The Portable Door (1987) (40 page)

“With respect,” Pip said quietly, “I don’t see how falling out with each other is going to help. Besides, as Carpenter here’s just pointed out, you had no way of knowing—”

“Shut
up
,” Sophie shouted. “When I say it’s all my stupid fault, why the hell won’t anybody believe me? None of this’d have happened if I hadn’t put that stupid philtre in his tea—”

“You did what?” Paul said.

“Oh.”

Paul was scowling horribly. “You put that stuff in my tea? For crying out loud, what did you want to go and do that for? I know you aren’t interested in me, but why in God’s name did you want me to go falling in love with that bloody goblin?”

Sophie gave him a look you could have stored main-moths in. “What goblin?” she said.

And then Paul figured it out.

Oh
, he thought; and then,
oh shit
, because—And, just to add the whipped cream and the glacé cherry on top, he had a sneaking feeling that it was no coincidence, Arthur’s second name being Tanner. “You know,” he said, “
her
. The one I told you about. The receptionist.”

“Oh.” Sophie’s eyes widened. “Oh, you thought—”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

The two clerks had gone bright pink, and were pretending to be utterly fascinated by a scrap of cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. “So it was you who—” Paul said.

“That’s right.”

“Because you—”

“Yes.”

“
Oh
.”

Of course, what he should probably have done was throw his arms around her and say, “But you didn’t have to, I love you anyway.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he wobbled, grabbed the back of his chair to keep himself from falling over, and said, “Bloody hell.” He realised while he was saying it that it wasn’t quite the most felicitous speech he’d ever made, but by then it was too late.

Sophie was staring at the scrap of rug visible between her feet. “I suppose I ought to say sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?” Paul echoed helplessly.

“Yes, all right, I know it’s not going to do a blind bit of good saying sorry, and obviously you’re going to hate me for ever and ever, but—”

“What’s there to be sorry about?” Paul said. “That’s
wonderful
.”

Over her shoulder, Paul could see the two clerks cringing.
The hell with them
, he thought. “No it’s
not
,” Sophie insisted, “it’s a total disaster, and it’s all my—”

“For God’s sake, Sophie. Shut up.” He jumped up to go to her, caught his foot in a fold of the rug, and fell heavily against Pip’s knees. Pip yowled with pain, and lashed out reflexively, hitting Paul on the nose with the heel of his hand. Then Sophie hit Pip with a chair.

“What the bloody hell’s going on?” said a bewildered-sounding voice from over by the window. All of them swung round, and saw the goblin, Mr Tanner’s mum, sitting up on the bed and staring at them.

Well at one of them.

“Arthur?” she said.

The clerk called Arthur gaped back at her; and then something seemed to click into place.

“Rosie?” he whispered.

Paul wasn’t completely on the ball, what with the angels singing and the bluebirds zooming about overhead and the sun coming out from behind the clouds and all that sort of thing, but he could still hop to the more obvious conclusions; and the manner in which the curly-haired clerk whose name was Tanner and Mr Tanner’s mum hurled themselves into each others’ arms with a crash like a lorry hitting a pillar box seemed to suggest he wasn’t too wide of the mark, at that.

“Sweetheart!” sobbed the clerk.

“Honeypetal,” crooned Mr Tanner’s mum.

Sophie nudged Paul in the ribs. “What the hell’s going on?” she whispered.

“Shh,” Paul replied. “Apparently, that’s our Mr Tanner’s dad.”

“But she’s a—”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

Paul shifted slightly, so as to avoid any risk of seeing what Mr Tanner’s mum and Arthur the clerk were getting up to. “Forget about them,” he said. “Did you really put that stuff in my tea?”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “Look, would you mind not going on about that? Only—”

“Only what?”

She frowned. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, and kissed him.

Compared with what was happening on the other side of the room, it was no big deal. Children and people of a nervous disposition could have witnessed it with no lasting damage. As far as Paul was concerned, however, it was without doubt the most amazing thing that had ever happened in the whole history of the universe; so it was hardly surprising that the other clerk, Pip, had to tap him on the shoulder several times before he managed to get his attention.

“Excuse me,” said Pip, “but would you mind awfully not doing that? I mean, if we’ve got to spend all eternity cooped up in here together—well, for one thing, I’m going to feel just a bit left out, if you see what I mean.”

All eternity; just then, Paul couldn’t see anything particularly wrong with all eternity being much like the moment he’d been interrupted in the middle of. Even so, he could see Pip’s point, and so, apparently, could Sophie. The same couldn’t be said of Arthur and Mr Tanner’s mum, but there didn’t seem to be a lot that any of them could do about that, even with buckets of cold water.

“I suppose we could use the curtains to close off that half of the room,” Sophie said. “But that wouldn’t solve the problem of the noises—”

“I heard that,” growled Mr Tanner’s mum. “Should be ashamed of yourselves, bloody perverts. It’s all right,” she added, “you can turn round now.”

Paul wasn’t so sure about that, and stayed where he was. “Sorry,” he said. “Only—”

“Yes, all right, I get the message. More to the point, we’d like a bit of privacy, if it’s all the same to you. I think we need to get out of here.”

“Really,” Sophie said. “What a brilliant idea. Maybe you could tell us how.”

“Sarky.” Mr Tanner’s mum sighed. “Actually,” she said, “it’s dead easy for you two.”

This time, Paul did turn round. “What? How?”

“Not so fast,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied. “First, you’ve got to promise me you’ll come back and let us out.”

“Yes, of course,” Sophie said. “So what’ve we got to do?”

“Simple. I’m assuming you’ve both had your little chat with Ricky Wurmtoter?”

It took a second or so for Paul to figure out what she was referring to. “Oh, you mean when he gave us—”

“The prefect badges, that’s right,” Mr Tanner’s mum said. “He’s a good boy, young Ricky, he’ll have you out of here in two shakes. Just press the badge and yell
help
, and you’ll be back in the office before you can say employers’ liability insurance.”

Sophie was fumbling for her badge already, but Paul hesitated. “Back in the office,” he repeated.

“That’s right. Simple counter-inversion, same as you’d use if you’d lost your car keys.”

“Fine,” Paul said. “But if we go straight back to the office, how do we rescue you? The door’s still on the train.”

Mr Tanner’s mum hadn’t thought of that. “Shit,” she said.

Long silence; during which Mr Tanner’s mum sat down in the big armchair with her head in her hands, while the two clerks stood by looking embarrassed. Finally, Sophie said, “Well, I can see that’s awkward for you three, but really, that’s no reason why Paul and I’ve got to stay here. Look, when we get back, maybe we could ask Mr Wurmtoter if he knows how to get you out of here. Or we could go to the lost-property office at Euston, see if this door thing gets handed in. What is this door thing, anyhow?” she added.

Mr Tanner’s mum called her a rude name. Sophie replied in kind, and things would probably have got rather fraught if Paul hadn’t said, “Excuse me,” three times, followed by, “SHUT UP!”, once.

“I’ve had an idea,” he said.

§

Much to Paul’s surprise, it worked.

Not that he enjoyed it, not one bit. The counter-inversion got them back to the office just fine, but the sensation—the nearest Paul could ever get to describing it was a bit like being sneezed out of God’s nostril, only backwards—was no fun at all; neither, though in a different way, was hurtling through the clouds ten thousand feet above the ground on the back of Mr Wurmtoter’s milk-white winged horse. Sure, it was fast, and it seemed to know the way without having to be steered or anything; and he supposed, as they soared over Birmingham at several times the speed of sound, that it was nice of Mr Wurmtoter to lend them the horrible animal. On balance, though, he’d rather have walked.

The horse dropped them both on the platform at Stafford just as the train started to pull in. It didn’t hang about, and for some reason or other, all the other people on the platform were looking the other way. As soon as the train came to a halt, they shoved through the nearest door and ran down the corridor, just in time to see the portable door being shovelled into a cleaner’s black plastic sack. Paul hesitated, but Sophie pushed past him, snatched it out, grabbed Paul by the arm and dragged him off the train just as it pulled away.

“There,” she said, as they stood panting on the platform. “
Now
will you tell me what this stupid thing does?”

So Paul told her. Her first reaction was to be bitterly hurt and offended that he hadn’t mentioned it before. He had no reply to that. But there was one thing he had to say, before they went any further.

“Listen,” he said. “If you want to, you can go back in time—I’ll stay here and keep the door open for you—and stop yourself putting that stuff in my tea. If you want to, I mean. If you’ve thought better of it, or something like that.”

She looked at him, with rather more of the old Sophie in her expression than he’d have liked. “Why?” she said.

“Oh, I just thought—”

“That’d be
stupid
,” she interrupted. “Because then we wouldn’t have been trapped in that strange room, and we’d never have found those two clerk people, and so they’d never have a chance of being rescued, so they’d have to stay there for ever and ever, and that disgusting goblin woman would never get her boyfriend back, and—” She stopped. “And anyway,” she went on, “I’d still love you, even if I didn’t spike your tea with the philtre stuff. So there wouldn’t be any point, would there?”

“No,” Paul said. “I just thought—”

“Don’t,” Sophie said. “Right, you’d better do whatever it is you do with this thing. And hurry up, people are staring.”

This time, Sophie stayed behind to make sure the door was kept open. Paul went through, and sure enough, there was the room, more or less as they’d left it, except that the two clerks and Mr Tanner’s mum were sitting round a table playing cards. For some reason, neither of the clerks was wearing any clothes.

“Strip canasta,” Mr Tanner’s mum explained, as the two clerks dressed hurriedly. “You were gone such a long time, we had to find something to do to amuse ourselves.”

“Fine,” Paul said. “Now, can we get a move on, please?”

“Spoilsport,” Mr Tanner’s mum said, and she led the way, followed by Arthur, followed by Pip, still struggling with his bootlaces. But when Arthur tried to cross the threshold—“I’m stuck,” he said.

Mr Tanner’s mum clicked her tongue. “For crying out loud,” she said, “this is no time for stupid jokes.”

“It’s not a joke,” said Arthur in a tragic voice. “I can’t move. I’m stuck.”

Mr Tanner’s mum reached out a long, scaly arm, grabbed him by the elbow and heaved. Arthur yelled like a cat being skinned alive, but didn’t budge.

Mr Tanner’s mum went a pale shade of aquamarine. “How about you?” she asked Pip. “You try.”

But Pip couldn’t pass through the door either. “It’s that bastard Humphrey,” Mr Tanner’s mum snarled. “He’s put a lock on the flicking door.” Then she sat down on the platform tarmac and burst into tears. Paul and Sophie looked at her, then back at the door. It had snapped shut, gone limp and fallen off the wall.

They tried to set it up again, but it wouldn’t stick; it just kept rolling sadly down again, like misbehaving wallpaper. Eventually, they saw a guard approaching with a policeman, and decided it was time to leave. The last thing they needed, they decided, was for Mr Tanner’s mum to start disembowelling people in broad daylight in a public place.

“It’s a lock,” Mr Tanner’s mum explained, as they walked slowly down the street away from the station. “Just like any other sort of lock, except it only affects certain people, the ones you want to keep in, and of course you can’t see it.”

“Fine,” Paul said. “So if it’s just a lock, is there a key?”

“Sure,” Mr Tanner’s mum said, with a grim laugh. “The problem’s finding it. Obviously, that bastard Humphrey’s got it, and you can bet your knicker elastic he won’t have left it lying about. It’ll be in a
very
safe place, you can rely on that.”

They sat down on a bench under a tree. Mercifully, Mr Tanner’s mum had abandoned her goblin shape in favour of something a little bit less ostentatious—only marginally, as the whistles she prompted as they passed a building site amply testified. Paul assumed she was only doing it to annoy Sophie. Successfully.

“Actually,” Mr Tanner’s mum went on, “it’s worse than that, because there’s two keyholes on that stupid door thing, so there’s got to be two keys, which means it’ll be twice as hard tracking them down. And,” she continued gloomily, “knowing Humphrey they won’t be nice straightforward knobbly bits of brass, either, they’ll be disguised as something, or there’ll be some sort of stupid test you have to pass or thing you’ve got to do before you can get at them or make them work. He’s a terror for that sort of thing is Humphrey. I remember when we first got the hot-drinks machine, and he put a spell on it so only the pure in heart could get it to do coffee, milk and two sugars. I told him, I said, pure in heart, around here, you must be—”

“Just a moment,” Paul interrupted. “A test, you said.”

“That’s right. Or there was the time when he fixed the fax machine so only the seventh son of a seventh son could change the toner cartridge. Now it just so happens that Ricky Wurmtoter
is
a seventh son, but of course he’s not always around, a lot of the time he’s off on a job somewhere, and it’s bloody inconvenient—”

“A test,” Paul repeated. “Like in fairy tales and stuff.”