“I think so,” Gill answered. “What about the kaleidoscope effect? Where does that come in?”
“The walls,” Haggie answered. “That’s where that came in! The walls … crawled! It was like the kaleidoscope, yes, but underwater. Moving patterns, flowing, ever-changing. Like the walls were just big screens showing a lot of liquid movement. But they weren’t screens. It was like … I mean … can you imagine a television picture without the TV set, without the screen? That’s what it was like, on all sides. And I could walk through it all I liked and never seem to go anywhere. I thought I walked for a mile or more and nothing changed. Except the patterns, which changed all the time …” Haggie paused again and looked at the ring of faces all around him. “Is this crazy?”
“No,” Gill answered him, shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s crazy. So how did you get out of there?”
Haggie took a deep breath. “That happened the first time I saw the jelly thing,” he said. “See, every now and then, in this room, I’d come across things like pillars. I thought of them as pillars because they went straight up from the floor presumably to the ceiling. They were, I don’t know, maybe six feet right through. But as for their shape—square or round or whatever—don’t ask me. I can’t say what they were in cross-section because they were the same as the walls. Their surfaces were full of this coloured motion, which made them look like they were revolving or … or melting. Hey! That’s right! That’s what they looked like, the walls and the pillars; like a gang of crazy painters were melting colours onto them and blowing it in all directions, until the walls themselves were molten!”
“That’s a good picture,” said Gill encouragingly. “And the jelly-thing?”
Pleased with his description, Haggie had been grinning, however nervously. Now the grin slipped a little. “The spook?” His puffy lips trembled. “He was behind one of the pillars. I came round it … and I saw him. He was like—like—”
“Go on.” Clayborne was fascinated, bottom jaw hanging slack. “What was he like?”
Haggie swallowed and said, “There’s this stuff spooks are made of.”
“Ectoplasm,” said Clayborne, nodding.
“Yeah? Is that it? Like funny putty, or goo, or the slime of a jellyfish? Well, if you piled stuff like that up say four feet tall—but thin, very thin—and split its bottom half three ways—”
“Tripedal?” said Gill.
“Three legs, yes. And if you gave it four or five thin, ropy, dangling arms, all snaking down from its top … then you’d more or less have it. As for motion: it flowed like an octopus. I’ve seen them move the same way. Not jet-propelled, mind, but flowing sort of. But eyes, nose, mouth, any sort of face like we have—forget it. It was the same all over: blue-grey, a jelly, fluid as the walls. But … I knew it lived, and I knew it was thinking things. I mean, if you saw it you’d know it too. You’d know it was …”
“Sentient,” Gill prompted him. “It had intelligence.”
“Christ, yes! Sly too. Anyway, I saw it; it saw me; I took off. We probably both took off, I don’t know. But I’ve seen it a couple of times since then and I think it avoids me. Which is okay by me.
“Anyway, I ran. There were places where there were holes in the walls. I mean, you couldn’t see these holes, for there was nothing there. But that was just it: there was nothing there, surrounded by motion. Panicked, I ran into one of these spaces. Not deliberately, mind. I just sort of collided with it. And …”
“And?” Angela prompted.
“And the hole was a door.” Haggie shrugged helplessly. “A kind of door.”
Turnbull frowned. “What kind of door?”
Haggie jumped to his feet. “There you go again!” he accused. “I don’t bloody know what kind of door. Shit, when is a door not a door? When it’s a jar? Christ, I never understood that one, either!”
“Not a jar,” said Gill. “Ajar—when it’s half-open. It’s a play on words.”
“Oh, play on my dick!” Haggie scowled. “Anyway this bastard door was fully open. And I ended up … somewhere else.” He stepped carefully to the rounded rim of the cliffs and looked down. “Actually, I came out in this place.” His eyes focused on forests far below, and on a green plain that sprawled beyond them, maybe six or seven miles away.
“Right here?” Anderson got up and followed him. The others followed suit.
Standing there with the sun warm on his back, outlined against the sky and the curve of the world, Haggie’s shoulders were shuddering; he had started to cry; silent tears of frustration, of impotent rage, welled from his eyes and ran down his grimy, haggard face. He pointed out and down and his arm was visibly trembling. “No,” he sobbed, “not here. Not this very spot. It was down there, see?”
They looked, and they saw. Before, there had been nothing to see. But now there was. Down there on the green, distant plain, a great house like some airy country mansion.
A House of Doors …
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“It’s a never-ending circle,” said Haggie, regaining control of himself. “A great big bloody circle, and I just keep running round and around it.” He sat down again on naked stone, with his calves and feet dangling over the rim. “If I had the guts,” he continued, “I’d put an end to it right now and just throw myself down.”
“That would be one way to the bottom, I suppose,” said Gill briskly, “but I don’t much fancy it for myself.” And to the others, more seriously: “The descent shouldn’t be too difficult. The cliffs don’t appear to be sheer. There are plenty of outcrops, rock chimneys, overgrown fissures. In some places the foliage looks pretty dense. We can split ourselves into teams, go down in stages. Then, if one team’s route becomes impossible, they can retrace their steps and work round it until they join up again with another team—and so on. We must of course stay within hailing distance of each other.” He craned his neck to glance at the sun standing almost directly overhead. “I suggest we start right now.”
Clayborne had gone deathly white. “Go down?” he said. “Climb? Why the hell would we want to do that?”
“But isn’t it obvious?” Anderson looked at him curiously. “That house down there is one of two things: a mansion built by people not unlike ourselves, or another kind of Castle.”
“It’s only one thing,” said Gill and Varre almost in unison. And the Frenchman continued, “Since it wasn’t there an hour ago, it can only possibly be one thing.”
Angela looked from one of them to the other and back. “A doorway?”
“Several,” said Gill. “Even from this distance you can see its doors. We’re being invited to try our luck somewhere else.”
“But what’s wrong with this place?” Clayborne wanted to know. “If we can find food here we’ll be okay. Good climate, water, possibly meat. Some of those fruits back in the forest should be good. What’s the big hurry to move on?”
Turnbull looked at him suspiciously. “What, are you planning on settling here or something? What is it, Clayborne? What the hell’s wrong with you? Not so long ago you were trying to convince us that this was the spirit world! Something about a metaphysical hell? Have you decided your ghosts aren’t such a bad lot after all, then?”
Clayborne licked his lips and glanced fearfully over the rim. He at once went weak at the knees and backed off. “Vertigo!” he gasped. “I can’t stand heights!”
“I’m not much for heights myself,” Angela told him, “but if that place down there means a chance to get back home, then I’ll just have to risk it.”
Haggie looked up from where he sat. “That’s what I keep telling myself,” he said. “Maybe it’s a chance to get the hell out of here. Except it never is … .”
“Teams, then,” said Anderson. He glanced at Clayborne and frowned. “Miles, you won’t mind me saying it, but since you’re bound to be something of a liability, I’m going to suggest putting you with two of our strongest. Strong-nerved, that is, as well as physically. Jack?” He looked at Turnb
ull. “And, er, Jon?” He turned his gaze upon the ever silent Bannerman.
Bannerman shrugged and said, “I’m easy.”
But Turnbull wasn’t. “Listen,” he told Clayborne, “and let this sink in. I don’t mind giving you a hand, but take some well-intentioned advice and don’t go throwing any fits of the screaming ab-dabs. Not when we’re climbing. I can sympathise and all that, but putting my own life in jeopardy is something else. I don’t intend to die for someone I’ve only just met who’s incapable of helping himself. So if your nerves get a bit wobbly, just you keep them to yourself. Don’t go setting me off, right? Hysteria can spread like wildfire in a bad situation.” He turned to Bannerman. “Jon, can you climb?”
“I’ll get by,” Bannerman answered. He seemed steady enough.
“Okay.” Turnbull turned back to Anderson. “We’re a team.”
“Next,” Anderson continued, “I propose to team myself up with Jean-Pierre. He’s lightweight and should be able to scout the way ahead; I’m beefy and can use myself as an anchor where the going gets a bit steep.”
Varre nodded his agreement. “I have done a little rock climbing,” he said. “I foresee no great difficulties.”
Gill said, “That leaves Angela, Alec, and myself.” He shrugged. “I think we’re all three agile enough. I tend to tire easily, but in any case I can’t see us doing it all in one go. In fact I think we’ll be lucky if we’re down by nightfall. We might find it’s as easy to camp on the cliff for the night—that’s if we can find a safe staging area. We’ll have to wait and see how it goes.”
“Very well, then,” said Anderson. “So if everyone’s ready, let’s split up into our teams and start looking for the easiest way down … .”
An hour later the sun had gone down a little, throwing various slopes and projecting facets of the great escarpment into shadow. This caused no real problems as there was still full daylight; in fact with the sun out of their eyes the descent became that much less dangerous, and in the near-tropical climate they might otherwise have found the going too warm.
To the north (taking directions from the path of the sun) Turnbull’s team followed a diagonally slanting fissure which split the cliff’s face to an as-yet-undisclosed depth and gradually closed the distance between them and the other teams; with a little luck the fault might go all the way to the bottom. The great crack was stepped in places, with horizontal fractures, rock chimneys galore and wide, scree-littered ledges where shallow-rooted flowering creepers grew greenly lush in weathered crevices. Even Clayborne had to admit that the going was fairly easy; the way was by no means sheer, and all he had to do was follow in the steps of his companions and keep from looking out over the unknown deeps below.
Anderson’s two-man team was located central between the other two. He and Varre had descended fairly quickly and were a hundred feet or more deeper than the others. They picked their way down a steep slope of piled boulders where in ages past part of the cliff face had collapsed onto a great jutting ledge. For them it was mainly a matter of testing each protruding rock before trusting their weight to it, and of keeping their balance when scree threatened to shift underfoot. It was more a test of nerves and patience than of skill; to become impatient and make too much haste here could well prove fatal. Varre, aware of Anderson’s greater bulk, made every effort to keep to one side of him or bring up the rear … .
Gill and his party were to the south, clambering along the side of a jagged spur of granitelike rock with no sliding scree to worry about but precious little of vegetation for handholds. As a boy Gill would have romped down this section, but now he found the going very difficult. His weakened system was suffering under the constant strain on wasting, unaccustomed muscles; his lungs worked like a battered bellows, sandpapering away in his chest.
Angela, carrying her parka tightly bundled on her back, was also in some difficulty. She wasn’t lacking in strength, but being small, she found it hard to stretch for the various hand- and footholds. Both she and Gill were aware that Haggie could simply put on a little speed and leave them behind if he so desired. They didn’t consider this likely, however; and certainly wouldn’t worry about it anyway—it was just frustrating that he should be so much more capable. During his time in this place he’d grown accustomed to its hazards; his wiriness helped and his quick thinking, and yes, his criminal instinct for survival had readily adapted to these more basic levels of existence. For in fact he was a survivor, and the despair he’d displayed at the top of the cliffs had been entirely transitory. If no one else made it to the bottom, Smart Alec Haggie most certainly would. If he didn’t, then it would be through the intervention of something completely beyond his control.
Already the three teams were more than a third of the way down, so that it began to appear that Gill’s assessment had been pessimistic. Each group was within hailing distance of the next; on the spur, Gill and his team were visible to Anderson and Varre; Turnbull and party could follow the progress of the other two teams visually while themselves remaining for the greater part out of sight in the recessed caves and convolutions of their fissure. But in fact Turnbull’s team was on a ledge out in the open when their first real confrontation with this alien world proved almost fatal.
The fissure had finally closed up—this section of it, anyway—becoming little more than a descending crack in the face of a cliff. Obliged to leave its protection, the three now worked their way along a ledge formed of the projecting lower lip of the fault. Some three to four feet wide, the ledge was neither an overhang nor itself overhung, so that Clayborne found his vertigo more or less containable. In places creepers hung down from above and closed the team in, making it appear that they descended the ramp of a steeply sloping tunnel. But abruptly and when they least expected it, as they rounded a jutting promontory of fractured rock, there the ledge, creepers and all, had been swept away, leaving only a sheer, glistening face that plunged into a misted abyss—misted by virtue of the waterfall whose wide white spout fell in a seemingly solid sheet down this section of the escarpment.
Turnbull was in the lead, followed by Bannerman, with Clayborne bringing up the rear. But seeing what lay directly ahead, Turnbull stopped, looked back and shook his head. “End of the road,” he called back over the roar of the thundering waters. “We’ll give ourselves a few minutes’ break, then go back and up a little. We’ll have to find a route across the water higher up—or maybe a route under it?”
“Under it?” Clayborne’s voice was faint, hushed, barely audible.
“That’s right,” Turnbull answered. “Like where it leaps an overhang, maybe.” He leaned back as the others crushed forward to gaze out at the obstruction.
When Clayborne saw the waterfall rushing into eternity, his mind froze; the great spout set his senses whirling; his vertigo struck at the worst possible time. Drawn as if by a magnet toward certain death, arms windmilling, he took a staggering pace forward. Turnbull caught his upper arm, used his own body as a pivot to swing Clayborne back against the face of the cliff. In so doing he tripped and sat down heavily on the ledge, and with his free hand automatically grasped at a nodule of projecting rock. But it wasn’t a rock.
Outwardly it was like a large, oval, deeply domed limpet as big as a man’s clenched fist—but underneath it was something else. Caught unawares and dislodged by Turnbull’s sideswiping hand, the thing fell from the cliff face onto the ledge close beside him, lying there for a moment on its back. Turnbull caught a glimpse of bright. purple, strangely jointed, twitching chitinous legs, pincer claws, venomously yellow mandibles and glittering diamond eyes—before the thing righted itself and sprang astride his outstretched hand!
Galvanized by shock and horror, Turnbull tried to snatch his hand back. But the thing had extended its many legs and driven them deep into the compacted scree and rootlet-forced cracks of the ledge. The creature’s carapace had closed on his hand like a vise, clamping it down. Doubtless this was how it trapped its victims before eating them
. No sooner had this thought dawned on Turnbull than he felt the thing’s bite. It was the acid-etched pain caused by the spines of a stonefish, the white-hot sting of a scorpion. And it was … agony!
Turnbull screamed and his eyes bugged as he frantically drove the fingers of his free right hand down into the soil under the rim of the domed shell. Still shrieking, he jackknifed to his feet and tore the creature free of the ledge. It came loose and left three of its legs still jerking where they’d fixed themselves to the rock. Continuing his movement, Turnbull hurled the crustacean thing out into space; but his swing was so desperate and agonized, and he was so dizzy—by virtue of the poison already working in his system—that he overbalanced and took a stumbling backward step out over the abyss. He would have fallen, indeed he did begin to fall, but Bannerman reached out, caught his left wrist and closed his fingers round it in an iron grip. In the next moment Bannerman lay spread-eagled on the ledge, peering over its rim, and Turnbull hung at arm’s length, slowly turning, looking up into the face of the one man who could save him.
He saw Bannerman’s face and shoulders in silhouette against blue sky and black rock, and even as the venom in his body began to exert a freezing paralysis, so his brain worked that much more coherently. Bannerman’s silhouette matched up exactly with another until now hidden in memory. A silhouette seen framed in a doorway on a certain dark night in Killin. Last night, in fact, and Gill’s doorway!
Turnbull looked at the hand grasping his left wrist and his brilliantly clear brain ran a replay; he saw the hand fly apart into so many crimson-spraying sausages. And then he looked into Bannerman’s face, directly into his eyes. Bannerman was smiling.