House of Doors by Chaz Brenchley Read Free Book Online Page A

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    I am not going to faint.
    Not going to.
    Not.
    Not again. She was oddly determined about that, even as her own world spun dizzily about her, as her gaze was drawn down and down into that sucking well. She was not going to faint again. That was all that mattered.
    Almost all.
    She might die, she thought. She might be found dead. That wouldn’t matter, except that it would be a bewilderment – her bones all broken, as though she had smashed to ground from miles high, just here in her own room beneath a plastered ceiling – and she really didn’t want to attract any attention to herself. It wasn’t about her, really not. Only the impossibility of living on, the dreadful dragging weight of it day after day after—
    Not going to, and so she didn’t faint.
    Neither did she die.
    Gradually, the fixedness of furniture and floor drew her back into her own body. Her swirling mind rediscovered rootedness, that sense of presence, here I am . With that came who I am , not Peter, and so not falling, no.
    The mirror  . . . failed. Today. No promises for tomorrow. But today she stood firm and was strong, and that spinning chaos faded and was blank again, and then was nothing but ill-silvered glass and she could just see her own face in it, if she stooped and peered.
    Actually she could just see her own face in motion as she twisted away, looking anywhere but there. Wanting to pull away entirely except that she needed to lean hard on both hands still, here I am . Trembling through to the bone of her, prickling with sweat all over, sick and dizzy again with the reaction.
    She was late, then, in finding her way downstairs. Very late, perhaps. She wasn’t sure. Her watch had stopped, at about the same time that she fell – no, that she didn’t fall into the mirror.
    She had washed again, despite the scummy water. And had put on her old uniform, for lack of a new one yet; and had barely troubled with her hair at all, determined not to look again into the glass. Perhaps no one would notice, with the wrong cap perched so blatantly atop. Perhaps they would all busy themselves with telling her how very incorrect her dress was, and what to do about it.
    Follow the noise , Matron had said. In fact she followed an orderly with a trolley, but she really didn’t need to. There was rather a lot of noise.
    And that was before the orderly used his trolley to nudge open the green baize door at the end of the passage. The trolley was weighted with a steaming urn, which she guessed to be reinforcements, a second round; but it wasn’t only sound that washed around the orderly to greet her, as soon as that door swung wide. There was an aroma also, instantly distinctive. Not tea.
    No hospital she knew would tolerate such a racket from its staff, no matron of her acquaintance would condone it for a moment. And that was beer that she was smelling, impossible and unmistakable, a heady tang that caught her throat with memory and yearning. Beer  . . .!
    She would have hesitated, even in full sight on the threshold there, only the orderly just barged straight in and she seemed to be caught in his wake, to have no alternative but to follow.
    In the passage, that weight of sound had overflowed her like a wave released. In the doorway it would have been a wall, that solid, it would have stopped her entirely if the trolley hadn’t broken through ahead of her.
    She felt it none the less, every brick of it, every separate voice. Her head dropped just a little, her shoulders hunched, as though she were walking into a wind. One step, two steps—
    Then she realized. And stopped dead, right there, two paces into the room; and straightened her spine, squared her shoulders like a soldier on parade, lifted her head and looked about her.
    This was a hallway, seemingly, or should have been. An open area between the servants’ wing and what must be the main family rooms, with a stairway