The House of Doors - Softcover

CHAPTER ONE

Hamish Grieve, as his surname might suggest, had been a gillie for the Laird of Earn for forty-four years. Before that he'd been apprenticed as a joiner, receiving his signed indentures and freedom on the attainment of his twenty-first birthday; at which point he'd given up working with woods to work in them. And from then until he was sixty-five and pensionable, like many a good Scot before him, he'd cannily managed his affairs and silted away a percentage of his middling but not entirely insubstantial wages.

Biding his time, he'd kept his contempt for the Laird well hidden, until the evening of his sixty-fifty birthday (the 2nd May, 1984), when, leaving the stables and crossing the paddock for the last time, he'd walked up to the great granite house at the heart of its many acres of woods and entered his master's rooms. There Hamishhad checked the contents of his wages envelope, laid down in a neat bundle his shotgun, notebook, dog whistle and certain lesser appointments of his profession, and resigned. It was his right, for he was sixty-five and there'd never been a written contract.

"But ... what'll I do?" The old laird had been flabbergasted. "And more's to the point, what'll you do, Hamish?" Hamish was head gillie; the others in the Laird's employ, for all their years of service, weren't nearly so experienced and much less trustworthy.

"Ah shid imagine," Hamish had grunted, "that ye'll do as ye've done for the last forty-four years--verra little! As for maself: there's a wee property come available in Lawers overlooking the water. Ah shall buy it and spen' ma time fishing and reading--what time's left to me." And he did just that.

For the next ten years he would get up each day, breakfast, open his windows over Loch Tay and do his deep-breathing exercises. At nine o'clock he'd get his bicycle from the lean-to and, weather permitting, peddle a fairly leisurely seven miles down to Killin at the eastern end of the loch, there to visit an old sickbed friend who'd been dying for fifteen years and never got any closer to the actual box. Hamish's mongrel dog, Barney, would trot alongside; which in the main was how the two of them got their exercise.

But on this Sunday morning in mid-June of 1994, a few weeks after Hamish had clocked up seventy-five years, things were to work out just a little different.

The morning was bright if somewhat chillyfor the time of year, and Hamish found the bike ride invigorating and even exhilarating--to a point. That point being reached when, in a moment, his emotions switched from exhilaration to astonishment. He saw it as he cycled round a gentle right-hand bend in the road: that which could not possibly be there to see. And his gnarled hands at once gripped the handlebars that much tighter, causing his front wheel to wobble. Barney, trotting alongside, yelped and narrowly avoided a trapped paw, by which time Hamish had brought his machine to a halt.

He sat there astride his bike, one foot on the ground, jaws agape and eyes staring their utter disbelief. The object of his amazement, what he could see of it, was a house, or even a mansion by its size; indeed, more a castle, with its turrets and battlements. It stood midway between twin spurs coming down from the lordly Ben Lawers, its base hidden by the ridge of a scree saddle and its back to a steep incline where granite outcrops came thrusting through the thin turf. A castle, yes, and not unlike many another of much the same size, period and general construction; in itself, hardly a matter for astonishment. Castles abound in Scotland, and to a native dour as Hamish Grieve one castle seemed much like any other; unless you were talking about the really grand jobs, like the one on the Mount of Edinburgh, for instance.

No, the building itself (in any other circumstance) would hardly take Hamish by surprise. But the fact that he'd found it here, now, would and did--for as recently as yesterday morning it had not been here! Neither then nor any othermorning for the last ten years, and for all the long years of time gone before that!

Hamish shook his head, rubbed at his eyes, frankly couldn't accept the evidence that his senses were offering him. But the longer he stared, the more undeniably solid the castle looked to him. Could it be, he wondered, that the thing really had been there all of this time, and he simply hadn't looked that way before, hadn't noticed it? But that was to ignore the facts, indeed to ignore his own especially lucid memory. Last summer, on these very slopes, he'd seen French and English botanists examining Ben Lawers' rare alpine plants. Six months ago there'd been skiers up there, coming over the crest of that very scree-filled depression. Hamish had always hated these periodic incursions of tourists and foreign riffraff, but now he thanked the Lord for these memories of them. Without such memories his sanity itself must be suspect.

Or perhaps it wasn't so much his sanity but his sight. He'd heard of people damaging their eyes like that, but never thought it could happen to him. "Barney," he said, still gazing at the castle rising there over the scree less than three-quarters of a mile away, "have ah been hitting it too hard? Is a couple or three wee drams of a nicht too much, d'ye think? Could it be that an accumulation o' malt's addled ma brains, eh?" But Barney only wagged his stump of a tail and whined, as he always did when he was worried.

"Well, ma laddie," said Hamish, more to himself now than to the dog, "it seems we'll just have tae look into this, you an' me."

There was a track climbing from the road toa spot maybe halfway between Hamish and the object of his curiosity, climbing in fact along the sharp, narrow ridge of the eastern spur. Hamish left the road, cycled a little way up the track until the going got too heavy, then leaned his bicycle against a boulder and continued on foot. Barney stayed right to heel, uncomplaining, perhaps wondering at this rare break in the tradition of so many years.

Finally, climbing above the scree ridge, Hamish paused for a breather and studied more closely the mysterious castle. And despite the fact that there was a great deal wrong with that enigmatic structure, at least Hamish was no longer in doubt of his eyesight.

The place most definitely was there; its squat foundations going down into scree, its frontage like half a hexagon, forming a flat face with flanking walls angling sharply back; and the frowning granite walls themselves, going up maybe fifty feet to the turrets and crenellated battlements. And all grandly set against Ben Lawers, rising majestically to its cloud-piercing four-thousand-foot crest; all very impressive, solid and powerful seeming. And very, very wrong.

For there was no road to the place, not even a track, and no windows in it that Hamish could see. And perhaps most peculiar of all, no doors ...

Up here, with a breeze tugging at his light coat and the sun warming his neck, space seemed to open up for Hamish Grieve and time to stand still. Long moments passed while his breathing settled down and his heartbeat slowed. Barney sat at his feet, stump of a tailwagging a very little, small whines sounding now and then from deep in his chest.

Finally Hamish shivered. His neck might be warm but the rest of him felt unaccountably cold. Or perhaps not unaccountably. It wasn't every day that something like this happened.

Before he could begin shivering again he started forward, skirted the castle, began to climb the ridge of the spur towards its rear. Down there, sheep clambered in the rocks at the castle's base and chewed on the coarse grasses. Hamish paused and stared at them. If sheep weren't afraid of the...