by Tom Holt
Tom Holt
The Portable Door
The first book in the J.W. Wells & Co. series
2003
Starting a new job is always stressful (particularly when you don’t particularly want one), but when Paul Carpenter arrives at the office of H.W. Wells he has no idea what trouble lies in store. Because he is about to discover that the apparently respectable establishment now paying his salary is in fact a front for a deeply sinister organisation that has a mighty peculiar agenda. It seems that half the time his bosses are away with the fairies. But they’re not, of course. They’re away with the goblins. Mister Tom Holt, Master of the Comic Fantasy Novel, cordially invites you to join him in his world of madness by reading his next hilarious masterpiece. Dress: informal. RSVP to Orbit Books. Bring a bottle.
ONE
After a very long time, the door opened, and the tall, Aryan-looking bloke came out. He was smiling, and shaking hands with the grim-faced man. Not a good sign, by any stretch of the imagination. But then, Paul told himself, as the grim-faced man called out another name and the girl with the Pre-Raphaelite hair stood up and followed him into the interview room, I wouldn’t have wanted this rotten job anyhow.
The Aryan took his coat from the rack and left, leaving Paul alone in the waiting room with the thin girl. Pointless, he told himself; we might as well both go home now and save ourselves the humiliation. If someone had offered to bet him money on which of the ten candidates who’d passed through the door since he’d arrived was going to get the job, he’d have refused to play, since there wasn’t a lot to choose between the eight who’d already been called. They were all, as far as he could tell, perfect: superbeings, almost certainly with superhuman powers and quite possibly from the planet Krypton. The only dead certainty on which he’d have been tempted to wager was that he didn’t stand a chance; and the only consolation was that the thin girl probably didn’t, either.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She was small and dark, with a drawn, bony face and enormous eyes, like one of the small, quick moving animals at the zoo that have to be kept in subdued lighting. It was saying something that even he hadn’t been tempted to fall in love with her at first sight. Not that she wasn’t attractive, in a sort of a way (to Paul, all females under the age of forty and still alive were attractive in a sort of a way, and also unspeakably terrifying); what had put him off was the chilling aura of hostility that she contrived to project. You could cut yourself to the bone on someone like that, he decided, and she wouldn’t even notice.
Nevertheless, he glanced again. She was perched on her chair at an angle, cleaning under her fingernails with the cap of a ballpoint pen. Earlier she’d picked her nose and reamed out her left ear with her little finger. Her hands were tiny, like little claws, poking out from the sleeves of her suit jacket. She reminded him of a bat.
“I know,” she said suddenly, not looking up as she wiped the pen cap on the knee of her skirt. “Disgusting habit.”
He winced. “No, that’s fine,” he said, looking away immediately. “You carry on.”
Dead silence. Paul fixed his eyes on the toecaps of his shoes (scuffed and in need of polishing) and tried to think about something else. All right, he said to himself, so which of them would you choose? He considered the question for a moment or so, narrowing it down to the Pre-Raphaelite, Intense With Glasses, Young Indiana
Jones and the Dog Boy. On balance, he decided, he’d have to plump for the Dog Boy, simply because he’d hated him most of all, and so it was inevitable that he’d be the one to succeed. Not that he’d ever know the outcome. Not that he cared. If he had any sense, he’d get up right now and walk out; with luck and a following 75 bus, he’d be back in Kentish Town in time for the second half of Buffy.
But he stayed where he was, while the thin girl excavated the talons of her left hand, like Carter and Caernarvon questing for dead Pharaohs. He couldn’t hear anything through the interview room door—like all the other fixtures and fittings in this place it was solid, chunky and antique—but it didn’t take much imagination to picture the Pre-Raphaelite smiling demurely as she gave concise, intelligent answers to the panel’s well-chosen questions. Maybe he’d change his bet and go for her instead; after all, if it was up to him he’d hire her like a shot, for any post up to and including President of the UN or Queen of the Elves.
“You’re probably right,” the thin girl said without warning. “Specially if the interviewers are men.”
This time he couldn’t help staring straight at her. She grinned sardonically at him.
“Oh, it’s obvious what you were thinking,” she said, “from that soupy expression on your face, and the way your shoulders are sagging. Like someone had sat you down in front of a radiator, and you’re beginning to melt.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said, “Oh,” instead. She pulled the grin back into a little wry frown, like someone reining in an unruly terrier, and scratched under her right armpit.
“I wish I could do that,” Paul said.
“What, scratch? It’s easy, look.”
“No,” he replied, “guess what people are thinking just by looking at them. It’d come in handy, being able to do that.”
She shrugged. “Not really,” she said.
He waited for her to expand on that, but she didn’t seem inclined to do so. She also appeared to have come to the end of her repertoire of revolting things to do while waiting for a job interview, and just sat still in her chair, looking small. For some reason, Paul felt it was up to him to say something now.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s got to be useful sometimes, surely.”
She looked at him. “In what way?” she said.
Fine, he thought. “ESP,” he said. “Yuri Geller bending spoons. You could go on the Paul Daniels show, things like that.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Makes two of us, he thought. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “So,” he went on, feeling like he was wading through knee-deep mud, “what made you apply for this job, then?”
“My mother,” she answered sadly. “At least, she drew a ring round the advert in the Telegraph in yellow marker pen, and left it lying about wherever I went. How about you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, wondering why in hell he’d raised the subject in the first place. “Because it was there, I suppose. I apply for most things that don’t involve getting shot at or A-level Sanskrit.”
She pulled a face carefully calculated to acknowledge a failed joke. “I wonder who’ll get it,” she said.
“Apart from us, you mean?”
“Get real.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Either this girl who’s in there now, or the short, dark bloke.”
“The one who looked like a dog?”
He nodded. “Him, probably,” he said. “He looked like the sort who can do quadratic equations in his head while playing Mahler piano concertos.”
She sniffed. “I think it’ll be that girl,” she said. “Specially if the interviewers are men,” she said again.
“You could well be right,” he said. “Daft, but there it is.”
“It shouldn’t be,” she snapped. “Still, it’ll get my parents off my back for a day or so, and it’s better than hanging round the house. I suppose,” she added.
Silence again; but Paul didn’t want to go back to staring and brooding, and there wasn’t anybody else he could talk to. “Actually,” he said, “I know this sounds silly, but do you happen to know what these people actually do?”
The thin girl shrugged. “No idea,” she said.
�
��Nor me. Pity,” he added, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to find out now.”
“Wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“Well, quite,” he said. “Still ‘position vacant for junior clerk’. Sounds like something out of Dickens.”
“Rather like this place,” the thin girl said. “What a dump.”
Paul looked at her for a moment; she was biting off a hangnail. Still, he said to himself, why not?
“Do you fancy having a drink or something afterwards?” he said. “I can wait for you outside.”
She looked at him as though she’d just found him on the sole of her shoe. “No, not really,” she said.
“Oh. Right. I just thought—”
She shrugged. She had the shoulders of a born shrugger. Mercifully, the door opened.
The Pre-Raphaelite came out, smiling in a manner that nearly melted Paul’s teeth, and the grim-faced man called out, “Mr Carpenter, please.” That’s me, Paul realised after a moment. He stood up, managing not to stumble or slip on the polished oak floor, and followed the grim-faced man into the interview room.
The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person’s self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob. The interview room achieved the same effect, but in a slightly different way. It was drab, bleak and hostile, just like the examples cited above, but there was far more to it than that. The oak panelling on the walls seemed to suck in light, whereas the enormous boardroom table was polished to a dazzling mirror. The huge crystal chandelier looked as if it had grown out of the ceiling over millions of years, like a vast stalactite. The glowing floorboards groaned under his heels as though demanding to know who had let a person like him in there in the first place. There was one vacant chair, as inviting as an Aztec altar. The grim-faced man gestured him into it, and he sat down.
“Mr Carpenter, isn’t it?” said the grim-faced man.
It only went to show how daunting the room itself was that Paul didn’t really notice the people sitting on the other side of the table until then. It didn’t help that they were perfectly reflected in the table top, so that they appeared to be looking down at him and staring up at him at the same time. They were absolutely terrifying.
“I’m Humphrey Wells,” the grim-faced man said. “These are my partners—” and he barked out a string of bizarre names that Paul was too stunned to catch; all that registered with him was that the names were as weird as the faces they belonged to.
There was a long, thin man with bushes of white hair sprouting out on either side of a gleaming pink dome, and a thin white wisp hanging off his chin like an icicle. There was a man with huge shoulders, gigantic round red cheeks and a gushing black beard that vanished under the edge of the table. There was a middle-aged blonde woman with unnaturally high cheekbones and a chin like a bradawl. There was an even blonder man, somewhere in his late twenties, who was either a rock star or a tennis champion; instead of a collar and tie he wore a black cashmere sweater, and what looked like a large claw on a fine gold chain. And there was a little, bright-eyed man with sunken eyes and the face of a freeze-dried child, who was grinning at Paul as if trying to make up his mind whether he’d taste better roasted or casseroled in red wine, with onions. In slightly less time than you’d allow for taking a photograph of a snowscape in bright sunlight, Paul decided that they gave him the creeps.
Silence. The six freaks stared at him. Then the grimfaced man cleared his throat, and said, “Right then, Mr Carpenter. What makes you think you’d be suited to this job?”
Suddenly, none of the answers he’d carefully prepared for this question seemed at all suitable. “I don’t know,” he said.
The freeze-dried character laughed, making a sound like dangerously thin brake shoes. Blackbeard smiled encouragingly. The woman wrote something down on a piece of paper.
“I see,” said the grim-faced man. “In that case, what prompted you to apply for it?”
Paul shrugged. There didn’t seem much point even in going through the motions; bullshitting these characters would be as futile as trying to sell a dodgy car to a Jedi knight. “I saw it in the paper,” he said. “I’ve applied for lots of jobs lately,” he added.
The grim-faced man nodded slowly. The white-haired man seemed to have fallen asleep. “Maybe you could tell us something about yourself,” said the tennis champion, in what Paul guessed might well be an Austrian accent.
“Not much to tell, really,” Paul said. “I’ve got four GCSEs and two A levels. I was going to go to Exeter University, but then my dad retired and they went to live in Florida, so they said I’d better go to London and get a job. That’s about it.”
The woman crossed out what she’d put down earlier, and wrote something else. Blackbeard frowned sympathetically, as if Paul’s story had struck him as terribly tragic and sad. The freeze-dried type lit a huge cigar and blew a perfect smoke ring at the chandelier.
“Fine,” said the grim-faced man. “How about hobbies?”
Paul blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Hobbies,” the grim-faced man repeated. “What do you like doing in your spare time?”
According to the book Paul had got out of the library, they always asked this, so of course he’d rehearsed a model answer—reading, keeping up with current affairs,
music and badminton. All lies, of course, but it had never crossed his mind to tell the truth at a job interview. Instead, he replied, “I watch TV a lot. I used to paint little model soldiers, but I don’t do that so much now.”
The tennis champion looked up at him. “Sport?” he said sharply.
“Sorry?”
“Sport. Football, fencing, archery. Do you do anything like that?”
Paul shook his head. “Not since school,” he replied. “And I was rubbish at it then.”
“Languages?” the woman asked; surprisingly, she turned out to be American.
“No,” Paul replied. “Well, I did French and German at school, but I can’t remember any of it now.”
“How about your social life?” asked the grim-faced man.
“Haven’t really got one.”
The white-haired man opened his eyes. “Can you tell me the four principal exports of Zambia?”
“Sorry, no.”
The white-haired man closed his eyes again. The woman put the cap on her pen and dropped it into a tiny black handbag. There was a long, silent moment; then the grim-faced man folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Suppose you were in the Tower of London,” he said, “all on your own, with all the cases unlocked, and suddenly the fire alarm went. Which three things would you try and take with you as you left?”
Paul opened his eyes wide, and asked him to repeat the question. The grim-faced man obliged, word for word.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said, “I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.”
Dead silence; as though it was the Last Judgement and he was standing before the throne of God, flanked by archangels and cherubim, and he’d farted. “How about the Crown Jewels?” said the woman. “I guess you’ve heard of them.”
“What? Oh, yes.”
“Yes, you’ve heard of them, or yes, you’d try and save them?”
“Um,” Paul said. “Both, I suppose.”
Another silence, which made the one that had preceded it seem positively jovial. “If you had a choice,” said the white-haired man, “between killing your father, your mother or yourself, who would you choose, and why?”
Oh, for crying out loud, Paul thought; and then, I bet they didn’t ask the Dog Boy any of this shit. “I really haven’t got a clue,” he said. “Sorry.”
The woman opened her bag again, took out a pair of tiny rimless spectacles, put them on and stared at him through them
. It was like that trick where you set light to a bit of paper with a magnifying glass, except it wasn’t done with heat. Quite the reverse. “You say you used to paint model soldiers,” she said. “Which period?”
The hell with it, Paul thought. Tell the horrible bitch the truth, and have done with it. “Medieval,” he said. “Also I did a lot of those fantasy ones, elves and orcs and trolls. I tried Napoleonic too, but they were too fiddly for me.”
The woman nodded gravely. “I see,” she said. “Can you tell me the properties of manganese when used as an alloying agent in steel?”
“No.”
She nodded again. “What did you think of the latest Living Dead album?”
Paul gave that one a little thought before answering. “It sucked,” he said.
“Who would you rather be, Lloyd George or Gary Rhodes?”
“Sorry,” Paul said. “Who’s Lloyd George?”
“What do you most admire about the works of Chekhov?”
Paul frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “The way he says, Course laid in, keptin, is pretty cool, but mostly he doesn’t get to do much.”
Nobody spoke. There hadn’t been such a silence since the beginning of the world. Then they all looked at each other (apart from the white-haired man, whose eyes were tight shut, his chin on his chest), and the grim-faced man said, “Well, I think that covers everything from our point of view. Is there anything you’d like to ask us?”
Paul managed to keep a straight face. “Not really, thanks,” he said.
“Fine.” The grim-faced man stood up and opened the door. “We’ll be writing to you in a day or so,” he said. “Thank you very much for coming in.”
“Pleasure,” Paul replied, and he followed the grim-faced man out. Some joker had seen fit to steal his leg bones and replace them with sticks of rhubarb, but so what? No more than he deserved.
As he passed the thin girl in the doorway he shot her a glance that tried to convey encouragement, warning and pre-emptive sympathy all rolled up together. He reckoned he made a pretty good fist of it, but she was looking the other way.
