The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  She laughed; then she held out her hand, palm facing him. He wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but he went back to the desk. He was obviously supposed to look at her hand, but he couldn’t—Then he saw them; four tiny red dots in the centre of the palm. They were about a centimetre apart, and if he’d had a felt-tip pen handy and joined them up, they’d have formed a square. Paul stared at them for a moment, then at the girl.

  “Mrs Tanner?” he said.

  She giggled. “Don’t tell anybody, but Dennis’s dad and I never actually got married. You couldn’t pronounce my name, but if you like, you can call me Rosie.”

  “Rosie,” Paul repeated. “Look, are you—?”

  She grinned, and there was the family resemblance once again. “You think I’m horrible, and you wouldn’t eat my cake. You looked in my seer-stone. You saw that thin cow having it off with—”

  “Yes,” Paul said quickly, “all right.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I like helping out in the office,” she went on, “it’s something to do, even if it does mean I’ve got to wear the monkey suit. Really, I don’t know how you lot can stand it. Bloody tight skin, and these things—” She patted her bust. “Barbaric, I call it. And don’t get me started about going to the toilet. Still, I suppose it’s all a matter of what you’re used to.”

  “I like it,” Paul said awkwardly. “Suits you, I mean.”

  She laughed. “Dennis doesn’t think so,” she said. “You should hear him. Bloody hell, Mum, you aren’t going to the office wearing that, are you? He should talk. I mean, he’s nothing to write home about himself, whichever way you look at it.”

  “I—” Quickly, Paul reviewed all the possible responses that came to mind, and realised that none of them was satisfactory. Not that it mattered, since the girl—the goblin—had already demonstrated that she could read his mind. “Um, is that what you usually wear, or do you—?”

  “I’m like Joan Collins,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied.

  “Wouldn’t be seen dead wearing the same outfit twice. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  Paul’s eyes opened wide. “You mean, every day it’s actually you?”

  She shook her head. “Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays it’s my sister, we take it in turns. You can call her Auntie Pam if you want.”

  Paul tried to remember a Tuesday, and an image slipped into his mind of a sultry Malaysian beauty with a waterfall of shining black hair. “Auntie Pam,” he repeated. “Fine. Why are you telling me this? Today, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said. “Like, if you’d spent all weekend scoffing those dragonshit beans, you’d have seen me like I really am. But obviously not. Also,” she said, “I like you. You’re weedy and pathetic and you’ve got some bloody weird notions about women, but you remind me of my brother. Uncle Alf,” she added, “rest his soul. Lose the ape costume, and you’d be the spitting image of Alf when he was your age.”

  “I see,” Paul said. “What happened to him, then?”

  She clicked her tongue. “Oh, killed,” she said. “Most of us get killed sooner or later. We like to play rough games when we’ve got the place to ourselves.”

  “Oh,” Paul said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Balls. You think we’re disgusting and horrible. But that’s all right, we think the same about your lot. Except you. You’re sweet.”

  Fine, Paul thought, and managed not to shudder, even though his restraint was pointless. “Thanks,” he said. “I suppose I’d better go and do some work now.”

  “No rush,” she replied. “Come on, you can’t kid me.”

  Last thing you want to do is go and sit in that office the rest of the day, with her. Talk about embarrassing.

  “You’re right,” Paul said. “But I’ve got to, haven’t I?”

  “I suppose.” She grinned again. “Bright and early, she was, waiting on the doorstep. I don’t like her much; goes around looking like a starving kitten, but she knows which side her bread’s buttered, you mark my words. Oh, and here’s a tip for you. Whatever you do, don’t look at her neck. On the right hand side, about two inches down from the ear.” She frowned. “And you lot think we’re like animals,” she said. “Try that lark where I come from, you’d get your throat ripped out.”

  This time, Paul did shudder. “I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he said.

  “Yes, well, Dennis always says, if I’d only joined the diplomatic corps when I was a girl, we could have had all sorts of really interesting wars. But our lot didn’t hold with careers for women back then; still don’t, actually. Fuck ‘em, I say.”

  “Right,” Paul replied. “But I’d better be going. It was, um, nice talking to you.”

  “Liar.” She laughed, and pushed a wave of golden hair back over her slim shoulder. Paul made a resolution not to eat any of the remaining beans on a Monday, a Wednesday or a Friday. “You carry on, then,” she said. “Only, if you get bored sick, or the atmosphere in your office gets more than you can stand, here’s a tip for you. It wasn’t just beans you found in that drawer, remember?”

  Paul frowned. “Sorry?”

  “Go and take a look if you’ve forgotten,” she said. “The instructions are pretty clear, but if you need any help, just ask. Only, I wouldn’t go mentioning it to our Dennis, if I were you. Or any of the other partners, come to that. They can get a bit snotty sometimes, when it’s stuff like that.”

  Paul remembered one of the things that had been in the drawer, besides the beans. “You mean the stapler?”

  She shook her head, and pointed; the stapler was on the desk next to her. “Have a nice day,” she said.

  He walked away down the corridor and up the stairs, thinking, Auntie Pam and Uncle Alf and Mr Tanner’s mum Rosie; Jesus fucking Christ. Then he reached the door of his office. Their office. Damn.

  Sophie looked up as he walked in, then immediately turned her head. Just as well he could only see her left profile. He sat down on his side of the desk and looked down at his hands.

  “Julie came in a moment or so ago,” she said, in a quiet, awkward voice. “She left some more of these for us to do.”

  The spreadsheets. Paul had never imagined the day would come when he’d be glad to see a tall stack of the horrible things, but at that moment they were as welcome as shelter in a blizzard. He grabbed his share and set to work on them as though his life depended on it.

  “Good weekend?” Sophie said.

  “All right,” Paul grunted back. “How about you?”

  He hadn’t meant to say that, it had just slipped out, like a cat curving itself round the edge of a slightly open door. “Great,” she mumbled. “Actually, we—”

  “Good,” Paul snapped. “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d better get on with this lot. Sooner it’s done, the sooner they’ll give us something else.”

  “Okay, fine,” she whispered. “I just—”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She had her left hand clamped over the right side of her neck, as though she’d just been stung by a bug. “Tell you later.”

  “All right.”

  Work; beautiful, mindless work, just complicated enough to keep one’s thoughts from wandering, but purely abstract, nothing to do with anything. There were moments, in the long drag down to lunchtime, when he forgot about the human presence a few feet away from him across the desktop—amazing, but apparently possible, like the fools who build villages on the slopes of volcanoes. One o’clock came, and at least she had the compassion to go out for lunch.

  “You coming?” she asked. Damn; it was almost as if she wanted him to.

  “No,” he replied. “I’ve got sandwiches. Besides, I can do some more of this garbage.”

  “Fine,” she said. “See you later, then.”

  He didn’t reply, and the door closed behind her; at which point, it was safe for Paul to look up and push his chair back. Work was all right in
its place, but he’d had enough of spreadsheets to last him this life and several dozen reincarnations.

  It wasn’t just beans you found in that drawer, remember? Sure, he remembered now. A funny little cardboard tube, and that plastic sheet thing. He took it out, put it on the desk and turned it over a few times with the tips of his fingers.

  By rights, it ought to be back in the strongroom—assuming, of course, that it was the same one as he’d found there while he was compiling the inventory. He frowned. There was something almost familiar about the stupid thing, as if there had been a time when he

  knew what it was. Instructions, he remembered. The goblin female, just call me Rosie, had said something about instructions. He couldn’t remember having seen anything like that. But, when he teased the rolled-up sheet out of the tube, a little wisp of very thin paper fluttered out and landed on the desk. There was writing on it, tiny little letters he couldn’t read—Yes, he could. He had to hold the paper right up close to the tip of his nose; but the more he squinted at it, the easier it got.

  J.W. WELLS PORTABLE DOOR

  Patent N°5567415th Aug 1872, 9423923rd Feb 1875

  BY APPOINTMENT

  Well, that didn’t help much. He looked again, and the letters seemed to grow larger.

  To use the portable door, first remove it from the cardboard tube. To ensure flawless operation, first spread the door out on a flat surface, taking care to smooth out any wrinkles, as these may inhibit adherence or corrupt the intelligence. Make a careful mental note of all aspects of desired arrival. Lift the door by the top corners, making sure that the door remains flat and level at all times. Press the door firmly against the wall until it adheres without support. Release corners, smooth out wrinkles as previously advised. Grasp the handle firmly in the right hand and rotate one half-turn to the left. Apply gentle, even pressure to open the door. You are most earnestly advised to use some convenient object of suitable weight to hold the door ajar during use. If possible, limit exposures to no more than one hour (observed time) per visit. Reverse the above procedure for disassembly and removal. Store only in the container provided, away from extremes of heat & cold, and out of the reach of children, invalids and persons of a nervous or prosaic disposition.

  Crazy as a tankful of gay piranhas. He turned the slip of paper over, but there was nothing to see except the shadow of the letters coming through from the other side. Whoever heard of a portable door? And what the hell would be the point—?

  He remembered something: a room without a door, a place where he lived, though not his own time. Of course, that had been just a dream, and he was wide awake now. A portable door, for Christ’s sake.

  On the other hand, just-call-me-Rosie had made it sound like the best thing since hallucinogenic chocolate. True, he had absolutely no reason whatsoever to trust the recommendations of a malicious female goblin who was also Mr Tanner’s old mum. Still; just supposing it worked, that it really was a folding or collapsible door, what possible harm could it do? Either it was a dud, in which case nothing would happen; or it wasn’t, in which case, if he slapped it on the back wall of his office, he’d be able to take a short cut through to the computer bay without having to go down the corridor and up and down two flights of steps. Megadeal.

  Paul thought it over as he stared at the thing, still tightly curled like a fine Cuban cigar. On reflection, he could think of various uses for something of the sort, ranging from the innocuous (Left your keys in your other jacket and locked yourself out? Don’t worry; the J.W. Wells portable door…) to the downright larcenous, or worse. Just the sort of thing a bank robber would love to find in his Christmas stocking mask; or the ideal present for the twelfth-level Ninja master assassin who has everything.

  (Yes, but it wouldn’t work, went without saying. It had to be some sort of gimmick, like the genuine authentic phaser pistols and lightsabers you saw advertised in the back pages of magazines for sad people. Maybe it was just that: a piece of tie-in marketing for a TV show that bombed or got cancelled before it was ever released. In which case, it’d do no harm just to offer it up against a handy slab of plasterwork, would it?)

  Paul was aware of a very strange, though barely perceptible sensation; the nearest parallel he could think of was a desperate nicotine craving, as experienced by someone who’d never smoked. Once again, he had the weirdest notion that he was familiar with this ludicrous object; furthermore, the urge to use it was linked to that memory like a withdrawal symptom, a suppressed addiction yearning for satisfaction in the presence of the forbidden luxury. That was all very well, but whatever it was, it was starting to make him feel distinctly uncomfortable. He felt jumpy, restless, hungry and stuffed at the same time. His hands were actually shaking just a little, and the inside of his mouth was salty and furry. All these unpleasant sensations would, he knew, vanish at once, just as soon as he unrolled the little plastic sheet and pressed it to a wall. At the back of his mind, red-alert sirens sounded as he recognised the intrusion of another slice of supernatural loopiness into his life, but he had to ignore them. He stood up.

  He put the instructions down on the seat of Sophie’s chair, and followed them carefully. First he smoothed the thing out on the desktop. It looked just the same as it had a short while ago, except that now there were two tiny keyholes, each with a neatly traced baroque escutcheon surrounding it, above and below the doorknob. Next, he lifted it by the corners in the prescribed fashion, and pressed it against the wall as if hanging a sheet of thin wallpaper. He felt it stick, as if it had magnets on it. Carefully, he pressed out a few small wrinkles and bulges, brushing with the back of his hand in a herringbone pattern. Then he took a step back and looked at it.

  Either he was imagining it, or the thing had grown; it was now as tall and wide as a full-size door, and the handle had somehow acquired an extra dimension; in fact, it was brass, polished and shiny. He reached out and touched it with the tip of his forefinger; it felt cold and smooth.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. Then he checked the instructions, to see what the next step was.

  You are most earnestly advised to use some convenient object of suitable weight to hold the door ajar during use.

  Ajar. When is a door not a door? Somehow, the old joke struck him as being even less funny than usual. He looked round; and there on the desk, hunched like a thin black rabbit, was the long stapler. He was way past the point where he was surprised to see it there, even though it had been in reception that morning, and he hadn’t noticed anybody bring it into the room. He frowned at it. Definitely an object of suitable weight, and there didn’t seem to be anything else in the room that’d serve as a makeshift doorstop. He picked it up. Then, feeling extremely foolish, he reached out and twisted the doorknob.

  The door opened.

  As soon as it was open, it had changed. It had weight. Its frame and lintel and the mouldings between its panels stood out in generous relief. No possible doubt about it: Nature might stand up and say to all the world, This is a door.

  Oh well, he thought, and peeked through it. But there was nothing to see, only darkness and shadows; if that was the computer bay out there, somebody had switched off all the lights and drawn the curtains. Creepy; but he was painfully aware that he couldn’t stop now, or the withdrawal symptoms would be back, a hundred times worse. Whether he liked it or not, he was going through. But first…He glanced at his watch (01:09:56), opened the door a little bit wider, then stooped down and snuggled the stapler up against it, tight as a cat rubbing against your leg. Then—Make a careful mental note of all aspects of desired arrival.

  Or, as Bill Gates would put it, Where do you want to go today? But that was just plain silly. Either it went nowhere, or it went through into the computer bay. Yes, but if he had a choice, where would it go? If he had the whole world to choose from?

  It was like when someone said, “What shall we talk about?” or, “Just say something into the microphone.” He couldn’t think of anywhere he wanted to go, really.
(All places are the same, after all; doesn’t matter where you are, if your life is a Polo mint and the only girl you’ve ever really loved is the hole in the middle.) But, all things being equal, he’d always rather fancied seeing Venice.

  Paul walked through the door, caught his foot in a coil of rope, and only just managed to avoid falling in a canal.

  The first thing he did was look round. There, in the middle of a crumbling red-brick wall, was the door, slightly ajar, with a stapler wedged in it. Next to it was what looked like a theatre poster, but in Italian. He turned slowly back. There was the canal; there was the coil of rope. Below, bobbing up and down on the green water, was a small motor boat. Three Japanese women walked past him, talking very fast, followed by a businessman in an expensive-looking suit. Away to his right, he could see a yellow fingerboard nailed to the façade of a tall, ancient building. Piazza S Marco, it said, and an arrow pointed into the distance.

  On the other hand, he was feeling a whole lot better; no shaking hands, no salty taste, no squirmy itch. Something prompted him to check his watch. 01:09:56.

  Oink, he thought, my watch has stopped. He looked round, and caught sight of a clock high up on the tower of some church or similar building. Ten past one.

  (But that wasn’t right, because there was a time difference; Italy was an hour behind, or two hours ahead, or something. He looked at his watch again. 01:09: 55.) Then he ground his toe against the pavement. It felt solid enough. Also he could feel a slight breeze on his face, and there was also the smell. Salt, fresh algae and vintage fish. Not imaginary.

  Not far down the road in the other direction there was a café. He thought for a moment, then, having glanced back to make sure the door and the stapler were where he’d left them, he wandered down the street towards it. There were chairs and tables outside; two men sitting at one of them, both talking loudly into mobile phones. Of course, he didn’t have any Italian money, so he couldn’t buy a coffee or a slice of cake. (They had about nine hundred different varieties of cake in the window. Yum.) Then one of the phoning men stuck a cigarette in his face, reached down to the table, picked up a book of matches, lit one. Paul checked the table nearest to him; sure enough, there was an identical book of matches, in a black shiny cover, with the name of the café in gold letters, its phone number and (God help us) its website address. Paul looked round to see if anybody was watching, then slipped the match-book into his pocket.