The House of Doors - 01 by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online Page A

independence, too.
    Dressing, putting on her very feminine underthings, Angela felt something of the sadness again, but also a lot of the freedom. Rod would get tired of the chase eventually, and then he’d have a choice. Straighten up and kick the habit permanently, and maybe find someone new who he’d have to treat right—or keep hitting the bottle until it hit him back, and go down and out without a friend in the world. Sober, he could be a most sensitive, even a tender man, but only give him a drink—just one—and everything he kept suppressed would surface on the instant and he’d be all hell let loose. The thing he’d kept most suppressed had been his jealousy … .
    The thought of that, Rod’s maniacal jealousy when he’d been drinking—his totally unwarranted, almost homicidal jealousy—drove out the last dregs of sadness. For in the end that was why she’d run: because at times it had been so bad that she’d feared for her life.
    Waiting one morning until he’d gone off to work, she’d packed a few things, left their flat in Edinburgh’s Dalkeith Road for the last time and caught a train down to London. She had friends there from her years at university. She had left Rod on a Friday, but by the following weekend he’d tracked her.
    First there had been telephone calls: Rod, desperately looking for her, pleading with her friends that if they knew where she was they must tell him. He had been to see her parents, too. Of course, she’d kept them in the picture by telephone right from square one; they’d been supportive and offered her every assistance; when Rod went to see them, they’d played the worried parents (which of course they’d been) for his benefit, or more properly for Angela’s, and kept her whereabouts secret.
    Then there had been the long, rambling letters: letters to her friends, explaining to them how sorry he was (wasn’t he always?) but that her leaving had shocked him back onto the rails, the straight and narrow, and all he wanted now. was that she’d forgive him and come back. He would make it all up to her, he promised.
    But Angela knew better. She was in hiding and intended to stay that way, for now anyway. The people she was with had their instructions to play dumb and never admit that she was there; Rod’s letters to her, to be forwarded through them, were returned to him unopened with sympathetic little notes saying that they couldn’t be forwarded because it simply wasn’t known where Angela was. All of this because she had needed the time to get herself—her thoughts, emotions, her plans for some kind of future—sorted out.
    But then Rod had found her.
    She was staying with Siobhan and George Lynch. On the Monday morning ten days after Angela left Edinburgh to travel down to their house in North London, when George drove down early to Finsbury Park to take the first tube train into the city where he worked, Rod had been waiting for him. The station had been almost empty: a bum with his bottle, moaning in a plastic bag stuffed with newspapers; a black workman in coveralls and a headset, jiving with himself at the far end of the platform; and Rodney Denholm, unshaven, with whiskey on his breath, following George from the ticket machines down onto the platform and grabbing him there. George wasn’t much physically, had never been a fighter to speak of … but at least when Rod was through with him he’d managed to telephone Angela and warn her. Apparently her husband had been keeping a watch on the house since Saturday evening.
    Now, shrugging into her parka, Angela thought back on that telephone conversation with the husband of her best friend. Siobhan hadn’t been out of bed yet (thank God! For she was the hysterical type) and so Angela had left her breakfast to answer the phone herself. If it had been Rod, she could simply jiggle the handset about a bit and put it down, to give the impression that the telephone wasn’t working properly or that the connection