The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt

take that would override the effects. Frank had his doubts about that. Most likely, he reckoned, it’d be harder to get R&D funding for an elixir of eternal middle age. The point was, Mr Tanner would know if anybody did. If there wasn’t one, maybe he could invent it. In return for money, of course, but that at least wouldn’t be a problem. If he really could come up with something, some miracle cure that’d make the real world bearable again for his poor, abused parents - well, there was still the small matter of finding them, in a place where even the Portable Door couldn’t go. One step at a time.
    He looked both ways and crossed the road. Of course, if he did hire Mr Tanner, it might be an idea not to mention to him that it was Mum and Dad he wanted the stuff for. However strong a motivator money might be, Frank had a suspicion that it might not get the job done in this particular case.
    Always assuming, of course, that Mr Tanner would agree to see him again. There was definitely a bit of unresolved hostility there. Not to mention what Bobby had done to his phone cables.
    Goblins, he thought. Goblins.
    Quick look over his shoulder, and then he slid the Door out of its tube, held it up against the hoarding, smoothed out the wrinkles with a practised sweep of his hand, and turned the doorknob. He winced as he stepped through, because it was raining on the other side. It always rained there, back home.
    (Can the word home possibly have any meaning to someone with a Portable Door? Frank had reservations about that, too. The Door changed everything, or at least it turned all the straight lines and edges to jelly. He always went back to these precise coordinates in time and space, in spite of the horrible clammy rain, so presumably it was his home. Strange place to pick; strange moment. He had no idea why he’d chosen it.)
    As he pulled the door to after him, he heard a shrill yap. He sighed. ‘Come on, then, if you’re coming,’ he said wearily, and the dog hopped in over his feet, cringed as the raindrops hit the top of its head. He slammed the door and put it away.
    On the other side, where a builder’s hoarding had suddenly reverted to being blank and featureless, something moved in the gutter. At first it was no more than a trick of the light-or, properly speaking, its absence. Movement defined it, turning it from a vague black blur into a recognisable shape: the two-dimensional silhouette of a dog, complete with frantically wagging tail. After a moment, it sat-sideways, of course, since it couldn’t do Up-and its raised head and eloquently expressive nose pointed at the place on the hoarding where the illusion of a door had briefly been. It waited, but the Door didn’t come back. The shape of a front paw stretched like bubblegum across the pavement, met the wall and bent at right angles, grotesquely extended, carrying on up the hoarding to where the knob had been. It dabbed at the spot, but there wasn’t anything there.
    The shadow of a dog can’t whimper, so it didn’t. The paw shape retreated to the position it had started from. The shadow sat, alert and at attention, like a negative of the HMV symbol. As the hours wore on it moved a little, but only because the angle of the sun changed. It had no mind of its own, needless to say; even less of one than the animal in whose image it had been formed. But the shape knew how to sit, because it had been trained. On some level so obscure and complex that even the most brilliant quantum physicist couldn’t begin to describe it, the shape vaguely remembered that there was a connection between sitting and little bits of chopped-up liver.
    Concepts of loyalty and patience have no relevance in the context of a patch of concrete where photons can’t reach because there’s something in the way. Even so; there’s a fair chance that it’d be there yet if the shadow of a woman hadn’t strolled horizontally towards it, whistled and said, ‘Here, boy.’
    CHAPTER