The Portable Door (1987) (32 page)

“Theo, I promised I wouldn’t.”

“Ah, but you’ve been to law school, you know all sorts of clever ways of telling people things without actually moving your lips. I want you to say you won’t tell him. Sincerely, and with all your fingers where I can see them.”

As he said this, Paul noticed what the professor couldn’t from where he was standing: the Countess had her fingers crossed behind her back.
Silly
, he thought;
but then, these people are different
. Quite possibly, crossed fingers might be a singularly powerful and significant magic spell, as far as they were concerned.

“All right.” She held up both hands. “I promise. I won’t tell him anything.”

Then Paul woke up; and he was sitting in an airliner seat in a yellow minivan driving at some unthinkable speed through the outskirts of London in the early morning; and next to him was the thin girl (whose name for the moment escaped him) and she was fast asleep, dead to the world; but the only other person in the bus was Mr Wells, apparently engrossed in a thick typescript. So Paul sat still and quiet for what seemed like a very long time; and then Mr Wells’s eyes closed, and the bundle of papers slid through his fingers onto his lap, and he snored.

Which just leaves me, Paul thought, and for some unaccountable reason, he was aware of the portable door, which was sitting in its cardboard tube in his jacket pocket. It was only there because he’d forgotten to take it out the night before, he certainly hadn’t intended using it today of all days. Nevertheless. A quick trip to Florence or Acapulco would break the monotony of the journey, give him a chance to stretch his legs. Furthermore, the overpowering fatigue that still followed a really long trip through the door would help him get to sleep, which would be a good thing on a five hour journey. Having made quite sure that both Sophie and Mr Wells were fast asleep, he unrolled the door, plastered it against the side of the van, and went through.

With hindsight, the mistake he made was not firmly deciding on his destination before crossing the threshold. Instead, he’d just gone through; a stupid mistake, entirely due to carelessness. It was, therefore, his fault alone when he looked round and discovered to his disgust that he was back at 70 St Mary Axe, in his own office.

It took Paul a moment to figure out what had happened; then he turned round to walk back through the door. But it wasn’t there. The reason for that wasn’t hard to guess, either. He’d forgotten to wedge the door open before stepping through, and the movement of the bus had jarred it shut.

A
nnoying, to say the least. Since Paul had no idea where Mr Wells had been taking them, he couldn’t get a bus or charter a plane and follow them, so there’d be raised eyebrows and pointed questions at the very least when they got back. Also, that was presumably the last he’d ever see of the portable door—unless, of course, it featured as an exhibit at his trial for stealing clients’ property from the strongroom.

All in all, a thoroughgoing cock-up. He forced himself to look on the bright side. (Maybe they’d sack him; but he doubted that, somehow. It’d be like getting thrown out of Hell for being antisocial.) Then, intending to go and report to Julie and ask for something to do, he reached for the door handle, and in doing so uncovered his watch, which told him the time was three minutes to two.

Hold on
, he thought; it might have seemed like he’d been in that horrible bus for eight hours, but he hadn’t.

A quick check assured him that the watch was working—second hand busily hoppiting round the dial—but obviously it wasn’t. He was considering the position when the door swung open, nearly bashing him on the nose, and Sophie bustled in.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and squeezed past him on her way to her desk—which, he noticed with alarm and bewilderment, was covered with stacks of Mortensen printouts, sorted and unsorted. Even by J.W. Wells & Co. standards, that was taking weirdness to excessive extremes. Sophie’s presence he could probably account for if he had to—for instance, she could have seen the portable door plastered up against the side of the van and gone through it. But they’d finished up the last of the spreadsheets during the course of yesterday afternoon—“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but haven’t we done all these?”

She looked up. “All what?”

“The Mortensen sheets.”

“The what?”

And then it occurred to him that if this really was yesterday afternoon, she wouldn’t have been to the meeting in the conference room yet, or heard Mr Wurmtoter explaining about the Mortensen Counters. “What day is it today?” he asked feebly.

“Wednesday. Have you been drinking, or something?”

“What? I mean, no.”

“You’re acting pretty odd. And what was it you called these bits of paper?”

“Oh, nothing.” Paul’s education might have been perfunctory at best, but he’d seen enough
Star Trek
to know that if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in a temporal anomaly, suddenly marooned in your own past, it’s absolutely essential not to do anything that might bugger up the timelines and change the course of events; for fear, among other things, that you’ll do something that might prevent whatever it was that shot you back through time from happening, in which case you’d be stuck halfway between the past and the future for ever, probably in one of those cheesy studio sets with all the polystyrene rocks. “Doesn’t matter, really,” he said. “Well, I guess I’d better get on with some work, then.”

The rest of the day was an absolute nightmare, as he struggled to remember every single thing he’d said and done yesterday, so as to be able to do and say it again in exactly the same way. In the end it proved impossible, although as far as he could see it really wasn’t his fault; there were several occasions when he distinctly remembered his lines, but either the reply they elicited was totally different, or the expected cue never came. Mr Wurmtoter’s deadly-perils lecture was shorter, and instead of warning them against Xavier Distortions he told them about Ehrlichmann Paradoxes—meeting yourself at your own funeral, and so forth—which struck Paul as pushing coincidence a trifle too far. There was only one bright spot; as he walked to the bus stop on his way home, he found that the portable door was still in his pocket—though that was an infringement of the temporal by-laws as well, since he could distinctly remember that at that stage yesterday, he’d entirely forgotten that it was there.

At this point he very nearly sat down on the pavement and burst into tears. But it was too late to do anything about it now—or was it? Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder precisely how he’d managed to arrive back at yesterday afternoon, and the answer was quite plain. The door had sent him not just through space but through time as well.

Oh for crying out loud
, he thought.

Pretty soon, however, disgust at finding himself caught up in a scenario he wouldn’t even bother to watch on TV unless there was nothing but motor racing on all the other channels gave way to a certain degree of cautious exhilaration. During his time at J.W.Wells Paul had come to realise that all that glitters was probably wired up to the mains, waiting to sizzle the eyebrows off unwary passers-by; nevertheless, being able to go back in time…If only he could figure out how to use the thing with any degree of precision, how wonderful that would be. He’d be able to go back through his life editing out the bloopers. He’d be able to avoid those embarrassing mistakes that made him wake up sweating in the middle of the night. For example—For example: he could nip back a couple of months, and make a point of not applying for the post of junior clerk at J.W. Wells & Co. Just think of it. No more Mr Tanner, or spreadsheets, or swords in stones, or goblins, no weirdness of any kind. Not to mention, no more broken heart.

No more Sophie.

Damn
, he thought.
But no, the hell with it;
it wasn’t as if anything could ever possibly come of it, now that she had Pot Boy to buy ham rolls for. Was it really worth turning his back on a chance to be free of all the crazy, terrifying, weird stuff, just so he could spend his working days not talking to her, not going out for lunch, not sharing the day’s experiences, not being there for each other as each new bizarre horror unfolded, not gradually being drawn closer by their shared traumas?

Paul thought about that.

Bugger
, he thought.

The bus drew up, and he climbed aboard.
All right
, he negotiated with himself;
how would it be if I went back to the day before she went to the party or whatever it was where she met the performance bloody potter, and somehow managed to stop her going to it?
Result, no Pot Boy, no broken heart.
Yeah, right
. He knew exactly what’d happen; a week later she’d meet an avant-garde neo-Marxist juggler on the bus, or get trapped in a stuck lift with an expressionist sea lion-tamer. It wasn’t with who she might fall in love but with who she quite definitely wouldn’t that mattered. As far as he knew, there was nothing the portable door could do about that, not even if it pitched the two of them up alone together on a desert island, with no source of food apart from inexhaustible oyster beds.

In other words, forget it. Ah, now, if only. If only the door could take him back to the day before the interview, and at the same time wipe his memory clean, so he’d forget he’d even met her. He’d settle for that; but apparently it didn’t work that way, or else how come he could remember Mr Lundqvist, and Mortensen Counters? He realised he’d been right all along. The door was just a toy, something out of the sorcering classes’ equivalent of an Innovations catalogue. He was back to where he’d started from, where he’d always been. It didn’t matter where you were, or when, or even (recalling Mrs Tanner) what. The only thing that matters a damn is who you are, and by a strange coincidence, it’s also the only thing you can’t change.

Nuts to that, then
. As the bus drew near to his stop Paul stood up to get off, and then remembered that yesterday at this point he’d been daydreaming, missed his stop, been carried on to the next one. He sat down, also remembering that he’d had a long walk home in the driving rain, which he would, of course, be obliged to repeat.

And, at six o’clock the next morning, there he was on the doorstep of 70 St Mary Axe; and there was Sophie. He’d spent most of the previous night trying to piece together his recollections of their strained, awkward conversation, the one where he’d ended up feeling sorry for Pot Boy. It had been bad enough the first time, God knew. Having to go through it all again, this time in cold blood—“Hello,” she muttered, still in her best doomed voice. “Hello,” he replied.

“Well,” Sophie went on, “we’re here on time.”

Paul remembered to nod. “He did say six o’clock, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. Of course, he could have meant six o’clock in the evening.”

“No. He said morning.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought he said.”

So far
, he reassured himself,
so good
. Of course, that had been the easy bit, the not-toe-curlingly embarrassing part. All the really painful bits were yet to come, starting with his next line; which was—“How’s things?” he asked awkwardly.

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, generally.”

“All right. I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

And then he dried. He could remember being thoroughly startled and panicked at this point, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what he’d actually said. A second passed, then another; it was rapidly turning into a Moment, and God knew what the upshot of that might be. He was going to have to busk it; but he couldn’t think of any sort of half-sensible reply. Finally, in desperation, he blurted out: “Oh. I thought it was you who wasn’t talking to me.”

Bad mistake. “Oh,” she said, and went pink. It was a Moment. Worse than that, he had a horrible feeling it was quite possibly one of those things Mr Wurmtoter had been prattling on about (“
fuck
, he thought;
twice now I’ve heard the stupid lecture, why the hell couldn’t I have been paying attention just once?
”), a Consequence Mine. In which case—“Oh,” she repeated. “Oh, right. What made you think that?”

“Well—” He could almost see the tattered shreds of the timeline blowing away on the breeze. “Well, ever since you and what’s-his-name, Shaz, got together, I suppose I’d assumed—”

“Oh.” It was snowing bloody Moments now, he could have shovelled them up, stapled them together and sold them on a market stall as calendars. “Actually, it’s not like that,” she was saying. “I mean, yes, we’re
seeing
each other, and I suppose we’re having a relationship, sort of, but it’s not—” She hesitated, scowled. “Actually, we’re going through this, like, really bad patch right now, in fact I’m really thinking about calling the whole thing
off
.”

Once again, though for rather different reasons, Paul didn’t shout, “Yippee!” at the top of his voice; nor did he dance a hornpipe, nor yet grin like a dog. Instead he cringed, and waited for a special effect to whisk him away to eternal damnation among the cardboard canyons.

“Actually,” Sophie was saying, “it’s bloody awkward right now. He’s changed a lot, really changed. All he wants to talk about is all these shows and gigs he’s got lined up, you’d think it was really important; and the bad thing is, when it comes down to it, all he’s really interested in is
money
.”

He recognised that bit, should have been relieved, wasn’t. The words were the same, more or less, but they were coming from a very different direction. He could see the crack starting to open up; all it’d take would be a very little wedge, gently pushed in with a fingertip, and Pot Boy would effectively be history. Alternative history. The other timeline.

“Come now,” he heard himself croak. “Don’t you think that maybe you’re being a bit unfair?”

She looked round sharply at him; almost as if she too was aware that he’d dumped the authorised script and was ad libbing disgracefully. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

“Well.” Yes, come to think of it, what the hell did he mean? No idea. “Obviously,” he said, “his career’s important to him. If he’s starting to make a go of it, you should be pleased.”