by Tom Holt
‘Dragon’s teeth?’
‘I think so. Anyhow, she found the cardboard tube in her pocket with the Door inside it, and by then, of course, she knew what it was and used it to escape. She came to my place in New Zealand, and when she walked in through the wall I’d just found out that the Door wasn’t in my jacket pocket. I assumed the Door she used to get away from the teeth people was my Door.’ He paused for much-needed breath, then added, ‘But what if it wasn’t? What if it was this spare Door of yours, which you say you stored in a bank vault? Well?’
Long silence.
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Mr Tanner’s mother said eventually. ‘Just, even if you’re right, I don’t see how it helps matters. It just means your girlfriend nicked my Door. A bit of a liberty, but in the circumstances I don’t think I’ll be pressing charges.’
Frank squeezed his nails into his palm. She was missing the point, and just at that moment Frank Carpenter was spearheading the movement for the ethical treatment of points. ‘If the Door she used wasn’t my Door, then what happened to it?’
Another silence. Then Dennis said, ‘You must’ve dropped it somewhere.’
Frank shook his head, a futile gesture in the pitch dark. ‘Can’t have,’ he said. ‘I was back home, in New Zealand, remember. So I must’ve had the Door with me when I got there, I must’ve used it to get home. And she-I mean, your mum - knows what my place is like. Small.’
‘Scruffy. Strong smell of mould. You really ought’
Reminder, if any was needed, that Mr Tanner’s mother was as much mother as goblin. ‘Well, quite,’ Frank snapped. ‘What I meant was, though, it’s a small place. One room, basically. I’m trying to remember what I did, and I think I just took the Door down off the wall and lay down on the bed.’
‘Fine, so that’s what you did. And at some point it must have fallen out of your’
‘No,’ Frank yelled. ‘It couldn’t have. Immediately I found it wasn’t in my coat pocket, I searched the place from top to bottom. No sign. And it may be scruffy but it isn’t cluttered. If the Door had fallen out onto the floor or down the back of a chair, I’d have found it. And I didn’t.’
A yawn from Dennis Tanner. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So whatsername’s Door must’ve been your Door after all.’
‘No!’ Frank hadn’t meant to shout. ‘No, how could it have been? How could it have gone back into the past, into that bank vault, under that dragon, all on its bloody lonesome?’
‘Magic?’ suggested Mr Tanner weakly.
‘That’s what I assumed at the time,’ Frank admitted. ‘Weirdness. The kind of shit I’ve had to get used to putting up with, ever since I fell in with you people. But you’re the magic expert. You tell me what sort of magic could’ve made that happen, and then I’ll be convinced. Well?’
‘Off the top of my head’
‘Hm?’
‘Not possible,’ Dennis conceded. ‘But this is the Door we’re talking about. Really, all we know about the perishing thing is that anything can happen. So’
‘Not possible,’ Frank repeated firmly. ‘In which case’ A huge thought collided with him. ‘No, it couldn’t be that, it’d be so’ He tore his jacket off his shoulders, laid it on the floor and started a fingertip search.
‘What’s he doing, our Dennis?’
‘I don’t know, it’s dark in here.’
‘Christ!’
Dead silence; then Mr Tanner’s mother said, ‘Now what’s he doing?’
‘Ask him yourself, you’
Frank sat up on his knees, his fingers in his inside coat pocket, the tip of his forefinger thrust into a hole in the lining. He was still dizzy from the nasty bump on the head that the huge thought had given him; maybe that was what made him reluctant to take the next step. Or it could have been fear that he was wrong.
‘Dennis.’
‘Shh.’
Frank pulled himself together. A hole in the pocket of a lined jacket. He knew what happened in those circumstances. ‘Anybody got a knife?’ he asked.
‘A what?’
‘Forget it.’ With his teeth, he bit into the jacket lining. Not nearly as straightforward as you’d think. Chewy old stuff, polyester. But, after he’d worried at it for a bit, he managed to make a hole big enough to get a finger in, and the rest was quite easy.
‘He’s tearing up his jacket.’
‘Why’s he doing that?’
Next, Frank inserted his hand, up to the wrist. Of course, it wouldn’t be there. You get these inspirations when you’re searching frantically for something; they fit all the known facts and for a while you’re all excited and hopeful, but they always turn out to be
He felt it; the pad on the tip of his left index finger brushed against cardboard.
He froze. Other things besides Door holders are made of cardboard, and he really, really didn’t want to get his hopes up. In fact, wriggling his fingers deeper inside the lining and teasing out the cardboard tube was quite possibly the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.
‘Got it,’ he said.
‘Now what’s he?’
‘I’ve got it,’ he said again. ‘The Door. My Door. It was in my coat, all the time.’
If anybody had told Colin Gomez, a week earlier, that a day would come when he wouldn’t feel like working, he’d have laughed out loud. Might as well predict that he’d stop breathing air. For Colin Gomez, the universe was composed of two elements, work and other stuff. He’d never cared much for the latter.
But, as he sat at his desk with a file open in front of him, the words of the letter (from Harlequin and James, a tempting compromise offer in the Northampton beanstalk dispute) seemed to repel him like reversed polarities, and however hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to read them.
He gave up trying and instead made an attempt to analyse the problem.
A mind like Colin Gomez’s can do practically anything with a bunch of facts. Accordingly, he quickly reached the conclusion that he’d done nothing wrong. True, he’d conspired against his senior partner, but he’d only done it for the good of the firm. Also true, he’d subsequently betrayed his fellow conspirators, but he’d only done that out of loyalty to his senior partner. So, he had nothing whatever to feel ashamed about, and plenty to be grateful for. He was still alive. He hadn’t been slung out of the partnership. He’d even hedged his bets, in the light of the apparent conflict between his two entirely justified actions, by giving the spare Door to Emily and her young man so that they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives horribly backdated, trudging grimly through Beatlemania into the flares-and-sideburns era and then on through monetarism and the noxious Nineties just to get back to where they’d started from.
All bases covered, therefore. He should be feeling properly smug. But he wasn’t.
Rationalising his misgivings into pulp should have restored his appetite for work, but when he returned to the letter from Harlequin and James, it continued to avoid him, the communications equivalent of walking straight past him in the street. He had an idea what that meant. Work was shunning him, because on some level somewhere he’d proved himself unworthy of it.
It was just possible, Colin Gomez conceded, that his self-justifications had been just a bit too glib. The death of Emily Spitzer, for example; on the face of it, no big deal. It’s the role of management to play chess with the lives of employees, and from time to time in chess you have to sacrifice a pawn or two. There is a difference, however, between letting a pawn be taken and jumping up and down on it till it’s reduced to a fine resin dust. Maybe Amelia Carrington had gone too far there, and maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so ready to help her.
He thought about that, and dismissed it, remembering instead the first rule of management. Once you start thinking of employees as people, you’re screwed.
The problem had to be, therefore, one of his two tactical betrayals. Unsettling: questions of right and wrong, ethical dilemmas, weren’t usually a fea
ture of his mental landscape, and detecting the presence of one was like coming across a stranded battleship in the middle of the desert. Still, if it was stopping him from working, it had to be dealt with, quickly.
Colin Gomez’s first loyalty was to the firm. The firm and the senior partner were one, an indivisible whole. Therefore his first loyalty was to the senior partner. No question about that.
By the same token, the firm had a right to have the best possible senior partner; and, it went without saying, the best man for the job was himself. Therefore he owed it to the firm to become senior partner. No question about that, either. Accordingly (it amazed him, now he came to think about it, that there had ever been any doubt or uncertainty in his mind on this score) Amelia Carrington had to go. Right. Fine.
Except that she was so scary. And not scary in the irrational-fear sense, like being afraid of loud noises or cows or the cracks between paving stones. Being afraid of Amelia Carrington was supremely rational, because she killed people.
Awkward.
For a short while, Colin Gomez had allowed himself to believe that the Spitzer child and her curious boyfriend might be able to get rid of Amelia, thanks to the Portable Door. But then it had become apparent that Amelia was way ahead of all of them, and was using them to get her perfectly shaped hands on that remarkable artefact, and he’d quickly purged his mind of dangerous wishful thinking and realigned his loyalties; quickly, and perhaps just in time, or perhaps not. Being realistic, probably not. If he was honest with himself, he had to recognise that he was almost certainly somewhere on her things-to-do list, gradually working his way up to the surface, like a splinter of shrapnel in an old wound.
He sighed. Such a shame that Spitzer and her sidekick were so sadly ineffectual. He’d gambled on them by making the fool Erskine give them the spare Door, but that had been some time ago, and nothing seemed to have happened, so presumably they’d used the Door to run away, as any half-sensible person would. No use pinning any of his dwindling stock of hopes on them
Lines appeared on the wall facing his desk. They could have been stray strands of dust-laden cobweb, except that they were too straight. He lifted his head and stared.
The Door opened. Colin jumped up, quite an achievement for a man of his bulk. The lunatics, he thought; they can’t come here, if she finds out
But the woman who walked in through the wall wasn’t Emily Spitzer, or Amelia Carrington; just some young blonde female. In Colin’s world, young women under the age of thirty were divided into two types. The ones who wore suits and carried briefcases were junior staff. The rest were typists, receptionists and office juniors. Neither category was any use except for routine, trivial tasks, and-most definitely-neither category should have the use of rare and powerful magical objects like the Door. In which case
‘Are you Gomez?’ said the inexplicable female.
‘Yes. Who are?’
Behind her, someone else. At least he recognised this one: Dennis Tanner, of all people. He’d known Dennis on and off for years, as a fellow professional, and of course he was the principal fall guy in the bauxite scheme. That didn’t give him any right to come walking through Doors
‘Where’s Emily Spitzer?’
A third voice. Behind Dennis Tanner (how many more of them were there going to be, for pity’s sake?) the Carpenter boy. Colin opened and closed his mouth, but no words came out. This was all too much
‘He asked you a question,’ said the inappropriate young woman. Colin ignored her. With all this going on, he couldn’t be bothered to notice impertinent questions from the secretarial grade. But then she sank her unexpectedly strong fingers into three of his four chins, and he revised his priorities accordingly.
‘Don’t know,’ he gurgled. ‘Let go.’
‘You’re in trouble,’ the annoying secretary said, with a disturbing grin. ‘First, Carrington knows you gave the spare Door to Frank and Emily. Second, I’m going to throttle you unless you do as you’re told. Third, Frank’s going to smash your face in for trying to murder his girlfriend. Fourth, our Dennis doesn’t like anybody in this firm very much. There’s probably a fifth, but I don’t think there’s enough of you to go round.’
Then she let go, and Colin fell backwards, banging the base of his spine painfully on the edge of the desk. He tried to summon up enough magic for a fireball, but there was something about this terrifying, steel-fingered secretary that drained all the power out of him. He opened his mouth to whimper, but his throat was too badly mauled.
‘On the other hand,’ the secretary said, ‘we could make you senior partner. Would you like that?’
The phone purred. Amelia picked it up.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, with a frown.
She wasn’t ready to talk to Colin yet. Not because the actual words she’d be saying were in any way complicated; she was undecided between ‘So long, then,’ and ‘Die, traitor’, but it really didn’t matter. It was just that she had other, more important things to do first: bauxite things, involving large sums of money.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ burbled the voice in her ear, ‘but I was just wondering. How did you get rid of the Spitzer girl, in the end?’
She frowned. Colin shouldn’t want to know that. ‘Why?’
‘Just interested.’
‘Need to know,’ Amelia replied shortly. ‘Just take it from me, she’s gone and she’s never coming back. After all,’ she added venomously, ‘it’d take a Portable Door to save her now, and we’ve got both of them. Haven’t we?’
‘Yes, absolutely’
‘Excellent. What did you do with the spare, by the way?’
Click. Colin had hung up on her. Both of Amelia’s precision-engineered eyebrows shot up in blank surprise. Then she quietly rearranged her Things To Do list, with Colin’s name a bit nearer the top.
She looked back at her screen. Bauxite prices. If they went much lower, they’d come out in Australia. She extended a finger to press a key that would set in motion the necessary sales and purchases, and then she could
Some invisible vandal was drawing thin black lines on her wall. Amelia lifted her hand away from the keyboard, scooping the elements of fire out of the air like a child clawing snow into a snowball, but before she could let fly, the Door opened.
‘Hello,’ said Emily Spitzer.
They found him in a poky little office in the annexe. He was stapling together bundles of computer printout, and sorting the bundles into neat piles. He seemed genuinely pleased to see them.
‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ Frank said, surprised to hear himself say it. ‘Only, I thought that when Amelia Carrington found out that you’d given me and Emily the other Door, she might have done something nasty to you.’
Erskine frowned. ‘Well, I’ve been sentenced to death,’ he said, ‘but she was quite nice about it. She said I’d been incredibly stupid rather than actively treacherous, and of course I can see her point. It looks like we both misunderstood what she wanted me to do.’
‘But you’re still alive,’ Frank pointed out.
‘For now, yes. She explained about that. She said she’s pretty busy right now, but she’ll try and fit me in before half past five. So in the meantime I’m making myself useful, filing the Mortensen printouts. I felt it was the least I could do, since she’d been so reasonable about everything. Oh, hello, Mr Tanner, I didn’t see you there. I don’t suppose you remember me, I’m Ms Carrington’s junior assistant. Was,’ he added, with a flush of shame. ‘I failed her, you see.’
Dennis said something under his breath, but Frank nudged him in the ribs. ‘Erskine used to be Amelia’s pet dog,’ he explained. ‘Man’s best friend, and all that.’
Erskine nodded eagerly. ‘She let me do all sorts of stuff for her,’ he said. ‘I fetched sticks and made the little rubber ball go squeak, and I always came back when she called, and lately I’ve been spying,’ (he counted the activities off on his fingers as he named them) ‘guarding, fetching a
nd carrying, providing back-up, and we did some spider-killing and troll slaying too. It was all very exciting, but then I did the bad thing, so’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you managed to get back from the past all right. Are you going straight back to Salt Lake City?’
‘Not quite yet,’ Frank said evenly. ‘Before I go, I wanted to ask you something.’
‘Me? Gosh. Yes, go ahead, fire away.’
Frank drew in a deep breath. On the one hand, he’d never really liked dogs. But ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘which you preferred. Being a dog, I mean, or being a junior management trainee. Just curious, you know.’
Erskine’s brows huddled tightly together. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I preferred being a dog. I mean, all the stuff you humans do is tremendously interesting and exciting. But it’s also very confusing, and I don’t like that. It means I make mistakes and do bad things, which upsets me.’ He simpered a little. ‘Actually, I haven’t been a very good human, and I reckon I was always a fairly good dog. It’s best to stick to what you’re good at, I think. So yes, a dog, definitely. Not,’ he added with a shy smile, ‘that it matters a lot now. I had my chance and’
‘The thing is,’ Frank interrupted, ‘fairly soon, Amelia Carrington isn’t going to be the senior partner here any more. In fact, she may be, um, going away on a long journey, so I was thinking: instead of, well, dying, would you like it if Mr Tanner here turned you back into a dog? He says he knows how to do it, and it won’t take a second.’