The House of Doors - 01 (29 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The House of Doors - 01
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The Brigadier had just potted red, a fluke if ever Anderson saw one. But: “Oh,
shot
sir!” he said, stepping in through the open doors.
Ffines glanced at him. “Eh? D’you think so? Well, I suppose it was, really.”
“What?” His young opponent was plainly astonished. “Shot?” He laughed. “A good shot? Why, I’ve never seen such a fluke!”
The Brigadier grunted something inaudible, went a little red in the face, put down his cue and began to twist his moustaches. A sure sign that he was annoyed. He looked at Anderson again and his expression was unmistakable.
Now who the bloody hell’s this?
he was thinking.
Suddenly Anderson felt cold. It was as if a breeze from outer space had just blown on his spine. He felt cold and weak and faint. And powerless, which was worst of all. In desperation he looked around the room. On one of the chairs he spied a copy of the
Financial Times
. In a place like this, that one would have to be right up to date, this morning’s paper. Two strides took him to the chair and he snatched up the paper in hands that were trembling again. 24 July 1994. And now things fitted together, and he remembered, and he knew … .
The Brigadier’s young opponent had meanwhile spotted the red ball. “Well …” He spoke to Ffines. “It’s still your shot. I suppose you do intend to claim that fluke?”
“They all count, young fellow-me-lad.” The Brigadier rounded on him. “And anyway it wasn’t a fluke.” And then he rounded on Anderson, too. “Incidentally, just who the blazes are you and what are you doing in here? Press, are you? Somebody or other’s secretary? Here to arrange an interview? I’ve an office for that sort of thing, don’t y’know!”
Anderson fell into a chair and let the newspaper go flying. Eyes staring from a chalk white face, he said, “You don’t know me, do you?”
“Eh? What? Haven’t I just said as much? Know you? I never saw you before in my life!”
The House of Doors, thought Anderson. The bloody House of Doors! My own personal hell. I should have known it
. He hadn’t lost five months but gained twenty of them, gone back in time. And this wasn’t the planet he was familiar with. Oh it was “Earth,” all right, but it wasn’t his Earth. In this world he didn’t exist, probably hadn’t even been born. Old Joe the commissionaire hadn’t recognised him; of course not, for he wasn’t a member and never had been. Not of
this
club. Joe Elkins, yes—who’d gone into hospital and never come out again. That had been eighteen months ago, but it hadn’t happened here yet. Anderson’s brain whirled as it tried to balance the facts and come out even. Why, he remembered now how he’d given a fiver into Joe’s widow’s fund. He’d considered it a bargain, that last fiver, instead of one each week.
“Are we still playing, or aren’t we?” The yuppie type had definitely soured now. And so had the Brigadier.
“Game’s finished!” he snapped. “And so are you. Out! Come back when you know how to lose gracefully.”
That too
, thought Anderson.
Except this isn’t the young idiot’s second go but his first
. “Jesus! Jesus!” he burst out, leaping to his feet. “That policeman should have known me. If not through all that filth, from my photograph at least. I don’t exist here. I’m nothing here. Power? I don’t even have an’identity here!”
He advanced on the Brigadier. Ffines saw him coming: a madman, eyes starting out, frothing at the mouth, mumbling and shrieking. Backed up against a wall, he snatched up his cue and prodded Anderson in the chest with it. “Eh? Eh? What?” he bellowed.
Anderson growled low in his throat and knocked the cue aside, sent it clattering to the floor. He pounced on the Brigadier and held him up by his lapels. It was worth one last try. But something was bending in Anderson’s brain, first this way then that, bending and weakening like a paper clip at a board meeting. “I’m Anderson,” he grated. “David A-n-d-e-r-s-o-n. MOD. A minister of the government of the day. You are Brigadier Ffines, president of this club. I’m a member and resident here, Suite thirty-seven. Now then …
tell me you know me
!”
“Eh?” Ffines spluttered, turning purple. “Are you mad? Carruthers has thirty-seven. He’s our man at MOD. David Anderson? I never bloody
heard
of you!”
Anderson snarled and tossed the Brigadier aside. “But it’s still a world
like
mine, at least!” he cried. “It’s still Earth or a sort of Earth! I came up from nowhere before and I can do it again. Power? I’ll show you power! I’ll get there yet!”
The receptionist and a porter ran in. They were both big men. They jumped on Anderson and bore him down, and the Brigadier sat on him. “Raving lunatic!” Ffines roared. “Who the hell let him in?”
“I did,” the receptionist gasped. “I was on the phone, sir. Message from the police—a warning—about this Anderson bloke coming here. They said they’d checked him out and he’d probably be impersonating a minister from the MOD. Except the MOD don’t know him! This must be the bloke.”
“It bloody well is the bloke!” Ffines exploded. “Out with the sod! Down the stairs and out the door! And make sure he bounces when he lands!”
The paper clip in Anderson’s brain bent one last time and snapped. He gave a wild shriek, threw them all off, fled out the billiards-room doors and went bounding, floating, gibbering down the stairs, across the foyer, and—
Outside, under the canopy, talking earnestly to dead Old Joe Elkins—there was the policeman Anderson had bumped into in Oxford Street. Anderson’s face split wide open in a mad, frothing grin. “Bastard!” he howled. “Oh, you bastard! Why … don’t … you …
recognise
… meeeee!”
He reached out long, eager arms, with straining hands shaped into talons, and hurled himself straight at the swinging glass doors. He crashed right through them—
But behind him they gonged shut, which wasn’t right. And outside, it wasn’t Knightsbridge … .
 
I
t was midnight in the police station in Perth, a Thursday night and quiet. In the rest room the three-man standby patrol took it easy, played cards and drank coffee. The mobile patrol Alpha One prowled in the town, crisscrossing the cold, damp streets with its headlights, occasionally coming up on the air in a crackle of hissing static to state its location and pass on desultory situation reports. Nothing much was happening.
Police Sergeant Angus McBride was on desk duty, keeping himself busy by checking out yesterday’s traffic accident reports. Eight more hours before his shift ended and he’d be free to go home, and by the time he got in his wife would already be on her way to work. Hell of a life! Maybe during the coming weekend they’d find some time to do something together.
McBride heard the outer door open and close, heard hesitant, uncertain footsteps cross the floor of the now empty advisory annexe to the door of the Duty Room. He waited expectantly until the buzzer went and a light started flashing over the door, then pressed the electronic release and heard the door click open. McBride watched the figure of a man enter and cross to the desk. Making no attempt just yet to look at his night visitor too closely, the Sergeant wondered what the trouble would be.
A missing person? A lost child? Burglary? Theft? This time of night it was usually a stolen car. Yobs thrown out of the pubs were wont to go joyriding—and sometimes they were wont to smash up the cars they took and kill people with them. The accident report he’d just been checking had been one such case: drunk steals car, mows down old lady. What a bastard!
The stranger had come to a halt now in front of McBride’s slightly elevated desk. They looked at each other. The Sergeant saw a man in an overcoat, tall and blockily built, with dark brown hair, faintly foreign eyes and a mouth without emotion. There was a sort of half-smile hidden in the face, but lacking any genuine warmth. The sergeant gained an impression of strength—rather of power, heat—like a blowtorch on stone. There seemed to be a deal of contradiction in the man. And in that McBride was very observant.
“Can I help you in some way?” he said.
His visitor had scarcely studied McBride at all; he saw just another human being. “Possibly,” he answered. “You’re holding a man called Rodney Clarke Denholm. I’ll be representing him. My name is Jon Bannerman.”
McBride sighed and looked this way and that; he tried hard not to show his disgust. “Do you know what time it is?” he said. “I mean, we don’t usually allow visitors—not even solicitors—at this time of night, Mr. Bannerman.”
“I did phone earlier, at about ten this morning,” Bannerman lied. “I’ve come up from London. Missed several connections due to snow on the rails. And the trains I did manage to catch were all delayed. I’m sorry if I’m putting you to any trouble.”
“You phoned, you say?” McBride opened the telephone book, began to check through the entries.
Bannerman took out his locator, looked at it in the palm of his hand like a man glancing at a pocket calculator. He saw that there were three men in a back room several rooms removed from here, and another man, alone, in one of a block of six cells down a corridor leading off from this control room. That would be Denholm. There was no one else around.
The radio came to life in a sputter of static. “Alpha One,” the caller announced himself, “it’s dead out here. ETA your location figures five minutes, over?”
McBride answered, “Zero, roger so far, over?”
“Alpha One: put the coffee on, out.”
Five minutes
, Sith thought.
It will be enough
.
McBride looked at him again. “Patrol’s coming in,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t find any record of your call. Ten this morning, you say? Nothing here …” He shook his head. “But look, if you care to wait a few minutes until the patrol’s in, one of them will let you in to see Denholm and wait outside until you’re through with him, okay?”
“No.” Bannerman shook his head. “Not okay, and I don’t care to wait. Do you have the keys to Denholm’s cell?”
Suddenly McBride was very much aware of the man’s size. He was big and strong, and seemed wound up as tight as a steel spring. Like a cat ready to leap out from the long grass on some unsuspecting sparrow. “The key?” He inadvertently glanced down at the bunch of keys dangling from his belt.
Bannerman saw the flicker of his eyes and nodded. “I want to see Denholm now. You’ll take me to him and open the door.”
Trouble!
the Sergeant thought, and his hand strayed towards the alert button connected to the standby room. Bannerman’s reactions were lightning fast; he reached across the desk and trapped McBride’s wrist in a fist like a vise; with his free hand he knocked the policeman’s flat-topped cap flying and sank his fingers into his hair, then yanked him bodily up and over the desk, hurling him to the floor. Crashing down on his head and one shoulder, the sergeant was knocked unconscious.
There hadn’t been a lot of noise. Bannerman cocked his head on one side and listened a moment, heard nothing out of the ordinary. He bent down and tore the bunch of keys loose from McBride’s belt, crossed silently to the door to the cells and opened it. And a moment later he stood in the corridor outside the occupied cell.
Denholm woke up when he heard the key grating in the lock. PIe was still lying on his back on a steel bunk bed when Bannerman put on the light and moved to stand beside him. “Rodney Denholm?”
Blinking and rubbing his eyes, Denholm sat up. He clasped his bandaged right arm, which was still stiff from the graze Turnbull’s bullet had given it, and looked at his visitor. “What?” he mumbled. “Yes, I’m Denholm. But who … ?”
Bannerman caught his arm under the shoulder and jerked him to his feet. “You are to come with me,” he said—but even as he spoke, behind him the cell door slammed shut!
Bannerman released Denholm, leaped for the door. He’d left the keys dangling in the lock. Sergeant McBride, weak, staggering and white as a sheet, was trying to coordinate himself sufficiently to turn the key. Barely conscious, he still hadn’t sounded the alert and acted more out of instinct than common sense.
In the upper section of the steel door was a grid of iron bars formed of nine eight-inch squares. Bannerman’s eyes glowed red and his breath began to whoosh. Calling on his construct’s reserves, Sith caused him to reach through the bars with both hands and grab McBride—and commence to drag him through them!
Bannerman’s right hand crushed the policeman’s throat, tore his windpipe and Adam’s apple loose and
into
the cell in a welter of blood and gristle. His left hand hauled on the sergeant’s right arm until it was pulled out of joint at the shoulder. And furiously Bannerman dragged pieces of McBride into the cell, including his head, from which the bars sheared off his ears. Finally, quite dead, the policeman hung there like a mutilated scarecrow, one-third of him on Bannerman’s side of the door.
The door was still unlocked; Bannerman turned the handle and kicked it open; he looked back at Denholm and motioned him into activity. “Out,” he said, his voice cold again and the fires dying in his eyes. “Quietly—and quickly!”
Denholm was frozen to the spot. His mouth had fallen open and his tongue flopped about in his throat, but no words came out. He was trying to scream and couldn’t, gurgling like a man in a bad dream who fights to wake up. And Bannerman saw that he was quite incapable of acting or accepting instructions. He struck him in the stomach and, as he folded, rabbit-punched him unconscious.
From the midnight street outside the police station, Alpha One radioed, “One for Zero, we’re home. Where’s the coffee?” The driver parked up and switched off; he and his Number One got out of the patrol car and entered the police station. As they crossed to the duty room, Bannerman stepped out from behind the door and carrying Denholm across his shoulders vanished into darkness. One of the two constables thought he heard something, turned quickly and looked. But the outer door was already swinging shut.
The other policeman pressed the buzzer for admittance and waited—and waited—and after some little time began to yell.
Eventually the standby patrol sent a member to find out what all the noise was about … .
 
 
Jack Turnbull was sucked through the coffin-shaped door into inky darkness. Then … he was inside a stone water chute, being hurtled like a spider down a plug hole into some monstrous subterranean sump—or into his own personal hell. As suddenly and terrifyingly as his ride had started, so it ended and he was shot out into jet black space … and down into water as thick and as black as midnight mud.
Surfacing, he gulped cold, reeking air into starving lungs, and treading water he turned in a slow circle. In all directions save one there was only darkness, but in that one direction he saw stalactites like stone daggers descending from a domed dripstone ceiling, and a ledge of slimy stone, all fitfully illumined by the flickering yellow flaring of a torch or torches.
And in an instant he was back in that mountain cave in Afghanistan, where his torturers weighed him with rocks and submerged him in the underground river, and left him there for—God, how long?—before hauling him out and questioning him again.
He’d been caught with a Mujehaddin outfit in the hills close to Kabul, disguised as one of them. The Russians had been tipped off: a gunrunner ferrying near-sentient American stingers through to the guerrillas was with them right now in the hills, teaching them how to shoot down Soviet transports out of Kabul. It was their chance to hit back against “foreign intervention” and teach Turnbull and those like him a well-deserved lesson, also to even the score for a lot of dead or missing Russian aircrew.
Whoever it was had blown the whistle, he must be Mujehaddin, one of two men employed as information gatherers, who had occasional jobs in the city. Turnbull had known both of them and one had been a close friend: the big man had saved the guy’s life in a misplanned foray against a Russian fortress down in Zam-indawar. He hoped to God it wasn’t Ali Kandamakh who’d shit on him. Not that it would make much difference now. Turnbull had been the only survivor of the ambush, and only then because the Russians had wanted him alive. But at the same time they hadn’t wanted to dirty their hands, which was why they’d given him to their Afghan puppets, who in turn had handed him over to their torturers … .
Turnbull swam towards the ledge, through water that glopped like glue, and saw in the shadows of stalagmites and stalactites a bearded, flame-eyed crew waiting for him there. And he guessed—no, he knew—that it was going to be the same all over again. He understood the principle of the thing; Gill’s explanation had been one hundred percent correct; the House of Doors was testing them—testing
him
—to the breaking point.
Well, Jack Turnbull hadn’t broken that time in Afghanistan—though he’d been no good for anything since then, except as a tame watchdog to puffed-up clowns—and he certainly wasn’t going to break now. Not now that he knew he was only fighting against himself, against his own worst nightmare. But—
He remembered how it had been: the cold, rushing water, and the rocks holding him there on the bottom, bound hand and foot, feeling the water sluicing by while his lungs screamed for air and his nostrils gaped and his heart pounded in his chest like it was trying to tear itself free and break out!
What did they think he was, these torturers? A pearl diver? A Japanese sponge fisherman? It was all in the mind, he knew—the ability to hold your breath underwater—but those guys did it for a living, and they had the psychological advantage of being able to surface whenever they wanted to. And Jack Turnbull? He had no advantages. Just ropes and rocks and water that wanted to be into him like—like a stiff prick into a willing virgin! Christ, it had no conscience at all, that water … .
And this water was just as bad. It was different but just as bad. It
would be
as bad, when he had no control over it. Stagnant but deep. Thick but cold. Made of a great deal of oxygen, true, but also of far, far too much hydrogen, in a combination just as deadly as sulphuric acid—if you happened to be lying under it. He was closer to the ledge now and could see that the raggedy types waiting for him there had ropes, and rocks in nets. Just the same as before. Or … worse?
Turnbull was suddenly aware of things moving about his legs. Fish? Blindfish? Cavernico-lous catfish come to sniff at this intruder and see if he was edible? He trod water and reached down along his right thigh. Something as big as a plate had fastened itself to him like a giant sticking plaster. He tore it free, brought it up into the light of the torches on the ledge.
Jesus!
The thing was a kind of leech. They were all over his legs, his belly, back and thighs! And over his screams he could hear those bastards on the ledge laughing!
They’d laughed in Afghanistan, too. ‘Four times they’d submerged him, and each time they’d brought him up they’d laughed. But he hadn’t talked, not a word. What good would it do to talk? The sooner he’d let it all out the sooner they’d let him out—all over the floor of the cave. Which was why he’d decided that the next time they sank him in the water, he was just going to open his mouth and drink the fucking stuff. It would be like drinking whisky except it wouldn’t taste so good and would knock him out that much faster—forever! But it was coming anyway and at least this way it would be on his terms.

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