The Portable Door (1987) (24 page)

No dice.

A brief moment of panic, followed by simple aggravation; and he snapped his fingers as though he was kicking the spin-dryer or thumping the photocopier (this hurts me more than it hurts you, but sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind). Then, without bothering to look, he poured milk into his tea, stirred it, fished out the tea bag and drank. It tasted just fine, as he’d known it would.

It was at that moment that Paul realised the simple, basic truth. The world ought to work properly, there was nothing wrong with it, but sometimes it stuck or it wouldn’t start in the mornings. Magic was the confident, well-placed clout on the side of the casing, the clip round the carburettor that got it going. Magic wasn’t changing the world or making it do impossible stuff; magic was persuading it, by force of will and a little controlled violence, to stop fart-arsing about and get on with what it was supposed to be doing.

Simple as that.

Now that he’d figured that out, he had no trouble at all. It was dark and gloomy outside the window, just starting to spit with rain; but he soon fixed that with a neatly directed finger-snap, and the sunlight switched itself on and the cloud-curtains were drawn and tied back, and the rain thought better of it and went away somewhere else. There was no bread, nor sausages, nor bacon; but that wasn’t right, because a hard-working magician needed a good breakfast inside him before he could go setting the world to rights. One click of the fingers sorted out the supply foul-up; another produced a perfect bacon sandwich. The dustbin needed emptying and the ceiling was swathed in dusty wreaths of cobweb, but he was far too busy these days with his important work for the bauxite industry to be bothered with menial chores like dusting and trash-haulage. A quick spot of thumb-and-middle-finger action, and it was all taken care of; what was more, three dirty mugs he hadn’t even noticed spontaneously washed and dried themselves and lined up to attention on the shelf over the sink.

Dismissed
, he told them.
Carry on
. Ironed shirts materialised on hangers, books left the floor and fell in on the bookshelf, the dead light bulb in the bedside lamp came alive and glowed cheerfully. Situation normal, all systems nominal. Just like a bunch of badly behaved kids in the street; all they want is for someone to tell them what to do.

And then he thought; that was all very well, but how could a busy, hard-working bauxite-dowser like him be expected to give his full attention to his work when his heart was going pitter-patter like a bird with a broken wing, and his thoughts kept turning to the only girl he’d ever really loved, getting up to God knew what in a derelict bus in a field near Esher with a performance-potting jailbird? Too much to expect of anybody, let alone a sensitive, fragile sensibility like his. Obviously something had gone wrong here, and it needed fixing; so he’d snap his fingers, and then the phone would ring, and—
well, we can take it from there. Okay? Fine
.

Paul snapped his fingers.

Two pairs of used socks vanished from the floor and reappeared in his underwear drawer, crisply ironed and neatly balled. A broken pencil on the mantelpiece sharpened itself. Apart from that, nothing.

Of course, it’d have helped if he’d had a phone; but when he looked round the room, there was a dinky little fifth generation Motorola lying on the bed. He checked to see it was fully charged up and switched on. Then he snapped his fingers again.

Nothing.

He sagged, and dropped into his chair (which had somehow contrived to move from over by the door to directly under his bum without him noticing). So much for that theory, then. What the hell use was magic if all it could achieve was a little light housework and some entry-level shopping? Any bloody fool can wash up or shift furniture; the fact that he carried out these tasks by snapping his fingers rather than the more conventional methods was neither here nor there. Magic didn’t work after all; it couldn’t set right the fundamental lash-ups of the cosmos. It was like having a car with a fully functional CD player and a buggered engine.
Useless. The hell with it
.

The phone rang.

Paul jumped up out of his chair like a space shuttle bursting out of the Earth’s gravity well. “Hello?”

“Listen.” He recognised the voice. It wasn’t the voice he’d wanted it to be. He sat down on the bed and closed his eyes. “I need you here at the office, right now,” Mr Tanner went on. “Don’t waste time putting a suit on or anything like that. Get yourself over here right away.” Before he could say anything (such as, for example, “
Get lost
”) the line went dead. Scowling, he aimed the phone at the wall opposite but didn’t actually let fly. It occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t him who’d magicked the phone out of thin air, but rather Mr Tanner; in which case, if he smashed it to bits, he might get in trouble. He shoved it in his pocket, grabbed his coat, and hurried out into the street.

Saturday; different bus timetable. He stood at the kerb, waiting to cross the road to the bus stop, but before he could do that, a taxi pulled up next to him and the door swung open.

“Paul Carpenter?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Hop in.”

He frowned. “But I haven’t got enough money,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that. Charged to the firm. J.W. Wells, right?”

Paul nodded and climbed in. All he could see of the driver was the back of his head: a cross between Yoda and one of the PG Tips chimps.
Wonderful
, he thought,
I’m being driven across London by a goblin. And my mum reckoned I’d never amount to anything
.

The journey hardly seemed to take any time at all, and as soon as he climbed out of the taxi, the door slammed shut and it drove away, leaving him standing outside 70 St Mary Axe. He was wondering how he was going to get inside when the door opened about twenty degrees, and a goblin face appeared. He didn’t think he recognised it (this one was more sort of warthog-cumpeccary, with matching tusks). The goblin beckoned to him, and then, as they passed in the doorway, bowed deeply. That, he felt, was something he’d probably never get used to.

“You took your bloody time.” Mr Tanner was sitting on the front desk, in more or less exactly the same place and position as he’d been when Paul had left the office on Friday night. “Still, at least you’re here now. Take a look at these, ring anything that gives you the twitch in green marker pen.” He slid a folder of large glossy prints across the desk. All landscapes: aerial views of desert, the same old stuff. Paul started to feel more than a little sceptical about the urgency in all this.

“You still here?” Mr Tanner was looking at him over the top of his glasses. “If you’re wondering how you’re going to get to your office with the place full of goblins, don’t worry about it. Leave them alone, and they won’t give you any bother.”

Paul left Mr Tanner in reception (he appeared to be reading a newspaper) and climbed the stairs to his office. No goblins anywhere to be seen; but no shortage of signs that they’d been there recently, from ripped carpet and claw-shredded wallpaper to axe-riven door panels and the occasional dark, foul-smelling brown stain on the floor. It’d take a dozen men six months to clean up and make good all that mess; but Paul knew better than that. A few finger-clicks was all it’d take, and nobody would ever guess there’d been anything on the premises larger or more destructive than a gerbil.

Just as well
, Paul thought as he sat down behind his desk,
that my social and personal life are a complete fuck-up and I wasn’t just about to go out or anything
. Even so, it was a bit much, being ordered back into the office on a Saturday morning. Was this sort of thing going to happen all the time, for the rest of his working life? Now there was a cheerful thought.

Never mind
, he reassured himself. The quicker he started, the sooner he’d be finished. He went through the pile of enlargements, waiting to feel the electric-shock effect, but either he’d lost the knack or else there wasn’t anything there in the first place. Not so much as a tiny twitch.

That wasn’t so hot, he reckoned. Probably it was because he wasn’t doing it right, maybe because his mind was on other things. It didn’t take much imagination to picture Mr Tanner scowling at him as he handed back a wad of pristine photos, telling him to go away and do it again, properly this time. Well, he thought, he could cheat; draw in a handful of squiggles here and there at random, Mr Tanner wouldn’t know he was lying. Then he thought; better still, if he could persuade Tanner that really he was rubbish at this job, maybe Tanner would decide Paul hadn’t got the touch after all, and he’d let him quit. He uncapped the green marker pen, closed his eyes and prodded with a fingertip. Where his finger landed, literally in the middle of nowhere, he carefully drew a green circle, then moved on to the next one. It didn’t take him long to do the whole stack; and as soon as he’d done the last one, the door swung open and in came Mr Tanner, with another blue folder under his arm, and a teacup and a plate of what looked like purple-iced Christmas cake in his hands.

“Any luck?” Mr Tanner asked.

“No. Yes, I mean. Actually, I’m not sure.”

Mr Tanner looked at him. “Thought you could probably do with a cup of tea,” he said. “Also,” he added, “it’s my birthday, Mum baked me a cake.” He put the plate down on Paul’s desk.

“For me?” Paul asked.

“Don’t eat it if you don’t want it,” Mr Tanner replied. “Anyhow, here’s some more pics for you to have a look at. I’ll take these other ones on, if you’re done with them.”

“I—” Paul hesitated. “Like I said,” he stammered, “I’m not sure about them. I mean, I could’ve got them all completely wrong.”

Mr Tanner shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said, “we all make mistakes. Just so long as you’ve done your best, that’s all anyone could ask.” Before Paul could say anything, he scooped up the old photos, with their entirely spurious green rings, conspicuous as acne on the face of a supermodel, and put them under his arm. “I’ll let you get on,” he said. “After all, I expect you’ve got things you’d rather be doing.” He paused at the door, and added: “By the way, I appreciate you coming in like this, on a Saturday, on such short notice. I’ll be honest with you, there’s been times since you joined us when I wondered if you’d got what it takes, attitude-wise. I’m glad you proved me wrong.”

Paul listened to his footsteps in the corridor until they died away, then said: “Fuck!” rather loudly. Anything else he could probably have coped with, but gratitude was too much to bear. He nearly jumped up and ran after Mr Tanner, to confess his sins and get rid of the guilt, but he was too scared and ashamed. A small part of him tried to argue that this was just another of Mr Tanner’s mind games, nastier even than the zombie magic, but even though he was pretty sure this theory was true, it didn’t make him feel any less guilty. He sipped the tea, which was lukewarm and at least forty per cent pure sugar, and looked at the slice of cake. The idea of goblin cuisine didn’t appeal to him one bit, but there was the dreadful problem of disposing of the body. If he just left it there and Mr Tanner saw it, untouched; or if he slung it in the bin—even worse. Eating it, on the other hand, was something he really wasn’t prepared to do. It was too big to fit in his coat pocket. With a sigh, he pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk, intending to hide the slice there until Monday, when he could return with a suitable container in which to smuggle it off the premises.

He’d had the bottom drawer open only yesterday, and he could have sworn that at that time it’d been empty. Now there was something in it. Three things.

One was the long stapler; but Paul was used to finding that lurking in unexpected places. The second was a bag of chocolate-covered raisins. The third was a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned, took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out. It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner; but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing his nerve and changing it to something less facetious. At least, that was what he took it for at first, because the markings (apparently representing the panels, hinges and handle of a door) looked at first sight to be the same. On closer examination, he reckoned they were in fact slightly different; an eight-sided doorknob instead of a round one, for example, and rather more detailed mouldings surrounding each pseudo-panel. He studied it for a moment, then shrugged, rolled it up and put it back.

Rather more interesting was the bag of raisins. Chocolate raisins were far and away Paul’s favourite form of recreational nibbling; once he’d opened a bag, his hand would insist on straying back to it until the very last raisin had gone, generally leaving him feeling bloated and sick. This bag, he couldn’t help noticing, was still sealed. That tempted him. Although what little residues of the basic human survival instinct that remained to him argued vehemently against eating anything he found on the premises, it seemed reasonable to assume that if the bag was still pristine and inviolate, it wasn’t just the leftovers of a goblin snack.
Go on
, whispered the voice of temptation,
just have one or two, they can’t hurt you
. It did occur to him that it was some—

thing of a coincidence that a bag of his favourite sweeties should manifest itself in his desk drawer, just when his guilt and general misery left him most vulnerable to the siren lure of comfort eating, but by then he was no longer in complete control of his actions. He hadn’t noticed himself opening the bag, but it was nonetheless open; three or four brownly gleaming raisins had spilled out and were lying on the desk in front of him, pretty well clamouring to be popped into his mouth. (His preferred method was to tuck the raisin into the corner of his mouth until the chocolate coating melted, before biting into the sugary heart of the raisin itself.)
The hell with it
, he thought; and by the time he’d put the slice of purple cake in the drawer and slammed it shut, he was already on his second raisin and reaching for a third.