The Portable Door (1987) (41 page)

“Yes. And—”

“Or folk tales. King Arthur and so forth.”

“Yeah, he loves all that crap. Just a big kid, really. Nasty spiteful bloody kid, but—”

“King Arthur.” Sophie’s eyes were wide as saucers. “The sword in the
stone
.”

Of course, Paul hadn’t been to Sophie’s house before. It was pretty much as he’d imagined it: double-glazed porch, tie-backs on the curtains, glass-topped coffee tables, stripped-pine kitchen units. Sophie’s parents weren’t quite the hopelessly obsolete museum-pieces she’d led him to expect; he rather liked them, in fact, especially the way that neither of them was particularly fazed when Sophie introduced her companions (“This is, um, Rosie, her son’s one of the partners; oh, and this is Paul, we’re in love”) as she pushed past on her way to the back door.

There on the grey-paved patio was the other sword in the stone, an exact duplicate of the one he’d grown used to sidestepping every time he crossed his bedsit floor to make a cup of tea. Neither rain, wind nor blue tits had marred its glowing hilt or shining blade. Mrs Pettingell had tied one end of the washing line to it.

“We’re still back where we started, though,” Sophie pointed out. “I’ve tried and tried, and so has Dad, and we can’t shift the stupid thing out of the stone.”

Mr Tanner’s mum nodded. “Like I said,” she replied. “It’ll be a spell, or an intelligence test. Humphrey’s a right bastard, but he’s good at what he does.”

Sophie thought for a while, then suggested going round to B&Q and buying a jackhammer. Mr Tanner’s mum didn’t think much of that idea; and while they were bickering about it in a fairly half-hearted fashion, Paul suddenly thought of something.
Gilbert and Sullivan
, he thought; also,
two hearts are better than one
.

“Just a moment,” he said, putting his hand on the left branch of the crossguard and beckoning Sophie over. “Here, you catch hold of your side, and when I count to three—”

It came out so smoothly that they nearly fell over; and, sure enough, the very tip of the blade wasn’t sharp and pointed—it was blunt and crinkly-edged, just like the wards of a key.

“Well, I’m buggered,” said Mr Tanner’s mum. “Looks like Humphrey’s got a soppy streak or something.”

Paul wasn’t so sure about that, but he kept his theory to himself. Having examined the end of the blade, he took a firm hold of the key portion and bent it sideways. The metal was brittle, and snapped. He dropped the key into his pocket, put the sword back in the stone and reattached the washing line. “One down,” he said.

They still had enough left over from the expenses money to run to a taxi from Wimbledon to Kentish Town. Paul really wished he’d had a bit more notice, since the flat was in its usual state of scruffy disorder whereby a bomb hitting it would count as a make-over, but Sophie appeared to be too wrapped up in the job in hand to notice, and he didn’t really care what Mr Tanner’s mum thought. The second sword came out as easily as the first, and the key snapped off like the tip of an icicle. “Right,” said Mr Tanner’s mum. “Here goes, then.”

So Paul pulled the portable door out of its cardboard tube one more time, and went through the preliminaries of smoothing it out and plastering it onto the wall. When it was ready, he took the first key and tried it in the top lock. It was a perfect fit, and so was its counterpart in the bottom. He straightened up, then hesitated.

“In case anybody was wondering,” he said, “I don’t think it was Humphrey who put those keys there. I think it was somebody else.”

“So what?” said Mr Tanner’s mum impatiently, but Sophie shushed her. “Who?” she asked.

Paul shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Though my guess is, the same person who arranged for each of us to get one. I think the keys were put there so Humphrey couldn’t get at them. That’s why it took the two of us to get them out.”

Sophie frowned. “But that’d mean—well, that whoever it was knew that you and me…And that’s just stupid. I mean, we only realised earlier today, and we’ve had these sword things for ages.” She turned on Mr Tanner’s mum and scowled. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“You are,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied. “Bloody hell, it’s been obvious for weeks, the way you two’ve been going on.”

Paul shook his head. “I think it goes back much further than that,” he said. “This probably sounds pretty weird, but I think we were sort of like
destined
to find these keys. And each other,” he added, going bright pink at the ears. “Not that it matters particularly,” he added briskly, “just thought I’d mention it.”

“Whatever,” growled Mr Tanner’s mum. “But I’ll tell you this. If you don’t get a move on and open this door, you’re destined to get my boot up your bum.”

Paul was no sceptic when it came to goblin prophecies. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered under his breath, and gave the door a gentle shove.

§

“Rosie!”

“Arthur!”

Paul looked away; it was enough to put you off true love for life. In passing, he wondered whether Arthur knew he had a son; probably not, he reflected, and a mental image of Mr Tanner floated into his mind.
Well
, he thought,
he’s got that to look forward to, poor bastard
.

“Excuse me,” said Pip mournfully, “but if you two could leave each other alone for just one moment—”

“You go ahead,” replied Arthur, with his mouth full. “We’ll catch you up in just a second.”

Pip shrugged. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “
I
can’t wait to get out of this awful place.”

He approached the threshold cautiously, as if expecting the door to bite him as he went through. “Odd,” he said, “I’ve been dreaming of this moment for ever such a long time, and now it’s actually here—”

“We don’t know it is, yet,” Sophie interrupted. “Only one way to find out, though.”

“True,” Pip said. “Ah well. Regardless of what happens next, I’d just like to say thank you, to both of you. And I’m most dreadfully sorry,” he added, to Paul. “About the dreams, I mean. Devil of a liberty and all that, intruding on another fellow’s sleep, but—”

Paul smiled. “That’s all right,” he said. “Compared to what my dreams are usually like…”

“I know,” Pip said. “Seen ‘em, actually. But even so.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and walked across the threshold.

“Good Lord.” They could hear his voice on the other side. “That stain on the ceiling’s still there, I see. I remember writing to the landlord about that in 1874.”

“You next,” snapped Mr Tanner’s mum; and she grabbed Arthur by his collar and frogmarched him through the door. “Well, I had to see it was safe first, didn’t I?” she explained.

That was almost touching, in a way.

She followed him; then Sophie went through, and finally Paul. He closed the door gently, then caught it as it rolled up and fell off the wall. “Well,” he said, “that’s that, I suppose.”

Pip and Arthur were standing in the middle of his floor, one on either side of the now swordless stone. “I hate to say this,” Arthur said, “but I think I preferred the way we had it. Still, it’s nice to be out. Back,” he amended. “Very nice,” he added, and he smiled.

“Glad you’re pleased,” grunted Mr Tanner’s mum. “Now, the next thing we’ve got to do is find Humphrey and shove him up himself with a long, sharp—”

“No,” Sophie said, surprising herself almost as much as she surprised everyone else. “No, the first thing is to turn this other bloke loose; you know, what’s-his-name, the senior partner. John Wellington. It’s obvious, surely,” she went on, as they all stared at her. “We can’t take on Humphrey Wells on our own, he’s like this really powerful wizard, he’d cast a spell on us or something and we’ll all end up in that horrible little room. But if we can rescue this John Wellington, presumably he’s an even better wizard, and he can sort out Humphrey for us. I don’t know why you’re all gawping at me like that,” she went on, “I’d have thought it was obvious, myself.”

Paul thought for a moment. “She’s absolutely right,” he said.

“Balls,” snapped Mr Tanner’s mum. “Just wait till I get my claws on him, he won’t be doing any magic for a very long time.”

“Well,” Arthur started to say, but then he caught his girlfriend’s eye and went very quiet. Pip, on the other hand, shook his head. “I agree with the young lady,” he said. “I think we’d best get the old devil—I mean, John Wellington, before we go marching into Humphrey’s office looking for a fight.”

“I agree with him,” said a voice from the corner of the room. “At least,” it added, “that’s what I’d have done, in your shoes. Too late now, though.”

They spun round, but before they’d stopped moving, the world started spinning in the opposite direction. Paul recognised the sensation; it was the same way he’d felt when Mr Wurmtoter’s recovery charm had whisked them out of the doorless room a few hours earlier. When it stopped, he saw that they were all standing in the boardroom at the office, lined up alongside the mirror-polished table, as Humphrey Wells advanced towards them. He was wearing his conjuror’s cloak and hat, and holding a saw.

§

O
f course,” said Humphrey Wells, pausing to mop his forehead on the hem of his conjuror’s cloak, “I’m probably being over-cautious, which is something of an occupational hazard with villains. After all, you know that I transformed my Uncle John into something, but you haven’t got the faintest idea what. Accordingly, you don’t really pose any sort of threat to me. Still, I happen to believe in attention to detail.”

He grinned and continued sawing. He was about two-thirds of the way through. Inside the box, Mr Tanner’s mum had stopped kicking and screaming, and was now lying ominously still.

“Furthermore,” he continued, raising his voice slightly over the grating sound of the saw, “I could probably have forced young Arthur here to tell me where the talisman’s hidden just by threatening to saw his sweetheart in two, without actually doing it. But I’ve been waiting for a pretext to get my own back on the miserable bitch for two hundred years.”

Arthur made a faint squealing noise and tried to struggle, but it didn’t do any good. Humphrey’s restraining spell held him tight in his chair, as firmly as though the ropes and gag had been real hemp and cloth rather than some magical effect. The others didn’t even try to move or make a noise. Real rope can be surreptitiously cut, burnt or frayed; the immaterial version is far less vulnerable.

“Of course,” Humphrey added, “you’re probably all wondering what I’m going to do with you once I’ve got my hands on this talisman. Good question; I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I suppose I could maroon you all in that poky little room; but as we’ve all seen, that’s not necessarily a permanent solution. Turning you all into things has a certain appeal, and once I’ve got the talisman it’ll be the proverbial piece of cake; or I suppose I could just kill the lot of you and have done with it. That’d be the sensible course,” he sighed, “but my trouble is, I’m far too tender-hearted. It’d be untrue to say I couldn’t hurt a fly, but I think I draw the line at five—no, make that six cold-blooded murders, since this time I’d have to do for poor old Uncle John as well. Who knows? I might even let you all go, for all the harm you could possibly do me.”

It was at this point, for the first time, that Paul genuinely wished that he was good at magic. A proper fully trained wizard, he felt, would be able to get free from the invisible ropes, turn Humphrey into a gnat and cause a heavy object to fall on him and deprive him of a dimension, all with a twitch of the nose or the waggle of an eyebrow. But Paul wasn’t a proper wizard, never had been one and never would be one, not now.
Pity
, he thought; though that wasn’t what he regretted most. The true bitch of it was that Sophie loved him—God only knew why—and any minute now he’d be dead, or transformed into a gerbil.
Do gerbils love?
he wondered. Naturally he’d still worship and adore Sophie if she was a gerbil; but would a gerbilized Sophie still love him, or would all that sort of thing get filtered out in the transformation process? In any event, it wasn’t fair, and if only he could get his hands free, he’d have a good mind to write to Esther Rantzen about it.

Humphrey had stopped sawing; he was leaning against the table and breathing heavily. “Actually,” he puffed, “make that seven cold-blooded murders, because I don’t suppose Dennis Tanner’s going to take kindly to having his dear old mum sawn in half. Still, he’s been a thorn in my side for far too long; and besides, I’ve never really liked him much.” He put one hand on each half of the box, and slid them gently apart. “Now,” he said, looking at Arthur, “let’s not muck about. You can see I’m serious, so don’t bother telling lies or playing for time. I want that talisman, please.” He snapped his fingers, and Arthur nearly fell out of his chair. “Come along,” Humphrey chided, “I’ve got a lot of things to see to after I’ve dealt with you people, so don’t waste my time.”

Arthur stood up. He was shaking all over, Paul noticed; couldn’t blame him for that. “Very well,” he said quietly. “But what assurance do I have that you’ll put her back together again?”

“My word as a gentleman, of course.”

“Ah,” said Arthur bleakly. “To be honest, I was hoping for rather more than that.”

Humphrey smiled. “Tough,” he said. “Did I mention that unless I put her back within three minutes, there won’t be a lot of point?”

Arthur closed his eyes briefly; then he reached across the table and picked up Humphrey’s conjuror’s hat, out of which he produced three white doves, a rabbit and a fine gold chain. The doves and the rabbit made themselves scarce; Arthur put the chain down on the table and said, “That’s it.”

Humphrey, who’d been staring, made a sort of gurgling noise at the back of his throat. “Do you mean to tell me,” he said at last, “that I’ve been carrying the wretched thing around with me for the last hundred and thirty years without knowing it? Of all the—” He laughed. “Well, I’ve got to admire your ingenuity,” he said, “not to mention your nerve. And I’ll forgive you for making me look a fool, because nobody’s ever going to know; and as soon as I’ve disposed of this annoying little trinket, my confounded uncle won’t be a problem any more.”