The House of Doors - 01 (23 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The House of Doors - 01
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But the gigantic mechanism on the rails was closer now, and its clanging that much louder. Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang
! It made it hard to think.
Nearby, something suspiciously like a crane on a gantry came suddenly to life. It trundled along its own tracks and swung a huge iron dinosaur-head bucket with steel jaws directly at the tower and platform. Gill and Turnbull were on their feet again, but as Angela yelled, “Get down!” they grabbed Bannerman and joined the others on the deck, where they clung for dear life to projecting bolt heads. At the last moment the crane lifted its head and came jarringly to a halt, leaving the jaws creaking and swinging like a rusty pendulum directly overhead.
“Shit!” Turnbull shouted. “Now I know what we’re standing on. It’s a fuelling platform!”
Gill knew that he was right. It was obvious. So obvious that he’d missed it—because he’d believed there was nothing here that he could grasp.
Gong-BANG! Gong-BANG! The thing on the tracks was passing beneath the shuddering platform; the jaws of the crane dipped lower; Gill thought:
It’s going to tip its load right on our heads, and we’re going to end up as so much fuel!
He looked up, saw the grinning steel jaws crack open, and closed his eyes … .
 
N
othing came out of the jaws except dust and grit and a powdering of iron filings. The machine had been working, but it had nothing to deliver. Silently, Gill began to thank someone or other—probably God—but his thanks were premature. The jaws extended to a gape and lowered themselves to press down on the platform’s iron surface. For a moment Gill and the others were enclosed by huge blunt metal teeth.
Meanwhile, clanking and snorting, the—engine?—on the tracks had come to a halt. In the top center of its box body was a shallow hopper, waiting to be filled. The jaws pressed down harder yet on the platform, which cracked open in the middle. It was hinged, spring-loaded. “Hang on!” Gill yelled as the weight of the jaws forced the trapdoor open. But … there was nothing to hang on to, except each other.
They fell through in a tangle of gasping, flailing bodies, and crashed down into the engine’s hopper. The huge metal plate where they landed was also a trapdoor; for a moment it gave an inch or two under their combined weight, then held. They weren’t quite as heavy as a load of fuel. Below them, in the body of the thing, they could hear a grinding and a hissing, a frustrated meshing of unthinkable machine parts.
Then the engine gave three short, shrill hoots, and recommenced its journey along the great track. The racket it created as it proceeded was brain-shattering: Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang!
Turnbull was first on his feet. Groaning, he staggered to the rim of the hopper and looked over. There was a sort of shallow perimeter moat some fifteen inches deep. He dipped a finger in a residual coating of black sludge and sniffed it. It smelled like fish oil. He rubbed it on the sleeve of his torn jacket and waited; it left a stain but that was all. So it wasn’t corrosive.
The others joined him one by one, Bannerman and Varre crawling. Gill and Angela were last, lifting and guiding Bannerman as they came. All were bruised and battered. Turnbull had meanwhile hauled himself up into the gutter or moat. He flopped there with his head on the rim, weary to the bone. The others got up with him, dragging Bannerman and Varre behind them. And eventually the monotony of the engine’s dinning took away a little of its own pain, until it became a “background” clamour against which they could begin to hear themselves think again, and even to speak.
“Follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the shining steel ribbons,” sang Turnbull tunelessly, his voice dripping with inward-directed sarcasm.
Gill looked at him.
“The Wizard of Oz?
”
Turnbull nodded grimly. “Except that this time the wizard and witch are one and the same, and the bastard’s got us exactly where he wants us.
And
we don’t know where that is!”
“And no Emerald City waiting for us,” said Angela. “Just another House of Doors.”
“If we’re headed in the right direction,” said Anderson, with none of his usual authoritative ebullience.
“Oh, we are,” said Gill, nodding. “We always have, haven’t we? The way I see it, it’s out of our hands.” They began to look around as the machine world slipped by.
They passed into a canyon of gigantic cogwheels and pistons, rusting ratchets, scabbed girder scaffolding, whose walls towered up on both sides like cliffs of condemned, corroding, incomprehensible clockwork. And Anderson was prompted to ask, “Spencer, is this what you meant when you said we were inside a machine?”
“No.” Gill shook his head. “We’re still inside
that
machine. This entire machine world is inside
that
machine. But everything you see here is commonplace by comparison. This junk came out of me.” He tapped his skull with a tired finger.
Turnbull gave a snort. “You mean this stuff isn’t alien?”
Gill stroked the furrows out of his brow, left sludge in the shape of a hand upon his forehead. “Weird but not alien,” he answered. “It’s like those machines that bothered me so much when I was a kid: Heath-Robinson things that couldn’t possibly work, or worked to no end. Illogical perpetual motion machines that don’t do anything. Mechanical mobiles that turn endlessly and without purpose. Idiot things. Executive toys that click and whir and do sweet—”
“Nothing,” Angela interrupted.
“That too.” Gill nodded ruefully.
“You were about to say ‘fuck all,’” said Angela, quite matter-of-factly. “I don’t know why I stopped you, except that I hoped you hadn’t given up hope yet. I’ll know that you have when you … well, when you let things go.”
“Can you come over here?” said Gill.
She crawled to him through the fish-smelling oil and he wiped grit and dirt from her face, then kissed her soundly. In her shredded, dirty ski pants, greasy, knotted shirt, and completely incongruous very feminine bra, she looked like some demonic urchin—but he kissed her anyway. And she responded fiercely. “Don’t let me let go,” he said, when their mouths at last parted.
“Is this really the time for … canoodling?” Varre was tenderly examining his torn, puffy thigh.
“You lick your wounds,” said Gill, but without malice, “and we’ll canoodle. Time moves far too quickly in this place. Right now we’re taking a break … from everything!”
The engine shuddered and clanked and gong-banged on its way; Turnbull sat with Bannerman and patiently explained what was happening; miles slipped inexorably by; they came out of the canyon into rust-scabbed suburbs of ferro-degenerable debris … .
 
Gill had been dozing. Angela shook him insistently. He opened his eyes and looked around. The others lolled and nodded, sleeping where it was almost humanly impossible to sleep. “Look at the sun!” said Angela. Gill did—and understood the look on her face.
In front the tracks stretched interminably on, shining into the sunset; behind, on the horizon, a spiky metal mound glowed red and silver; on both sides stretched dunes of red rust, with here and there girders protruding like broken teeth from bleeding, rotten gums. And sinking towards the horizon at ten o’clock of where they were heading, the “sun” put the whole mad scene in perspective where it covered the land with its warmth and light. Its entirely unnatural warmth and light.
For it was no “sun” that Gill had ever imagined—and yet it must be, for it was “his” sun. Twice or three times as large as Earth’s sun, it hung there in the sky and defied acceptance. It was a giant, silver ball-bearing a million miles across, peppered with blow holes which blasted out spokes of fire and light and radiation—a never-ending chain reaction of nuclear energy—a
machine
sun set centrally in a machine system of worlds!
Gill looked away, shook his head, refused to consider it; but in the next moment he narrowed his eyes as they lighted upon a lesser, more acceptable wonder. Coming towards them, but on the other track, gong-banged a duplicate of the great engine whose back they were riding. Gill woke up the others with a warning: “Don’t ask me about the sun, for I don’t know. But here comes another Heath-Robinson mobile.”
A mile away, the thing stopped. A twisted tower of metal lay collapsed on the track directly in front of it. Appendages at once commenced to work: great piston-driven arms that shoved and jostled, pincer claws tugging and lifting, a giant sledgehammer fist that hammered and battered. Finally the obstruction was broken up; and their own engine gong-banged its way towards the other, rapidly narrowing the distance between.
But now the second engine began carefully piling the twisted rubble of its success onto the other track, in the way of its passenger-carrying colleague! It made an untidy pyramid of the stuff, then came gong-banging on. As the two engines passed each other by, so they toot-toot-tooted derisively.
“That’s better!” said Gill. The others looked at him. He nodded. “It makes no sense, what that machine just did. If it had made sense, something would be wrong. Heath-Robinson, remember?”
They had reached the rubble-piled section of track; their engine came to a halt, began piling the wreckage back where it had been; it finished the job and stood as if appraising its handiwork, then thrust a pincer deep into the rust on one side of the tracks and drew out a huge iron girder, which it rammed haphazardly into the stack like a stanchion.
“That’ll teach him!” said Turnbull, almost hysterically.
And then they were off again: Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang
! Gong-
bang
!
 
An hour later and the atomic sun was that much closer to the horizon. The tracks beelined along an elevated gantry over a desert of rust dunes, where the shadows were growing longer by the minute. For the past half hour the engine’s human cargo had seen nothing of note: no collapsed towers or twisted girders, no burnt-out boilers scabbing their way to oblivion, no metal parts at all except the gantry and interminable tracks stretching fore and aft. And upon all sides wave upon wave of red rust, sifted as fine as sand.
Then, on the horizon up ahead, three dark nodules or knolls became apparent, seeming to grow up from the rust desert as the engine gong-banged towards them. Because they were the only irregularities in an otherwise monotonous vista, Gill and the others took special interest in them, watching them enlarge and expand as the distance narrowed down. They were gigantic, oddly shaped, spired like mountains or castles painted by an artist of the fantastic, with nothing regular or mechanical about them at all. In short, while they did not appear to be junk as such, neither were they of a mechanical construction. On the other hand, nor were they
man
ufactured. Natural? It seemed unlikely, in this most unnatural of places.
The track-runner gong-banged a little slower now; it put up a tall, telescopic periscope from its flank and surveyed the—land?—around. There came a thick, glutinous gurgling from the rear of the moat, and Gill crawled over to that section to take a look. The moat was deeper here, where the bottom sloped off into a massive funnel welded onto the rear of the engine. Gill wrinkled his nose; the funnel was full of the fish-smelling oil.
Oil began to spray from a system of sprinklers down by the wheels, a fine stinking mist of the stuff that clung to rails and gantry, permeated and darkened the rust from ten to fifteen feet outwards from the desert-bordered rim of the track.
Turnbull joined Gill, suggesting, “Protection from the rust?”
Gill looked at him and frowned. “That would be the obvious answer,” he said. “The logical answer …”
“Spencer!” Angela’s voice calling over the racket of the track-runner held a note that trembled a little, and Gill thought:
Oh, yes
—
too logical by far!
He looked where she was pointing.
Out in the desert to the left of the tracks, maybe fifty yards away, something was
creating
a new dune! Red rust was being thrust aloft in a straight line that kept pace with the engine, building a long, shuddering barrow of the stuff like a mole run in a country garden. Turnbull, checking the other side of the tracks, said, “Oh-oh—flanked! We have an escort.”
More runs appeared even as they watched, parallel lines of rust forming themselves as if by some weird seismic force just beneath the surface. The one on the left suddenly changed course, came angling in towards the tracks. Then it hit the oil-soaked belt and hastily veered away again, keeping a respectful distance. “Things that burrow through loose rust at fifteen to twenty miles an hour,” said Gill, “against which these tracks and engines are self-protected by use of this stinking oil.”
“Creatures?” Turnbull was tense. “Animals?”
“I get on with machines.” Gill was as thoughtful as a man could be under the dinning of the engine. “I used to, anyway. Machines are the tools that lifted man up from ignorance. I’d hate to see machines threatened. This is my nightmare. In this world they’re not only being threatened but devoured, turned to rust. All of them. This rust desert is encroaching on the machine cities, with only the tracks and engines left to link them together across endless graveyards of long-dead metal.”
“Iron to filings,” said Turnbull, “rust to rust, amen. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure.” Gill shook his head. “But it’s just dawned on me that this bugger”—he rapped his knuckles against the metal wall of the moat—“must be rapidly running out of fuel!” The gaps between each gong-
bang
! were definitely lengthening.
“My God!”
Anderson cried his alarm. One hundred yards out, rust erupted volcanically—scabs and flakes and tons of grains of the stuff hurled aloft—as one of the fantastic burrowers thrust up its snout and emerged … .

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