Free The House of Doors - 01 by Brian Lumley Page B

he’d never experienced before … .
     
    Turnbull, Anderson, and Varre were waiting for them at the foot of rough concrete steps leading up to the base of the Castle. As Gill and Angela made towards them, he said to her, “Will you wait down here for me, at the gate?”
    “Can’t I come up?” Only a little over five foot tall, she was obliged to look up at him. “It’s only a dozen steps away … .” As their eyes met something passed between them. They both felt it; and Gill thought: She’s like a beautiful doll! How could anyone want to hurt her ?
    He smiled to hide his bewilderment, shook his head half in annoyance—at himself—and said, “You shouldn’t even be here!”
    “I’m not here’ because I wanted to be,” she reminded him. “But … I’m glad anyway.”
    He nodded and took her left arm. “You can come up if you want to.”
    Climbing the wide steps, the group of five made way for a party of Americans coming down. All were wearing SCOPE badges. One member of their group remained at the top, at the foot of the Castle’s blank, frowning wall. He stood there unmoving except for his head and eyes; the latter scanned slowly up and down the wall, absorbing the featureless lower face no less than the high, apparently pointless upper battlements.
    “No windows, no doors,” he was drawling to himself as they came up behind him. “Weird as all get out!”
    Weird is right ! Gill thought. He came to an abrupt standstill and Anderson, immediately to his rear, bumped into him. “What?” Gill mouthed, out loud. The Castle—this great machine—had suddenly woken up. Gill knew it if no one else did.
    But in fact there were others—other human beings—who did know. Down in a sandbagged dugout under the perimeter fence, someone was yelling incoherently, and from the foot of the steps a man with a walkie-talkie was shouting up at them, “Sir? Mr. Anderson, sir—Mr. Gill? The activity has gone right off the register. Off all the registers!”
    There was no time to do anything. Someone Gill didn’t know, a tall, sturdy man, was climbing the steps directly behind them, walking right into it. Gill—the only one of them who knew that something was about to happen—might have made a run for it, but this stranger was in his way. Also, all the strength had gone out of him. He was afraid—because he knew that the Castle was suddenly intent upon something.
    “Oh, God!” he said, his voice very small.
    The others just looked at him: a sea of round, uncomprehending eyes. No, for one of them at least seemed aware of something. The American from SCOPE, shouting: “Shit, shit, oh shit !” and trying to run.
    But Turnbull grabbing him and holding on, asking, “What the bloody … ?”
    Gill wanted to shout, “Let go of him! Let him go!” But all that came out was, “Oh, God! Oh my good God!”
    And the Castle’s wall shimmered and began to expand, eating up the ground as it rushed to engulf them … .

CHAPTER NINE
     
    T he shock threw them off their feet. They weren’t hurled down physically, just reduced to such a state of imbalance that they fell of their own accord. All of their senses clashed with what had happened to them, fought against the unbelievability of it, and lost to its reality. They had moved or had been moved between an “A” and a “B” with neither physical nor mental perception of distance covered or time expended. And human minds aren’t built to take that sort of treatment. The sensation it produced was a sort of drunkenness without the alcoholic confusion. Confusion was there, certainly, but it was that of minds confronted—indeed surrounded—by the Unacceptable.
    What Gill had seen as he staggered and collapsed to all fours was this:
    Square grey clouds moving with an almost mathematical precision across a domed sky of blue hexagons, like a cross-section through a honeycomb but vast as the vault of heaven itself. In the distance, mountains formed of a myriad pyramidal and