The House of Doors - 01 Read Free Page B

waved his weapon again, almost dismissively, and decapitated him where he stood. The cut was so clean and effortless that the man’s head remained upright on his neck until a moment after he began to topple sideways … .

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T he pubs in Killin—the old pubs and the three new. ones alike—were doing a roaring trade, as they had been since the arrival of the “Killin Castle” some twenty months ago. In the main bar of one of the new ones, called simply The Castle, Jack Turnbull and Spencer Gill got better acquainted. Turnbull was a minder looking after his boss from the MOD (Ministry of Defence), and in that capacity he’d earlier attended a briefing given by Gill to the two dozen or more VIPs currently here to make this or that decision in respect of that weighty phenomenon guarding and now guarded on the lower slopes of Ben Lawers.
    “Lackluster?” Gill repeated Turnbull’s terse but not deliberately unfriendly critique of his talk. Turnbull was outspoken, that was all. Gill shrugged. “I suppose it was. Hell, it always is! If you tell the same story twice weekly with occasional matinees for the best part of a year, it’s bound to get boring, isn’t it? I mean, it isn’t The Mousetrap. And it’s not like a joke where you can spice up or tone down the story to suit your audience. I can’t embellish the facts: they are what they are. And the Castle is what it is: a machine. That’s what I was telling them, and I did it as best I could.”
    “It wasn’t a criticism,” Turnbull told him. “Or at least I didn’t mean it that way. But I just sat there listening to you, and I thought: This bloke’s knackered, and it’s showing. He’s saying something exciting and it comes out dull as ditchwater.”
    Gill smiled wryly. “Actually,” he said. “I don’t have much to be excited about. Not a hell of a lot, anyway. Maybe that’s why it comes out so dry. You see, you don’t know all the facts.”
    “Actually,” Turnbull mimicked him, but unsmilingly, “I do know the facts. Most of them. I know more about you than you’d believe. Want to hear?”
    Gill raised an eyebrow, nodded. “Why not?” he said. “I’m flattered that my confidential reports are that interesting! Go right ahead.”
    Turnbull looked at him almost speculatively. A curious look. It wasn’t appraisal; perhaps it was an attempt at understanding what must be going on in there; or maybe he was simply remembering what he’d researched or been told. Gill thought: There can’t be all that much of the intellectual in him, not in his line of work. But Turnbull looked at Gill anyway, and took a mental photograph of him, his way of remembering. Now, if he saw Gill again ten years from now, he’d know him on the instant. Except, of course, Gill didn’t have ten years. He’d be lucky if he had two.
    Gill was maybe five-eleven, a little underweight at around eleven stone, thirty-three years old but already looking more like forty. And he was dying. Fifteen years ago as a teenager he’d caused something of a stir; they’d recognized him as a new phenomenon, a quantum leap of Nature to keep pace with Science. Gill had “understood” machines. His great-grandfather had been an engineer, which seemed to be Gill’s only qualification for the trick his genes or whatever had played on him. But nothing his great-grandfather had done could possibly have anything in common with Spencer Gill’s ability.
    “In the Age of Computers,” some sensationalist journalist had written, “there will have to be minds which are like computers! This young man has that sort of mind … .” Of course, he’d had it wrong: Gill’s mind wasn’t like a computer at all. It was simply that he understood them, them and all other machines: by touch, taste, smell, sight; by listening to them and feeling for them. He was a mechanical empath; or rather, he had empathy with mechanical things. And people had first taken note of him when, at the age of