“You should have gone with him,” Gill told Angela. They had watched the cars come back, and Jack go down to the road to meet them. But he had not left the area of the Castle, and wouldn’t until he got the word from Gill. If that word didn’t come … at least he’d be able to tell them what it was all about. And perhaps help them a little with their preparations …
“Why?” she asked; and immediately nodded, answering herself: “Because I’d be safer out there. But no, I think I’d prefer to know that you’re safe, too. So when you leave, I leave.”
“When I leave,” said Gill, “it may not be to go out there, with Jack. I might be going … out there, instead. What I have in mind—I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I have to try it. You see, this place—this spaceship, synthesizer, House of Doors—it’s like an examination room at a university, where the students take their final exams. And I do mean final! The Thone use it to decide which races live and which die. That’s the long and short of it. Whole planets are judged right here. If their races are found worthy—if they have intelligence, wit, the will to survive—then they’re okay. Now as far as I’m concerned we’ve passed all our tests with flying colour. But—
“The Thone need room. They’re expanding through the universe. If they find a world they can take and mold and change into something which to them is home, then they’ll take it—if its peoples don’t come up to scratch. But this invigilator we’ve been dealing with, he broke the old rules and made some new ones of his own. And right now he’s back home, lying his head off about what a bad bunch we human beings are.
“So …”
“You’re going after him,” said Angela, “to put the picture straight.”
“If I can, yes.” Gill nodded.
“And I’m coming with you.”
Gill shook his head. “We don’t know what’s out there. And anyway, you really don’t want to waste your time with me. Spencer Gill’s a lost cause. In this body of mine—no, in that body of mine”—he nodded towards the sleeping figures—“I have maybe a couple of years left. And that’s it. Lights out.”
“And what about the body you’re using now?”
“This body?” Gill looked down at himself. “I’ve thought about it and … it isn’t me.” He shook his head. “And that isn’t you. Later, when I’ve found out how to put our minds back where they belong … I mean, I want to be me again.”
“I know what you mean.” She sighed. “And anyway, we really don’t know how long we’re … well, built for, do we? But in any case, I still want to come with you.”
He shrugged and sighed. “We can argue about it later. And right now no one is going anywhere until I find out just exactly what the synthesizer can do, and how it does it. Now I’m going to programme the thing, and then I’m going to sleep. While I’m asleep it will teach me all I need to know—I hope. I think it’s possible because I know the synthesizer can beam energy, create solids, send messages, ideas.” He shrugged again. “And when I wake up, maybe I’ll know what else it can do. So … why don’t you get some sleep, too?”
She smiled, not coyly, not seductively—perhaps a little nervously—and answered, “I thought you’d never ask!” And before that could sink in: “But Spencer, can we sleep on my world? Just one night? It was—will be—a paradise without those clones of Rod. I’d like to swim in that warm sea with you, watch the sun go down with you, and then sleep with you. Is that possible?”
And from the look on his face she knew that it was … .
They woke up to a beautiful alien dawn in the cup of the biggest palm they’d been able to find. Climbing down to the sand, cool where the sea had crept in overnight to cover the beach with its gleaming ripples, Gill felt completely alive; a feeling he’d not known since he was a boy, and one he’d thought was gone forever. Angela was his, for however short a time, and whatever the future would bring, somehow he felt it had all been worth it.
While they had slept, the synthesizer had filled in the blank areas of his new knowledge; he was now aware as no man had ever been before him, the source of a science which—if it was to be—would eventually take men to the stars. Not in Gill’s lifetime, for his expectations were short, but eventually. If things went according to plan. The ifs were still there … .
The first intimation he had that things were not going to plan came as he and Angela started out along the beach. He could sense the locations of several nodes in his near vicinity, but the idea of a giant clam as a door fascinated him and he wanted to see it for himself. And there on the beach, that was where Gill’s so recently acquired mental alarm system first began clamouring.
She felt his hand stiffen where it held hers, glanced at his face. “Spencer?”
“The House of Doors has visitors,” he said. “Several!”
She clutched at his arm. “Visitors?”
He nodded. “And we’ve been summoned.” His gaze went beyond her, in the direction they’d been heading.
She looked where he was looking, along the beach, and saw something forming there: a shimmering oblong figure, like a doorway made of air, hovering over the sand. It moved towards them: a mirage of heat haze in the shape of a door. They could see the sand underneath it, the sea to one side of it and the jungle to the other, and the blue sky overhead—but within the shimmering oblong itself there was nothing. Light entering it struck on nothing and made no reflection.
Gill drew Angela close as the door dipped down towards them, flowed forward and enveloped them … .
Frozen, immobilised—held in a temporary stasis which allowed thought but denied physical movement, and which neither Gill nor Sith before him had known the synthesizer possessed—the human couple were drawn into the control centre and the travelling door collapsed around them. With their backs to the same wall of coloured motion where stood the six sleeping people of the original test group, Gill and Angela came face-to-sensors with the Grand Thone himself, and with several senior members of the Thone Council. Calming thoughts washed over them, easing their troubled minds, as the Principal Power of Thonedom communicated through the synthesizer.
“Sith is confined, and I have come to see for myself what damage has been done, and what reparation may be made. The synthesizer has told me all. There has been loss of worthy, sentient life, and other atrocities for which I am sorry. Never in Thone history was any machine put to such perverted use!”
“Never?” Gill found his thoughts flowing from him like speech; they conveyed his feelings, his meanings, but more lucidly than words or actions might ever have done. For any and all sorts of reasons, a man may hold back words he might like to use, but he may not hold back his thoughts. “But you don’t know that. How many Thone invigilators are loose in the universe, seeking new worlds for you? And how many of them, like—Sith?—are misusing their power, for the glorification of the Thone? For your glory? We have a saying: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“We, too, have a saying,” the Grand Thone countered. “Before a teacher may instruct, first he must be instructed. Upon a time, I was an invigilator. And I was tempted, and instructed in my temptation. But like the Thone majority, I did not succumb. From that time to this there have been safeguards. As the invigilators test, so are they tested.”
“Really?” said Gill. “But I, too, have communicated with the synthesizer. And I know that Sith was short-listed for absolute power, that he was in fact a candidate for your own position as the Ultimate Thone Authority! That is why he broke the rules: to impress you with a stolen world—my world—and so improve his chances.”
If a mind may smile without a face, that was when the Grand Thone smiled. “That,” he said, “was the test—and he failed it! I have no inclination, just yet, to abdicate the crystal pedestal … .”
Gill couldn’t be consoled, placated. “But there have been deaths—murders! A man called Haggie floats miles deep under a frozen sea on an alien planet, and another named Denholm—”
&n
bsp; “I know these things,” said the Grand Thone. “And … murders, yes, of which you are not aware, because you were specific in your investigations. These things are inexcusable, and Sith will not be excused. But alas, they are beyond reparation. Even I cannot undo what is done so completely.”
“But you can ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
And after a long moment: “Perhaps. Obviously the safeguards must be made … safer.”
“I would ask you for your word that they will be!” said Gill.
There were shocked stirrings from the Thone Councillors, but the Grand Thone brought them to order. “You have my word,” he said. “But you should know, Spencer Gill, that we are not alone in our expansion through the universe. And there are some who are not governed by our ethics. Oh, I know it could be argued that even our ethics are not all they could or should be, but by comparison …”
“The Ggyddn!” the Thone Councillors whispered.
“Ggyddn?” said Gill, feeling their mental shudders. But they hid what was in their minds.
“Let us hope you never come across the Ggyddn,” said the Grand Thone, “and that they never find you. Space is a big place. But now, Spencer Gill, we must go. You are a man of honour, and this world is yours, not ours. May I take it for granted that you will deenergize the synthesizer?”
“Yes,” said Gill. “But …” and he paused.
“Yes?”
“There’s just one thing that still puzzles me. You Thone have the science, the power to synthesise whole planets. Why then do you seek to colonise the worlds of other races? Why not simply inhabit synthesised worlds?”
“It takes energy,” the Grand Thone answered. “The very presence of the synthesizer here in your world will have drained away thousands of years of the planet’s life span.” A mental shrug. “Nothing compared with the billions it has left. But you see my point. Uncontrolled, such waste would speed the devolution of the universe. Also, there is always the chance of power failure. To live permanently on a synthesised world would be too risky.”
Gill’s thoughts were sour now. “And you don’t like taking too many risks, do you, you Thone?”
For a while the Grand Thone was silent, but then he said, “At least you, personally, have not lost by your experiences here in this House of Doors. That much may be said, at least.”
“Not lost?” Gill was astonished. “I’ve been through hell! All of us went through hell!”
“But you were also terminally diseased,” said the Grand Thone. “You were going to die, before your time.”
“You WERE terminally diseased,” the message slowly sank in. “You WERE going to … ?”
“We abhor illness,” said the Grand Thone as he and his councillors prepared to take their departure. “Here in the synthesizer, where at all possible, all such malfunctions are automatically corrected.”
Then they had gone, leaving Gill and Angela staggering together as their will over their limbs at once returned … .
Gill found Barney where he knew he would find him: in a world of rolling plains, great forests and six-legged rabbits. He found the synthesised remains of Clayborne and Varre, too, where Sith had stored them, and recovered Anderson’s clone from the world of the great crystal. Not that this was necessary, for their minds were now part of the synthesizer; only their bodies—their synthesized bodies—had died. As for “Smart” Alec Haggie and Rod Denholm: there was nothing he could do for them.
Then he sent Angela outside onto the slopes of Ben Lawers to bring Turnbull back in, and finally he instructed the synthesizer to return all of their minds to the sleepers and then to deenergize—in a fashion.
Gill had seen to it that Anderson kept all of his memory, for that would be needed for corroboration; Varre and Clayborne remembered only that they had gone to see the Castle, and then that it had vanished before their eyes. Nothing more. Both of them had failed the Thone tests and their minds had caved in. To retain their memories intact could easily have driven them mad all over again.
But Angela and Turnbull: they kept everything, and because of it and with Gill they were made that much stronger.
So there they stood, six people and a dog, on the slopes of Ben Lawers, and the Castle fading like a mist until it disappeared and the mountain was itself again. But as Barney rushed off, barking wildly, on his way home to the master he’d missed for far too long, and as the Castle’s staff of technicians, military men and scientists came running, Gill stooped, picked something up and put it in the pocket of his good clothes.
He had promised to deenergize the synthesizer and that was all. And the thing in his pocket was a tiny miniature Castle. To anyone seeing it, it would seem an incredibly detailed model, exquisitely carved in granite. But only Gill would know that it was bigger on the inside than on the outside. A lot bigger.
And for the moment and for quite some little time to come, he would say nothing at all about it.
Nor about the Ggyddn …
Epilogue
In Shantung Province, Ki-no Sung yawned as he rolled up his reed bed and took down from the bamboo walls two great bundles of nets. He carried the first armful out into the dawn light flooding from the east across Hwang-Hai, the Yellow Sea, and looked down upon the narrow strip of beach separating the jungle from the ocean. His boat sat there as at the rim of a millpond, calm in the gathering light, with never a ripple to rock it. Except for when the storms came, it was always like this, a scene that never changed.
Ki-no Sung went back inside, put on his wide-brimmed hat, took up the second bundle of nets and carried it outside—and dropped it!
Down the beach his boat had disappeared, been swallowed up. Ki-no Sung saw a splendid pagoda, half in, half out of the water, rearing a hundred feet high! Impossible! He rubbed at his slanted, sleep-filled eyes and looked again. And it was still there! It was real! A mighty, wondrous pagoda. But—
It had no windows. And no doors …
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN LUMLEY
BRIAN LUMLEY’S VAMPIRE WORLD
Blood Brothers
The Last Aerie
Bloodwars
THE PSYCHOMECH TRILOGY
Psychomech
Psychosphere
Psychamok!
THE NECROSCOPE SERIES
Necroscope
Necroscope II. Vamphyri!
Necroscope III.- The Source
Necroscope IV: Deadspeak
Necroscope V: Deadspawn .
Necroscope: The Lost Years
Necroscope: Resurgence
Necroscope: Invaders
OTHER NOVELS
The House of Doors
Demogorgon
The Maze of Worlds
Titus Crow Volume I: The Burrowers Beneath/The Transition
of Titus Crow
Titus Crow Volume II: The Clock of Dreams/Spawn of the
Winds
Titus Crow Volume III: In the Moons of Borea/Elysia
SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi
“Thoroughly enjoyable. It’s like those rare ‘great’ B movies—a fast, fun time.”
—OtherRealms on Necroscope
Door number 666 slid swiftly, silently out of sight—and hell itself became visible behind it, red and orange flames rumbling and roaring. A great shaft of fire belched out like a thick, dripping tongue and licked Clayborne for long seconds, head to heels. He disappeared, screaming, in liquid light and heat.
Then the tongue of fire was retracted and the door hissed shut to contain it, and the thing that had been Clayborne screamed again as it fell in a smoking, steaming heap upon the scorched earth.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
THE HOUSE OF DOORS
Copyright © 1990 by Brian Lumley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
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A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Cover art by J. Thiesen
eISBN 9781466818668
First eBook Edition : April 2012
ISBN: 0-812-50832-7
First edition: March 1990
Brian Lumley, The House of Doors - 01
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