The House of Doors - 01

by Brian Lumley

  Police Sergeant Angus McBride was on desk duty, keeping himself busy by checking out yesterday’s traffic accident reports. Eight more hours before his shift ended and he’d be free to go home, and by the time he got in his wife would already be on her way to work. Hell of a life! Maybe during the coming weekend they’d find some time to do something together.

  McBride heard the outer door open and close, heard hesitant, uncertain footsteps cross the floor of the now empty advisory annexe to the door of the Duty Room. He waited expectantly until the buzzer went and a light started flashing over the door, then pressed the electronic release and heard the door click open. McBride watched the figure of a man enter and cross to the desk. Making no attempt just yet to look at his night visitor too closely, the Sergeant wondered what the trouble would be.

  A missing person? A lost child? Burglary? Theft? This time of night it was usually a stolen car. Yobs thrown out of the pubs were wont to go joyriding—and sometimes they were wont to smash up the cars they took and kill people with them. The accident report he’d just been checking had been one such case: drunk steals car, mows down old lady. What a bastard!

  The stranger had come to a halt now in front of McBride’s slightly elevated desk. They looked at each other. The Sergeant saw a man in an overcoat, tall and blockily built, with dark brown hair, faintly foreign eyes and a mouth without emotion. There was a sort of half-smile hidden in the face, but lacking any genuine warmth. The sergeant gained an impression of strength—rather of power, heat—like a blowtorch on stone. There seemed to be a deal of contradiction in the man. And in that McBride was very observant.

  “Can I help you in some way?” he said.

  His visitor had scarcely studied McBride at all; he saw just another human being. “Possibly,” he answered. “You’re holding a man called Rodney Clarke Denholm. I’ll be representing him. My name is Jon Bannerman.”

  McBride sighed and looked this way and that; he tried hard not to show his disgust. “Do you know what time it is?” he said. “I mean, we don’t usually allow visitors—not even solicitors—at this time of night, Mr. Bannerman.”

  “I did phone earlier, at about ten this morning,” Bannerman lied. “I’ve come up from London. Missed several connections due to snow on the rails. And the trains I did manage to catch were all delayed. I’m sorry if I’m putting you to any trouble.”

  “You phoned, you say?” McBride opened the telephone book, began to check through the entries.

  Bannerman took out his locator, looked at it in the palm of his hand like a man glancing at a pocket calculator. He saw that there were three men in a back room several rooms removed from here, and another man, alone, in one of a block of six cells down a corridor leading off from this control room. That would be Denholm. There was no one else around.

  The radio came to life in a sputter of static. “Alpha One,” the caller announced himself, “it’s dead out here. ETA your location figures five minutes, over?”

  McBride answered, “Zero, roger so far, over?”

  “Alpha One: put the coffee on, out.”

  Five minutes, Sith thought. It will be enough.

  McBride looked at him again. “Patrol’s coming in,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t find any record of your call. Ten this morning, you say? Nothing here …” He shook his head. “But look, if you care to wait a few minutes until the patrol’s in, one of them will let you in to see Denholm and wait outside until you’re through with him, okay?”

  “No.” Bannerman shook his head. “Not okay, and I don’t care to wait. Do you have the keys to Denholm’s cell?”

  Suddenly McBride was very much aware of the man’s size. He was big and strong, and seemed wound up as tight as a steel spring. Like a cat ready to leap out from the long grass on some unsuspecting sparrow. “The key?” He inadvertently glanced down at the bunch of keys dangling from his belt.

  Bannerman saw the flicker of his eyes and nodded. “I want to see Denholm now. You’ll take me to him and open the door.”

  Trouble! the Sergeant thought, and his hand strayed towards the alert button connected to the standby room. Bannerman’s reactions were lightning fast; he reached across the desk and trapped McBride’s wrist in a fist like a vise; with his free hand he knocked the policeman’s flat-topped cap flying and sank his fingers into his hair, then yanked him bodily up and over the desk, hurling him to the floor. Crashing down on his head and one shoulder, the sergeant was knocked unconscious.

  There hadn’t been a lot of noise. Bannerman cocked his head on one side and listened a moment, heard nothing out of the ordinary. He bent down and tore the bunch of keys loose from McBride’s belt, crossed silently to the door to the cells and opened it. And a moment later he stood in the corridor outside the occupied cell.

  Denholm woke up when he heard the key grating in the lock. PIe was still lying on his back on a steel bunk bed when Bannerman put on the light and moved to stand beside him. “Rodney Denholm?”

  Blinking and rubbing his eyes, Denholm sat up. He clasped his bandaged right arm, which was still stiff from the graze Turnbull’s bullet had given it, and looked at his visitor. “What?” he mumbled. “Yes, I’m Denholm. But who … ?”

  Bannerman caught his arm under the shoulder and jerked him to his feet. “You are to come with me,” he said—but even as he spoke, behind him the cell door slammed shut!

  Bannerman released Denholm, leaped for the door. He’d left the keys dangling in the lock. Sergeant McBride, weak, staggering and white as a sheet, was trying to coordinate himself sufficiently to turn the key. Barely conscious, he still hadn’t sounded the alert and acted more out of instinct than common sense.

  In the upper section of the steel door was a grid of iron bars formed of nine eight-inch squares. Bannerman’s eyes glowed red and his breath began to whoosh. Calling on his construct’s reserves, Sith caused him to reach through the bars with both hands and grab McBride—and commence to drag him through them!

  Bannerman’s right hand crushed the policeman’s throat, tore his windpipe and Adam’s apple loose and into the cell in a welter of blood and gristle. His left hand hauled on the sergeant’s right arm until it was pulled out of joint at the shoulder. And furiously Bannerman dragged pieces of McBride into the cell, including his head, from which the bars sheared off his ears. Finally, quite dead, the policeman hung there like a mutilated scarecrow, one-third of him on Bannerman’s side of the door.

  The door was still unlocked; Bannerman turned the handle and kicked it open; he looked back at Denholm and motioned him into activity. “Out,” he said, his voice cold again and the fires dying in his eyes. “Quietly—and quickly!”

  Denholm was frozen to the spot. His mouth had fallen open and his tongue flopped about in his throat, but no words came out. He was trying to scream and couldn’t, gurgling like a man in a bad dream who fights to wake up. And Bannerman saw that he was quite incapable of acting or accepting instructions. He struck him in the stomach and, as he folded, rabbit-punched him unconscious.

  From the midnight street outside the police station, Alpha One radioed, “One for Zero, we’re home. Where’s the coffee?” The driver parked up and switched off; he and his Number One got out of the patrol car and entered the police station. As they crossed to the duty room, Bannerman stepped out from behind the door and carrying Denholm across his shoulders vanished into darkness. One of the two constables thought he heard something, turned quickly and looked. But the outer door was already swinging shut.

  The other policeman pressed the buzzer for admittance and waited—and waited—and after some little time began to yell.

  Eventually the standby patrol sent a member to find out what all the noise was about … .

  Jack Turnbull was sucked through the coffin-shaped door into inky darkness. Then … he was inside a stone water chute, being hurtled like a spider down a plug hole into some monstrous subterranean sump—or into his own personal hell. As suddenly and terrifyingly as his ri
de had started, so it ended and he was shot out into jet black space … and down into water as thick and as black as midnight mud.

  Surfacing, he gulped cold, reeking air into starving lungs, and treading water he turned in a slow circle. In all directions save one there was only darkness, but in that one direction he saw stalactites like stone daggers descending from a domed dripstone ceiling, and a ledge of slimy stone, all fitfully illumined by the flickering yellow flaring of a torch or torches.

  And in an instant he was back in that mountain cave in Afghanistan, where his torturers weighed him with rocks and submerged him in the underground river, and left him there for—God, how long?—before hauling him out and questioning him again.

  He’d been caught with a Mujehaddin outfit in the hills close to Kabul, disguised as one of them. The Russians had been tipped off: a gunrunner ferrying near-sentient American stingers through to the guerrillas was with them right now in the hills, teaching them how to shoot down Soviet transports out of Kabul. It was their chance to hit back against “foreign intervention” and teach Turnbull and those like him a well-deserved lesson, also to even the score for a lot of dead or missing Russian aircrew.

  Whoever it was had blown the whistle, he must be Mujehaddin, one of two men employed as information gatherers, who had occasional jobs in the city. Turnbull had known both of them and one had been a close friend: the big man had saved the guy’s life in a misplanned foray against a Russian fortress down in Zam-indawar. He hoped to God it wasn’t Ali Kandamakh who’d shit on him. Not that it would make much difference now. Turnbull had been the only survivor of the ambush, and only then because the Russians had wanted him alive. But at the same time they hadn’t wanted to dirty their hands, which was why they’d given him to their Afghan puppets, who in turn had handed him over to their torturers … .

  Turnbull swam towards the ledge, through water that glopped like glue, and saw in the shadows of stalagmites and stalactites a bearded, flame-eyed crew waiting for him there. And he guessed—no, he knew—that it was going to be the same all over again. He understood the principle of the thing; Gill’s explanation had been one hundred percent correct; the House of Doors was testing them—testing him—to the breaking point.

  Well, Jack Turnbull hadn’t broken that time in Afghanistan—though he’d been no good for anything since then, except as a tame watchdog to puffed-up clowns—and he certainly wasn’t going to break now. Not now that he knew he was only fighting against himself, against his own worst nightmare. But—

  He remembered how it had been: the cold, rushing water, and the rocks holding him there on the bottom, bound hand and foot, feeling the water sluicing by while his lungs screamed for air and his nostrils gaped and his heart pounded in his chest like it was trying to tear itself free and break out!

  What did they think he was, these torturers? A pearl diver? A Japanese sponge fisherman? It was all in the mind, he knew—the ability to hold your breath underwater—but those guys did it for a living, and they had the psychological advantage of being able to surface whenever they wanted to. And Jack Turnbull? He had no advantages. Just ropes and rocks and water that wanted to be into him like—like a stiff prick into a willing virgin! Christ, it had no conscience at all, that water … .

  And this water was just as bad. It was different but just as bad. It would be as bad, when he had no control over it. Stagnant but deep. Thick but cold. Made of a great deal of oxygen, true, but also of far, far too much hydrogen, in a combination just as deadly as sulphuric acid—if you happened to be lying under it. He was closer to the ledge now and could see that the raggedy types waiting for him there had ropes, and rocks in nets. Just the same as before. Or … worse?

  Turnbull was suddenly aware of things moving about his legs. Fish? Blindfish? Cavernico-lous catfish come to sniff at this intruder and see if he was edible? He trod water and reached down along his right thigh. Something as big as a plate had fastened itself to him like a giant sticking plaster. He tore it free, brought it up into the light of the torches on the ledge. Jesus!

  The thing was a kind of leech. They were all over his legs, his belly, back and thighs! And over his screams he could hear those bastards on the ledge laughing!

  They’d laughed in Afghanistan, too. ‘Four times they’d submerged him, and each time they’d brought him up they’d laughed. But he hadn’t talked, not a word. What good would it do to talk? The sooner he’d let it all out the sooner they’d let him out—all over the floor of the cave. Which was why he’d decided that the next time they sank him in the water, he was just going to open his mouth and drink the fucking stuff. It would be like drinking whisky except it wouldn’t taste so good and would knock him out that much faster—forever! But it was coming anyway and at least this way it would be on his terms.

  Then one of the bastards had yelled: “I spicking English! I insulting you in your own tongue pig-bastard shit-eater!” And Turnbull had known the voice, and when its owner came closer, he’d known the gap-toothed, wicked grin, too! Ostensibly checking his ropes where they bound his hands behind him, the Afghan had sliced them through and pressed the knife into Turnbull’s eager hand. God bless you Ali Kandamakh, you old mountain wolf! And a moment later they’d kicked him back into the underground river.

  Down on the bottom he’d freed his feet, sliced through the ropes which bound him to the weighted nets; then clung tight to the bundles of stones, waiting for them to drag him out again. And when at last they did … this time Turnbull had been the one with the psychological advantage.

  He’d come out of the water like a salmon and into them like a knife. Exactly like a knife! Ali took one and Turnbull two, which left the one who put his knife in Ali’s back and through his heart. Then Turnbull got that one, too, and it was over. All over for Ali.

  After that … Turnbull had been into the hills and gone like a ghost, listening to the choppers overhead until nightfall, then heading for the big rebel camp up in the Hindu Kush.

  A month later and he’d been back in London … .

  But all of that had been nine years ago and this was now. And now as then these jokers on the ledge thought they had the advantage. For which reason Turnbull screamed his throat raw and tore more of the leeches off his body and begged them with every gasped breath to drag him up out of this scummy soup. They had knives, too, just like the ones his Afghan torturers had had. (Of course, for that was his recurring nightmare, from which he still hadn’t managed to free himself.) But when they saw his terror—the fact that he was totally unmanned—they relaxed a little and some of them put their knives away.

  Not the one who reached down a hand to him, though; no, for that one kept his long, curved knife handy just in case. He reached a hand down to Turnbull, but at the same time showed him his dully glinting knife. Turnbull came half up out of the scum, tightened his grip on the man’s hand, braced his feet against the ledge—and yanked! He yanked himself up and his yelping would-be torturer down! And as that grimacing scarecrow fell, so Turnbull snatched his knife from him and sprang at the others on the ledge.

  Oh, there were too many of them to make a go of it; he could only hope to slow them down a little, put the fear of Christ into them; but nonetheless he was like a lion amongst lambs while it lasted. He gutted one and hacked the throat out of another, and then he was off and running through the dripstone maze, following a path of flaring flambeaux. And as he went, so he cut down the torches and stamped them out on the dusty floor, leaving only smoke and reeking darkness, screams and shouted oaths in his wake. Then, as he passed through the last of the stalactites where the stone ceiling came down low and the cave bottlenecked—

  —The way was blocked! It had been a tunnel, but now it was plugged with a mighty slab of black stone. One last torch flared where it lit the plug with its yellow light. And Turnbull saw that the slab of stone had … a knocker? A knocker, yes, in the form and shape of a huge iron question mark!

  Footsteps pounded behind him and a ragged pant
ing that seemed to sound right in his ear. He tore loose the last leech from his ribs and turned, ducked, slammed the thing like a wad of bloody red dough into a snarling heathen face, then leaped for the knocker—

  —And knocked … !

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Angela slept. She hadn’t intended it when she’d climbed the tree, but once at the top and when she’d seen the great soft cup formed at the heart of the palmlike branches, then she’d known that she had to sleep. Her reason for climbing the tree had been simple: to spy out the land around. To see if any of the Rod Denholms had picked up her trail. And if they had, to choose the best direction in which to run from them.

  For this was her nightmare world, the world of her very blackest dream: a beautiful world marred only by the presence of her bestial, lusting, loathsome husband. Made so much more monstrous by the fact that there were dozens of him!

  The climb had been easy. Like a palm, the bole of the tree had been regularly serrated where older branches had died and fallen away. The horny, cusped stumps of these shed branches had been hard on her now naked feet, but that had been the least of Angela’s concerns; she’d learned as the others had learned that wounds healed quickly in these worlds created by the House of Doors; and in any case, torn feet would seem a blessing in comparison with the tearing her body would suffer if the Rods caught her.

  But at the top of the long, gracefully bending trunk where the new branches grew out in a great fan to droop like exotic green and yellow plumage—in the very heart of the hugely spread leaves—there she’d seen the central cup and had gratefully settled her scratched, bruised and bloodied body into it. Lesser fronds angling inwards overhead had provided shade from the sun, and a breeze off the achingly blue sea had served to cool the fever of her body—but not of her heart and soul. For despite all of its undeniable beauty, this jewel world had proved beyond the slightest doubt that it was also capable of the utmost horror!