by Tom Holt
Nobody grabbed him or called for the police, so he guessed he’d got away with it. He felt guilty, stealing from inoffensive strangers, but all he could think to do was to reach in his trouser pocket for some English change. He found a twenty pence piece and put it on the table; it was the thought that counted, he asserted. Like hell, replied his better self.
It was pleasantly warm. A pair of girls clicked by on monster heels—sunglasses, loud and lilting voices, clothes that looked like they’d cost more than he’d earn in a year, if he lived that long. A waiter came out of the café and cleared away the dead cups and plates. The twenty pence piece puzzled him; in the end, he balanced it on his thumbnail, flicked it two feet up in the air, caught it backhanded and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. He smiled at Paul as he went past; it was just a reflex, but it wasn’t a goblin grin. A cup of coffee, Paul thought, and one of those shiny chocolate things that look like a scale model of the Kremlin; I could really fancy that.
The slight breeze gusted sharply and something blew against his cheek. At first he thought it was a leaf, but there weren’t any trees in sight. He retrieved it, and saw that it was a banknote.
What the hell, he thought.
The banknote was blue, and the row of noughts behind the figure five looked like the stream of bubbles left behind by a diving otter; but Italian money was funny stuff, he remembered. Buy £4.50’s worth of peanuts and give the man a flyer, and the change would be enough to make you a lira millionaire. Still; he felt braver than usual, for some reason, and sat down at the nearest table. When the waiter came up, he held out the banknote and said, “Excuse me.”
The slight quiver of the waiter’s upper lip made it obvious that he’d placed Paul as an Englishman; but he was polite and dignified, as all native Venetians are, and didn’t spit.
“Excuse me,” Paul repeated slowly, “but can I buy a cup of coffee with this?”
This time the waiter did grin; no family resemblance, though. “Si.”
“Right. Um, uno café, por favor.”
“One coffee,” said the waiter. “Anything else?”
One of the advantages of making a fool of yourself is that you don’t have to worry about looking foolish. “Can I afford anything else?”
The waiter’s grin spread into a smile. “Si.”
“I’ll have that, then, please.”
“Coming right up.” The waiter went away, and came back with a coffee and one of the Kremlin buns. Paul tried to give him the banknote, but he looked shocked and handed Paul a little slip of paper, which he took to be the bill. He apologised. The waiter forgave him, and went away.
The coffee was wonderful, and the cake was better, even if it did split its seams and gush confectioner’s custard up his jacket sleeves. He took his time, paying
proper attention to the taste of the coffee and the texture of the pastry. It was only when he’d finished both, and surreptitiously licked the last splodge of errant custard off the underside of his wrist, that it occurred to him to look at the church clock he’d noticed earlier.
Fuck, he thought. Five past two.
He jumped up, wedged the banknote and the bill under the sugar-cellar, and dashed back down the street. He’d forgotten all about the door, but there it was, patient and steadfast as the HMV dog. He nudged the stapler aside with his foot, pushed the door open and went through.
To his relief, he found himself standing in his office. There, on Sophie’s chair, was the little piece of paper with the instructions. Sophie wasn’t back from lunch yet—A thought struck him, and he looked at his watch. 01:10:02. He’d been away for six seconds. Not even that, come to think of it; he’d stood in the doorway that long. He hadn’t been away at all.
He turned round, just as the door, or rather the little plastic sheet, peeled off the wall and flopped onto the floor. Shit, he said to himself, so I did just imagine it all, after all. But he’d thought of that, he remembered, and done a proper scientific test. He felt in his pocket, and there was the book of matches, with the name, phone number and website.
Shit, he thought again.
First things first. He rolled up the plastic sheet and stuffed it, together with the instruction slip, back in its tube. Then he hesitated. Properly speaking, it should go back in the drawer where he’d found it or, better still, in the strongroom. Yeah, right, he thought, and tucked the cardboard tube carefully away in his inside pocket.
He looked round for the stapler, but it had vanished again. For a moment he wondered if he’d left it on the other side of the door; but he could distinctly remember stepping over it, on this side, as he came through. Not that it mattered a damn.
Well, Paul thought, so that’s a portable door. Not bad. Just the thing for beating the rush-hour traffic, assuming it could be aimed with anything approaching precision, and perfect for those spur-of-the-moment impulse holidays, particularly if it was really true and the time he’d spent on the other side hadn’t actually happened back here. Nobody had raised the subject of holiday entitlement since he’d been with the firm (presumably, he suspected, for the same reason that maximum-security prisoners on Dartmoor don’t get asked where they fancy going for their annual outing this year); but if the door worked the way it seemed to do, he could have three weeks in Martinique every day in his lunch hour. Of course, spending money and hotel bills might be a problem; or maybe not, if the door could also let him into, say, Fort Knox or the vaults of the bank of his choice. At that point, though, his train of thought jumped the track. It wasn’t just that doing that sort of thing wasn’t right, and if his mother got to hear of it he’d have hell to pay. There was also the unpleasant feeling that that was precisely the sort of thing the door wanted him to do, and maybe it wasn’t quite as user-friendly as he might have supposed. Sneaking off work, he reckoned, was probably all right. Thieving, on the other hand, could well be something quite other; the dark side of the Force, or something to that effect. He could be quite wrong about that, of course, but on balance it’d be better not to risk it, at least not until he’d had the opportunity to run a few more controlled tests, acquire a little bit more data.
Suddenly he realised that he was feeling extremely tired, as if he hadn’t slept for several days. That also put a rather different complexion on the matter, since he felt it was a pretty safe bet that the door was somehow responsible for that, too. Clearly he was guessing, but it seemed likely that if he felt worn out after ten minutes or so on the other side, more than an hour over there would leave him exhausted, and three weeks—for all he knew, it could kill him. Further tests, he resolved, more data. Characters in TV sci-fi series might press unidentified buttons just to see what they do and live to tell the tale, but he didn’t have the comfort of knowing that his name was in the cast-list in next week’s TV Times.
Even so. He had to admit it; most of the ambient weirdness he’d run into since joining J.W. Wells & Co. had ranged from unpleasant to downright nasty, but this was different. In fact, if it was any cooler you could stick it in a cone and sell it as ice cream.
He leaned back in his chair, which had never felt so comfortable. He felt ever so slightly pleased with himself: more so than if he’d found a pound coin in the street, rather less than if he’d just discovered a new sea-route to the East. At the back of his mind there was a nagging fear that he’d just taken a left turn in the maze and got a crumb of cheese instead of an electric shock, but it didn’t bother him all that much. Cheese, after all, is cheese. He was just wondering whether, after all, he ought to wander down to reception when the lunch hour was over and ask the Mrs-Tanner goblin if she could throw any more light on the matter, when he caught sight of his watch. Three minutes past two; and the door opened and in came Sophie.
He snapped upright in his chair, almost guiltily; because he wasn’t going to tell her about it, not now, not after what she’d done to him…That was, of course, just plain silly, but nevertheless. And there went a large slice of the pleasure of the discovery, of course
, but he couldn’t help that. He wasn’t the one who’d chosen to go frolicking with performance potters in buses. He grabbed a bunch of spreadsheets and scowled at them, as if it was all their fault.
“Hello,” she said. He grunted back.
She was looking at him. “I thought you were going to get on with some work,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, you don’t look like you’ve got much done.”
“No,” he replied.
Another moment; and suddenly he felt awful, as if he’d just trodden on a baby fieldmouse. But it was too late to do anything about it. She sat down opposite him and reached for her pile of printouts. The moment froze over, like the Arctic sea in winter, cutting them off from each other, and for the next few hours they grimly did spreadsheets at each other.
Which was ridiculous. They hadn’t talked to each other properly since that horrible night, when they’d got locked in and Paul had found himself charging through the building with a spear in his hand, desperately trying to save her from a pack of goblins holding knives under her throat. Since then, they’d found out that magic was real and they were magicians, that they were trapped in the weirdness up to their necks for ever (but with the implied promise that if they stuck at it, worked hard and kept their noses clean, they might in time rise up the corporate ladder and themselves become secret masters of the universe). And now Paul had stumbled across a piece of really big medicine of his very own, something that might just mean they could escape, or at the very least adjust the balance of weirdness in their own favour; and here they were, a million miles apart across a desk, sorting through bits of ludicrous paper, all because Sophie had met a bloke she liked. It was as though America had refused to help Britain in World War Two because it was jealous of Britain having the benefit of the Gulf Stream.
Obvious. But did that mean he was going to stop acting like a five-year-old and talk to her? Did it hell as like.
At twenty-nine minutes past five, they both got up, put on their coats and left the office in complete silence, not looking at each other. As they walked through reception, call-me-Rosie gave Paul a dazzling smile. It startled the life out of him, and he stopped dead for a moment; Sophie pushed past him and hurried out of the door.
“Snotty cow,” said call-me-Rosie blithely. “Dunno why you’re wasting your time on her.”
Paul gave her a horrified look and retreated in bad order.
§
The next few weeks were confusing, to say the least. Needless to say, Paul couldn’t resist playing with the portable door; partly because it was fun, but also because, while he was using it, he forgot about Sophie and the performance potter. Once he became aware of it, this effect puzzled him greatly, if only because it was so marked. He’d be brooding darkly as he stepped over the threshold, and the moment he came back through he’d catch up the train of thought at exactly the point where he’d left it, but while he was out there, in the streets of Rio or Florence, or treading the flower-carpeted slopes of Nepal or the ramparts of the Great Wall of China, she was completely out of his mind, like a distant cousin’s forgotten birthday.
It was a while before he realised that he could use his bank card to draw foreign money out of holes in walls from Anchorage to Adelaide; when eventually he cot-toned on, he was nevertheless cautious at first, since on his J.W. Wells salary he had to think twice about splashing out on a coffee and a bacon roll in London, let alone sushi in Yokohama or green tea and honey cakes in Samarkand. But then his bank statement arrived, and he saw to his great bewilderment and joy that none of the withdrawals he’d made on his various jaunts were recorded there. Even then he was inclined to believe that this was simply because it took foreign-currency transactions longer to reach the computer, and that sooner or later they’d come home to roost like a squadron of B-52 chickens. But his next bank statement told him the same thing. Apparently he could buy what the hell he liked, and not have to pay for it, ever.
Unfortunately, there was more to it than that, as he discovered on his return home after a frenzied tour of the jewellers’ quarter in Paris. He’d bought a whole load of stuff—gold watches, coins, rings, anything and everything made of the yellow stuff that he’d been able to cram into his pockets. He could feel it all clinking and digging into him through the cloth of his coat; but as soon as he crossed the line the extra weight and the sharp edges vanished, and when he shoved his hands into his pockets, he found nothing more valuable than his keys, a dead biro, a packet of Kleenex and the inevitable unwrapped, fluff-coated boiled sweet. The full weirdness of that took a little while to sink in; because he’d bought the Kleenex in Paris, at the same time as all the gold, but apparently the invisible, intangible Customs officers assigned to his case had either overlooked it or let him keep it as a consolation prize. Next day, just for fun, he went to Manchester and drew out fifty pounds. When he got back to St Mary Axe, it had gone. When he repeated the experiment the next day and drew out £10, it was still there when he stepped back through the door, but a quick balance check on the way home showed the withdrawal. While he was trying to figure this one out over the next few days, he became aware of another consistent effect: no matter how much he ate while he was away, it seemed to have no impact on his appetite when he got back; also, in spite of all the choux pastries and gateaux he was scoffing in the pavement cafés of the world, he hadn’t put on any weight. At this point, he resolved to give up trying to rationalise, and concentrate on enjoying his daily holiday.
One encouraging trend was that, once Paul started using the door on a daily basis, the period of exhaustion that followed once he came back was gradually decreasing, to the point where he was able to risk staying for two hours (observed time) without having to struggle to stay awake for the rest of the day. An hour hadn’t really given him time for much more than a search for a bank machine followed by a hasty lunch; with double the time at his disposal, he could enjoy a leisurely meal and still be able to fit in a little gentle sightseeing. The only thing lacking from his excursions was, of course, company.
Wherever he went, he was a stranger; this, in fact, seemed to be one of the rules, since he’d gone back to the same coffee shop in Houston three days in a row and found the same man behind the counter on each occasion, but there’d been no indication whatsoever that he’d been recognised. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily significant—Paul had no illusions whatsoever about his memorability; but he found it odd that a wool-suited Englishman could turn up three days running in a Texan diner without exciting some comment.
Once the initial excitement of the discovery had worn off, and he’d started to get blasé about the foreign travel aspect, he came to think of his trips through the door as just a rather more pleasant way to spend his lunch hour than sitting in the office munching stale cheese sandwiches (though, since the food through the door didn’t have any nutritional value, he had to do that as well). It was still the high spot of his day, and a couple of hours’ break from the embarrassed misery of sharing an office with Sophie was particularly welcome, but the fact remained that the door was little more than an entertaining toy. He could sip lattes in Manhattan or swill wheat beer in Munich (like money, alcohol didn’t seem able to travel back through the door), but afterwards he had to come home and spend the afternoon sorting spreadsheets in grim silence until it was time to catch the bus back to Kentish Town. He tried not to acknowledge it, but if someone had offered to swap him the door for just one of those lunchtimes he’d shared with Sophie in the miserable little Italian sandwich bar round the corner (a hundred years ago, or so it seemed now) he’d have jumped at the chance.
One Wednesday Paul was sitting outside a café in Ankara, nursing a cup of Turkish coffee. He’d only tried it because he couldn’t believe it could be as bad as everybody reckoned, and was reflecting that it wasn’t only cats who were liable to come to a bad end because of curiosity when a female voice behind and above his head asked if anyone was sitting in the other chair.
He was too preoccupied to lie, and it was only after the voice’s proprietor had sat down opposite him, casting a shadow over his face, that it occurred to him that she’d made her request in English, or at least Australian. He looked up, mildly intrigued.
She was tall and slim, about twenty, probably half Chinese and half European, with long black hair under a round, broad-brimmed straw hat. She was also bewilderingly pretty, in a traffic-stopping, accident-causing, shampoo-advertisement sort of way, and she was smiling at him.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re English, aren’t you?”
Her eyes were as bright as the headlights of an oncoming truck, with Paul as the hedgehog. “Yes,” he said.
“Thought so.” She lifted a coffee cup to her lips and blew on the foam. “Is that Turkish coffee you’re drinking?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“Mud,” Paul replied.
“You don’t like it much, then.”
“No.”
“Ah well.” She pursed her lips at him. “I was going to give it a go—like, if you’re in Turkey, people expect you to try the coffee. But if it’s that bad—”
“It is. Worse.”
“That bad.” She nodded gravely. “Thank you,” she said. “In that case, I’ll stick to the regular stuff.” She poked the tip of her tongue into the froth. Paul began to sweat. “Have you tried the tea as well?”
“Turkish tea, you mean?”
She nodded.
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “In that case I can return the favour. Don’t.”