CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Let’s get this over with quickly, shall we?’ Amelia said. ‘Boys.’

It says a lot about Amelia Carrington’s presence and force of personality that, until she drew attention to them, Frank hadn’t noticed her two companions. They were, he guessed, trolls or ogres or something like that: anthropoid, like the better class of ape, but so drastically out of proportion that you’d never be tempted to think of them as human. Not even Walt Disney could have made them cuddly. The overall impression was that they’d been designed by someone who was very good at muscles but had never quite got the hang of heads. The spears and axes gripped in their enormous paws were easily the friendliest things about them. As far as menace went, however, they might as well have been little gambolling puppies, because they added nothing. Compared to Amelia they weren’t scary, just quaint.

‘Uncle Dennis,’ she said. ‘Sweet little office you’ve got here. Auntie Rosie.’ She looked straight past Frank as though he wasn’t there. ‘Emily, dear. I hope you haven’t been upsetting my dragon-it cost ever such a lot of money. I’m very disappointed, though, it really should have burned you to a crisp instead of just lying there sleeping like a teenager. I’m going to have to have a serious talk with the supplier about that.’ She finally noticed Frank, advanced a step towards him and held out her hand. ‘The Door, please,’ she said, and Frank gave it to her, because trying to resist would’ve been like arguing the toss with gravity.

‘I shall deal with Erskine later,’ Amelia said, more to herself than to them. ‘It’s a bad day when you can’t even rely on your own dog. Fortunately, Lynford and Gervase here aren’t dogs, they’re nose-hairs, so I know I can rely on them implicitly.’ She nodded her head, and the trolls picked up Dennis, his mother and Frank by their collars and held them a foot off the ground, presumably just to show that they could, since none of them struggled a bit. ‘Emily, you’re with me,’ she said. ‘Come along, now.’

So Emily followed her through the Door, and found herself once again in the cellar where she’d encountered the dragon’s teeth. Someone had been round with a dustpan and brush and tidied them all away, though there were still a few patches of sawdust with a sort of brown mud seeping through. The trolls came after her, carrying their luggage, which they put down neatly against the wall. ‘You’re staying here,’ Amelia said to them. ‘Emily.’ She opened the Door again, and Emily followed her through it into a place she didn’t recognise. Not somewhere she’d be likely to have forgotten if she’d ever been there before.

It was daylight, but the sky was black and freckled with stars. She stood up to her ankles in fine grey dust, staring at a landscape of rocks and boulders, without the faintest suggestion of green. Directly overhead, huge and yet tiny at the same time, was the round shining blue-green Earth.

‘Welcome,’ Amelia said, ‘to the Moon.’

Oh, Emily thought.

‘Now, then,’ Amelia went on. ‘While I’m here with you, you’re quite safe. I brought enough air and gravity with us for five minutes. After that, well—’

Emily listened hard, but there was no simultaneous translation. Amelia, it seemed, was one of those people who says exactly what they’re thinking.

‘One small step, dear,’ she said. ‘Which is about all you’ll have time for. Oh, before I leave you.’

‘Yes?’

‘The Macpherson case. Did you ever get around to sending them a bill? Only I can’t tell from the file. You always were rather sloppy about credit control, you know.’

‘What? Oh, no, sorry. I was meaning to, but—’

A faint tongue-click. ‘You never got round to it, quite. Never mind. Apart from that, I have to say, your files are in pretty good order-it won’t take your replacement long to get the hang of them. All in all, I’m sorry to lose you, but there you go. Plenty more fish. I was hoping that Erskine could take over from you, but I think I’ll have to get an ordinary human after all. Goodbye.’

‘Wait,’ Emily gasped, but Amelia had already stepped back through the Door and closed it. The thin black lines faded from the boulder in front of her, until it was hard to believe they’d ever been there.

Emily Spitzer, she said to herself, the first girl on the Moon.

Three minutes.

She spent one of them just standing perfectly still and shaking all over, partly because of the cold. The remaining two she wasted seeing if you really could make out the Great Wall of China like you’re supposed to be able to. As luck would have it, it was night in Asia just then, and she eventually found what she thought was Japan, though at first she thought it was New Zealand. But if that was Japan, then the sort of semicircular cut-out must be the Yellow Sea, in which case, the Great Wall must be—

But then time ran out.

The trolls left, closing the Door behind them. It vanished, taking the light with it. For a long time, nobody said anything. Then Mr Tanner’s mother swore.

‘Where are we?’ Frank asked.

Dennis laughed. ‘Here,’ he said.

‘Urn. That’s not terribly helpful.’

‘No.’

‘Is there a light-switch anywhere?’

Dennis sighed and muttered something, whereupon the room filled with pale green light. ‘Look around,’ he said, ‘see the sights. Only you’d better be quick about it, because I can’t keep this up for more than ninety seconds.’

Frank saw a table, on which stood a plate of sandwiches and a plastic Coke bottle. That was it. No windows, no other furniture or contents of any kind. No light-switch. No door.

‘All done?’ The green light faded and died. ‘Well,’ Dennis went on, ‘here we are. Bloody fucking Carpenters,’ he added, managing to pack an extraordinary amount of feeling into seven syllables.

‘Yes, but where—?’

‘It’s called a sealed room,’ Frank heard Mr Tanner’s mother say, and it worried him to hear how subdued she sounded. ‘Which describes it pretty well. The plate and the bottle fill up by magic twice a day, so we won’t starve to death. We’re a long way underground, so the temperature stays more or less the same. I expect if you ask him nicely our Dennis can do the pretty green light from time to time, though since there’s nothing to see I don’t think there’d be much point. That’s it, basically, until we grow old and die. Though,’ she added, with a faint wobble in her voice, ‘rumour has it that when you’re in one of these places, real time doesn’t actually pass, so you don’t even grow old. Dennis’s dad was stuck in one of these for a hundred and fifty years, till your dad let him out, bless him, and when he escaped he didn’t look a day older—’

‘Oh,’ said Frank.

‘But it’s not all doom and gloom,’ Dennis said, with a featheredge of hysteria in his voice. I mean, we can play games to pass the time. How about I Spy? Something beginning with D.’

‘Be quiet, Dennis, you’re not helping.’

‘Be quiet yourself.’

Stunned silence; then, eerie as a banshee’s wail, the sound of muffled sobbing. Frank listened to it in fascinated horror, until he heard Dennis say, ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I didn’t mean—’

Sob, sob, sniffle; and Frank couldn’t help wondering if this was the first time that Mr Tanner had ever heard his mother crying. There had been panic in his voice, the sort you’d expect from a man standing on a collapsing bridge. He tried to imagine what it must have been like, growing up with her for a mother. Of course, it would be different for goblins. But not all that different.

‘Please don’t cry,’ he heard Dennis say. ‘I didn’t mean it, really. I shouldn’t have answered you back, it’s just that I’m all stressed out with this being-trapped-for-all eternity thing. I’d really like it if you could stop crying now. Please?’

Slowly, sniffs came to outnumber sobs, while Dennis rambled pitifully on through a repeating loop of explanation and apology; and Frank thought, Trapped in here for ever, with them. Oh boy.

“Salright,’ Mr Tanner’s mother snuffled eventually. ‘Only you hurt me, our Dennis, you really did. And you were always such a good boy, when you were small. And what about poor little Paul Azog, who’s going to look after him while I’m stuck in here? I’ll never see my baby boy again, and it’s all his fault—’

Pitch dark, but Frank just knew that two pairs of very sharp red eyes were fixed on his last known location. Trapped in here for ever with two goblins who hate me.

‘Don’t blame me,’ he snapped, his patience fraying. ‘You wanted to come, you volunteered. Bauxite, remember? All that money. I just wanted to rescue the girl I love, but you—’

‘Oh be quiet,’ said Mr Tanner’s mother, and just because her voice was back to its usual peremptory bark Frank was filled with joy. ‘Of course it’s your fault, for playing around with the bloody Door in the first place. If it’d stayed in New Zealand, nice and safe, none of this would’ve happened.’ Long sigh. ‘Actually,’ Mr Tanner’s mother went on after a moment, ‘it’s as much my fault as anyone’s. Should never have given the stupid thing to your dad in the first place. Of course, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the trade without it, and he most definitely wouldn’t have got together with your mum. So I guess it serves me right. That’s what you’re both thinking, isn’t it?’

Well, yes, Frank thought. ‘No, of course not,’ he said briskly. ‘It’s all that bloody Carrington woman’s fault. She started it all, she was the one who tried to kill Emily and kidnapped my friend George and stole the Door and concocted this stupid bauxite thing. So why don’t we all stop having a go at each other, get a grip and figure out how we’re going to escape. Well? Come on, you two, you’re supposed to know about this magic stuff, what’s the drill? I mean, do we all say a spell or an incantation or something, or what?’

The long silence that followed was eventually broken by a sigh from Mr Tanner’s mother. ‘You tell him,’ she said.

‘Tell me what?’

He heard Dennis clear his throat. ‘Yes, there is a way out of here,’ Dennis said. ‘Tried and tested, it’s in all the books, comes up in the final exams most years.’

‘Great. What is it?’

‘The Portable Door,’ Dennis replied. ‘And if you haven’t got it, then tough. And since there’s only two of the bloody things in the world, and that woman’s got both of them—’

‘Three, actually.’

‘—It really isn’t a whole lot of… what did you just say?’

‘Three,’ Mr Tanner’s mother repeated. ‘The original, the new one she’s got hold of somehow-Pereira’s Last Theorem, presumably, that’s how I made my back-up, just before I gave the original to Paul Carpenter.’

Frank opened his mouth but nothing came out; it was Dennis who rasped, ‘Back-up?’ ‘Yes, that’s right. Hence three. She’s got two, plus my one.’

‘Mother—’

‘Oh, don’t go getting all excited, it’s no bloody good to us in here, is it?’ Mr Tanner’s mother made a strange noise, somewhere between a sigh and a snort. ‘What am I going to do with this rare and dangerous magical object, I thought; can’t just leave it lying around, someone might pinch it and fuck up the fabric of space/time. No, I thought, I’d better put it somewhere nice and safe until I need it again. So what’s what I did. More fool me, really.’

No need of troll’s blood to know what Dennis was thinking. ‘Somewhere nice and safe,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘That’s right. Well, I could just imagine the fuss you’d have made if you happened to come across it in a drawer somewhere. So I put it in a safe deposit box, in a bank.’

‘A bank.’ Dennis made the words sound like the death warrant of the universe.

‘That’s right. The National Lombard in Fenchurch Street. Best security in London, they reckon. If only I’d gone with my instincts and shoved it down my front we’d be out of here by now and ripping bloody Carrington’s lungs out with a bent spoon. All in all, it makes me wish I’d never set eyes on the stupid thing in the first place.’

It’s not despair that does the real damage, it’s hope. Dennis mumbled, ‘Well, that’s that, then.’ His mother found a bit of wall and kicked it for a while, but only because it was there. Then she groped round for the plate of sandwiches and started to munch. ‘Well, why not?’ she said, with her mouth full. ‘I always eat when I’m miserable. Salmon paste,’ she added resentfully, after a brief bout of noisy spitting. ‘Now that’s just plain spiteful.’

After a while, Frank felt his way along the wall to a corner and sat down. Eternity, he thought. Eternity in the dark with the Tanners and salmon-paste sandwiches. Later on, he supposed, he could have a go at slitting his wrists with the Coke bottle or choking to death on sandwich crusts, but he was fairly sure he’d be on to a hiding to nothing. If Mr Tanner’s mother was right and you couldn’t grow old in here, more than likely you couldn’t die, either. Or if he did succeed, what was the betting that Amelia Carrington would zoom in with the Door and bring him back to life? Someone capable of putting salmon paste in their eternally self-replenishing sandwiches wouldn’t think twice about doing something like that.

So far he’d managed not to think about Emily, but he knew he couldn’t dodge it for ever. Sooner or later he was going to have to face up to-well, what? He’d never see her again. By now, maybe, she was dead— His mind skidded off the word, like tyres on black ice. He’d taken more than his fair share of liberties with death lately; for George Sprague and his shareholders, to begin with, and then for her. Maybe somewhere in the valuable warehouse space behind his eyes he’d got into the way of thinking that it was somehow optional if you were clever enough, like capital gains tax. But now, here he was, for keeps, and if she wasn’t dead already she soon would be (in ten minutes, an hour, sixty years, two hundred; what’s time anyhow but calibrations on a clock face, artificial and arbitrary?); and that being so, how long would he sit here in the dark before it no longer mattered?

Really don’t want to start thinking about that. Frank dragged his mind away, but there wasn’t really anything else to think about; nothing that mattered, anyhow. All that was left inside his head was superseded trivia. What’s the capital of Paraguay? How does that song go? When was the last time an Australian won Wimbledon? Whatever happened to poor old George? And how did the Door come to be in Emily’s pocket when she was stuck in here with the dragon’s-teeth people?

Oink, he thought.

Frank held perfectly still and, for some reason, listened. Somewhere in the dark, Dennis Tanner was having a sneezing fit and his mother was eating. Very soft noises, you could easily go mad listening to them.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

No reply, so he said it again. ‘Excuse me?’

Nothing, apart from Dennis Tanner snuffling through his blocked nose. For some reason it was a rather evocative, poignant sound; mournful, even. While my catarrh gently weeps, and all that.

‘Excuse me.’

‘What?’ Mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed bread.

‘The spare Door,’ he said. ‘Did you just say you put it in a bank?’

‘Mmm.’

‘The National—’

‘Lombard.’

‘Fenchurch Street?’

‘Mm.’

Suddenly, Frank’s mind was buzzing. ‘Isn’t that the bank-oh hell, of course, you wouldn’t know.’ He didn’t feel much like explaining; that would mean going back over ground he’d already covered, when he was bursting to press on with the tantalising new hypothesis growing in his mind. ‘Emily had to go to a bank, I think it was in Fenchurch Street, to kill a dragon. When she’d killed it, she found it had burned all the money and papers and stuff, so that all that was left was a cardboard tube which turned out to be the Door. But she didn’t know that at the time, of course, so she stuffed it in her pocket and forgot all about it, until that Colin Gomez bloke locked her in here with a load of magic warriors-something to do with teeth I couldn’t follow when she told me—’

‘Dragon’s teeth?’

‘I think so. Anyhow, she found the cardboard tube in her pocket with the Door inside it, and by then, of course, she knew what it was and used it to escape. She came to my place in New Zealand, and when she walked in through the wall I’d just found out that the Door wasn’t in my jacket pocket. I assumed the Door she used to get away from the teeth people was my Door.’ He paused for much-needed breath, then added, ‘But what if it wasn’t? What if it was this spare Door of yours, which you say you stored in a bank vault? Well?’

Long silence.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Mr Tanner’s mother said eventually. ‘Just, even if you’re right, I don’t see how it helps matters. It just means your girlfriend nicked my Door. A bit of a liberty, but in the circumstances I don’t think I’ll be pressing charges.’

Frank squeezed his nails into his palm. She was missing the point, and just at that moment Frank Carpenter was spearheading the movement for the ethical treatment of points. ‘If the Door she used wasn’t my Door, then what happened to it?’

Another silence. Then Dennis said, ‘You must’ve dropped it somewhere.’

Frank shook his head, a futile gesture in the pitch dark. ‘Can’t have,’ he said. ‘I was back home, in New Zealand, remember. So I must’ve had the Door with me when I got there, I must’ve used it to get home. And she-I mean, your mum - knows what my place is like. Small.’

‘Scruffy. Strong smell of mould. You really ought—’

Reminder, if any was needed, that Mr Tanner’s mother was as much mother as goblin. ‘Well, quite,’ Frank snapped. ‘What I meant was, though, it’s a small place. One room, basically. I’m trying to remember what I did, and I think I just took the Door down off the wall and lay down on the bed.’

‘Fine, so that’s what you did. And at some point it must have fallen out of your—’

‘No,’ Frank yelled. ‘It couldn’t have. Immediately I found it wasn’t in my coat pocket, I searched the place from top to bottom. No sign. And it may be scruffy but it isn’t cluttered. If the Door had fallen out onto the floor or down the back of a chair, I’d have found it. And I didn’t.’

A yawn from Dennis Tanner. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So whatsername’s Door must’ve been your Door after all.’

‘No!’ Frank hadn’t meant to shout. ‘No, how could it have been? How could it have gone back into the past, into that bank vault, under that dragon, all on its bloody lonesome?’

‘Magic?’ suggested Mr Tanner weakly.

‘That’s what I assumed at the time,’ Frank admitted. ‘Weirdness. The kind of shit I’ve had to get used to putting up with, ever since I fell in with you people. But you’re the magic expert. You tell me what sort of magic could’ve made that happen, and then I’ll be convinced. Well?’

‘Off the top of my head—’

‘Hm?’

‘Not possible,’ Dennis conceded. ‘But this is the Door we’re talking about. Really, all we know about the perishing thing is that anything can happen. So—’

‘Not possible,’ Frank repeated firmly. ‘In which case—’ A huge thought collided with him. ‘No, it couldn’t be that, it’d be so—’ He tore his jacket off his shoulders, laid it on the floor and started a fingertip search.

‘What’s he doing, our Dennis?’

‘I don’t know, it’s dark in here.’

‘Christ!’

Dead silence; then Mr Tanner’s mother said, ‘Now what’s he doing?’

‘Ask him yourself, you—’

Frank sat up on his knees, his fingers in his inside coat pocket, the tip of his forefinger thrust into a hole in the lining. He was still dizzy from the nasty bump on the head that the huge thought had given him; maybe that was what made him reluctant to take the next step. Or it could have been fear that he was wrong.

‘Dennis.’

‘Shh.’

Frank pulled himself together. A hole in the pocket of a lined jacket. He knew what happened in those circumstances. ‘Anybody got a knife?’ he asked.

‘A what?’

‘Forget it.’ With his teeth, he bit into the jacket lining. Not nearly as straightforward as you’d think. Chewy old stuff, polyester. But, after he’d worried at it for a bit, he managed to make a hole big enough to get a finger in, and the rest was quite easy.

‘He’s tearing up his jacket.’

‘Why’s he doing that?’

Next, Frank inserted his hand, up to the wrist. Of course, it wouldn’t be there. You get these inspirations when you’re searching frantically for something; they fit all the known facts and for a while you’re all excited and hopeful, but they always turn out to be—

He felt it; the pad on the tip of his left index finger brushed against cardboard.

He froze. Other things besides Door holders are made of cardboard, and he really, really didn’t want to get his hopes up. In fact, wriggling his fingers deeper inside the lining and teasing out the cardboard tube was quite possibly the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

‘Got it,’ he said.

‘Now what’s he—?’

‘I’ve got it,’ he said again. ‘The Door. My Door. It was in my coat, all the time.’

If anybody had told Colin Gomez, a week earlier, that a day would come when he wouldn’t feel like working, he’d have laughed out loud. Might as well predict that he’d stop breathing air. For Colin Gomez, the universe was composed of two elements, work and other stuff. He’d never cared much for the latter.

But, as he sat at his desk with a file open in front of him, the words of the letter (from Harlequin and James, a tempting compromise offer in the Northampton beanstalk dispute) seemed to repel him like reversed polarities, and however hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to read them.

He gave up trying and instead made an attempt to analyse the problem.

A mind like Colin Gomez’s can do practically anything with a bunch of facts. Accordingly, he quickly reached the conclusion that he’d done nothing wrong. True, he’d conspired against his senior partner, but he’d only done it for the good of the firm. Also true, he’d subsequently betrayed his fellow conspirators, but he’d only done that out of loyalty to his senior partner. So, he had nothing whatever to feel ashamed about, and plenty to be grateful for. He was still alive. He hadn’t been slung out of the partnership. He’d even hedged his bets, in the light of the apparent conflict between his two entirely justified actions, by giving the spare Door to Emily and her young man so that they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives horribly backdated, trudging grimly through Beatlemania into the flares-and-sideburns era and then on through monetarism and the noxious Nineties just to get back to where they’d started from.

All bases covered, therefore. He should be feeling properly smug. But he wasn’t.

Rationalising his misgivings into pulp should have restored his appetite for work, but when he returned to the letter from Harlequin and James, it continued to avoid him, the communications equivalent of walking straight past him in the street. He had an idea what that meant. Work was shunning him, because on some level somewhere he’d proved himself unworthy of it.

It was just possible, Colin Gomez conceded, that his self-justifications had been just a bit too glib. The death of Emily Spitzer, for example; on the face of it, no big deal. It’s the role of management to play chess with the lives of employees, and from time to time in chess you have to sacrifice a pawn or two. There is a difference, however, between letting a pawn be taken and jumping up and down on it till it’s reduced to a fine resin dust. Maybe Amelia Carrington had gone too far there, and maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so ready to help her.

He thought about that, and dismissed it, remembering instead the first rule of management. Once you start thinking of employees as people, you’re screwed.

The problem had to be, therefore, one of his two tactical betrayals. Unsettling: questions of right and wrong, ethical dilemmas, weren’t usually a feature of his mental landscape, and detecting the presence of one was like coming across a stranded battleship in the middle of the desert. Still, if it was stopping him from working, it had to be dealt with, quickly.

Colin Gomez’s first loyalty was to the firm. The firm and the senior partner were one, an indivisible whole. Therefore his first loyalty was to the senior partner. No question about that.

By the same token, the firm had a right to have the best possible senior partner; and, it went without saying, the best man for the job was himself. Therefore he owed it to the firm to become senior partner. No question about that, either. Accordingly (it amazed him, now he came to think about it, that there had ever been any doubt or uncertainty in his mind on this score) Amelia Carrington had to go. Right. Fine.

Except that she was so scary. And not scary in the irrational-fear sense, like being afraid of loud noises or cows or the cracks between paving stones. Being afraid of Amelia Carrington was supremely rational, because she killed people.

Awkward.

For a short while, Colin Gomez had allowed himself to believe that the Spitzer child and her curious boyfriend might be able to get rid of Amelia, thanks to the Portable Door. But then it had become apparent that Amelia was way ahead of all of them, and was using them to get her perfectly shaped hands on that remarkable artefact, and he’d quickly purged his mind of dangerous wishful thinking and realigned his loyalties; quickly, and perhaps just in time, or perhaps not. Being realistic, probably not. If he was honest with himself, he had to recognise that he was almost certainly somewhere on her things-to-do list, gradually working his way up to the surface, like a splinter of shrapnel in an old wound.

He sighed. Such a shame that Spitzer and her sidekick were so sadly ineffectual. He’d gambled on them by making the fool Erskine give them the spare Door, but that had been some time ago, and nothing seemed to have happened, so presumably they’d used the Door to run away, as any half-sensible person would. No use pinning any of his dwindling stock of hopes on them—

Lines appeared on the wall facing his desk. They could have been stray strands of dust-laden cobweb, except that they were too straight. He lifted his head and stared.

The Door opened. Colin jumped up, quite an achievement for a man of his bulk. The lunatics, he thought; they can’t come here, if she finds out—

But the woman who walked in through the wall wasn’t Emily Spitzer, or Amelia Carrington; just some young blonde female. In Colin’s world, young women under the age of thirty were divided into two types. The ones who wore suits and carried briefcases were junior staff. The rest were typists, receptionists and office juniors. Neither category was any use except for routine, trivial tasks, and-most definitely-neither category should have the use of rare and powerful magical objects like the Door. In which case—

‘Are you Gomez?’ said the inexplicable female.

‘Yes. Who are—?’

Behind her, someone else. At least he recognised this one: Dennis Tanner, of all people. He’d known Dennis on and off for years, as a fellow professional, and of course he was the principal fall guy in the bauxite scheme. That didn’t give him any right to come walking through Doors—

‘Where’s Emily Spitzer?’

A third voice. Behind Dennis Tanner (how many more of them were there going to be, for pity’s sake?) the Carpenter boy. Colin opened and closed his mouth, but no words came out. This was all too much—

‘He asked you a question,’ said the inappropriate young woman. Colin ignored her. With all this going on, he couldn’t be bothered to notice impertinent questions from the secretarial grade. But then she sank her unexpectedly strong fingers into three of his four chins, and he revised his priorities accordingly.

‘Don’t know,’ he gurgled. ‘Let go.’

‘You’re in trouble,’ the annoying secretary said, with a disturbing grin. ‘First, Carrington knows you gave the spare Door to Frank and Emily. Second, I’m going to throttle you unless you do as you’re told. Third, Frank’s going to smash your face in for trying to murder his girlfriend. Fourth, our Dennis doesn’t like anybody in this firm very much. There’s probably a fifth, but I don’t think there’s enough of you to go round.’

Then she let go, and Colin fell backwards, banging the base of his spine painfully on the edge of the desk. He tried to summon up enough magic for a fireball, but there was something about this terrifying, steel-fingered secretary that drained all the power out of him. He opened his mouth to whimper, but his throat was too badly mauled.

‘On the other hand,’ the secretary said, ‘we could make you senior partner. Would you like that?’

The phone purred. Amelia picked it up.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, with a frown.

She wasn’t ready to talk to Colin yet. Not because the actual words she’d be saying were in any way complicated; she was undecided between ‘So long, then,’ and ‘Die, traitor’, but it really didn’t matter. It was just that she had other, more important things to do first: bauxite things, involving large sums of money.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ burbled the voice in her ear, ‘but I was just wondering. How did you get rid of the Spitzer girl, in the end?’

She frowned. Colin shouldn’t want to know that. ‘Why?’

‘Just interested.’

‘Need to know,’ Amelia replied shortly. ‘Just take it from me, she’s gone and she’s never coming back. After all,’ she added venomously, ‘it’d take a Portable Door to save her now, and we’ve got both of them. Haven’t we?’

‘Yes, absolutely’

‘Excellent. What did you do with the spare, by the way?’

Click. Colin had hung up on her. Both of Amelia’s precision-engineered eyebrows shot up in blank surprise. Then she quietly rearranged her Things To Do list, with Colin’s name a bit nearer the top.

She looked back at her screen. Bauxite prices. If they went much lower, they’d come out in Australia. She extended a finger to press a key that would set in motion the necessary sales and purchases, and then she could—

Some invisible vandal was drawing thin black lines on her wall. Amelia lifted her hand away from the keyboard, scooping the elements of fire out of the air like a child clawing snow into a snowball, but before she could let fly, the Door opened.

‘Hello,’ said Emily Spitzer.

They found him in a poky little office in the annexe. He was stapling together bundles of computer printout, and sorting the bundles into neat piles. He seemed genuinely pleased to see them.

‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ Frank said, surprised to hear himself say it. ‘Only, I thought that when Amelia Carrington found out that you’d given me and Emily the other Door, she might have done something nasty to you.’

Erskine frowned. ‘Well, I’ve been sentenced to death,’ he said, ‘but she was quite nice about it. She said I’d been incredibly stupid rather than actively treacherous, and of course I can see her point. It looks like we both misunderstood what she wanted me to do.’

‘But you’re still alive,’ Frank pointed out.

‘For now, yes. She explained about that. She said she’s pretty busy right now, but she’ll try and fit me in before half past five. So in the meantime I’m making myself useful, filing the Mortensen printouts. I felt it was the least I could do, since she’d been so reasonable about everything. Oh, hello, Mr Tanner, I didn’t see you there. I don’t suppose you remember me, I’m Ms Carrington’s junior assistant. Was,’ he added, with a flush of shame. ‘I failed her, you see.’

Dennis said something under his breath, but Frank nudged him in the ribs. ‘Erskine used to be Amelia’s pet dog,’ he explained. ‘Man’s best friend, and all that.’

Erskine nodded eagerly. ‘She let me do all sorts of stuff for her,’ he said. ‘I fetched sticks and made the little rubber ball go squeak, and I always came back when she called, and lately I’ve been spying,’ (he counted the activities off on his fingers as he named them) ‘guarding, fetching and carrying, providing back-up, and we did some spider-killing and troll slaying too. It was all very exciting, but then I did the bad thing, so—’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you managed to get back from the past all right. Are you going straight back to Salt Lake City?’

‘Not quite yet,’ Frank said evenly. ‘Before I go, I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Me? Gosh. Yes, go ahead, fire away.’

Frank drew in a deep breath. On the one hand, he’d never really liked dogs. But— ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘which you preferred. Being a dog, I mean, or being a junior management trainee. Just curious, you know.’

Erskine’s brows huddled tightly together. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I preferred being a dog. I mean, all the stuff you humans do is tremendously interesting and exciting. But it’s also very confusing, and I don’t like that. It means I make mistakes and do bad things, which upsets me.’ He simpered a little. ‘Actually, I haven’t been a very good human, and I reckon I was always a fairly good dog. It’s best to stick to what you’re good at, I think. So yes, a dog, definitely. Not,’ he added with a shy smile, ‘that it matters a lot now. I had my chance and—’

‘The thing is,’ Frank interrupted, ‘fairly soon, Amelia Carrington isn’t going to be the senior partner here any more. In fact, she may be, um, going away on a long journey, so I was thinking: instead of, well, dying, would you like it if Mr Tanner here turned you back into a dog? He says he knows how to do it, and it won’t take a second.’

Erskine’s nose twitched. ‘Whose dog?’

‘What?’

‘Whose dog would I be?’

One of those questions that jumps out at you when you aren’t expecting it. ‘I don’t know,’ Frank answered. ‘Your own dog, I guess.’

But Erskine shook his head. ‘You can’t be your own dog, it doesn’t work like that. I’d have to be somebody’s, or— No, I think I’d rather be dead than a stray, thanks all the same. But it was very kind of you, and Mr Tanner, too.’ And, although he had no tail to wag, he sort of vibrated on the spot while smiling warmly.

Oh for pity’s sake, Frank thought. ‘You could be my dog,’ he made himself say. ‘If you wanted, I mean. Rather than being dead.’

‘Your—?’

‘After all,’ Frank ground on, ‘you were sort of my dog for a while, when you were trailing round after me, and you weren’t that much of a nuisance, I suppose.’

‘That’s right. You called me Bobby.’

‘Quite. And you did rescue Emily and me from the Sixties, so I guess I owe you one.’

‘Yes, please.’ A huge beam lit up Erskine’s face; you could have read small print by it in the dark. ‘At least, until Ms Carrington gets back from her long journey. I’d have to go back to being her dog then, of course, it’d only be right. But until then, that’d be super.’

‘Fine,’ Frank said, muffling a heavy-duty sigh. ‘Right then. Dennis, if you wouldn’t mind.’ Mr Tanner cleared his throat and lifted his left hand, but before he could go any further, Frank suddenly stopped him.

‘Just one other point,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘When you were, urn, spying on me.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re good at that sort of thing, are you? Finding people, sniffing things out. Good nose, I mean. A knack for following a trail.’

‘Oh yes,’ Erskine said, not without pride. ‘I can find most things. I did lots of finding for Ms Carrington, even tricky finding, like across interdimensional barriers and stuff. So long as it’s alive, I’m fairly sure I can track it down.’

‘I see,’ Frank said slowly. ‘So if I asked you to find my friend George—’

‘I’m sure I could. What does he smell like?’

‘Only,’ Frank said, ‘Ms Carrington sent him somewhere, and I really ought to bring him back again. I don’t think he’s dead or anything like that, just-well, put somewhere. Is that the sort of thing—?’

‘Piece of cake,’ Erskine said cheerfully. ‘Just give me a sock to sniff, or a shoe, or his favourite chair, and I’ll have him for you in no time.’

‘Excellent,’ Frank said, with a certain degree of genuine authentic sincerity. ‘In that case, Dennis, if you wouldn’t mind.’

Dennis nodded. A moment later, there was a flash and a sort of sizzling noise— ‘It’s the same dog,’ Dennis observed. ‘The one that was following you about, the first time you came round my place.’

‘That’s him, yes.’

‘And he’s—’ Dennis frowned. ‘He’s yours now, then.’

‘Apparently.’

Dennis clicked his tongue. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you should make him get off that chair. Once you start letting them sit on the furniture, they think they own the place.’

‘Hello,’ Emily said.

It only took Amelia a third of a second to recover. She closed her right hand hard on a fistful of air, squeezing out all the trace elements that wouldn’t burn until she was left with a sort of fiery snowball. With a fast, easy movement she hurled it at Emily’s face. For a split second, the girl’s head was shrouded in roaring flames. But then they went out, leaving no mark or trace of any kind.

‘That’s not very friendly,’ Emily said, taking a step forward. ‘Anybody’d think you weren’t pleased to see me.’

Amelia threw another fireball. Might as well not have bothered.

‘For crying out loud,’ Amelia screeched. ‘Can’t you stay dead for five minutes?’ Emily smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bet you can, though. Like to find out?’

Amelia was groping under her desk for the panic button. ‘Don’t you dare threaten me,’ she shouted. ‘You’re just an assistant, you ought to be terrif—’ She stopped and froze, as a sensation she hadn’t felt for years soaked into her. Fear, she remembered. She’d never liked it much. ‘Why aren’t you scared of me? Everybody’s scared of me.’

‘With good reason,’ Emily replied placidly. ‘Which is why you need to be put down, like a biting dog.’ She came a step closer, and Amelia (much to her own surprise) retreated.

‘You can’t have come back,’ Amelia said. ‘I’ve got both Doors.’

‘Indeed. Two out of three. Nearly the complete set, but not quite.’

‘There’s a third—’

‘Yes.’ Emily smiled. ‘Thanks to the intelligence and foresight of Dennis Tanner’s mother, a splendidly resourceful woman who you completely underestimated. Most people do,’ she added. ‘Anyway, that was your big mistake. Oh, and I wouldn’t rely too much on anybody coming to rescue you. The alarm doesn’t work. Well, it does, but Colin Gomez rerouted it to his office. So it’s just you and me. Well, go on, then. Fireballs don’t seem to do any good, but I’m sure you’ve got lots of other weapons up your sleeve. Let’s see, how about Litvinov’s Polecat? Or a nice consequence mine? Or dragons’ teeth, even.’

Amelia stared at her warily. ‘They won’t work, will they? You wouldn’t be suggesting them otherwise.’

‘No.’

‘You’re bluffing.’

‘Perhaps.’

Rather clumsily, Amelia tugged a few hairs from the top of her head, blew on them and threw them in the air. They changed into giant bats, which flew at Emily’s face. She swatted them easily with the back of her hand. They hit the walls and folded up.

‘You can’t possibly do that,’ Amelia protested.

‘Can’t I?’ Emily smiled. ‘I kill monsters for a living, remember. And I’m good at it. Maybe you should consider paying me more.’

The next twist of hair turned into three adult male lions. They took one look at Emily and scampered behind the desk, making whimpering noises.

‘Try spiders,’ Emily suggested. ‘I never did like spiders.’

Amelia did just that. The spiders, Atkinsonii, each as big as a Great Dane, joined the lions behind the desk. There wasn’t really enough room for all of them, but they managed to squeeze in together somehow.

‘You can keep that up till you’re as bald as a cue ball and it won’t do you any good,’ Emily said smugly. ‘Look, why don’t you give Litvinov’s Polecat a try? It won’t work, of course, but I do so enjoy all the pretty coloured lights. Or, tell you what, how about an inversion grenade? The worst that could happen is that it’d get you too, and you’d hardly feel a thing.’

Amelia had retreated so far that her back was to the wall. The feel of it seemed to calm her down, somehow. ‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘Your turn. If you’re going to attack me, go ahead.’

‘Splendid,’ Emily said, and clapped her hands together. ‘A little bit of backbone, that’s what I like to see. Preferably sticking out through the side of your neck.’ Faster than Amelia’s eye could follow, Emily lunged forward, raised her right hand and slapped her across the face. Amelia howled, tried to retreat, tripped up over her own feet and fell on her bum. ‘That hurt,’ she squealed furiously.

‘Yes. Serves you right. Come on, get up. We’ve got a lot to get through, and I haven’t got all day.’

Amelia didn’t move. ‘There’s something wrong about this,’ she said quietly. ‘This can’t be happening. It’s all an illusion, it must be.’

‘Maybe,’ Emily replied, and kicked Amelia hard on the shin. ‘Real enough for you?’

Amelia replied with yet another fireball. It missed, bounced off a wall and hit one of the spiders. There was, interestingly, a distinct smell of burning hair.

‘The joke is,’ Emily said, ‘you did it yourself.’

‘What?’

‘The way you killed me, the last time.’ Emily clicked her tongue. ‘It was a really neat idea, but it backfired, and now-well, I’m not afraid of you any more. And that’s all it takes, you see.’

‘Nonsense.’ Amelia had gone from terrified to angry without even noticing. ‘There’s nothing unusual about the lunar atmosphere that could possibly— Or the reduced gravity,’ she added, dismissing the thought as quickly as it came. ‘I had Simon Aristides in Metaphysics run a thorough computer simulation, and there couldn’t possibly be any side effects. You’re bluffing again.’

Emily’s face was as featureless as East Anglia. ‘The Moon,’ she said. ‘Generally speaking, of course, you’re right. But maybe there were other factors you didn’t take into account. Oh, I don’t know; something to do with the time of day, or perhaps there were significant beryllium deposits just under the surface of that particular crater. Easily overlooked, of course, but—’

‘Balls.’ Amelia was almost beside herself with fury. ‘I checked Simon’s results myself, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone ahead. You can read his report for yourself if you like-it’s just there, on the desk.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Help yourself,’ Amelia added sardonically. ‘You won’t find—’

‘Thank you.’ Emily swung round and pounced on the desk like a cat, sweeping papers aside until she found what she was looking for. ‘That’s marvellous,’ she added, glancing at the front page before tucking it firmly down the front of her blouse. ‘Exactly what we needed to know, and congratulations on being so wonderfully thorough. Oh yes, before I forget.’

Two long strides took her back to where Amelia was kneeling; then she shook herself, like a wet cat, and turned back into a goblin.

‘Surprise,’ she said. Amelia stared at her for a moment, then shut her eyes tightly. ‘Shit,’ she said.

‘Quite,’ the goblin replied. ‘It’s like I keep telling our Dennis, never judge by appearances. You’d have thought he’d have got the message, what with being part goblin himself, though of course he can’t do the shape-shifting, because of his human side. Ah well,’ she added, and booted Amelia in the side of the head, sending her to sleep.

Once she’d made sure that Amelia was out cold, Mr Tanner’s mother tied her up securely with a length of computer flex. Then she picked her up and swung her over her shoulder like a sack of coal, checked to make sure the report was still safely wedged down her front, and headed back to the Portable Door in the far wall. On its threshold she paused and turned towards the desk.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You can come out now.’

But the lions and the surviving spider didn’t budge; in fact, one of the lions twitched an inch of exposed tail back out of sight behind the leg of the desk. Mr Tanner’s mother grinned.

‘Talk about a hair of the dog,’ she said to herself, and closed the Door behind her.