Doorways

Chapter One.

Elrick stepped through the doorway and onto the grey tarmac of the platform, and as usual he stopped for a moment to take the transformation in. One moment long, green grass; the next cold, grey tarmac. Sweeping fields of green instantly replaced with dirty grey railway platforms. A single step and yet an entire world traversed. The shock of the change amazed him as it always did. You'd think that after so many years doing this very thing it would become routine. But it never did.

He never really understood it either. He could see the doorways, somehow. He could see through them to the worlds beyond. And he could step through them. But despite that he had no better understanding of what he did than he did of how he caught a ball. It just happened. And there was no thought involved. Only instinct. Reflexes. And there was no logic either. He'd just crossed worlds to get here and yet it wasn't as if it was a long journey. It was less than the blink of an eye.

But then he hadn't really moved either. Not a millimetre. The doorway he'd entered in Erislan was in exactly the same geographic location as the doorway he'd just exited on Earth. Whatever the distance was that lay between them, it wasn't physical. It wasn't an actual distance.

In fact his entire journey to get here was very short. He had just walked out of his house, fifty metres down across the field to the doorway, turned a little to the right, sort of, and stepped onto the number nine platform of the Wellington Railway Station. The longest part of the trip was yet to come. And even it wasn't that arduous. A simple bus ride. Of course the change in weather was as always a shock to the system.

He shivered a little as the sudden cold hit him. The chilly Wellington wind blew up from the south to be channelled through the city streets and the platforms of the station. Although the weather had improved over the last decade or so there were still times when it seemed as if the wind came straight from Antarctica itself. It was that bitter. Especially in spring when the gales blew. And of course it was made all the more difficult by the fact that a second or two before he'd been bathing in warm sunshine. Still, he needed his groceries and so he buttoned up his coat a little tighter and carried on his way. He liked his home in Erislan but the food there was pretty basic. Vegetables from his garden, eggs from his chickens and meat from the local farms. The locals had never mastered the art of microwave meals. They'd never mastered electricity. So every so often he had to travel into the city to shop. It was a pain, but not a terrible one.

From the platform it was just a short walk through the railway station and then down through the tunnel to the waiting buses which would take him to the supermarket. Although there was a supermarket in the railway station he needed to also pick up his mail and as that was a little distance away it was better to visit one of the bigger ones at the other end of town. Besides, it had the advantage of carrying a greater range of stock. On a good day the trip took him just over ten minutes. And even on a bad one it was no more than twenty.

Unfortunately this was looking like a worse one. One look at the dead body draped over one of the metal bench seats along the platform was enough to tell him that. Elrick gasped a little and unconsciously took a step back, horrified by what he saw.

He instantly knew that the man was dead. It was hard to imagine anyone being alive when he had a huge black spike sticking out of his head and a lake of blood pooled around his feet. Of course, the huge rips and tears through his body that had nearly torn him apart were also a pretty good give-away. Still, his first instinct had been to want to check that the man was all right. His next, after he'd stopped himself doing something so stupid, was to stand there with his mouth hanging open, staring like an idiot. It seemed he was not the only one however, as other people gradually noticed the body and stopped to do the very same thing. It was Sunday, mid morning, and he'd deliberately timed his visit to miss the arriving trains and the crowds, but still a small crowd started gathering around him quite quickly.

The small crowd had grown quite large by the time the police arrived.

He doubted though that anyone else was thinking what he was. For they couldn’t know what had happened to the man. They saw the victim but didn't know the killer. They didn't recognise the horn in his head. And how could they? The man had been killed by a spiderkin, a giant and terrifying predator from the world of Olorion. A predator unlike anything that had ever lived on Earth.

It was also a predator that could not possibly have travelled to Earth by itself. They weren't intelligent. Any intelligent life on Olorion had been wiped out by the spiderkin long before it could have evolved. Olorion was home only to the most deadly and savage of creatures, and the spiderkin was the most deadly and most savage of them all. It was the shark of the world. The top of the food chain. They ate everything and nothing ate them. In fact the only thing that controlled their numbers was starvation. They ran out of food every so often because they'd killed and eaten everything in sight, and then had to starve themselves until their prey regenerated.

And yet with no people on Olorion, and the spiderkin only beasts, one of them had somehow arrived on Earth. In Wellington on the number nine platform. Killing people. The black chitin horn sticking out of the man's head was proof of that. A horn shoved so powerfully into his head that it had not only punctured the man's skull but had also deformed his face. So someone had brought it here. Elrick guessed that the person who had done so wasn’t filled with good intentions.

Finding a body killed by a beast from another world was not good. Worse was the fact that unless someone had killed it or taken it away the beast was still probably somewhere nearby. That made him very nervous. So nervous that he desperately wanted to have his shotgun in his hands. And so nervous that all the while as he stood there he was looking around for any sign of the creature. So nervous that when the police asked him to go with them half an hour later to give a statement, he was very happy to oblige.

A trip in a car with a solid roof and doors, to a secure police station over a kilometre away with strong walls! It was amazing how civic minded Elrick was suddenly feeling.

And yet as he sat in the car and gradually let the feeling of safety absorb into his psyche, the only thought running through his brain was that this wasn't right. All he'd wanted to do was buy some groceries.

You shouldn't run across dead bodies while you were out shopping.

Chapter Two.

The interview room was fairly basic Elrick thought. The colours were surprisingly neutral some hues of green and brown that were really too insipid to even be called colours. The cheap plastic furniture looked like it had come from a school classroom, the table too. Other than that the room was empty. There wasn't even a mirror from which people in the next room could be watching him. Though there was a camera in the corner. Maybe that did the same thing. It didn't look anything at all like the interrogation rooms he saw on the cop shows he downloaded. He supposed he should be grateful for that, although he wasn't sure why he was at the station at all.

The officers had said it was routine. He had to give a statement having been first on the scene (even if it was only by a minute or so), and they preferred it to be done at the station rather than on the platform itself with all the onlookers listening. Elrick wasn't completely sure he believed them. He thought they fancied him as the killer of the man with the black spike in his head. Though the only thing they had on him was that he had been the first one to see the body.

He wasn't carrying any weapons, least of all the terrible knives that would have been needed to rip the man apart or the huge pincers that had smashed the venom laden horn into his head. Elrick didn’t have any blood on him either, and doing that sort of damage to a man should have left blood everywhere. And like all the others he had simply stood there stunned when he'd seen the body. Surely if he had been a killer he would have left the scene quickly? The police knew all that. They'd even checked his clothing for blood at the scene. They'd taken his initial statement there. So why had they then brought him here?

He didn't know. He was sure he didn't look like a killer, let alone the monster that had killed the man. He looked like what he was, a student. Okay, so maybe at twenty nine he was a little older than most. And given his new jeans and carefully ironed shirt perhaps a little neater. But still there was nothing terribly homicidal about him. In fact most of his friends said that he looked a little bland. That he seemed on the boring side. Slightly over average height and perhaps a little thin, but that was about as distinctive as he got. His hair was a middling brown of middling length, his face not too pretty and not too plain. He was what most people would describe as forgettable. There was nothing edgy about him. Nothing of any great character. Sometimes he wished there was.

No doubt the police would have been surprised if they'd known that he could see the doorways between worlds and step through them with a thought. Or the fact that he was far too wealthy to be a student. A millionaire in fact. Of course if they had known either of those things they would then have wondered why he lived such a mundane existence. The fact was that Elrick didn't know either. It was just the way it was.

But he did know that if they had known who, or rather what had killed the man on the platform they would not have merely been surprised. They would have freaked out. As Elrick had. In fact he was still freaking out quite a bit, – quietly of course. Spiderkin should not be on Earth. The very thought was a nightmare.

And the idea that someone could control one of the beasts somehow, at least long enough to bring it to Earth was shocking. That someone would actually do it was appalling. The creatures were nothing but savage killing machines. And the one thing he knew for certain was that the spiderkin had not killed its last human. There would be more deaths before it was finished. Many more deaths. It would not stop until it was dead.

Unfortunately Elrick couldn't tell the police any of that. As he sat there and sipped at the god awful coffee he'd been brought, he knew he could tell them nothing. Not that there was a creature out there that would kill without stopping until it was stopped. Not what it looked like. And most certainly not where it had come from.

Mr. Moorcroft. Elrick looked up from his coffee to see the Police Officer return to the interview room. Detective Kimberley Benson was how she'd introduced herself. She was a fairly ordinary looking woman with brown hair and blue green eyes. Not unattractive but not a bombshell either. He suspected though that she was smart. Those eyes of hers darted around a lot, assessing things, assessing him. And they were studying him again as she took a seat in one of the cheap plastic chairs opposite him. He felt distinctively uncomfortable. Like the chickens did when the fox was nearby. Though that was just an expression. His chickens were quite used to the fox that called his place home, probably because Muggins had never attacked any of them. She preferred mice. And whatever he fed her of course. Free food always tasted good.

Elrick? That's an unusual name isn't it?

My mother was a Michael Moorcock fan. It was actually true or so he understood from his childhood papers, even if his name was spelled slightly differently. Those few papers and letters were all that had been left to him by his parents before they'd died. But the reference was lost on the detective. He guessed that she didn't read classic sci fi and fantasy. He probably wouldn't have either save for the name he had been left with.

So tell me about your address again? Detective Benson wasn't letting that go he noticed. And she couldn't seem to understand that he didn't have one. Not on Earth at least. He didn't live on Earth. He'd had a house once, but the demands of simply trying to keep up a house that he didn't live in had been too much for him. And it was dangerous. If someone saw a complete stranger vanish into thin air one day there was nothing they could really do except get laughed at. They would do nothing and pretend it had never happened. But when your neighbours saw you vanish because your home was close to a doorway, then questions could be asked. And if it kept happening the chance of being caught grew. So he'd sold his house ten years before and moved completely off world to live with others like him.

But naturally he couldn't tell her that. If he had the chances were that she wouldn't believe him. After all who would believe that there were parallel worlds, fifteen of them, all intersecting at Wellington and a few other locations around the world, and that certain people could simply walk through doorways of a sort and travel between them? He wouldn't have believed it either if he hadn't discovered the ability to see the doors at the age of twelve and stepped through them soon after. His early teens had been an interesting time in his life. Difficult too.

Her disbelief though was the better option. If instead she did for some strange reason believe him, it could start a national and maybe international sensation. Other worlds, other races only a few steps away? There would be government agents and scientists everywhere. The press around every corner. There could even be wars. Actual wars of conquest.

And he and the few others that could find the doorways and travel between worlds would likely find themselves roped into top secret military projects. The sort of projects that he only knew about from watching DVDs. The sort of projects where civil liberties were forgotten and rights trampled on. He didn't really know if such things existed, but he feared that they did. Maybe even here in New Zealand.

For that reason the travellers were very secretive. What they could do was a gift. But it wasn't any protection against men with guns and badges. And their ways of making money were legal, but also obvious if you knew what to look for. Though he called himself a trader on his tax returns, the fact was that he never bought anything. He only sold. If the authorities became aware of the travellers it wouldn't take them long to track down those who made their wealth by selling precious gems and gold without the benefit of a registered mine. Most other travellers did the same. If the word of their existence ever got out they would be identified in a heartbeat. For that reason every traveller, whether they lived on Earth or any of the other worlds was committed to secrecy. And they were good about keeping the secret. After all, it was their lives that hung in the balance.

Of course there was yet a worse danger if she believed him. To him at least. The elves. If they found out that he'd revealed the secret of the fifteen worlds the elves would be upset. Worse than that they'd be angry. And they would accuse him of committing a crime. The High Guard would be sent to collect him and when they had him and the charges had been laid, he would be found guilty – the elves really hadn't mastered the concepts of reasonable doubt and prisoner's rights – and the punishment would be dire. There would be no soft earthly prison cell for him. Instead there would be months or years of hard labour and a cold stone cell.

He was a traveller, and in the end travellers had no allies save for their own people. All in his best option was to continue to lie through his teeth. To pretend he didn't have a home.

I'm a student. I move around a lot, stay with friends and sleep on couches. No fixed abode as they say. But I have a cell and a post office box. You can contact me if you need to.

Hmmm. She didn't seem convinced and unfortunately he could understand that. He didn't look like a typical student. He dressed like one in jeans and a casual shirt, though he didn't wear his hair so long as most and he did his best to make sure that his clothes were neat and tidy. He did not wear worn out or torn clothing. It was one of the things the High Guard expected whenever they came calling. Also the laptop in his pack was far too expensive for most students. And he was nearly thirty. Something that the detective had picked up on. Aren’t you a bit old for a student?

A little but I'm working on my fifth degree. I already have a bachelor's degree and masters in microbiology and a bachelor's degree and masters in sociology. Now I'm studying for my masters in philosophy. It all takes time. It was true of course, which was why he had told her. He was sure somehow that the detective would check it out and he knew better than to give her any reason to doubt his story.

Why? Her question didn't exactly surprise him. It wasn't the first time he'd been asked the very same thing. People tended to ask it when they realised that he was still a student. And as always Elrick had only the one answer.

Because I like it. I'm lucky enough to have enough money to live on without needing to work, so why shouldn't I do what I like?

It wasn't completely true. He did work, digging and polishing his opals, but it wasn't a forty hour a week job by any means and he didn't have to.

Ah huh! She didn't sound convinced, but he guessed she wasn't willing to press him on it. Tell me about the body.

Elrick shrugged helplessly. I walked on to the platform and there he was. That thing in his head, blood everywhere. It wasn't hard to sound shocked as he said it. He was shocked. Horrified. Even now having had some time to think about things and a cup of coffee to clear his head, the image of the man was still vivid in his thoughts. He'd never seen a dead body before, let alone something like that.

That's really all I know. I mean at first I wanted to rush over and see if I could do something for him, but then I realised there was no point. Not with him like that. And after that I just stood there staring like everyone else. It was really horrible. So horrible in fact that he knew he would be seeing that face in his quiet moments for a long time to come. And he wouldn't be the only one. Some of the others who'd seen it had thrown up. A couple of women had screamed. And yet all of them had still stood there, almost mesmerised by the sight. It was so horrible that they just couldn't draw their eyes away from it. They'd been trapped there until the police had finally shown up and pushed them away.

You didn't touch the body?

God no! Elrick shuddered. He couldn't hide his revulsion at the thought. You couldn't touch something like that. You can check my fingerprints. My DNA. I didn't go near it. And they could. He had nothing to hide, at least on that front. He hoped that that would convince them of his innocence.

There was a tapping at the door and they both looked to it as the door swung open and an officer stepped a little way into the room.

Detective Benson. There's someone here to see you.

The detective got up and went to the door without saying a word, and for a moment Elrick wondered if the interview might be over. But then in the doorway behind the detective and the officer who'd called her he saw the reason for the interruption, and he knew it had only just begun.

Oh crap! Maybe he shouldn't have said it. Not when everyone heard his exclamation and turned to stare at him. But he couldn't help himself. Elrick instantly recognised the women in the hallway outside the interview room and his mood soured further. As if it wasn't already a bad day. For a moment he was tempted to ask the detective if there was any other crime he could confess to, just so he didn't have to face the woman. But still he knew that there was nothing he could do except sit there and sip at his bad coffee in the polystyrene cup while he waited for the woman to come in and ruin the rest of his day. And that wouldn't be long.

Already she was flashing her fake ID and her equally fake smile at the officers, and he knew they would swallow her cover, whatever it was. She was an elf and whatever else her people could do, they seemed to have the almost magical ability to convince people of whatever they wanted. Everyone that was except the travellers. Their powers didn't work on travellers, perhaps one reason they didn't like them. The other being he assumed, that travellers could walk the doorways between worlds in a way that they couldn't. For a start they could see through the doorways to the worlds on the other side while the elves couldn't. It was useful when you wanted to know what was on the other side before you stepped through it. The elves had to work by a system of partial sight and rote learning which doorways lead where. They had only half the gift. They needed an atlas. Then again, if she couldn't see through the doorways and couldn't fool him with her hypnotic talent then he in turn couldn't convince people of whatever story he wanted them to believe. Maybe it all worked out fairly evenly in the end.

It still struck him as bizarre to see her talent working though. It was obvious that she looked nothing like a normal human being. To him. One look at her brilliant green eyes and the impossibly white eyebrows, not to mention the impossibly sharp planes of her face should have sent people rushing for their cameras. But still they didn't. The officers looked at her and somehow assumed she was just like everyone else.

How they did it he wasn't completely sure. Magic? Some sort of psychic ability? Actually he had no idea at all. But certainly it wasn't a perfect ability. There were some things even it couldn't overcome. For example she was wearing some sort of woollen hat and wig to cover her pointed ears and the ice white hair that normally fell down her back. She also had something over her teeth to hide the points. And she was wearing several layers of clothing to cover her unnatural thinness and if he had to guess some sort of makeup to hide the lines of her sharp angular cheek and jaw bones. But even with all that, to simply walk into a police station and flash around her fake piece of plastic and expect to be believed - that took some confidence in her ability. And, knowing Valcora as he unfortunately did, it also took some measure of arrogant contempt for the reasoning abilities of humans.

Still, her disguise worked and a few seconds later he watched as she said something quietly to the detective who was supposed to be taking his statement and the woman and the other officer immediately left the room. What Valcora had said he didn't know, but it seemed to have worked. A few seconds later she shut the door behind them and then strode over to the table as if she owned the place. Then again she always wandered around like that. All the High Guard did. And when he thought about it, this was very likely the sort of place she was familiar with anyway.

High Guard were police, of a sort. But not the decent ones that patrolled New Zealand's streets. These were more like the jack boot wearing Gestapo of the elf world. And they didn't just patrol the cities of Tindersley, or annoy the Ellis veri as they called their people. They patrolled all the worlds, dealing out their own heavy handed version of law to everyone. Not justice mind, law. The Principles as they called them. Apparently they were even willing to come to Earth to harass the innocent when they thought the occasion demanded it. His being interrogated apparently was such an occasion. He wasn't sure if he should be honoured or worried by her arrival. He suspected the latter.

She was out of uniform, something she probably hated. A uniform to Valcora was more than just a set of clothes. It was her identity. She was after all High Guard. It wasn't a job or even a career. It was a calling. The position defined her life. If he knew nothing else about her he knew that. But perhaps the leather jacket with all its buckles and pockets would have looked unseemly on Wellington streets? More at home on an assault course. And the heavy dark trousers weren't normal wear for women on the city streets. In a factory maybe. As for the uniform’s shirt it wasn’t flattering to a woman's figure. It wasn't meant to be. Nor were the boots. In her uniform she would have been taken for some sort of Tomboy.

One piece of her normal kit had made it across he noticed. The little crystal arm brace she always wore was still attached to her left arm. He could just see the leather and silver thread strap around her wrist poking out through the sleeve of her business jacket. Apparently the little devices which were worn along the inside of the lower arm were too important to take off. But then they were little video communications systems as well as cameras. The High Guard always wanted to be in contact with their superiors. The chain of command was a life line to them and they lived to follow orders. The devices were also used to record evidence, which he guessed was why she was wearing it even here. No doubt she was hoping for a confession.

He did have to wonder where her shock spear was – not that he missed it. The elves had mastered some technology that humans had bypassed, in particular how to direct electricity without wires, and the shock spears were the most obvious evidence of that. They worked like tasers though with a far greater range and a lot more power. They could send a minor zap fifty feet across a field to give you a sudden burn. Valcora enjoyed doing that. They could also emit a pulse that would knock you out. And they could kill. The weapons could fry a person in a heartbeat.

Normally the nasty little weapon would be strapped to her side, as it was for all High Guard. And it wouldn't leave her side. Ever. From what he understood each High Guard apprentice was required to craft his own shock spear before he attained the basic rank of Spearman, and they considered the weapons to be as personal to them as a man would consider his toothbrush. They carried them everywhere. But this was New Zealand and no one was allowed to carry weapons. Any weapons. And even retracted the spear looked like a foot long metal club. Also being metal he couldn't imagine that it would have passed through the metal detectors at the front entrance without problem. Elrick wasn't stupid enough to ask her about it though as it would just make her angry. Instead he waited patiently while she took her seat and smiled somewhat cruelly across the table at him.

It was odd seeing her like that. A study in contrasts. An elven woman in a human police station. A woman of unearthly, austere beauty in the most hum drum of rooms. A woman of surprisingly slight build who was not particularly tall who still somehow managed to intimidate him in a way a ten foot tall gorilla couldn't.

Mr. Moorcroft, you've finally found your proper place in the world I see. It wasn't just a casual slur. The humour was intentionally barbed. Valcora had never been a friend of his, and he knew she was taking pleasure in seeing him in the police station being interrogated. In her world he was a nuisance who no doubt deserved to be locked up just for the crime of existing. He was a traveller after all. What more proof of his guilt did she need?

"I haven't been charged