The House of Doors - 01 (30 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The House of Doors - 01
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Then one of the bastards had yelled: “I spicking English! I insulting you in your own tongue pig-bastard shit-eater!” And Turnbull had known the voice, and when its owner came closer, he’d known the gap-toothed, wicked grin, too! Ostensibly checking his ropes where they bound his hands behind him, the Afghan had sliced them through and pressed the knife into Turnbull’s eager hand. God bless you Ali Kandamakh, you old mountain wolf! And a moment later they’d kicked him back into the underground river.
Down on the bottom he’d freed his feet, sliced through the ropes which bound him to the weighted nets; then clung tight to the bundles of stones, waiting for them to drag him out again. And when at last they did … this time Turnbull had been the one with the psychological advantage.
He’d come out of the water like a salmon and into them like a knife. Exactly like a knife! Ali took one and Turnbull two, which left the one who put his knife in Ali’s back and through his heart. Then Turnbull got that one, too, and it was over. All over for Ali.
After that … Turnbull had been into the hills and gone like a ghost, listening to the choppers overhead until nightfall, then heading for the big rebel camp up in the Hindu Kush.
A month later and he’d been back in London … .
But all of that had been nine years ago and this was now. And now as then these jokers on the ledge
thought
they had the advantage. For which reason Turnbull screamed his throat raw and tore more of the leeches off his body and
begged
them with every gasped breath to drag him up out of this scummy soup. They had knives, too, just like the ones his Afghan torturers had had. (Of course, for that was his recurring nightmare, from which he still hadn’t managed to free himself.) But when they saw his terror—the fact that he was totally unmanned—they relaxed a little and some of them put their knives away.
Not the one who reached down a hand to him, though; no, for that one kept his long, curved knife handy just in case. He reached a hand down to Turnbull, but at the same time showed him his dully glinting knife. Turnbull came half up out of the scum, tightened his grip on the man’s hand, braced his feet against the ledge—and yanked! He yanked himself up and his yelping would-be torturer down! And as that grimacing scarecrow fell, so Turnbull snatched his knife from him and sprang at the others on the ledge.
Oh, there were too many of them to make a go of it; he could only hope to slow them down a little, put the fear of Christ into them; but nonetheless he was like a lion amongst lambs while it lasted. He gutted one and hacked the throat out of another, and then he was off and running through the dripstone maze, following a path of flaring flambeaux. And as he went, so he cut down the torches and stamped them out on the dusty floor, leaving only smoke and reeking darkness, screams and shouted oaths in his wake. Then, as he passed through the last of the stalactites where the stone ceiling came down low and the cave bottlenecked—
—The way was blocked! It had been a tunnel, but now it was plugged with a mighty slab of black stone. One last torch flared where it lit the plug with its yellow light. And Turnbull saw that the slab of stone had … a knocker? A knocker, yes, in the form and shape of a huge iron question mark!
Footsteps pounded behind him and a ragged panting that seemed to sound right in his ear. He tore loose the last leech from his ribs and turned, ducked, slammed the thing like a wad of bloody red dough into a snarling heathen face, then leaped for the knocker—
—And knocked … !
 
A
ngela slept. She hadn’t intended it when she’d climbed the tree, but once at the top and when she’d seen the great soft cup formed at the heart of the palmlike branches, then she’d known that she had to sleep. Her reason for climbing the tree had been simple: to spy out the land around. To see if any of the Rod Denholms had picked up her trail. And if they had, to choose the best direction in which to run from them.
For this was her nightmare world, the world of her very blackest dream: a beautiful world marred only by the presence of her bestial, lusting, loathsome husband. Made so much more monstrous by the fact that there were dozens of him!
The climb had been easy. Like a palm, the bole of the tree had been regularly serrated where older branches had died and fallen away. The horny, cusped stumps of these shed branches had been hard on her now naked feet, but that had been the least of Angela’s concerns; she’d learned as the others had learned that wounds healed quickly in these worlds created by the House of Doors; and in any case, torn feet would seem a blessing in comparison with the tearing her body would suffer if the Rods caught her.
But at the top of the long, gracefully bending trunk where the new branches grew out in a great fan to droop like exotic green and yellow plumage—in the very heart of the hugely spread leaves—there she’d seen the central cup and had gratefully settled her scratched, bruised and bloodied body into it. Lesser fronds angling inwards overhead had provided shade from the sun, and a breeze off the achingly blue sea had served to cool the fever of her body—but not of her heart and soul. For despite all of its undeniable beauty, this jewel world had proved beyond the slightest doubt that it was also capable of the utmost horror!
Before allowing herself the luxury of sleep (which her mazed and staggering mind needed, if not her poor body) Angela had thought back a little on the somewhat blurred sequence of events she’d experienced since her arrival here.
Of the arrival itself:
Sucked out of Varre’s claustrophobic, crushing rock tomb by her own sarcophagus door, Angela had found herself thrown down in shallow salt water on the rim of an ocean so perfect as to make the loveliest oceans of Earth seem dull. Washed in soft, white-foaming wavelets, she’d come reeling to her feet on sand as white as marble, on a beach where a million alien shells lay drying in the warmth of a golden alien sun.
And at once she’d known that she was not alone here, for there on the beach were fresh footprints in the sand, and out in the shallows—
A dark head bobbed like a cork on the gentle swell! At first her heart had given a great leap inside her. She’d thought:
Spencer!
Or perhaps Jack Turnbull! Anderson? Then the swimmer had turned to face her—to see her and come swimming in towards the beach—and as he’d climbed up out of the waves she’d realised the full cruelty, the perversity, of the House of Doors. For it wasn’t Gill or Turnbull or Anderson but her husband, Rod Denholm. Strong, handsome, leering Rod Denholm, his eyes turning to slits as the frown lifted from his forehead and he smiled … one of
his
smiles!
Naked, even as he’d splashed up out of the shallows towards her his lust had become apparent, and his face had twisted into that same vile mask she’d seen him wear so many times before.
She was a woman, alone on a world of her own making (or if not of her making, inhabited by her fears) and now for the first time she felt a woman’s weakness. It had been different when the others were there, all in the same boat, all pitting their wits against whatever it was that controlled them. Even in the darkest circumstances they’d given each other strength, hope to carry on, companionship of sorts. Yes, even with Haggie there had been that. Oh, he had been much of a kind with Rod—in
that
respect, anyway—but however he might have misused her, Angela doubted that he’d have killed her. But Rod was something else. That look on his face said it all: he would take her, repeatedly and savagely, and
then
kill her!
At that point she might simply have given in, surrendered herself to whatever fate was waiting—which would have signalled the end. Thone directives would have come into operation and the game would have been over; the synthesizer would have removed her from this world—or this world from Angela—and recorded her failure; all memory of her travails with Gill and the others would have been erased and she would be returned to her own place and rightful existence no worse off. All of these things would have been …
if
the normal rules had applied. But they no longer applied. The directives had been overruled: Sith demanded that failure be paid for in full. Clayborne had failed, and “died”; likewise Varre, a terrible, unthinkable death; and now the girl. Except she wasn’t about to give in.
For as the Denholm clone came lolling arrogantly up the beach, his arms already reaching, Angela had remembered what Turnbull had said to Gill just a few minutes ago (a few
minutes
! God!) as the rock walls closed to crush them: “It won’t be finished until we break,” he’d said. “So for fuck’s sake don’t break now!”
For fuck’s sake? A certain irony in that!
She’d backed away from the advancing Denholm, tripped and fallen on her backside—but as he sprang she’d hurled sand straight into his glittering, lusting eyes!
“Don’t break now!”
Turnbull’s words kept repeating in her brain as she ran for the palm-fringed forest where the sand turned to loamy soil.
“Don’t break now!”
For somewhere in this place—on the surface of this planet—there would be another cross section, another projection, another manifestation of the House of Doors. And while there were other places into which she might escape, then she wasn’t finished yet.
And not once had she asked herself how Rod came to be here: as well ask who was Bannerman? What was he? Or a dozen other of the hundreds of questions she felt rushing through her whirling head. No use asking who this—facsimile?—was; she knew
what
he was and what he would do. He’d told her clearly enough on the telephone that time, hadn’t he? And even if he was only part of her nightmare—no,
because
he was that nightmare—she knew that he or it would do it.
She’d looked back once and seen him staggering and stamping on the beach, clawing at his eyes and screaming her name with Rod’s voice. “Angela! Oh, you bitch—
Angela
! Run, sweetheart, run—but I’ll find you.
We’ll
find you, Angela!”
The “we” had made no sense to her, not then. But in the forest, shortly, and suddenly, it would.
As she entered the cover of the trees, so beyond them she’d seen green mountains rising through a ragged tree line to yellow and ochre peaks bathing in warm sunlight. Since there seemed little chance of finding the House of Doors in the woods or along the beach, she determined to cut straight through the trees to the mountains. At least from up there she’d have an excellent view of the land all around; and if the thing she sought was to be found (in whatever shape or form it would take this time) then perhaps she’d see it.
Also (it had dawned on her) in each of the episodes or on each world so far visited, she and the others had come upon the House of Doors almost without trying. And usually just as they were reaching the borders of human limitations. So that she’d wondered:
Is that the way this game is played?
Well, if it was, then she hadn’t reached her limit yet—not nearly.
The trick of it was not to break. To win one must first play, and give it all one had. Gill wouldn’t break, she knew that. Nor Turnbull. And she wondered where were they now, especially Spencer Gill. Was he in a fix as bad as hers? Probably, for that seemed to be the nature of the thing. But at that stage she still hadn’t known exactly how bad her fix was … .
The whipping branches of trees and shrubs lashed and cut her where she burst through them; vines tripped her and pitched her headlong into the mud beside a stream; the stains of pulpy exotic plants tinted her body where she fell amongst them, crushing their leaves and flowers. And the air rasped in her throat and lungs as she drove her body to even greater excesses—to such excesses that she really couldn’t believe that this was Angela Denholm at all, performing like an athlete!
And yet she knew that while this was her nightmare, still it wasn’t a dream but a
living
nightmare. It was as real as all the rest of it had been. For however vivid the dream, and however true it may seem, dreaming pain is not an easy thing to do. Dreams may hurt emotionally, but rarely physically. And in this place—and in just about every place—Angela hurt like hell!
Then she’d come across the river, a broad belt of glistening water flowing between well-formed banks and over a pebble bed, and the sight of it had given her a big boost. She was a fair swimmer and knew she could make it across if she just took her time and moved diagonally with the river downstream; but the beauty of it was that this was sweet, clean, deep
water
! And if any woman had ever felt that she needed a bath—not to mention a drink—that woman was Angela Denholm.
Her bra had finally had to go; it had suffered and was no longer as form-hugging as a swim costume; its cups would act as brakes. Spencer’s now tattered shirt would tuck down inside what little remained of her ski pants. And that was that, the sum of her otherworldly possessions! Bare-breasted she’d taken to the water, and almost swooning from sheer pleasure and relief as it laved her cuts and bruises, swum out across the placid deeps. In a little while she’d felt the current take her; not fighting it she’d simply gone along, at the same time gradually cutting through it towards the opposite bank.
This was a tropical world, however, and Angela did worry a little about cannibal fishes or perhaps crocodiles; but since she personally had never considered these to be “nightmarish” creatures but simply “things of nature,” her fears were not exaggerated. Nor for that matter had been her fear of Rod—not now that she was clean away from him—but two-thirds of the way across, that had been about to change.
“Angelaaa!” The long halloo had echoed out mockingly over the river, disturbing dragonflies where they skipped the water. But … it had sounded from in front of her! Impossible! How could Rod have crossed the river ahead of her? Angela trod water, lifting herself up to scan the bank ahead. And there he was, naked, rampant, stepping down into the river and wading to meet her. “Sweetheart,” he’d called. “I can see you’re all ready for me. Those lovely firm breasts of yours—but they’ll be puffy purple bags when we’re through, Angela my love!”
That “we” again—or did he simply mean he and she? Then, this time from behind her: “Don’t swim so hard, Angela. Why waste your strength on running and swimming? You’re going to need all the strength you can find in a little while, Angela.”
She’d churned wildly in the water, losing her rhythm, caught up in a suddenly strengthening current. And then behind her she’d seen a second Rod Denholm—or the first?—even now diving cleanly into the water from the far bank.
Two
of them? And now it was a nightmare and she felt herself squeezed in the grip of sheerest terror.
Spun dizzily by the quickening current, she saw more Rods on the banks: displaying themselves as he had used to do, or simply waving at her and smiling their leering smiles, or diving into the river. A dozen of him. Two dozen!
Upriver, heads had bobbed and powerful arms knifed the water; she’d turned downstream, deliberately driven herself into the fastest-flowing part of the current, been swept away from him and him and—
Only her will had kept her going then. Her will to survive, to win. He hadn’t got her in her own world and he wouldn’t get her in this one. Not while there was an ounce of strength left in her. Ahead of her she’d been aware of white water, a foaming, but whatever was there had to be better than what was behind. Now she made no effort to swim, was simply swept along unresisting to her fate—but at least not
that
fate.
Behind her the Rods were swimming back towards the banks, but it was too late for Angela to do the same. The current had her, was racing her back towards the sea. She remembered then how she’d climbed up from the beach through the forest. It had been the steepness of her climb which gave the river its impetus. Ahead, black shining rocks broke the surface; between them passed a tumult of tossing water; the rocks had rushed closer and she’d slipped through—into space. Torn air and rushing water and the roaring of the falls! And then the downward plunge into cool, green depths that galvanised her once more, sending her swimming underwater away from the falls, to surface in comparatively placid waters some little way beyond.
Exhausted, she’d flopped over onto her back and floated, and up there at the crest of spray-wreathed cliffs had seen a line of Rods like soldiers on the wall of a fortress, all following her progress. Then the river had taken her round an overgrown bend and the trees and foliage had intervened to separate her from the view of her tormentors; and ahead, shortly, the forest gradually opened to ocean, and the river swept grandly to the sea … .

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