James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

“Not even slit see through,” he reported in a whisper.

The shrine was a little altar, recessed into the wall. A tiny statue of a squatting Buddha was at its center, with a few dried flowers scattered in front of it. But most significant was a bundle of rose-scented joss sticks that were smoking in front of the altar. About a third of them were unburned.

“Must’ve been lit in the last few minutes,” Mildred said. “The guys who came out of the gateway.”

Ryan nodded. “Has to be. Means they can’t be all that far away from us.”

“Exit door,” the Armorer said, pointing with the barrel of the Uzi.

It was an ordinary door set at right angles to the passage. It looked like white-painted wood, but as soon as Ryan touched it he realized that it was actually a disguised sec door. At its upper corner a small sec camera was moving back and forth, a bright green light showing that it was operating.

“Anyone watching that’ll know we’re here,” Krysty said. “Could mean a reception committee.”

“Nothing we can do about that. There’s no reason for them to expect visitors, so they probably don’t have a watch set on the vid screens.” Ryan tested the door handle. “It’s open.”

“Looks a good fit,” J.B. observed. “Almost vacuum tight around the edges.”

Ryan eased it open and peered around the corner.

“Still nobody,” he said.

They were in a small, brightly lit anteroom, about ten feet square, with no windows and another disguised sec door facing them at its far side.

Doc was carefully examining the door that they’d just passed through. “This reminds me strangely of an air lock,” he said. “Have you noticed that it has rubber seals all around the edges to make it tight?”

“Not like any redoubt ever saw,” Jak commented.

Ryan reached for the handle of the second door. With every barrier they reached, it was obvious they were getting closer to the heart of the mystery.

“We could still go back, lover.” Krysty laid a hand on his sleeve, biting her lip.

“Bad feeling?”

She shook her head. Ryan noticed that her mane of sentient red hair was packed tightly against her skull instead of flowing freely across her shoulders.

“Not bad. Just different. When I can’t see clearly, it worries me, Ryan.”

“We’ve come this far. Might as well go that last step and see what’s what.”

He turned the handle and eased open the last door.

Chapter Five

“Dark night!” At Ryan’s shoulder, J.B. peeked out past the edge of the open door.

Doc, looming over Jak, also expressed his surprise. “By the Three Kennedys! We are transmogrified from a mat-trans unit into an ordinary house.”

“Not many houses got a gateway hidden away in a deep root cellar,” Mildred said.

The door opened into a hallway of what looked, as Doc had said, like a perfectly ordinary American house. It was sparsely furnished in a style that seemed a little out-of-date for the end of predark times, with a three-legged semicircular table holding some dried flowers and a high-backed bench seat with a red padded chair on either side of it.

There were a couple of spaces on the wall where the paint was a distinctly different, brighter color, showing that paintings or mirrors had hung there at some time.

Ryan could see that the hallway veered to the right in a sharp right angle, and he moved cautiously toward it. He glanced into the open doors on both sides, seeing that the place was more or less fully furnished, though odd gaps showed where things had been moved or removed.

J.B. glanced behind them. “That door used to have a curtain or a tapestry in front of it to hide it,” he said. “See the rail above it?”

Ryan looked back, seeing that the Armorer was right. “Seems more and more that this is like that house in Russia,” he said. “Might’ve been a sort of diplomatic home, and they used it to secretly build a gateway.”

The angle in the hall revealed the front door of the mansion and a flight of stairs.

Ryan stood still and held up his hand. “Quiet a moment.”