The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  It didn’t take him long to reach the conclusion that he’d done the right thing. They weren’t just yummy, these raisins, they were super-double-plus yummy with a yummy chaser. He dug his fingers into the packet and scooped out a half-handful, cramming them into his mouth like a small child, and for quite some time all he could think about was how gorgeous they tasted. In fact, it was only when he realised that half the packet seemed to have gone that he made an effort and stayed his hand. Time, he decided regretfully, to start thinking about rationing what was left. He put the packet back in the drawer, closed it firmly and wedged it shut with his knee.

  And now, he told himself, you’d better get some work done, unless you want to stay here till Monday morning. He reached for the nearest photo, and immediately felt the by now familiar tingling, starting at his fingertips and running all the way down to the base of his wrist. Pay dirt.

  His first thought was dismay—if the scrying magic was working absolutely fine again, maybe there hadn’t been anything wrong with it to begin with, and he’d drawn a blank on the first batch of photos simply because there quite genuinely hadn’t been anything there to find. He elbowed the thought out of his mind, drew a green circle and reached for the next picture. Instead, his fingers found the raisin packet.

  Weirder and weirder, since his knee was still jammed against the drawer. Still, he knew from long, dyspeptic experience that choccy raisins don’t just sit there waiting for you, like cowboys holed up behind a barricade of wagons as a Sioux raiding party appears over the skyline; they sneak out like pale insubstantial wraiths and find their way into hand and mouth. Simple confectioner’s magic, the sort that happens every day. Nothing to worry (“munch”) about.

  He examined and marked four or five more pictures, each time feeling the scrying buzz. At least he was doing it properly this time, which he hoped would go some way towards making up for his childish and unprofessional behaviour with the first batch. If only—He looked up, suddenly aware that he wasn’t alone in the room. A goblin was standing on the other side of the desk, looking at him through tiny, traffic-light-red round eyes. Before he’d even had a chance to jump out of his skin, the goblin opened its mouth and screamed at him.

  It was exactly the same scream as he’d heard yesterday, the subtle blend of mynah bird and monkey. This time, however, he realised he could understand it.

  “Hello,” the goblin was saying.

  (He wasn’t translating, or anything like that; he hadn’t suddenly learned goblin language without realising. Rather, it was as if the goblin was being dubbed into English, and the dubbed voice was coming from somewhere inside his head. Weird as square eggs; but somehow he wasn’t as taken aback as he would have been under other circumstances.)

  “Did you like the cake?” the goblin was saying, and that triggered something in his mind; this was the goblin he’d fought in reception, the one whose hand he’d stapled. In other words, Mr Tanner’s mother.

  “Um,” he replied (and he wasn’t screaming, he was talking English; but the goblin seemed to understand). “Yes, it was great. Very nice.”

  The goblin nodded and bared her teeth; she had nine of them, all very long and sharp. “Liar,” she said. “You never even touched it, it’s there in your desk drawer.”

  “Ah,” Paul said.

  “And don’t say you weren’t hungry,” the goblin went on, “because you’ve been stuffing sweets all morning. Doesn’t bother me,” she added, “but if you can’t bear to touch my cake, at least don’t lie about it. Took me hours to make that. I’m not a ruddy servant, I hope you realise.”

  The only reply he could think of at that moment was ‘Sorry’; so he said it. “Quite all right,” the goblin replied, still a trifle stiff but not nearly as bad as before. “Actually, it’s probably just as well. The icing’s purée of rat liver whisked up with spiders’ eggs and a dab of crème fraiche. You wouldn’t have liked that, with your sweet tooth.”

  Paul nodded slowly. “Wasted on me, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Yes,” the goblin said. “Well, give it here, then. Waste not, want not.”

  Paul opened the desk and took out the slice of cake. The goblin snatched it from his hand and swallowed it in one gulp, like a performing seal eating fish in mid-air.

  “In case you’re wondering,” she said with her mouth full, “those weren’t just ordinary choccy raisins.”

  Paul nodded. He’d guessed that already.

  The goblin laughed; at least, she screeched, and Paul heard a laugh inside his head. “You want to go easy on the rest of ‘em, mind. They’re not actually raisins, see.”

  §

  The goblin shook her head. “Actually,” she said, “they’re dragon droppings. Very expensive and rare.”

  Paul felt his insides making a determined effort to become outsides. “Chocolate-covered dragon droppings?” he croaked.

  “Not chocolate-covered,” the goblin corrected him. “Tastes like chocolate, of course, only better. But it’s not just the flavour, see. It’s the—”

  Her last screech was untranslatable; that was, he heard it in clear, and no equivalent word passed through his mind. “Sorry?” he said.

  The goblin paused, as though searching for a synonym. “Magic,” she said. “Special with dragons. You get the same effect drinking their blood, only then it’s permanent. With the droppings, it only lasts an hour or so. Still, you ask yourself which you’d rather do, cut a dragon’s throat or follow around after it with a dustpan and brush.”

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “What exactly do they do, these—?”

  “Oh, of course, you don’t know.” The goblin grinned, just like her son. “They make you Understand. Like, if you eat one you can understand languages you never learned—well, like you’re doing now. Also,” she went on, “and this is the really good bit, though it can be a real pain sometimes; also, when people tell you lies, you hear what they say, but inside your head you hear what they’re really saying, if you follow me. I’ll give you an example, hang on.” The goblin paused for thought, and then—The sound Paul heard was a shrill yell, totally inhuman. The words he heard were, “I’m sorry I attacked you yesterday, and I deserved to get my hand stapled.” But at the back of his mind, in the dark corner where he couldn’t even lie to himself, he heard Like hell I’m sorry, you smooth-skinned tall git. “See what I mean?” she added.

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Oh, I see. That’s—”

  “That’s a very good reason for not gulping ‘em down a handful at a time,” the goblin said, “quite apart from you’ll spoil your dinner and end up fat as a pig. Still,” she went on, “it’s just a little present sort of thing, by way of saying sorry for trying to kill you.” (“Bullshit. Dennis made me give them to you. Dunno what he’s up to, but you want to watch yourself Sly bugger, he is, takes after his dad.)”

  “Thank you,” Paul said.

  “That’s all right.” (Drop dead.) “Anyway,” she went on, “mustn’t keep you from your work. And this time, mind you do it properly. Drawing green squiggles at random isn’t what you’re paid for, remember.”

  Paul winced. “You know about that?”

  The goblin giggled; or at least the candied dragonturd in his bloodstream translated the noise she made as a giggle. “Do me a favour,” she said. “When I was a kid, we had dragon black pudding for breakfast, straight from the pan. Bloody delicious, it was. Anyway, you can’t fool me.”

  “Apparently not,” Paul muttered. “And I suppose you’re going to go straight to Mr—your son, I mean, and tell him?”

  “No.” (What do you think, you snoutless clown?) “But he wouldn’t care anyhow. He can tell the difference between a random squiggle and the real deal. I mean, he’s not thick.”

  “Ah,” Paul said. “Well, thanks, anyway.”

  The goblin shrugged, but didn’t move. “Well, get on with it, then,” she said. “Or are you like all them other humans, can’t perform when there’s someone watching?”

&
nbsp; It was the way she said it, rather than any input from the unseen translator, that made Paul feel slightly sick. “What I mean is,” he said lamely, “I’m sure you’ve got lots of things you want to be doing, so don’t feel you’ve got to keep me company or anything.”

  “Liar. You think I’m horrible, and you want me to piss off.”

  “Well,” Paul admitted, “yes.”

  “Fair enough.” The goblin headed for the door. “If you don’t want to hear the other thing I was going to tell you, that’s fine. No scales off my nose.”

  Paul decided that trying to keep up in a points-scoring match with Mr Tanner’s mum was almost certainly beyond him, and he couldn’t be bothered anyway. “What other thing?” he asked.

  She sniffed. “Oh, you don’t really want to know. Besides, I’m horrible, so why should I tell you?”

  Paul frowned; then he remembered the Great Magic, the one his mother had taught him. “Please,” he said.

  “That’s more like it,” the goblin said. “All right, here you go. Close your eyes, then open them when I tell you. Not before, mind. All right?”

  Paul wasn’t at all sure about that, but he did as he was told. After about ten seconds, the goblin said, “Now,” and he opened his eyes.

  He found that he was looking directly into what he took at first to be an old–fashioned A-Present-From Llanelli glass paperweight, the sort that was round and contained a nondescript scrap of plastic seaweed, or something equally delightful. Then whatever it was started to glow with an offensively bright light. Before he could turn his head, however, he heard the goblin say, “Oh no, you don’t. If you look away, it won’t work.” So he narrowed his eyes and tried to ignore the full-blown headache that was getting nicely under way in his right temple. Just when he reckoned he’d had enough, the light abruptly cut out, and in the centre of the glass ball, surrounded by what looked like a snowy day in Saskatchewan, he could see tiny dots moving about against a green background.

  “Bloody interference,” the goblin said apologetically. “Personally, I blame the satellite TV. Really screws things up when you’re in the middle of a Seeing and suddenly all you get is reruns of On The Buses.”

  “It’s a crystal ball,” Paul said aloud.

  “Yeah, and I’m a Smurf. This is a genuine seer-stone, you ignorant twat. Now look carefully, I can’t keep this up all day.”

  So Paul looked; and the harder he concentrated, the bigger and clearer the scene became. He could see a motorway; beside it, wedged in between the arms of two access roads, a scrubby patch of grass; in the middle of the grass, an old single-decker bus, painted in alternate swathes of pink, canary yellow and red oxide primer; inside the bus, general squalor, of the kind he’d always thought only he could create in a confined space; in the epicentre of the squalor, an ancient, faded blue mattress; on the mattress, two pink people with no clothes on, one of whom he recognised. He closed his eyes.

  “Seen enough?” the goblin asked.

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  NINE

  For some time after the goblin had gone, Paul sat quite still, looking at a photograph of an unspecified area of Australian sand, seen from above. He didn’t feel angry, or sad, or suicidal; if he felt anything, it was as though someone had picked him up like a teapot and poured all the Paul Carpenter out through his ear, leaving him completely empty. When the feeling eventually coagulated into words, he said to himself, Oh well.

  As far as he was concerned, he could’ve sat there all day. Didn’t matter. If he hadn’t been there, he’d have been at home, in his poxy little room, staring at the walls. What difference did it make where you happened to be, anyway? It was as important as the colour of the socks you choose to wear on the day of your execution. Might as well look at a picture of some sand as four slabs of masonry covered in beige woodchip. Where you are, when you are, what you’re doing: none of it matters a damn when there’s nothing left inside you except a huge hole where your life used to be.

  Not that that mattered, either; he’d known from the start that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. Not even Sir Clive Sinclair in all his glory had ever come up with anything less likely to succeed than the slender hope Paul had built his life around, ever since he’d sat down in the waiting area outside the conference room on the day of his interview and seen the thin girl. Hence, presumably, the absence of any real feeling. The blow, the shock, hadn’t exactly hit him out of a clear blue sky. It was like being told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist when you’re fifty-five and head of particle physics research at MIT; sad, depressing, but hardly unexpected.

  Oh well, he thought; and that was more or less all he had to contribute.

  That was how Mr Tanner found him, some unspecified time later.

  “Well?” Mr Tanner said.

  Paul looked up. “Sorry,” he said.

  Mr Tanner frowned at him. “Have you finished that last lot I gave you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Problems?”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I got sidetracked.”

  He’d expected anger, or at the very least another dose of Mr Tanner’s special unpleasantness. Instead, he heard him say, “Mum’s been in here bothering you, hasn’t she?”

  “She did drop by,” Paul replied.

  “Oh. Well, just ignore her, that’s what I do. She can be a real pain in the bum when she wants to.”

  “She didn’t bother me,” Paul replied.

  Mr Tanner grinned, presumably because he could read the lie. Dragon black pudding, or something of the kind. “You wouldn’t think to look at her that she’s probably the best metallurgist in Europe,” he said. “Not to mention the second richest female in the UK. What did she do? Show you something you’d rather not have seen?”

  “Something like that,” Paul replied.

  Mr Tanner sat down on the edge of the desk. “There’s something you should know about our line of work,” he said. “There’s no rabbits out of hats, or kissing princesses into frogs, or enchanted talismans that mean you’re the ruler of the world. Truth is, even the best of us, even the likes of Theo Van Spee or Judy di Castel’Bianco, we’re like a bunch of Trobriand Islanders with a machine gun—don’t know how it works, can’t fix it if it breaks down, can’t build one from scratch, but we can point it where we want to and squeeze the trigger, and when we do that, stuff happens. But the machine gun’s still a machine gun, you can’t paint a wall with it, or cook a chicken, or sew a button on a shirt. You can use it for X, Y and Z, and that’s all. Everything else in life is just shit that happens and if that’s the way it wants to go, there’s nothing you or I or even Humph Wells can do about it.” He stretched forward, picked up a photograph that Paul had already marked up, and looked at it. “What we can do,” he said, “is our job. And a fat lot of good it may do, most of the time, but the same’s true of builders and dentists and people behind tills in petrol stations. We all just carry on, and that’s that.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “And I’ll get this lot done, I promise.”

  Mr Tanner stood up. “You’d better,” he said. “There’re people relying on you, even if they are just a bunch of bauxite miners in Australia you couldn’t be expected to give a flying fuck about.” He grinned, but it wasn’t a Mr Tanner grin. “And you know why?” he said. “Because somewhere in the world, there’s some poor little shit like you who’s got a hatful of problems, can’t for the life of him see why the hell he should bother, but still he gets on and does his job, the thing he’s supposed to be doing; and what he does is just some meaningless garbage to him, but to you, it’s the answer to all your troubles, the light at the end of the tunnel, the miracle you were sure could never happen, but it does, and suddenly everything’s just fine, when you least expected it. Don’t ask me why it’s like that, but it is. So you just get on with finding bauxite in the desert, and leave fixing your problem to whoever it is who’s supposed to do it. That way, we all do our jo
b, and everybody gets paid on Friday.”

  Paul looked at him and came to the conclusion that the effects of the dragon turd must’ve worn off already. “Fine,” he said. “Just leave it to me.” Then he added; “Just out of interest, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” Paul said, frowning slightly. “If you’re right, and we’re all busy helping other people, and they’re all busy helping us—that is what you were saying, isn’t it?”

  “More or less.”

  “Fine,” Paul said. “In that case, what exactly does your mother do?”

  Mr Tanner thought for a moment. “Buggers people about, mostly,” he replied. “When you’ve finished that lot, bring ‘em up to my office and I’ll give you the next batch. OK?”

  §

  It was a very long weekend. Mr Tanner kept him scrying bits of Australia until gone five o’clock, then turned him loose with a growled ‘Thanks’ and a turned back. Paul went straight home, sat in his chair till ten o’clock, and went to bed. Sunday seemed to last for ever.

  On Monday morning, he arrived at the office at nine o’clock exactly, and shuffled into reception, shoes full of lead, back arched, head bowed. The receptionist on duty was even more stunningly beautiful than usual (a complete stranger, of course, but he was used to that by now); but he looked away, and was almost at the fire door when she called out, “Morning, Paul,” in a bright, loud voice. He mumbled some sort of reply.

  “Cheer up,” the receptionist said. “Maybe it’ll never happen.”

  Fuck you, Paul thought. “Charming,” the receptionist replied. “So you still think I’m horrible, then.”

  Paul stopped dead and turned slowly round. The girl behind the desk was slender and golden-haired, with a long, graceful neck, high cheekbones, a full mouth and sparkling blue eyes. “Sorry?” Paul said.

  “Apology accepted,” said the girl. “How was your weekend, then?”

  “Boring,” Paul said; and then: “Excuse me if this sounds rude, but do I know you?”