The House of Doors - 01

by Brian Lumley

  It was like pulling the plug in a bath full of water, or as if the door were an airlock, with empty space behind it. It fell—was sucked flat—inwards, and like ants under the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, Clayborne, Gill, Angela, and the others were sucked up. All except for Haggie, who had somehow contrived to place himself at the rear and well out of range.

  Whirled head over heels and tossed down in something warm and soft, Gill slid to a halt facing the other side of door number seven. The door was a dark oblong set in a white surround, beyond which Haggie was silhouetted against the fire. Gill saw the look on his face where he strained backwards from the door’s suction—elation, criminal glee that he’d made such great fools of the six—and thought: You bastard!

  Haggie was still clutching the carcass of the deerlike quadruped; but then the door sucked harder still and the look on his face turned to one of desperation as he backed off farther yet. But the creature he’d intended to eat was snatched from his arms, drawn through. It went tumbling overhead, and Haggie was left with nothing for his troubles.

  He gestured obscenely and his lips formed a pair of parting words. Gill couldn’t make them out over the howling of the wind, but he knew what they were anyway: “Fuck you!” And he guessed that this new place wouldn’t be as Haggie had described it. He got to his knees, gritted his teeth, pointed at Haggie and shouted some choice invectives of his own … then stopped and in the next moment laughed. He looked beyond Haggie and laughed.

  The little man’s jaw fell open. He whirled about-face … .

  And the last thing Gill saw before the door slammed gongingly shut and disappeared was the hunting machine, coated in slime, closing its pincer claws on Haggie’s upper and lower body.

  The last thing he heard was the redhead’s terrified screaming, echoing off into silence … .

  “Desert!” Turnbull called down from the top of the dune. “White, glaring desert in all directions. And thataway”—he pointed at something the others couldn’t yet see—“is a mountain range. Don’t ask me how far, could be five miles or fifteen—or just a mirage. Everything shimmers. But … is there something glinting up there? A mirror? A piece of glass or crystal? Windows?” He shrugged. “If we’re going anywhere, I’d guess that’s our destination. Anywhere else is nowhere.”

  “Is that it?” Gill called back. “No trees anywhere? Buildings? Ruins?” He sat at the foot of the dune, roughly where the door had been, and gazed at the drifts of sand all about. His jacket felt rough against his shoulders and back, for now Angela was wearing his shirt. It gave her back something of modesty and protected her from the sun. For it was broad daylight here, and hot; something less than twenty minutes had gone by since their arrival; sufficient time that they’d all made their adjustments and recovered their senses.

  “That’s it,” Turnbull answered. “A few kites in the sky far off—birds of some sort, anyway. Nothing else. Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, this isn’t Earth. As well as that sun up there”—directly overhead was a small, blinding white orb—“there’s another one low on the horizon. And a big moon; its craters are clearly visible.”

  Gill looked at the others. Anderson was already toiling up the side of the dune, with the muttering Clayborne a little to his rear. Give the ex-Minister his due, at least he was making the best of it. He paused for a moment for a breather and wiped his brow. His foppish handkerchief was little more than a silken rag now. “Come on, let’s go!” he called down to Gill, Angela and Varre. Apparently he’d got his second wind! People seemed to make very quick recoveries … here.

  Varre was examining the carcass of the quadruped. He licked his lips. “Haggie said we could eat this?”

  Angela went to the thing and looked at it, said, “Oh!” and drew back. She looked shocked or disgusted—or both—Gill couldn’t say. He, too, went to look at the dead creature. It was like a fawn from tail to shoulders, but from the shoulders up its “neck” was more a tapering torso, with short, childlike arms and six-fingered hands. The face was also childlike, which is to say very nearly human. And it was female.

  “Haggie would have eaten this?” Angela was appalled.

  Varre looked at her curiously. “But it is an animal, a beast. It is meat.”

  “Like a small centaur.” Gill shook his head in wonder, gently closed the large, sad, lifeless eyes. And to Varre: “Meat? Of course it is. So is Angela. So are you.” He shook his head again. “I couldn’t touch this. It would be like eating a legend, a kind of cannibalism.”

  “You think so?” Varre lifted his eyebrows. “Come now, hardly that!” He licked his lips again, insisting, “And it is meat.”

  “If you want it,” Gill told him bluntly, “you carry it.” He turned away and with Angela started up the side of the dune. A moment more and Varre came scrambling after them.

  “Actually,” he said, “or even amazingly—I’m not especially hungry!”

  “A sign!” Clayborne whispered as they reached the top. The American was pointing at the low range of grey mountains shimmering on the horizon. Under the crags, something burned silver in the shadows with an intensity that hurt their eyes. “Do you see it? Do you know what it is?”

  Turnbull whispered in Gill’s ear, “This bloke’s condition is becoming serious!”

  “A burning bush!” Clayborne cried, his eyes blazing in their dark orbits. “I told you I would lead you up out of hell, and I will! We were like children in a wilderness—like the Children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness—but soon we shall find a land of milk and honey … .”

  Varre scowled at him. “They wandered for forty years, didn’t they? The Children of Israel?”

  And Turnbull added, “Yes, and a hell of a lot longer since then! Better calm yourself down, Miles. Christ, you’ll be demanding a burnt offering next!”

  Clayborne glowered at him, and at Varre. A vein pulsed in his neck and he began shaking with rage. But then his eyes went wide and his jaw fell open. He gasped. “Out of the mouths of babes! But don’t you see? We were given a fatted calf to make our offering—and we abandoned it!” Before the others could say or do anything to stop him, he’d gone scrambling back down the side of the dune.

  They watched him go and Anderson said, “Let him get on with it. He’s mad as a hatter, anyway—and treacherous.” He glanced sideways at Varre. “He was treacherous when he was in his. right mind, so God only knows what he’ll be like now.”

  He turned away and started off along the crest of the dune. In front of him the desert stretched in wave after white wave, and to his rear the others followed in his tracks. There was nothing much else for them to do … .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sith of the Thone had not been following the progress of the seven; he had other things to do, and anyway the synthesizer was monitoring them, recording all that transpired. Sith would enjoy their various predicaments later, during editing. But for the present, while he was kept busy with his programming and with thoughts of his glorious future as Grand Thone, they simply adventured in those alien worlds which could support them, however marginally.

  So far they had had the (random) choice of those worlds; Sith had not yet interfered with them, not substantially. He had little doubt that some of them would “die” during the course of their adventures between the synthesizer’s foci; indeed some of them might already be “dead”—but that made no real difference. The manner of such “deaths” would have been recorded, for editing later, and all would be seen to have expired ignobly, without honour. They were an ignoble species.

  Because he had not kept tabs, Sith was unaware that Haggie had been taken out of the game until the correction construct brought his unconscious body back to the control room. The correction construct had access to all stored worlds and had been “hunting” for Haggie ever since his accidental incarceration here. Hunting was not its normal function: that was the removal of extraneous refuse from (and the general tidying up of) stored worlds after contamination by any parti
cular group of beings under test. In this way the synthesizer’s memory was kept clean and uncluttered by events that had taken place since the original recording and storage. Thus the correction construct was a sort of erasing cursor moving across and within the entire scale of the synthesizer’s multiscreen. Its hypodermic stinger was a refinement Sith had built into the construct to facilitate its handling of Haggie.

  When the construct arrived via one of the control room’s many projection ducts, Sith was on the point of entering the Bannerman construct in order to reinsert himself into the game. He couldn’t leave it too long, for he desired to be present—indeed to be responsible—when both Gill and Turnbull met up with and were consumed by the Unthinkable; desired to let them know he was responsible, and so square the account. It was not Thone-like to behave in this manner, and Sith knew it. But it was Sith-like: the minds and mores of all individual creatures are individual. And so Sith was annoyed that he must now deal with Haggie before proceeding further with his plans.

  At first, in his annoyance, Sith considered destroying Haggie, disposing of him utterly. That was no real problem: Sith might simply transmat him far out into space, or into the heart of this system’s sun. But … in fact Haggie had been something of a bonus. If all Earth’s billions of inhabitants were of his stamp, then none of Sith’s subterfuge was necessary in the first place! He could have simply recorded the vileness of the place and commenced planetary restructuring out of hand. Yes, for Haggie’s capacity for wrong thinking and doing was simply astonishing; the dark depths of his incredibly complex criminal mind were as yet unfathomed. So … perhaps Sith might yet find a use for him in the scheme of things to come.

  Of course, Haggie was quite different from the other players in Sith’s game. For one thing—and quite apart from the fact that he was a self-confessed criminal—his presence there at all was completely unscheduled, an error. He had put himself in the game. (Or the “examination,” as Sith should rightly think of it. Except that now he preferred to think of it as a game. His game.)

  And because Haggie had not been processed, his needs and requirements remained exactly what they had been before he was taken: he required to eat, drink, sleep, and perform all the other human-animal functions he’d performed before. The others didn’t; the synthesizer had taken care of all such matters; but of course they had no way of knowing it. Unless by now they’d started to work it out for themselves … .

  Sith stored Haggie—not synthesised storage but the real thing—by placing him in suspended animation: hypersleep, as the Thone knew it, when they journeyed out between the stars. As he did so, he checked the little redhead’s numerous parts for any permanent damage and found none. Small degrees of dehydration, hunger, and the resultant fatigue were only to be expected; while he slept, the hypersleep chamber’s placenta would adjust to his needs and make up any deficiencies. Sith quickly programmed it to do just that.

  Finally all was done and he could now reenter the game. He used the control room’s rapid-scan locator to check the whereabouts of the six, discovering them on a desert world which for the past thousand years had been the domicile of three medium-rank Thone theosophists. In such close proximity, each could argue with the others the various merits of his philosophy to his core’s content. This balanced the disadvantage of overcrowding.

  Of course, the six humans only occupied a projection of that world as it had been before Thone colonization, a synthesised “memory” of it. It was nonetheless real within the parameters of its three dimensions, its mass and all its content, but it did not occupy space as the humans were aware of space. It was instead a synthesised world occupying synthesised space.

  Sith decided to take the easy route: he would emerge up in the mountains, at the focus which they had made their destination. But before leaving, he must check a small matter of programming. It had amused him to wonder what would happen if the adventures of the six were shaped by their own fears and beliefs, their own phobias and fallacies; and to that end he had programmed the synthesizer to produce effects corresponding to each individual’s character. The trigger was to have been the mind of whichever one of the group first passed through a door.

  Now, on checking, he was delighted to discover that on this occasion Clayborne had been the first. Clayborne with his vertigo and his ghosts, his religious and paranormal passions. For what the mind of any sentient creature could imagine, the synthesizer could make real. And right now it was working to make real all of Clayborne’s worst nightmares … .

  To the diamond blue eyes of the birds of prey fanning high overhead, the six people plodding the dunes formed a straggly line of black dots on an aching white backdrop, leaving prints like punctuation marks behind them. Two dots to the fore, like the head of some strange lizard, three in the middle, the lizard’s squat body, and one bringing up the rear like a stubby tail. Anderson and Varre were the head, Gill, Turnbull and Angela the body, and Clayborne, carrying the dead quadruped over his shoulder, the tail.

  Despite the fact that they’d been tramping the dunes for close on two hours, still the small, hot sun seemed scarcely to have moved in the sky. Sweat rivered them, causing Gill to wonder out loud, “Where the hell does it all come from? I mean, did we really drink this much on our way down the escarpment? And if we did, why haven’t we found an easier, quicker way to be rid of it?”

  “Don’t talk about drink,” Turnbull groaned. “Lord, I could murder a pint!”

  “Really?” Gill said. “Are you dying for one?” Turnbull looked at him. They’d had this conversation before. “No,” he eventually answered, perhaps reluctantly, “not really. Frankly, I don’t think I need a drink. It’s just that I know I should, and I remember what a pint tastes like.”

  Angela walked between them, half a pace to the rear. She looked from one to the other. “Am I supposed to know what you two are on about?”

  Gill managed a grin, if only for her sake. He wiped the dust from his upper lip where it clung to the sweat. “We’re on about something we’ve discussed once before,” he said. “About not needing to shave, eat, drink, sleep, go to the loo, et cetera. About me being a dying man—and never feeling so fit in my life! And Anderson being overweight—but belting along there like an athlete only slightly behind in his training. And you, a ‘slip of a girl,’ as the saying goes, having the energy of a war-horse!”

  Turnbull took over. “We’re talking about cuts and bruises that heal in hours, and presumably lethally poisonous stings that knock you down but don’t kill you, and about being sick to your stomach from eating inedible fruit, yet an hour or so later running a ten-mile cross-country marathon!”

  “In short”—Gill again—“we’re talking about something being very wrong—or right?—with our bodies! So what do you make of it?”

  She considered it and said, “I had noticed those things, I suppose, but hadn’t really worried about them. There’s always been so much else to think about. In fact we did sleep, in that cave back in that other world, but now that I think of it, I’m not sure we needed to. I don’t think I did, anyway. We did it out of custom, out of habit. As for calls of nature …” She shrugged. “I for one haven’t been called. Which for me is strange, to say the least. I’m like most women: I spend my pennies frequently. Or I used to.”

  “And yet,” Turnbull put in, “when Haggie slept on top of the escarpment, it was because he was quite genuinely exhausted. Also, he’d grown a straggly beard and his hair had gone a bit wild. And I noticed that when he slaked his thirst, he really went at it. By comparison, we only took sips.”

  Gill nodded. “He needed food, too. Really needed it! He was actually drooling when he killed that poor wild centaur thing.”

  “And he … made water,” Angela added. “Twice in the forest, he … went. I just walked on a little way and waited for him.”

  Turnbull frowned, wiped sweat from his forehead. “So what’s the big difference between him and us?”

  “I don’t know,” Gill answer
ed, “but maybe we should be thankful for it. Whatever the difference was, that hunting machine didn’t much like it!” He came to a halt, shielded his eyes, and gazed up ahead. Another mile and the mountains began, rising maybe a thousand feet to sharp, craggy crests. Gill’s eyes narrowed as he let his sixth sense come into full play.

  “And talking about machines,” he said, “Clayborne’s ‘burning bush’ is just such an animal!”

  Turnbull and Angela stopped, too. They all three squinted their eyes to gaze up into the shadow-streaked flanks of the shimmering range. The unknown glinting, fire-flashing object was still there, a bright jewel of painful light reflecting out from shadowy darkness. Clayborne, coming from behind, caused Gill to start where he brushed by. He mumbled incoherently as he passed between the three, his “sacrifice” draped limply over one shoulder. They let him get out of earshot.

  “A machine?” Turnbull finally said. “You can feel it from here?”

  Gill nodded. “Oh, don’t be mistaken, there’s ‘machine’ all around us, just like before—a background of machine static that tells me we’re still inside the House of Doors—but it has its focal point up there. Take my word for it: it’s there, waiting for us … .” He started forward again and the others kept pace.

  “What sort of machine?” Angela wanted to know.

  Gill slowly shook his head. “I only wish I knew,” he said, a little peevishly, angry that any sort of mechanism should elude him. “The sort of machine that’s sitting there right now on the slopes of Ben Lawers. It didn’t have any doors—not on the outside, anyway. Castles within castles, worlds within worlds. Chinese boxes that fit inside each other.” Again the angry, frustrated shake of his head. “Russian dolls, making more space on the inside than there is on the outside. Houses of Doors enough to build a city, and each one of them the same—the selfsame—House of Doors!”