The Hall of Doors

Mary Jo feigned retreat to her room, muttering indignant statements under her breath for the benefit of Atomic Ranger's hearing. She did not glance behind her even once, instead trusting her ears and her nose to tell whether and how closely he followed her. Her glow-in-the-dark prison warden always triggered an ancient scent-memory of sitting in a clinic, awaiting a tetanus shot; it was not exactly that he smelled like industrial cleaners, but rather their result, the unmistakable impression of sterility. There was no subtle melange of sweat, oils, or soap and detergent like on everyone else. As unpleasant as those very human odors could sometimes be, their total absence was disconcerting. They probably contributed as much to her uneasiness with him as his phosphorescent skin and his obvious disdain for her.

By the time she reached her dormitory, she was satisfied that Atomic Ranger had not followed her. Nevertheless, she made a show of loudly turning the deadbolt latch and then very quietly re-opening it. Then she waited, her ear pressed to the door, her breath stilled until finally her lungs gave out and she sucked in a sharp draught of conditioned air. With the rush of oxygen to her brain, all this sneaking suddenly struck her as moronic. How many sleepless nights had she spent wandering the building in the past? It would almost be more suspicious if she didn't. Besides, for all she knew, Atomic Ranger could see her standing here through the wall — or through the floor. She shook the apprehension out of her head and strode out into the hallway.

But having reached the threshold of the Promethean’s ‘magic portal,’ Mary Jo's misgivings returned. She found herself peering intensely down the hallway, her ears straining for the signal of footsteps, the swish of fabric in motion, or the whistling of breath through a slightly congested nose. There was nothing. The passage was so still, its silence was so complete, that it sterilized even her imagination.

And now those misgivings rocketed to the realm of paranoia. Her breath became suddenly ragged and she felt the pressure of her heartbeat in the back of her head, just like the last time she experienced such complete stillness in the police interrogation room at the hands of Amp. She was suddenly sure that he and perhaps the entirety of the Challenger Foundation might be hiding around the corner, shielded by his cone of silence and ready to spring on her. Or perhaps the walking-on-her-grave sensation she felt was Ephemera, untraceably surveilling her from realms invisible.

All of a sudden, a muffled bang echoed from overhead and Mary Jo jolted, her hands clamped around her mouth, much too slow to block the squeal of surprise. But no one appeared, and a few seconds later, she recognized it as the normal outbursts of a building at night: the minute bending of the beams caused by a settling foundation, the sudden expansion of a pipe from a flow of hot water.

“Snap out of it!” she hissed at herself. If someone was spying on her, it was already too late.

Chemistra squared her narrow shoulders and set about her first challenge: getting past the door.

Not opening the door; she presumed she already knew how to do that. But her overwhelming curiosity over its mechanism, to say nothing of the intense desire to flaunt her comprehension of it to the Promethean, needed to be conquered. Rationally, she understood that she had no chance of solving its riddle in the short time available to her, but she also understood just as clearly that she lacked the willpower to not give it at least a cursory examination. Her psychological eccentricities simply wouldn’t allow it.

She ran her fingers across its surface from jamb to jamb, feeling only the smooth texture of epoxy-covered steel, its temperature only a few degrees cooler than the air in the hallway. Save for the absence of a handle, there was nothing unusual about it; it seemed for all the world like a steel exterior door you could buy at a construction store.

‘Unexpected,’ she thought. She bit her lip and turned to study the enigmatic dial on the wall. Was the whole secret in that contraption? And what, exactly, did it do?

Up close, the device looked charmingly baroque: a series of finely-crafted cylinders, pressed with the mysterious glyphs, and a pressure trigger, all in an assembly made of brass. ‘No, not brass,’ she thought, sniffing the air. She knelt down, ran the tip of her tongue across it. ‘Bronze. Very interesting.’

There were 18 glyphs on each cylinder — what were they? 'That would be an unusual base for a number system. If it's an alphabet, it's obviously not a 1:1 match with the Latin.'

She understood, of course, that it might just be an elaborate combination lock, and the key a meaningless string, but she didn’t believe that. Mary Jo was obsessed with the idea that the sequence determined where the door opened to, like in a story she dimly remembered reading in an ancient, yellowed magazine. And more: that her chance encounter with that old chest of pulps in her grandfather’s attic had been arranged to prepare her for just this moment. This was her woman’s intuition speaking, a ken of the fabulous synchronicities that lately had ruled her life, like that old book literally falling into her lap in the university library, open to the picture of Boris Yvain, or her improbable meeting with the Sin-Eater.

Chemistra was sorely tempted to test her hypothesis by entering a random string of characters and taking a peek at where the door led, but something a bit more reptilian-brained than her women’s intuition warned against that. She had also read her share of horror stories in those old, yellowed pulp mags and she could vividly imagine the catastrophes that might result from a bad combination. Besides, she reminded herself, she didn’t have the time to indulge idle curiosities. She had to get to Rome and back before breakfast.

At last, feeling that she had probed enough to master her autistic impulses, Mary Jo retrieved a piece of notebook paper from her pocket and flattened it out against the door. It was covered in her own scribbles of the sigils she had memorized when she first saw Bulwark and Atomic Ranger carrying the stone man. Mary Jo had an excellent visual memory, the kind that mystified her parents with precise recollections of mundane episodes from her preschool years and tormented her boyfriends with detailed recountings of failings they had barely noticed even as they committed them. In moments of humility, she allowed that such feats probably accounted for half of her perceived genius. Nevertheless, in pressure situations, these impressive faculties sometimes abandoned her, and the paper was one of several contingency plans she carried with her. She was, after all, an actual genius, and not merely a perceived one, as the Promethean would soon discover.

She dialed in the sequence of glyphs, watched them flash across the LED display, and held her breath as she pressed on the trigger switch. A chorus of solid thunks followed, a buzz from the wall monitor, and then a rush of sweet-smelling air as the door gently swung open.

Chemistra’s eyelids retreated, her head involuntarily angling upward to take the sweep of a vast, circular chamber of pillars and intricate stonework, very much taller than the hallway she stood in, so much so that she could not see the top of it. And there were doors everywhere, each framed in exquisitely carved wood.

Chemistra’s legs wobbled as she stood athwart the door frame, her cheeks aglow in an alien light. Her prison was behind her, endless possibilities were ahead. A very self-satisfied sort of smile grew on Chemistra’s face as she stepped across the threshold.

It was some time before Chemistra remembered to breathe. She was starting to feel light-headed, and not only from a build-up of carbon dioxide. The place was wonderful to look at. She stood just inside the doorway for several minutes, her body slowly rotating as her gaze spiralled up level upon level of mezzanines. At some point they blurred together and it became hard to distinguish one from another, though she could see a definite end of them far above her, a vaulted roof covered in mosaics, with a circular skylight from which entered the soft, golden glow that suffused the hall. Even in breadth the chamber was vast, like a grand hotel lobby built within the walls of a castle. Especially because of the endless series of doors and winding staircases, the place resembled one of those abstract paintings with impossible perspectives. Thankfully, there were no staircases jutting from the ceiling, but there was something decidedly otherworldly about the place, a sort of... buoyancy in the air. Chemistra couldn’t quite articulate it. Her steps felt lighter.

“Where am I?”

She could not just check the GPS; she had left her mobi behind to avoid being tracked. She at least decided that she was not in Rome; it was too early for sunrise.

A warm breeze wafted through the place, carrying a pleasant and exotic bouquet. Flowers, surely, but what kind? Mary Jo remembered scents almost as clearly as images, and her chemoreceptivity allowed her to smell minute differences even between cultivars, just as she could taste the difference between brass and bronze, but these were not familiar smells.

In the corner of the room, quite out of place, was a tropical plant of prodigious size, about the bulk of a pickup truck, swaying in the breeze. The huge, variegated bush was covered with spiky fronds, shot through with vibrant hues of blue and green. She wondered if this was the source of the fragrance and started to walk over to it when she suddenly remembered why she had come here.

“I’ll check you out on the way back,” she said, and pulled something that looked like a miniature handheld vacuum out of her belt pouch. If she was not already in Rome, then the catacomb must lay behind one of the chamber's myriad doors, and the device was how she intended to find which one.

It was a chem-sniffer that she had calibrated back at the Challenger Building to identify several odorless lanthanides, particularly Yttrium, which the Atomic Ranger shed like dander, an exceedingly strange detail she discovered thanks to a carelessly discarded diagnostic report on the building’s air filters. These were rare earth elements that played no part in any terrestrial biology; in fact, they were toxic. This was another mystery she would solve one day, but for now, it was good enough to know she could follow his invisible trail.

She swept the air with the wand, and the device emitted a satisfying crackle as it started processing the signal. The needle on the display swung to the right and Chemistra followed it, half-stooped over the carpet like an old movie detective with a magnifying glass. The path led her to a door about ten rooms over from the one she’d entered, halfway across the circle.

“Piece of cake,” she said, tucking the wand away. When she finally looked up from the floor, she saw that the door in question had a six-inch-long piece of masking tape at eye level, with the words “TEMP. ROME CATACOMB” written on it in permanent marker.

“Oh, good grief!” Chemistra rolled her eyes.

Unfortunately, she never noticed that when she put away the chem-sniffer, the roll of Peachy Keen Freshmints fell from her pouch and rolled silently along the carpeted floor. Nor did she notice the huge, tropical bush roll onto its side and stretch halfway across the hallway as she struggled with the door.

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