The House of Doors - 01

by Brian Lumley

  Now, in the rusty red gloom of the cave, Anderson was temporarily forgotten as finally they looked upon a door of grey slag five feet in diameter and round as a plug in a hole. There was no knocker and no number, just the door itself set in a wall of compressed, congealed rust.

  “Is this …?” said Varre uncertainly. “It doesn’t look … I mean, is it really … ?”

  “A door like all the others?” Gill finished it for him. “Yes, it is.” He could feel that it was; he knew it was. “Not exactly like the others, no. They’ve all been different, anyway. But this is the House of Doors, all right. And this is a door.”

  Angela stepped forward. In a voice that was tiny, which yet echoed, she said, “My turn, I think.”

  “Wait,” said Gill, taking her arm. “I think it is your turn, yes—but first you’d better tell us if there’s anything we should worry about. I mean, we know how this game is played now. So it’s only fair that we should know if there’s anything you’re desperately afraid of.”

  She turned her face away. “It’s nothing for you to be afraid of, anyway,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something men really worry about.”

  “Can we be the judge of that?” Varre snapped harshly. “Are we supposed to coax it out of you? Come on, girl, speak up.”

  “Violation!” She rounded on him and spat it out. “My husband was … he was a pig!” She turned to Gill. “Spencer, I—”

  “We understand,” he said simply. “And for what it’s worth, I’ll go down before I see that happen to you again.”

  Bannerman stumbled, came blundering forward. “What’s going on?” he said. “Won’t someone tell me what’s happening?” He stumbled again, flew forward.

  “Be careful!” Gill cried, but too late. He and Turnbull were supporting Anderson, were unable to move fast enough to stop it from happening. Bannerman had already crashed into the slight figure of Varre, hurling the Frenchman against the door!

  Behind the group the roof of the cave crashed down in massive chunks, completely blocking the entrance. And ahead of them—

  —The circular slab of fused slag simply disappeared, and a Stygian darkness fell on them like the Primal Dark before there was ever light … .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Gill?” Turnbull’s voice echoed rumblingly in a darkness that was absolute. “Where in the name of all that’s … ?”

  “Anderson’s lighter.” Gill breathlessly ignored the other’s half-formed question. “Hold him up while I find it.” Angela’s trembling hand was on Gill’s arm as he frantically searched Anderson’s pockets and found what he was looking for. And Varre was utterly silent apart from his rapid, frightened panting.

  But at last the Frenchman found voice. “I … I came through first!” he whispered. “Mon Dieu—I was the first!”

  But for the moment Gill wasn’t worried about any of them; or if he was worried at all, it was about Bannerman. Back in the machine world Gill’s sixth sense had been more or less useless—had been drowned out in meaningless, alien machine static—but here it was working properly, and even in the dark he knew that one of the group was other than human. His first instinct had been correct: Bannerman was part-human, part-alien mechanism, and possibly part something else. And Gill and the others were in the dark, in close proximity with him.

  Fingers all thumbs, Gill worked the lighter.

  Light flared and thrust back the wall of darkness. Controlling himself, presenting a comparatively calm front, Gill looked first at Bannerman. The—blind?—man was slumped against a seamless stone wall, a tightly curving wall that formed a perfect circle up the line of his back, overhead, down, and underfoot. They were crouched in a tube of stone only five feet in diameter—a tunnel through solid rock

  “Jesus!” Varre screamed then, and threw himself to the floor. “No! No! Noooooo!” He pounded with his fists on the solid stone floor, and his terrified cries came echoing deafeningly back—and again—and again.

  “His phobia.” Turnbull was aghast, understanding only too well where they were: underground, trapped in a claustrophobic hell of the Frenchman’s own making.

  “What’s going on?” Bannerman asked, his voice hushed and gasping. “What is it?”

  He’s still playing his little game. Gill was relieved. Relieved and furious—but for now he’d go along with it. “We’ll put you in the picture when we get sorted out,” he told the supposedly “blind” man.

  “Sorted out?” Varre sat up. In the flickering light of Anderson’s cigarette lighter his eyes were staring, starting orbs. “But we can’t get sorted out, Gill—not ever! Don’t you know where we are? We’re under a million tons of rock! We’re buried alive, man, buried al—” He couldn’t go on, burst out sobbing.

  Gill passed the lighter to Turnbull, got down on one knee beside Varre. Unseen, he took out the thorn hypodermic and used it to sting the little Frenchman in the arm … and in the next moment gentled him down onto his back on the curving stone floor. “Better this way,” he said, looking up at the others. “This place is bad enough as it is, without him making it any worse. We know what Clayborne conjured up in his world, also that it killed him and might have killed us. I’d prefer not to have Varre do the same sort of thing.”

  Crouching and holding the lighter out before him at arm’s length, Turnbull had meanwhile turned in a full circle, illuminating their immediate surroundings. Behind them, where they’d entered the cave and seen the roof come crashing down, now there was nothing, no rubble at all. The tunnel finished there in a smooth wall of stone. It was as if a rock borer had come this far and then been withdrawn along its own bore. In the other direction … the tunnel disappeared into darkness.

  “Not much of a choice,” Angela whispered.

  Gill thought: God, she’s got guts, this one! For her sake, if only for her sake, he mustn’t show what he was really feeling. “Jack,” he said, “can you sling Anderson over your shoulder? And Jon, I’m going to ask you to do your part, too, okay?” It seemed a good idea to bring him into things, keep him busy.

  “Anything, anything,” said Bannerman at once. “Glad to be able to help.”

  “No—uh!—need for that,” said Anderson as Turnbull passed the lighter back to Gill and made to pick him up. “I can—uh!—manage very well, thank you.” With Turnbull’s help he got to his feet and propped himself against the wall for a moment or two.

  Another remarkable recovery! Gill thought; and he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “My face and hands feel … burned?” Anderson gingerly examined his hands, touched them to his face. Turnbull quickly explained what had happened with the rust worm, and how they now came to be where they were. “My own fault entirely,” said Anderson. “I should have heeded you, Spencer. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “Varre probably wouldn’t agree with you there,” said Gill. “But I reckon we’ll still let Jon here do his share of the work. He’s a strong man after all. And the rest of us have been having a pretty rough time of it.” As he spoke he looked at Turnbull and narrowed his eyes a little, briefly, warningly. The big man made no comment.

  “You see, Jon,” Gill continued, “in this place there’s nothing for you to fall over. We’re in a horizontal tube drilled through solid rock. You can’t very easily stumble, and you can’t head off in the wrong direction. There is only one direction. Okay?”

  “Anything you say.” Bannerman was still willing. “It will be a relief to be of some use to you.”

  And so they started off. Anderson, having repossessed his lighter, took the lead; Gill and Angela followed immediately behind; Turnbull was next, and Bannerman last of all, holding on to Turnbull’s jacket and with Varre tossed over one shoulder.

  They had covered only fifty to sixty paces when Anderson said, “Up ahead. Is that … natural light?” He cupped his hand over the lighter’s lifesaving flame. And maybe thirty or forty paces ahead there was indeed light: a pale haze of yellow, looking like dusty sunlight slanting int
o the mouth of a cave.

  Eagerly they moved on, their footsteps echoing, and after a few more paces Anderson was able to snap shut his lighter and so conserve its fuel. The yellow light brightened rapidly as the bore carried them to its source—which was not what they’d hoped for.

  Anderson came to what looked like the end of the shaft, paused, leaned out into the soft haze and looked around. “What … ?” he said then, simply and quietly. But it was more a puzzled exclamation than any sort of question. He stepped down maybe twelve inches onto the flat stone floor of a domed hemisphere of a chamber, paced falteringly forward a little way, then came to a halt and shielded his eyes to look straight up at the source of the light. And this time when he spoke it was definitely an exclamation—of total disappointment and frustration. “What!”

  Angela and the others joined him, but Gill hung back and just a little to one side in order to observe Bannerman emerge from the tunnel. Caught up in the suspense of the moment, no one had thought to say anything to the blind man by way of warning, but still he stepped down unerringly into the chamber without a moment’s pause or thought. And:

  Got you! thought Gill. But now wasn’t the right time for any big expose or showdown. That would have to wait.

  Turnbull, slowly turning on his own axis, took in the layout of the place and said, “Spencer, what do you make of it?”

  Anderson at once bridled. The impression was that all authority had now passed to Gill, indeed that it had been that way for some time! But he would see about that! “Why, obviously it’s a junction of tunnels,” he said. “I mean, really, Jack—does it need an explanation?”

  Turnbull scowled at him. “Anderson, you’re not often right but you’re probably wrong again,” he said, without humour. “Spencer, on the other hand, is more often right than wrong, which is why I’m asking him.”

  Gill looked around, said, “Can someone mark that tunnel we just emerged from? Pointless to make a stupid mistake and end up going back in there!”

  Angela stepped back to the mouth of the first tunnel, licked her finger and put an X on the wall to one side of the circular bore. The mark was cut very clearly into the dust. “Which leaves us with four more to choose from,” she said. “Or five—except the fifth one is impossible.”

  The fifth was straight up, perpendicular, the source of the light. Squinting his eyes, Gill could just see its rim shining on high, like the rim of a well, maybe fifty feet overhead. And she was quite right: five feet wide, the shaft was too big for a man to jam himself inside and climb. Also, the domed ceiling’s centre where the shaft was situated was at least fifteen feet high. The other four tunnels were exactly the same as the first one, horizontal, disappearing into darkness.

  “The way I see it,” said Gill, “we’re in a maze. But it seems to me there has to be a way out—or the game finishes right here. If we’re to proceed to the next House of Doors, then there has to be a way out.”

  “Why a maze?” Angela wanted to know.

  Gill shrugged, pointed at the slumped figure of Varre where Bannerman had put him down. “I reckon that’s his doing. His claustrophobia on the one hand, complicated by this entire situation. Earlier he said we were like starving rats in a maze, and every time we get to the food they put it somewhere else and change the system. Obviously the idea stayed with him, manifested itself here. This is Varre’s big nightmare. Anyway, we’re wasting time. We should be figuring out what to do next.”

  Angela said, “We don’t yet have enough experience of this place to try using any sort of logic or perhaps develop a geometrical system. Which I suppose leaves guesswork. Trial and error. Since we’re all in the dark, as it were, I suggest we let Jon pick our route. Light or dark, it’s all the same to him.” She touched Bannerman’s arm. “I didn’t mean that to sound uncaring.”

  But Gill shook his head. “I think we can do better than that,” he said. “Jon stays here with Varre. Jack and I, we take a tunnel and explore it—only for a hundred yards or to the next junction, whichever comes first. Angela, you and David take another tunnel and do likewise: one hundred paces, or the next junction, and then back here. Okay?”

  Turnbull nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “And that way we might get a better idea of the layout of this place.”

  “I’d like to think so,” said Gill. “And even if we don’t, we can use the same method to try out the last two tunnels. Finally, if nothing at all comes of it, then we can take Angela’s suggestion and let Jon choose our route. Who’s to say a blind man’s instincts aren’t the best anyway?” And if he intends to continue the game, then he’ll have to lead us out of here … .

  They split up, marked their new tunnels with a Y and a Z, and proceeded as planned. Gill and Turnbull had no light, but now that their eyes were more accustomed they found that the darkness wasn’t absolute after all. A very little light from the vertical shafts was filtering its way into even this darkest of places.

  About a hundred yards down their chosen tunnel, they came to a domed chamber identical to the first. Turnbull marked their exit with an X2 and was about to reenter and return along it when Gill stopped him. “What is it?” Turnbull asked.

  “It’s Bannerman,” Gill answered in a whisper, a finger to his lips. “We were right first time. The machine world kicked my senses out of play for a while, but as soon as we came through into this place I picked him up again. He isn’t human.”

  “What? But he’s blind! I mean, why would he—”

  “Shhh!” Gill warned. “Not only is he fully sighted, he isn’t deaf either!”

  “But you’ve seen his eyes; they—”

  “You’re still thinking human.” Gill cut him off.

  Turnbull thought about it. “Supposing you’re right, what do we do about it?”

  “We go back, offer him the chance to lead us out of here. Certainly we can’t afford to confront him here. If he wants to carry the game on, to whatever end, then he’ll be obliged to see us safely through this—at least as far as the next stage of the game.”

  “I’ll give the bastard ‘game’!” said Turnbull grimly. “And what makes you so sure he knows the way out?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Gill. “But I’m assuming that if he didn’t know the way out, then he wouldn’t have pushed Varre in here in the first place!”

  “Pushed him … ? You’re right! Of course he did!”

  “Time we got back,” said Gill. “But remember: play it as close to your chest as possible, just the way it comes … .”

  “You took your time,” said Anderson, when they got back.

  “We didn’t have your lighter,” Gill answered. “We found a place just like this one, identical. We marked it just in case we end up there again, from a different direction.”

  “Ditto,” said Angela. “So what now? The last two tunnels?”

  Gill pursed his lips, appeared to give it some consideration, finally shook his head. “I’ve a feeling we’ll find exactly the same setup,” he said. “That’s the nature of mazes, isn’t it? That every which way should look the same? No, I reckon it’s time we tried it your way, Angela, and gave Jon his head. What about it, Jon? Are you game?”

  Bannerman shrugged. “Whatever you say,” he said.

  “Ohhh!” Varre groaned, stirring where he lay on the stone floor.

  Gill frowned and took out the thorn hypodermic. He checked the bulb in the thorn’s root and found it soft and flacid. When he squeezed it with his thumb, only a single drop of liquid fell from the thorn’s tip. He tossed the thing disgustedly aside. “So now we’re going to have him to deal with, too,” he said.

  Angela took Bannerman to the first untried tunnel. “We can try this one,” she said, letting him feel the edge of the opening, “or—”

  “That one will do,” he answered, before she could show him the other tunnel. “It feels … right.” Behind him, Gill and Turnbull exchanged brief glances.

  “Very well,” said Gill. “Jon takes the lead, with
David right on his heels with the lighter. Then Angela, with Jack and myself bringing up the rear and looking after Jean-Pierre. Okay, let’s go … .”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  It appeared that Gill must be right about the nature of mazes: after about a hundred paces they came to another junction cave, exactly the same as all the others. By that time, too, Varre had struggled back to consciousness, so that Turnbull could sit him down on the cold stone floor, and Anderson was beginning to worry about the fuel in his lighter. “These things are meant to light a thousand cigarettes,” he said, “but they’re not meant to burn for minutes on end! I’ve turned the flame as low as it will go, but there can’t be a lot of time left in it.”

  Varre said, “A … a cave?” He got up and staggered to the centre of the floor, stood swaying where he gazed up the vertical shaft at the haze of softly flooding light.

  “A whole series of caves,” Angela answered him. “There appears to be one of them every hundred yards or so, all with five tunnels radiating from them and one central, vertical shaft to the surface. Except of course they’re not really ‘caves’ as such; we only call them that. Obviously they’re too regular to be caves; their walls are too smooth, too perfectly hemispherical. It’s a maze someone has fash—” And she came to an abrupt halt as she suddenly remembered who she was talking to.

  Varre nodded, continued to stare up the shaft into the flowing yellow light. “Which I have fashioned, right?”

  “It looks like it,” said Gill. And an idea came to him out of nowhere. “Jean-Pierre, since you’re the, er, architect, as it were, maybe you can tell us the secret.”

  Varre looked at him. The Frenchman’s eyes were dark-circled, deep now and less fearful, yellow where they reflected the suddenly sinister light. “Horizontal tunnels,” he said, “and five to each junction point. How many of these—call them ‘caves’, if you will—have you visited? And did you cross any side tunnels en route?”