The House of Doors - 01

by Brian Lumley

  “Your world, Spencer,” said Turnbull, sighing, picking the thought right out of his head. “You were first through, and this place was shaped by your mind.”

  “By my fears,” Gill corrected him.

  “Your fears?” Varre was quick on the uptake. “There are things here to be afraid of? What are you saying, Gill? What do we need to be afraid of?”

  “You?” Gill looked at him. “Nothing much, I suppose. No, you’re lucky. This place is my nightmare, not yours. And I’m not like Clayborne, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “Your world! Clayborne’s world!” Anderson threw up his hands. His voice was full of barely controlled anger, seething frustration, and more than a little fear. He looked back into the iron cave and licked his lips. “But where does it go when we come through? I mean, there was a crystal whose facets were doors. We came through one of them, but now the crystal’s not there anymore. So … where is it?”

  “One-way doors,” Gill answered. “Like one-way mirrors: now you see ’em, now you don’t.”

  “No”—Tumbull shook his head—“more like a quagmire. With quicksand there really is only one way to pass through. And you don’t stop till your feet touch bottom … .”

  Angela frowned at him and said, “That’s morbid—and unscientific. We’re agreed that none of this is supernatural, not even on Clayborne’s world. It’s in the mind, or it has come out of the mind. And it’s all controlled by the House of Doors. The crystal was just another projection of it, another cross section through the same basic structure. It didn’t disappear just because we came through. It’s still there on Ben Lawers, and in the world of the escarpment it’s the mansion, and in Clayborne’s world it’s an evil crystal. Here … it’s out there somewhere.” She stood beside Gill and gazed out upon a desolation of metal run wild, but mercifully run to a standstill. Most of it …

  Gill felt the horror of the place, which the others were incapable of feeling. They felt only its strangeness, but to Gill it was undiluted horror. His brain collided with each new machine or piece of machinery and was unable to grasp it. It was the Castle all over again, but magnified a million times. The only mercy was that he had a safety valve, he could shut it off. He did so now: squeezed his eyes tightly shut and shook his head, and denied it.

  No, he told himself. No, it’s not going to get me. I didn’t build it—it’s just an enlargement of my innermost fears. It’s someone’s deliberate ploy to drive me crazy: to put me in a world where my machine mind is surrounded by the unknown and completely unknowable! Except … it could be that same someone’s big mistake. Gill clung tight to that idea: that this could be his best chance yet to come to terms with and understand an alien science. Because if he could only get inside—get his mind inside—these weird machines, then maybe—just maybe—he could begin to make them work for him.

  “Spencer? Are you all right?” It was Angela.

  Gill opened his eyes, nodded. “Yes, I’ll be all right. But … what did you say just then? A cross section through the same basic structure? A projection?”

  “I was talking about the House of Doors,” she answered. “It’s like a beam switched off the moment we use it, and redirected somewhere else. The lamp is still there, but pointing in another direction.” She blinked, shook her pretty head, said, “Ignore me. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

  “You make sense to me,” Turnbull grunted. He was very bitter, sharing Anderson’s and everyone else’s frustration. “It’s a false lighthouse built by wreckers, and like doomed ships we fall for it every time—and go crashing on the rocks.”

  “We’re like rats in a maze,” said Varre, “who smell food on the other side. But when we get there they change the maze around and put the food somewhere else.”

  Gill’s patience was used up. Not only must he keep a tight rein on his own terrors but pacify these people as well. He was starting to feel smothered. “So what do you want to do?” He rounded on them. “Quit? So go ahead, quit!”

  “We can’t quit!” Anderson clenched a fist, shook it at nothing. “How do we quit, anyway? Lie down and die? You can’t even die in a place where you don’t need to eat! I can’t see how this is happening to us—I don’t even believe it’s happening!”

  “Oh, it’s happening, all right,” Gill told him. “Clayborne died, remember? And probably Haggie, too. You want to know how to do it? Just throw yourself down there. That will do it.”

  They looked down through a tangle of girders to a wide iron catwalk far, far below. Anderson drew back at once. “It’s just …” he started to say, “just that …”

  “It’s just a bastard.” Turnbull finished it for him. “Like someone wanted to kill us, but didn’t want to do it himself. As if he wants us to do it for him …”

  They all thought about that—until Bannerman said, “Can someone please guide me? From Gill’s description of this place I could very easily hurt myself. I’ll be burden enough without that.” For the moment his misery took their minds off their own.

  More than that, it successfully steered them away from a potentially dangerous line of enquiry … .

  They climbed down towards the nearest “roadway,” a giant catwalk ninety feet wide and … how long? It stretched away in both directions, out of sight. The climb wasn’t difficult; without Bannerman it would have been the simplest thing. There were great metal ladders, dangling cables, pipes and pylons everywhere. It was as if at the core of this world (was it a world? Or was it like this all the way through?) a giant robot factory had gone wild, churning out machines and machine parts until it had buried itself, and that it was still down there, its production lines unceasingly manufacturing meaningless machinery.

  The spaces between great engines as big as city blocks were bridged by gantries; huge metal spiders with round, square and triangular “wheels” at the ends of their jointed legs abounded, all stiff and immobile; TVs the size of cinema screens were protected by metal grids, not all of which were dead. When Turnbull, in a mood of destructive defiance, picked up a huge iron bolt and hurled it at the centre of one such screen, there came a bright flash of electrical energy and the bolt was shattered and deflected. Blobs of metal splashed down and sizzled on iron surfaces, skittering like solder. After that they avoided all such grids.

  Barney had already left them. As the climb had become steeper, the dog had gone off on his own along a safer, horizontal route. When he’d looked back, wagged his stump anxiously and barked for their attention, Angela had offered her opinion that: “He wants us to follow him.”

  Impatiently Varre had snapped, “Of course he does! He desires our companionship. Dogs are not good climbers. He knows he can’t follow us and so wishes us to follow him.” It was the last anyone would see of Barney for some considerable time.

  Almost down to catwalk level, they found one of the giant screens that was still working—in a fashion. It showed a slow whirl of muddy colours, like dull paints stirred in a giant’s caldron, interspersed with flashes of white light. And Anderson asked, “Who is it for?”

  Gill looked at him. “What?”

  “The picture, the screen, the information—if there was information and not just that sickening … static? Who would it be for? I don’t feel that there are people here—”

  “There aren’t,” said Gill, with certainty.

  “—so who needs TV screens?”

  “But that’s the whole point,” said Gill. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say that there’s no rhyme or reason to any of this. It’s my biggest nightmare come true: a million mad machines, an entire worldful of them, and not one of them serving any recognisable purpose. They don’t have a purpose—unless it’s to drive me crazy—which is why I’m trying to ignore every damned one of them!”

  “Listen!” said Angela.

  They had climbed down through a vast tangle of partly collapsed scaffolding to rest for a while on a sheet-iron platform some forty or fifty feet over the road. A nervous silence fell as
they followed Angela’s instructions and listened. But after a little while Anderson shook his head impatiently and said, “I hear nothing.”

  “Try feeling it, then,” said Gill. “It’s in the metal, coming up through the platform, the soles of your feet.”

  And now indeed they could feel it: a dull, distant, metallic thumping, like the beat of some unseen mechanical heart; and in another moment they began to hear it. “It’s coming from the road,” said Turnbull. “Like the sound of a train transmitted along a track.”

  “Look down there,” said Gill, pointing at the tremendous catwalk below. “There are tracks—two sets of them. So now it appears that there are things in this bloody place I can understand after all! But now I have to ask myself, what runs on tracks like those?”

  Twin, parallel sets of steel rails each a foot wide, with a gage of at least forty feet, were bolted to massive iron sleepers along the full length of the road. Bright, fat metal ribbons, they narrowed into the distance in both directions and disappeared down canyons of colossal, corroded components. Turnbull observed, “Everything else down there except the tracks is covered in rust, swarf or oil. So whatever it is, something does run on those tracks.”

  “And … and here it comes!” said Varre. Gaunt-faced, he pointed at the mouth of the nearer canyon.

  Gill strained his eyes, shook his head in bewilderment, finally said, “It’s like … like nothing I ever saw before. Just a huge metal box on wheels, not going anywhere very fast and making a hell of a lot of noise about it.”

  “A spiky iron box on wheels,” Turnbull corrected him. “It has bits of junk sticking out all over it. Arms, hooks, grapples.” He, too, shook his head. “What the hell is the thing?”

  “Listen,” said Gill resignedly. “Get used to one thing: it’s no good asking me what anything is. For the last time, they don’t have any real purpose. I don’t see how they could have, seeing as they’re my bloody fantasy!”

  “That’s as may be,” said Varre, “but your ‘fantasy’ is on our side of the tracks. It will pass directly beneath us.”

  “Hadn’t we better get down from here?” Anderson was hopping from one foot to the other again, scared for his life. His breath came in explosive gasps. “Even at this distance that thing is … huge! The noise it’s making is hellish. Why, we could be shaken right off this platform!”

  Gill and Turnbull got down on their stomachs and looked over the platform’s edge. The structure was supported by a square iron stem at one corner. It might just be possible to climb or slide down it, but even if there was time Angela was going to find it very difficult and Bannerman simply wasn’t going to make it. “We’ll have to climb back up a ways,” said Turnbull. “A little way, anyway—until we spot an alternative route down.”

  But the gigantic mechanism on the rails was closer now, and its clanging that much louder. Gong-bang! Gong-bang! Gong-bang! It made it hard to think.

  Nearby, something suspiciously like a crane on a gantry came suddenly to life. It trundled along its own tracks and swung a huge iron dinosaur-head bucket with steel jaws directly at the tower and platform. Gill and Turnbull were on their feet again, but as Angela yelled, “Get down!” they grabbed Bannerman and joined the others on the deck, where they clung for dear life to projecting bolt heads. At the last moment the crane lifted its head and came jarringly to a halt, leaving the jaws creaking and swinging like a rusty pendulum directly overhead.

  “Shit!” Turnbull shouted. “Now I know what we’re standing on. It’s a fuelling platform!”

  Gill knew that he was right. It was obvious. So obvious that he’d missed it—because he’d believed there was nothing here that he could grasp.

  Gong-BANG! Gong-BANG! The thing on the tracks was passing beneath the shuddering platform; the jaws of the crane dipped lower; Gill thought: It’s going to tip its load right on our heads, and we’re going to end up as so much fuel!

  He looked up, saw the grinning steel jaws crack open, and closed his eyes … .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Nothing came out of the jaws except dust and grit and a powdering of iron filings. The machine had been working, but it had nothing to deliver. Silently, Gill began to thank someone or other—probably God—but his thanks were premature. The jaws extended to a gape and lowered themselves to press down on the platform’s iron surface. For a moment Gill and the others were enclosed by huge blunt metal teeth.

  Meanwhile, clanking and snorting, the—engine?—on the tracks had come to a halt. In the top center of its box body was a shallow hopper, waiting to be filled. The jaws pressed down harder yet on the platform, which cracked open in the middle. It was hinged, spring-loaded. “Hang on!” Gill yelled as the weight of the jaws forced the trapdoor open. But … there was nothing to hang on to, except each other.

  They fell through in a tangle of gasping, flailing bodies, and crashed down into the engine’s hopper. The huge metal plate where they landed was also a trapdoor; for a moment it gave an inch or two under their combined weight, then held. They weren’t quite as heavy as a load of fuel. Below them, in the body of the thing, they could hear a grinding and a hissing, a frustrated meshing of unthinkable machine parts.

  Then the engine gave three short, shrill hoots, and recommenced its journey along the great track. The racket it created as it proceeded was brain-shattering: Gong-bang! Gong-bang! Gong-bang!

  Turnbull was first on his feet. Groaning, he staggered to the rim of the hopper and looked over. There was a sort of shallow perimeter moat some fifteen inches deep. He dipped a finger in a residual coating of black sludge and sniffed it. It smelled like fish oil. He rubbed it on the sleeve of his torn jacket and waited; it left a stain but that was all. So it wasn’t corrosive.

  The others joined him one by one, Bannerman and Varre crawling. Gill and Angela were last, lifting and guiding Bannerman as they came. All were bruised and battered. Turnbull had meanwhile hauled himself up into the gutter or moat. He flopped there with his head on the rim, weary to the bone. The others got up with him, dragging Bannerman and Varre behind them. And eventually the monotony of the engine’s dinning took away a little of its own pain, until it became a “background” clamour against which they could begin to hear themselves think again, and even to speak.

  “Follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the shining steel ribbons,” sang Turnbull tunelessly, his voice dripping with inward-directed sarcasm.

  Gill looked at him. “The Wizard of Oz?”

  Turnbull nodded grimly. “Except that this time the wizard and witch are one and the same, and the bastard’s got us exactly where he wants us. And we don’t know where that is!”

  “And no Emerald City waiting for us,” said Angela. “Just another House of Doors.”

  “If we’re headed in the right direction,” said Anderson, with none of his usual authoritative ebullience.

  “Oh, we are,” said Gill, nodding. “We always have, haven’t we? The way I see it, it’s out of our hands.” They began to look around as the machine world slipped by.

  They passed into a canyon of gigantic cogwheels and pistons, rusting ratchets, scabbed girder scaffolding, whose walls towered up on both sides like cliffs of condemned, corroding, incomprehensible clockwork. And Anderson was prompted to ask, “Spencer, is this what you meant when you said we were inside a machine?”

  “No.” Gill shook his head. “We’re still inside that machine. This entire machine world is inside that machine. But everything you see here is commonplace by comparison. This junk came out of me.” He tapped his skull with a tired finger.

  Turnbull gave a snort. “You mean this stuff isn’t alien?”

  Gill stroked the furrows out of his brow, left sludge in the shape of a hand upon his forehead. “Weird but not alien,” he answered. “It’s like those machines that bothered me so much when I was a kid: Heath-Robinson things that couldn’t possibly work, or worked to no end. Illogical perpetual motion machines that don’t do anything. Mech
anical mobiles that turn endlessly and without purpose. Idiot things. Executive toys that click and whir and do sweet—”

  “Nothing,” Angela interrupted.

  “That too.” Gill nodded ruefully.

  “You were about to say ‘fuck all,’” said Angela, quite matter-of-factly. “I don’t know why I stopped you, except that I hoped you hadn’t given up hope yet. I’ll know that you have when you … well, when you let things go.”

  “Can you come over here?” said Gill.

  She crawled to him through the fish-smelling oil and he wiped grit and dirt from her face, then kissed her soundly. In her shredded, dirty ski pants, greasy, knotted shirt, and completely incongruous very feminine bra, she looked like some demonic urchin—but he kissed her anyway. And she responded fiercely. “Don’t let me let go,” he said, when their mouths at last parted.

  “Is this really the time for … canoodling?” Varre was tenderly examining his torn, puffy thigh.

  “You lick your wounds,” said Gill, but without malice, “and we’ll canoodle. Time moves far too quickly in this place. Right now we’re taking a break … from everything!”

  The engine shuddered and clanked and gong-banged on its way; Turnbull sat with Bannerman and patiently explained what was happening; miles slipped inexorably by; they came out of the canyon into rust-scabbed suburbs of ferro-degenerable debris … .

  Gill had been dozing. Angela shook him insistently. He opened his eyes and looked around. The others lolled and nodded, sleeping where it was almost humanly impossible to sleep. “Look at the sun!” said Angela. Gill did—and understood the look on her face.

  In front the tracks stretched interminably on, shining into the sunset; behind, on the horizon, a spiky metal mound glowed red and silver; on both sides stretched dunes of red rust, with here and there girders protruding like broken teeth from bleeding, rotten gums. And sinking towards the horizon at ten o’clock of where they were heading, the “sun” put the whole mad scene in perspective where it covered the land with its warmth and light. Its entirely unnatural warmth and light.