took out a bunch of keys. “Oh,” he said, “one last thing—particularly as far as you’re concerned, Ms Pettingell. Goblins aren’t all that different from people. Scare the shit out of them, and you may find they get panicky. Leave them alone, and they won’t bother you. And it’s particularly important you don’t go getting on the wrong side of this particular colony, because as I said a minute or so ago, they’re actually our landlords here; they own it, let it to us at a peppercorn rent, strictly on the understanding that we see to it that when the doors are locked, they can come out of the tunnels where they live, run about, have a bit of harmless fun after a long day digging ore with their fingernails, without bloody great big humans jumping out at them, frightening them half to death. Not a lot to ask, I think you’ll agree. Also,” he added grimly, “they happen to be family, and I’d like you to ask yourselves how you’d like it if huge ugly monsters barged into your parents’ lounge and started shoving them around. Really, it’s just basic good manners and consideration for others. Understood?” He unlocked the door, and opened it for them. “Right,” he said, “off you go. Ms Pettingell, if you get a move on and don’t dawdle, you’ll find you’re in plenty of time to catch the 6:05 from London Bridge to Denmark Hill, which just happens to be running twenty minutes late. That means you should get to the Spaniel and Spigot just as the warm-up band’s grinding to a halt, and I promise you, you won’t have missed anything.” He grinned, and winked insultingly. “Have a nice weekend,” he said. “Be good.”

  The door closed behind them, an
d they could hear the keys graunching in the locks. It was just starting to rain.

  “Well,” Paul said. Sophie didn’t answer. They walked a few steps, then paused.

  “You heard him,” Paul said. “Hurry, or you’ll miss your train.”

  She looked at him; rain was running off her forehead and down her nose, like fat tears. “What’re we going to do?” she said.

  Paul shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “My dad’s got an old Spanish proverb he’s always quoting: when you’re drowning in beef stew, it’s a hell of a time to decide you’re a vegetarian. I’m not sure whether it applies to this or not, but it’s the best I can manage right now.”

  Sophie looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Well,” she said, “see you Monday.”

  “Yes, right. Enjoy your pottery thing.”

  “Ceramics,” she corrected him, and walked away.

  §

  Paul took the only course of action open to him at that point in his career. He went to the nearest pub and drank six pints of lemonade shandy, without the lemonade. When he asked for a seventh, the man behind the bar said he reckoned he’d probably had about as much lemonade shandy as was good for him, and maybe he ought to go home. Paul thanked him, left the pub, found another and ordered a pint of ginger-beer shandy, without the ginger beer. When the barman asked him if he wouldn’t rather just have a pint of lager instead, since it amounted to the same thing, Paul shook his head and replied no, he’d rather stick to shandy because he wasn’t used to strong drink. Then he fell over; whereupon kind-hearted bystanders helped him out through the door and into the gutter. There he stayed for a while, considering his options and restructuring his priorities, until a policeman came along and arrested him.

  But Paul merely smiled. True, he’d just passed through unutterable horrors and every aspect of his life had turned to cheap cooking shit between his fingers, but at least he didn’t have to take that sort of nonsense from coppers; not now that he was a wizard.

  First, though, he tried to explain. “You can’t arrest me,” he said. “I’m a wizard.”

  The policeman admitted to a certain degree of scepticism. He advanced an alternative theory of his own, and tried to grab Paul by the lapels.

  Paul brushed him aside, none too gently. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Not respectful. I’ll give you one last chance, and then—”

  But the policeman didn’t seem to want his last chance; a pity, but there’s no helping some people. With a mild sigh of regret, Paul narrowed his eyes, took a deep breath and clicked his fingers.

  It didn’t seem to be working.

  Meanwhile, the policeman hadn’t been idle. He’d got Paul up on his feet, and was shoving him rather brusquely against a wall, while unshipping his handcuffs. Paul was disappointed, to put it mildly. This wasn’t what he’d been led to expect. Fat lot of good it was, being a wizard and being able to find bauxite blindfold in the dark wearing boxing gloves, if you couldn’t do a perfectly simple thing, like ordering Porky Pig to eat his truncheon. Then he remembered, and suddenly it all became clear. He’d thought of the bit about the truncheon after he’d snapped his fingers. Well, there you are, he told himself, and tried again.

  For a moment, Paul had the nasty feeling that it still wasn’t going to work. But then, just when he was beginning to get worried, the policeman let go of him, took a step back, and made a very faint mewing noise, like a cat inside a large suitcase. Then, in slow motion like an action replay, he pulled the shiny black riot stick from his belt, lifted it to his mouth and bit it.

  There was a faint pinging noise. In retrospect, Paul figured out it was probably a tooth breaking.

  “There you go,” Paul said happily, as the policeman bit again. “Though, if I was you, I’d try it spread on toast, or with a couple of bits of bread. Truncheon meat, ha ha.” He grinned, Mr—Tanner-fashion. He’d never had a policeman for a straight man before. “Mind how you go,” he said, and walked away, straight into a deep, oily puddle.

  The special providence that looks after cats and drunks got him home. He closed his door, flopped down on the bed and went straight to sleep. He had a strange dream; in this dream, he fought a band of goblins, discovered he had unearthly magical powers, and forced a policeman to commit an undignified and painful act in public. While the dream was playing inside his mind, he found himself thinking that, even by his standards, this dream was as weird as the plumbing on the Tardis. Then he woke up; and, in the split second between the return of consciousness and the hangover spinning its wheels in the poisoned mush of his brain, he realised that it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory.

  Oh, he thought.

  Jesus, he thought, did I really say truncheon meat? Not good. Not good at all.

  He stumbled out of bed, found the kettle and filled it with water. Just for fun, instead of flipping the switch he gave it a stern look, snapped his fingers and said, “Boil!” But nothing happened. Still, he hadn’t expected that anything would. Maybe that was why it hadn’t. Whatever.

  Thinking about it rationally and sensibly didn’t really help. He’d got past the stage where he could kid himself that the various weird things he’d seen were hallucinations or unusually vivid dreams. Instead, he had to face the fact that he was living in a world where magic seemed to work, goblins existed and he was stuck in the cold eye of Weirdness Central without the option of running away. In theory, there was a positive side, since apparently he could do at least some bits of magic; he could immobilise policemen (ever since he could remember, he’d been terrified of them) and so, also in theory, he could do pretty much what he liked, without having to worry about being arrested and sent to prison. Fine; but even if this was true, when he came to think about it he couldn’t call to mind a single illegal thing he actually wanted to do. So maybe he could rob banks and have lots of money; a fat lot of good it’d do him, even if he got away with it, when he was obliged to turn up for work every day at 70 St Mary Axe and file printouts or play Spot-the-Bauxite all day, or else risk some imaginatively nasty penalty from the murky depths of Mr Tanner’s imagination. Besides, he rationalised, there was probably a very good and obvious reason why the possessors of magical powers didn’t go around helping themselves to anything they took a fancy to, or else why were the partners in the firm working for a living, instead of swanning about enjoying themselves like a bunch of supernatural Kray Brothers? It was much more likely that the scope of his superpowers was severely limited; he’d be able to stare down one copper, for example, but not two—something like that. On balance, he decided, having magical powers would probably turn out to be rather like satellite TV; sounds cool, turns out to be more hassle than it’s worth.

  All that bothered him, for sure; but for most of the weekend, as soon as he allowed his mind to wander, Paul found his thoughts turning to Denmark Hill, and wherever the trail led from there. The more he thought about that, the worse it got. For the last month, he realised, his whole life had been founded on one admittedly unlikely supposition: if I can woo and win this girl, I shall be happy ever after. He’d never for one moment believed that he could actually win, but at least he’d been in the race, in contention. Now, at a stroke, he was out of it. She’d found someone else. No vacancies, the position’s been filled, go away. Not just that; thanks to Mr Tanner and his horrible associates, he was condemned to go on seeing her every day, spending hours on end in the same room with her, when what he really should be doing was putting as much distance between himself and her as he possibly could. He knew the drill, he’d been turned down often enough. If he could quit his job and get another one, it was a pound to a chocolate Euro that within a matter of days he’d light on some other unsuspecting female who happened to meet his not-too-exacting criteria and fall hopelessly in love with her. No problem; that was his natural defence system, a series of rebounds as quick and complex as the highest level on a pinball table. Unfortunately, that option didn’t seem to be open. The best he could do woul
d be to fall for someone else at JWW; and he didn’t hold out much hope in that direction, for the simple reason that if there’d been anybody suitable on the premises, he’d have done so already. But who was there? The secretaries were either notoriously spoken for or far too glamorous and beautiful to offer him the tiny glimmer of hope that was a prerequisite for crush acquisition. It had always been the same; the ones Paul fell for tended to be boot-faced, bespectacled, a tad too fat or too skinny to slot neatly into the conventional stereotype of womanly beauty. It was, he’d admitted to himself, the difference between hunting for the rainbow’s end and buying a lottery ticket every week. Neither path was ever going to make him a rich man, but doing it his way, at least he had a one-in-fifty-million chance. That was enough.

  But.

  All right, then, Mr Wise Guy: why do fools fall in love? There had to be a reason. About the only thing Paul still remembered from school science lessons, aside from various interesting things that happen when you mix iodine and ammonia, was Darwin’s theory. Evolution; it was something he couldn’t help taking personally. Gradually, over ten thousand dark millennia, everything necessary had been designed and installed, everything useful had been adopted, everything harmful or unhelpful had been pared away. Sometimes he fancied he could almost hear the thoughts of those successive generations of prototypes, trudging wearily up the steep path of progress with nothing to keep them going except the instinctive knowledge that their effort and unselfish sacrifice would some day lead to the ultimate, the final version that couldn’t be improved on: himself, Paul Carpenter. It would be an unforgivable insult to their memory to assert that any design feature comprised in his physical or mental make-up wasn’t there for the very best of reasons. The same sequence of processes that had brought about such miracles of engineering as bones, muscles, blood and brain had also shaped his instincts and emotions; inevitably, therefore, the software had to be as perfect, in its way, as the hardware. Accordingly, there had to be a reason for the apparently loopy way he carried on around girls—it had to be some kind of survival skill or behavioural trait optimised for the greater glory of the species. Nature had included it in the package for a purpose; but he was buggered if he could see what on earth it might be.