Doorways (A Book of Vampires, Werewolves & Black Magic) (The Doorways Trilogy - Book One)

by Tim O'Rourke

  He looked across the bar and up at the landing that ran around the upper level of the saloon. He stared at the many doors that led from it. His eyes burnt as he remembered her standing there outside the room they had shared. They were to be married, but Meadda had long since left the town of Tux and he didn’t know where she had fled or even if she were still alive.

  Gritting his teeth he turned, and pushing a table out of his way, he went to the far corner of the bar where the piano had once been played. He looked back over his shoulder just to make sure that he wasn’t being watched. Tanner did this more out of habit then need as there was just the seven of them hiding out in Tux and he hadn’t seen anyone pass this way in months. Confident that he wasn’t being spied on, Tanner pulled away a panel that was secreted into the wall. Brushing away a veil of cobwebs, he placed his mouth up against the opening and whispered into the darkness:

  ‘Hey! You down there! Get your kit together. Our wait is over. I believe it’s started to happen!’

  As Tanner stepped through the doorway into Endra, Fandel slithered up against the remains of his car. He watched the police officers race back and forth like feeble minded farmyard animals, not one of them the faintest idea as what to do.

  Fandel arched his back and rubbed at his temples.

  ‘My doorway! I must be able to see my door,’ he whined.

  Closing his eyes, he pictured his black iron door with the doorknob that looked like a deformed fist. But there was just too much noise. Those blasted sirens approaching from the distance were distracting him. He needed a certain amount of tranquillity if he was to conjure his doorway to Endra. Fandel needed his most favourite chair and he needed the warmth of the fireplace.

  ‘I need some god-damn peace and quiet!’ he screeched at no-one in particular, rolling his hands into fists and slamming them against the road like a spoilt child.

  Closing his eyes again, he fought to block out the distractions that were all around him. Then, in the darkness of his mind, he could see it. The door stood at the end of a long corridor that bored its way into the deepest and darkest part of his mind. He staggered towards it like a man dying of thirst who could see a stream in the distance.

  ‘Come closer!’ he screeched, as police cars, ambulances and fire trucks arrived on scene.

  ‘Come closer,’ he begged again, ‘I need to be away from here!’

  Inside his mind, he reached for the door handle that beckoned him forward. Fandel placed his bony hands over his ears and screwed up his eyes as he fought to concentrate on that door.

  ‘Don’t you disappear on me now!’ he roared at it as if it were a living thing.

  ‘Hey look at that crazy!’ someone in the crowd shouted, ‘what’s he doing?’

  Hearing this, some of the other spectators turned to watch Fandel as he staggered around in the middle of the chaos like a kid playing a game of ‘Pin the tail to the donkey’.

  ‘What’s his problem?’ someone yelled.

  Inside his head, Fandel had reached his doorway and taken hold of that fist as if he were holding on to it for dear life. But the door wouldn’t open. There was still too much noise for him to picture it.

  ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ he screamed.

  The onlookers turned on their camera phones as they filmed this very tall man with the misshapen back and narrow face pull and yank at thin air.

  ‘He’s insane!’ a woman jeered. What a morning! A werewolf, giant bat, giggling boy and disappearing doorways. What could happen next? She wondered.

  Then as if in answer to her question a black metal fist appeared out of nowhere, snatched hold of the madman’s wrist and dragged him into thin air.

  Screaming, Fandel was dragged into Endra. Passing between the doorways had never hurt before. In fact, he had found it exhilarating, almost addictive, but this time around it had hurt. Fandel lay in the sand and gasped for breath. He felt as if he had been turned inside out and he patted himself just to make sure that his lungs, heart and intestines weren’t hanging from his coat.

  Why am I in so much pain? he wondered, thrusting one skinny hand into his mouth to stop himself from throwing-up.

  Perhaps it was because the door wasn’t complete before me? he guessed. Fandel realised that if he were to avoid such an agonising experience again, he would have to work on, and master, conjuring his door quick and in whatever circumstance he happened to find himself in at the time.

  Things had started to go from bad to worse, and he knew deep in his wrinkled heart that he was losing control over events. He couldn’t rely on being in the comfortable surroundings of his cottage if he was to pass into Endra. He might need to do it anywhere now. He might have to conjure the door while on the run.

  But what should I do now? he thought, his head pounding again.

  ‘Stop it!’ he hissed, tapping his temples with the tips of his fingers, ‘Don’t you dare start thumping!’

  ‘Should I go straight to Throat?’ he wondered. ‘But what would I tell him about this mess?’

  He ran the back of his hand across his brow that glimmered in the hot sun rising above him.

  ‘What about Anna? I need to get back and give her some medicine!’

  Then he saw something that made up his mind for him. Crouching on all fours, Fandel hid himself behind some rocks that jutted from the sand and spied over the top of them. He licked the taste of sea salt from his lips as he watched Zach and his friends fighting for their lives in the murky waves that rushed the shore below.

  Chapter 25

  Zach kicked his legs against the water, but it felt thick and gloopey, like slush. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he struggled to keep his head above the waves. The water took him again, forcing his head under and smothering him.

  The water was so black that Zach found it almost impossible to see anything beneath the waves. He kicked his legs again as the sea squirted into his mouth, up his nostrils and down his throat. His head bobbed above sea level again and he coughed the fluid from his lungs like dark lumps of phlegm.

  Zach looked around and could see the shoreline in the distance, but with his arms restrained in the small of his back and the heavy water clinging to him like wet sand, he knew it would be impossible for him to reach the safety of the beach.

  Again he went under the water, and he struggled to draw breath as his head sunk beneath the surface. He could feel his lungs becoming heavy and the thought of just closing his eyes and going to sleep seemed overwhelming. Like a stone, Zach began to plunge deeper and deeper beneath the waves. Just as he closed his eyes and could feel sleep taking him to the bottom of the sea, something coiled itself around his waist and dragged him back to the surface.

  Gasping and choking like an old car trying to start on a freezing cold morning, Zach sucked mouthfuls of sea air into his lungs. He thrashed his legs and somebody shouted in his ear:

  ‘Stop struggling Zach! I’m trying to save ya!’

  Although Zach had thick black waves sloshing around his ears, he recognised that voice at once.

  ‘William,’ he coughed, ‘where’s Neanna?’

  ‘I got her onto the shore, but she won’t survive for long under this blistering sun. So stop flapping and help me!’ William cried.

  Trying to relax every muscle in his body, Zach lay back in his friend’s arms as William crawled back to the shore.

  As soon as he could feel the seabed beneath his feet, William released his grip on his friend and Zach stumbled up the beach, collapsing onto his side in the sand.

  ‘We don’t have time to rest!’ William yelled. ‘We’ve got to get her into some kinda shelter.’ He then bounded towards Zach. Pulling one of the crossbows from his friend’s holster, he spun Zach over in the sand and ordered him to put his arms out. Taking aim, William pointed the crossbow at the hard looking piece of metal that joined the cuffs.

  Zach lifted his face out of the sand and looked back over his shoulder. Seeing William there, his large eyes squinting behind the tel
escopic lenses, he shouted;

  ‘Whoa! Hang on a minute are you sure your eyesight is…’

  Before he’d even finished, the air vibrated with an ear-splitting boom as William fired the crossbow, tearing apart the handcuffs.

  Feeling the cuffs disintegrate, Zach pulled his arms free and rubbed his aching wrists. William threw the crossbow into the sand and turned his attention to Neanna.

  Still choking up stringy lumps of black mucus, Zach rolled onto his side and looked at William wrapping Neanna in her cloak and swooping her up into his arms. William was back to his former self; dressed in his brown rough looking shirt and blue trousers, bare feet and those odd looking spectacles covering his glowing eyes. William threw the supplies that his father had left over his shoulder, then charged up the beach towards a severe looking cliff-face that loomed in the distance.

  Zach rolled onto his knees then forced himself to his feet. He stood and brushed sand from his wet clothes. He too was now wearing his pallid blue shirt, long black coat, boots and the crossbow holsters. Gathered into two neat piles was his own and Neanna’s supplies. Collecting up the items, he made his way after his friend.

  William guided him to a large overhang of rock that jutted out like a boxers chin. It offered plenty of cool shadows for Neanna to rest in. Laying her on the ground, William peeled back her cloak like a nurse removing a bandage from a wound. Wafts of smoke curled upwards from her skin, which looked blistered and sore.

  Knocking her black coloured fringe from her eyes, Zach gazed down at her scorched face. Zach knew for the second time since their meeting, she had risked her own life to save his.

  ‘Will she be okay?’ Zach whispered not wanting to disturb her.

  William looked at her through his magnified lenses and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She was out in the sun for longer than I’ve known before. Her skin looks pretty raw. Time will tell, I guess. All we can do is wait.’

  William slumped down in the shade and pulled some of the lunar bear meat from his bag. He unfolded the leaves that it had been wrapped in and began gnawing on it. Zach sat opposite him and rubbed his wrists which were red and sore from where the handcuffs had been.

  ‘Not going to eat?’ William mumbled, swirling the meat around the inside of his mouth.

  ‘I’d prefer mine cooked instead of raw,’ Zach grimaced as William smacked his lips together and then licked his fingers clean.

  ‘I could always get a fire going,’ William suggested. ‘There’s plenty of deadwood lying around this place from shipwrecks.’

  Watching William pick stringy pieces of meat from between his crooked teeth, Zach shook his head and said:

  ‘Nah, you’re okay. I’ll eat later.’

  They sat without speaking and listened to the sound of the thick black waves crashing against the beach. Zach broke the silence and said, ‘well, we’re back where we started I guess.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Back on the beach, with no way of crossing the sea.’

  ‘We’ve crossed it,’ William said,

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Pointing one long finger into the distance, William said, ‘see those four big shadows in the distance?’

  Zach looked in the direction that William was pointing. Way off in the distance four enormous towers soared up into the sky like giants trying to reach out and touch the clouds.

  ‘They’re the search towers that surround the Prison of Eternal Despair.’

  ‘I thought you said that it was built underground?’

  ‘I said the prisoners were kept underground,’ William said, and if it were possible his eyes grew even bigger behind those lenses.

  ‘So who’s this prisoner?’ Zach asked as Neanna murmured from the corner of the overhang.

  ‘He has the key,’ William reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, I know that,’ Zack said. ‘But who is he?’

  William placed the leaves on the ground beside him and folded his arms over his knees, which he had drawn up beneath his chin.

  ‘So who’s the prisoner?’ Zach asked again.

  ‘He’s my granddad,’ William said.

  ‘Oh,’ Zach gasped. ‘What did he do to get himself sent to prison?’

  ‘Nothing,’ William said, without looking up. ‘He got sent there because of me.’

  ‘Because of you?’ Zach said confused. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I opened the box,’ William said.

  Zach sat and shook his head. ‘But I don’t understand William. Why would opening that box get your Granddad thrown into prison?’

  William raised his head and stared into Zach’s eyes. ‘Because if I hadn’t have opened it, none of this would’ve happened.’

  ‘None of what?’

  ‘Everything,’ William said. ‘If I had done as my dad had instructed then we wouldn’t be sitting here right now having this conversation. My father wouldn’t be blind, Endra wouldn’t be being eaten by the desert, Neanna’s people wouldn’t have been cursed, mine wouldn’t have fled to the snowstorm mountains and your sister and my Queen wouldn’t be dying!’

  Zach sat and tried to comprehend what it was that William had told him. ‘I can’t believe that you could be responsible for everything that has gone bad in our two worlds. It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem possible.’

  ‘I’ll tell ya what I did. Then you’ll see why I had to come and find the key if I am to stand any chance of putting right everything that has gone so wrong. But more than anything I want to hear my father say that he forgives me.’

  Chapter 26

  The blistering sun sat at its highest point above the Onyx Sea and its rays sparkled on the waves like glitter. William rolled Neanna to the furthest corner of the rocky overhang and tightened the cloak about her. Content that she was well covered from the light of the sun, William slumped against the rocky wall and looked at Zach through his thick lenses. Although William was tall, muscular and not only looked older but seemed wiser than Zach, like an older brother, he now looked smaller, lost – fragile somehow.

  ‘My dad was an ironsmith by trade. The best in the whole of Endra. His father was one before him and it was hoped that one day I would follow them both in the family business.

  ‘On the same day every year the Queen would summon my dad and granddad to the Splinter. Knowing how skilled a craftsman they were, she entrusted them to repair the seals on the box that contained the heart of Endra.’

  ‘Why did the seals need to be repaired?’ Zach asked, spinning the chamber of one of his crossbows with his thumb.

  ‘They call whatever is in the box the heart of Endra. But one thing’s for sure, it’s powerful and after a time it erodes the box. The Queen was fearful that its power may escape from it. Therefore once a year, if it needed repairing or not, my dad and granddad would be entrusted to check its seals and carry out any repairs. My granddad was also a gifted locksmith, and it would be his task to cut a new key and lock for the box. There was only ever to be the one key, the Queen forbid a second to be made.’

  Holstering his crossbow, Zach lent forward and said, ‘so where do you fit into all of this?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have been a part of this at all. Just my dad and granddad were trusted to enter the Splinter and work on the box. But every year I pleaded with my dad to take me with him and every year, keeping his promise to the Queen, he refused. So one year, I snuck aboard my dad’s stagecoach, and without him knowing, I went to the Splinter.’

  William toyed with the hair that sprouted from his chin. He remembered how hungry he had become whilst hiding under the pile of rough sacks in the rear of the carriage for the three days and nights it had taken to cross the wastelands to the Splinter.

  He had hidden there as the smell of roasted Bloat meat had wafted from the campfire his dad had made. On the second night, William’s stomach had growled so loud with hunger, he feared that his father and his granddad would discover him.

  William lay beneath the sacks
and wiped the saliva from his mouth with the back of his hands. Closing his eyes he imagined what could be inside the box that his family had been entrusted to repair for so many years. He remembered how on his dad’s return from previous trips he had hung around his giant legs and begged to know what was inside.

  ‘Please dad, tell me. What did you see inside the box?’

  Ruffling up his hair with his huge hands, Warden would look down at him with his big brown eyes and smiled. ‘The Heart of Endra....or so they say.’

  ‘But was does it look like?’ William would howl.

  ‘Your granddad and me don’t get to open the box, the queen forbids it. I mend any of the boxes seals and your grandfather fits a new lock and key. Then we come home and forget all about it.’

  ‘But don’t you want to know what’s inside the box?’ William pestered.

  Warden hunkered down so he was at William’s height and looked into his pale green eyes.

  ‘Sometimes in life you don’t always get to find out what’s inside the box. Just like you don’t always get answers to all your questions’

  Then, saying not another word about it, Warden would get up and unpacked the stagecoach.

  William lay in the dark at the back of the carriage and dreamt of what could be inside the box.

  On the third day the Stagecoach began to slow, and poking his head from beneath the sacks, William peered through the coaches windows as it passed through the enormous gates of the Splinter. The gates towered so far into the sky that he lost sight of them amongst the clouds. The Splinter was surrounded by a complex maze of white cobbled streets, which were lined with a thousand different kinds of shops, selling everything from the most delicious looking candy to succulent loins of meat. William was amazed to discover that there appeared to be a secret city built behind the gates of the Splinter.