The Portable Door (1987) (20 page)

They dealt with the last item in the strongroom at a quarter past five precisely. Curiously or by coincidence, they’d been given exactly the right number of yellow stickies for the job, with not one left over.

“Right,” Sophie said. “Thank God that’s that done. I’ve had enough of this stupid cellar.”

“Me too,” Paul agreed. “Feels like I’ve been down here for a hundred years.”

“I suppose we’d better cross-reference the red book against our inventory,” Sophie said, with absolutely no enthusiasm whatsoever. “But it can wait till tomorrow, can’t it?”

“Oh, I should think so,” Paul confirmed. Something wasn’t right, he thought again. Just then, there should have been a bond between them, a shared sense of achievement, drawing them closer together. It should have been, Paul knew, a moment. But somehow it wasn’t. He was leaning against a shelving unit; she was sitting on a trunk (Item
445
, containing, according to the red book, the uniform worn by General Raglan at the battle of Balaclava), staring at the door and humming softly under her breath. He’d had occasion to notice before that she could carry a tune to the same extent that lobsters can pilot transatlantic airliners. Not that he minded, in fact he’d made a conscious decision that it was endearing. Nevertheless, Sophie’s mind was clearly elsewhere. He found a stray sheet of blank paper and started folding it into an aeroplane.

“Paul.”

Now that was a first; she hadn’t called him by his name before. He paused in mid-fold.

“Hello?”

“Well—” He knew that she was undecided about something, trying to make up her mind. He dropped the paper aeroplane, not bothering to look and see where it fell. Better late than never; here came the moment, unless he was very much mistaken. “Well,” she repeated, “do you mind if I tell you something? I mean—well, we’re friends, aren’t we? After doing this, and everything. And I’ve got to tell someone.”

“Sure,” Paul said. “Fire away.”

“All right.” She had her back to him, her thin shoulders and long, slim neck outlined against the white paint of the door. “The thing is,” she said, and paused once again. “The thing is, I went to a party yesterday. After all,” she added, with just a tiny hint of extreme, dark, savage bitterness (
Why?
he wondered; and then—
Oh, shit
—he remembered) “I didn’t have anything else to do, as it turned out, so I went to this party. Well, not really a party, I don’t like parties, but this friend of mine, Lucy, she’s just come out of the Army, she was a tank mechanic—anyway, she’s just moved in to a new flat and she asked some friends round, and she wanted me to go so I went. And I met this bloke.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Suddenly Sophie swung round and looked at him. Her face was blank, but her eyes were shining. “His name’s Shaz and he does anarcho-socialist ceramics as a performance art, and he lives in an old bus in a field near Esher, and we talked for hours about all sorts of stupid stuff, and, well, I think I like him a lot.” She stopped abruptly, then went on. “I know, it’s really like stupid and girly, because I’ve got to tell someone, and really I haven’t got a clue if we’re going to have a relationship or not, we haven’t talked about it or anything, but I think it’s sort of likely that we probably will, I don’t know. Anyway,” she added, “you don’t mind me telling you, do you? Because the fact is, you’re probably the closest friend I’ve got, apart from Leeza, but she’s still in the Ukraine, and Rachel, but she’d be all snotty about it, because she doesn’t hold with men at all, and I suppose there’s Harmony, but all she ever wants to talk about these days is the destruction of owl habitats in Northumbria. You don’t mind me telling you, do you?”

“No,” said Paul’s voice, “not at all. Um, great,” Paul’s voice added. “Congratulations, I guess.”

She shrugged, but with great vigour. “Oh, it’s way too early for that,” she said. “I mean, yes, we talked for hours and hours, but then he and a bunch of his friends were going to drive to Stonehenge and watch the sunrise in his bus, and he asked did I want to go too, but I said no, I had to get up for work in the morning, but he said that was all right, like he really didn’t mind, which was really good, I thought, like not making demands or anything. But anyway, he mentioned he was doing a performance tonight at a pub out Denmark Hill way and he said I could come along if I felt like it, so I said yes, all right. So that’s all, really.”

“Great,” said Paul’s voice, sounding like it was coming from a very long way away. “Well, I hope everything, um, I hope it all goes okay. Have a nice time, I mean. And it’s Saturday tomorrow, so you don’t have to get up early—” He made a promise to himself to smack himself round the face with a brick for saying that, as soon as conveniently possible. “Well, great,” he said. “Hope it all works out for you.”

“Thanks.” She nodded. “So, what’re you doing for the weekend? Got anything lined up?”

“Me? Oh, no, nothing much. Thought I might have a lie-in tomorrow, read, do the ironing, relax, just flop around.”
After all
, he added to himself,
what the hell else can I do, when my whole life’s just fallen down a grating and got lost for ever? Some moment
, he thought,
some bloody moment
.

Sophie was looking at him; and if she really could read his mind, possibly what she saw there was bothering her, a bit. There was just a hint in her expression of the look he’d seen in the faces of Duncan and Jenny, the vast, noble compassion of the fixed-up for the eternal unwilling celibate. At another time, in another context, the next thing she’d say would be that there were lots of other fish in the sea.

“So,” he heard himself saying, “he’s into pottery, then? Interesting.”

“Ceramics,” she corrected sharply. “What he does, it’s more like conceptual than, well, useful or anything. He told me all about it. Apparently he learned most of it from a tribe of Tuareg nomads in North Africa, and now he’s applying for a Lottery grant so he can evolve the interactive side of it, hopefully with multimedia and the Internet. Then he’s hoping to go to New Guinea, apparently they’ve got a really exciting tradition of conceptual ceramics there, based around this stuff they use, it’s sort of like a mixture of straw ash, volcanic lava and pig manure, which he wants to try and incorporate into his own work at a fundamental level. But, of course, that all depends on the grants position, so it’s not settled yet.”

Pity
, Paul thought.
How about if I bought a lottery ticket? Loads of lottery tickets? How much does it cost to send one lecherous arsehole to New Guinea, anyway?

“Great,” he said. “So, how long’s he been doing this?”

“About five years,” she said. “As a performance thing, anyway. He started on the pottery ages ago, while he was still in prison. Then he was two years in North Africa after that, and six months in Finland learning to be a shaman, so all told it’s quite a long time, really.”

“I see,” Paul said. “He’s probably pretty good at it by now, then.”

“Oh, yes,” Sophie said. “Well, I haven’t actually seen any of his stuff, but he showed me a couple of albums of photos, and it all looked really amazing.”

“Right,” Paul said. “And that was without the performance, presumably.”

She nodded. “Anyway,” she said, standing up, “we’d better be getting out of here. What is the time, by the way?”

He checked his watch. “Just coming up to ten to six,” he said.

It took about half a second for the implications of that to sink in.

“Shit,” she said crisply. “Let’s just hope they haven’t locked the stupid door yet.”

They hurried up the stairs, walked then ran down the corridor, and burst through the fire door into reception. Nobody there. Sophie raced to the door, shot back the bolts at top and bottom, lifted the Yale catch and tugged at the door. It didn’t move.

“Shit,” she repeated.

“There’s two deadlocks,” Paul pointed out helpfully. “I suppose there might be keys in the desk or something.”

Maybe there were, at that; but the desk drawer was also locked, so they never had a chance to find out. “Now what do we do?” Paul asked, helplessly.

Sophie wrenched at the door one more time, then kicked it. “This is
stupid
,” she said. “All right, there’s got to be someone in the building. I mean, aren’t the partners in a firm like this supposed to work late every night, and all through weekends? Or there’s the cleaners,” she added. “We’ve just got to wait till they show up—”

“Unless they don’t come in till the morning,” Paul said. “Or even until after the weekend. What I mean is, we don’t know they’ll come tonight.”

“Fuck.” Sophie gave the door another kick. “Well, there’s got to be a side door or something like that. A fire escape,” she added triumphantly. “Got to have fire escapes, it’s the law.”

Paul nodded enthusiastically. “You’re right,” he said. “Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where are they? Only, I don’t remember ever seeing one.”

“Well, of course there’s fire escapes—” She hesitated, frowning. “Actually, neither do I. Mind you, there’s lots of bits of this building I haven’t been in yet. We’ll have to look. That’s if we can’t find someone to let us out, of course.” Paul could see her forcing herself to relax; it was like watching a small child holding back a huge, frisky dog on a long lead. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to bust a window or something.”

Paul was horrified. “We can’t do that,” he said. “They’ll fire us.”

“So?”

“So…” He stopped short. He couldn’t possibly explain why he didn’t dare risk losing this job; though of course all that had changed now, presumably. “They’ll fire us,” he repeated.

“Fine.” She scowled at him so ferociously he could feel his skin tanning. “All right, I’ll break a window and go home, you can stay here all night and explain that it wasn’t your idea and you didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“Sorry,” Paul said automatically. “I mean, before you go doing anything like that, let’s see if we can find Mr Tanner or somebody.”

“Why Mr Tanner?”

“I don’t know,” Paul admitted. “It’s just that the day I came in early, he was already in here, before the door was unlocked. So maybe he stays late.”

She thought about that, and nodded. “All right,” she said, “we’ll try his office first. Come on.” She stormed out of reception like a scale model of the
Bismarck
breaking out of the Denmark Straits, and Paul jogged along after her. He didn’t like the situation at all, but probably, he felt, for different reasons. For one thing, she hadn’t seen the red eye peering out through the letter-box flap.

Mr Tanner wasn’t in his office, that was the first thing they noticed. The second was the mess. Papers everywhere; on the floor, on the chair, piled up in heaps as though someone had thrown them up in the air and then jumped on them. The other chair had been knocked over. Also, Paul noticed but didn’t mention, there were several gaps in the tomahawk collection on the wall.

“Maybe he’s in the photocopy room,” Sophie said. “We’ll try there.” Either she hadn’t noticed the mess; or, more likely in Paul’s view, she’d decided there wasn’t time for worrying about side issues. She took half a dozen steps towards the door, then stopped. Footsteps outside, in the corridor; someone running. Or rather—Paul scrabbled in his memory for the right word. Scampering.

“That’s all right, then,” Sophie said. “Hello? Hello—”

The footsteps stopped, as she reached the door and put her fingers to the handle. Something about the sound must have got through to her, because she hesitated. They listened to the footsteps coming back. More than one of whoever it was.

Sophie said, “I don’t—”

—And then the door flew open. It hit her hard on the side of the head, and she fell sideways. Paul moved forward, then stopped in his tracks, gawping helplessly. In the doorway stood something utterly unlike anything he’d ever seen before, except maybe in a book, when he’d been very young. Up to a point, it was a bit like a tall, thin monkey, except that it was wearing clothes—a leather jerkin, and over that a chain-mail shirt, black steel red with rust, and on its head a round steel helmet that was too small and the wrong shape generally. In its left hand it clutched a short axe—one of Mr Tanner’s tomahawks, Paul guessed, though he really wasn’t too bothered about details. It had the face of a pig, and little round red eyes that he was sure he knew from somewhere.

“Bloody hell,” Paul whispered.

The creature—the hell with it, Paul decided, he’d call it what it was. The goblin saw him and stopped dead, like a startled cat. Another goblin, more or less similar but more ape- than pig-faced, appeared behind it and pulled up sharply, peering over its shoulder. They stood quite still, watching him. He watched back. He was, of course, scared out of his wits (to his shame, he could feel something warm and wet trickling down his inside leg, but there wasn’t time to feel bad about that); but somehow he knew that of the four life forms in the room, he wasn’t the most terrified, not by some considerable margin. While this thought was crossing his mind, he noticed that the back goblin was holding a short, wide bladed spear, and both of them had claws where there should have been fingernails.
Claw-marks
, an isolated part of his subconscious duly noted,
that clears that up
.

He had an urgent feeling that moving, at least before the goblins did, wasn’t a good idea; likewise, breaking eye contact. He had no idea why, it was just something he knew, in the same way that he could point accurately at the corner of the room with his eyes shut. He wanted very much to see if Sophie was all right, but that would mean shifting his eyes a fraction to the right, and that simply wouldn’t do. He was stuck.

So, apparently, were the goblins. At any rate, neither of them was moving or breaking eye contact either. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any reason why the three of them shouldn’t stay exactly as they were until nine o’clock on Monday morning; assuming, that was, that no fourth party intervened to break the spell.

Sadly, life wasn’t like that. From some other part of the building, downstairs by the sound of it, came a loud crash, followed by an outburst of chattery screaming, like a million monkeys trying to dictate the works of Shakespeare into a tape recorder. Paul nearly jumped out of his skin; so did the goblins, but apparently this was just their reaction to Paul’s sudden movement. Either they knew what the noise was, or it didn’t bother them. Maybe it even reassured them. In any event, while