Free The House of Doors - 01 by Brian Lumley

intentions. “We should be out again in about two hours,” he finished off. “Maybe less.”
    “Very well, sir.” The officer was amenable. “But don’t forget to stop and let us have a word with Mr. Turnbull and Mrs. Denholm, now will you?” He waved them on.
    Gill and Turnbull got into the car. As Anderson started the car moving again, he turned and glanced at the girl. “I take it that what just happened here has nothing to do with the Castle? That it was an entirely, er, private and personal affair?” His instinct, too, had been to connect this latest incident with last night’s business at Gill’s place.
    “Yes,” she said. “I mean no—it has nothing to do with anything.” Taking her weight off her right shoulder, she leaned a little against Gill where he sat in the middle. He was very much aware of her there. Her parka’s fur collar held her perfume. “I’ve broken up with my husband,” she continued, “and now it seems that he … well, that he wants to break me up!”
    “Hmm,” said Anderson. “Well, I should hardly think he’ll be in any position to do that for a while.”
    Through all that had happened, Jean-Pierre Varre had sat in the front passenger seat very stiff and silent and a little pale. Now he coughed, cleared his throat and quietly ventured: “What on earth are things coming to?”
    In a voice so dry it might easily have been Anderson’s own, Turnbull said to him, “What? Don’t people try to kill each other in France, then? It would have been a crime of passion, surely? I always thought Frenchmen were supposed to understand that sort of thing.”
    Varre said nothing but merely turned and stared at him for a second or two. Looking into his eyes, Turnbull made a mental note that perhaps, in this Frenchmen, anyway, there wasn’t a deal of passion to spare … .
     
    At the second barrier Anderson asked the men on duty to phone ahead to the first-aid post and have someone waiting. And a minute later, driving round a bend in the loch road between the water and the mountain—
    “Is that it?” Angela asked in a small, hurting voice.
    Up on the slopes of Ben Lawers, the Castle had come into view. At its foot, about fifty feet to the fore, a high fence had been erected like the perimeter of some fort out of a Hollywood western. It had wooden towers, a catwalk and observation points, searchlights, and a wicket gate guarded by uniformed policemen. Behind the Castle the steep mountainside had been enclosed in barbed wire, and even up there were wooden towers with roofed-over observation platforms. The entire place was staffed by policemen, members of the security services, and men in plain workaday clothes who looked like nothing so much as soldiers—which in fact was what they were. Little of these people could be seen from the outside, however, for in the main they were within the enclosure, in various fortified workplaces both above and below the ground. Slender metal masts stuck up here and there from the fortress walls: the aerials Gill had spoken of to Turnbull. Between the lakeside road and the massive fence, a cable lift had been constructed with two open cars each capable of carrying four people.
    “That’s it,” Gill finally answered the girl, hearing his own voice as faintly as if it came from some distance away. And even though he’d spent so much time here, still he found himself staring as in some fatal fascination up the slope as the mountain’s contours unwound and the Mercedes swept them closer to the great enigma which was their destination. For impressive as the perimeter structure and its entirely man-made facilities were, the alien Castle itself drowned them in solemn stone, in a sort of cold, implacable patience. That was how Gill thought of it, anyway: as something old as the mountains and impersonal as … as what? As the hangman’s rope? As the terminals on an electric chair?
    Now where did that thought spring from? he wondered as Anderson pulled off