The Door in the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

head.”
    â€œFor the lock! To break the lock.”
    She breathed out, tense. “Oh. All right. I’ll look around.” She seemed to move away, then her voice come back. “Don’t go anywhere.”
    He was about to be sarcastic until he realized she was probably as scared as he was, so he forced a laugh. “I won’t. Thanks for coming along, Sarah.”
    â€œVenn won’t thank me,” she whispered.
    Jake pulled a face. That was only too true.

    Sarah moved away from the door, reluctant. Judging from the glow coming under it, Jake had found light of some sort, but she had nothing. Groping the walls was useless; there were no electric light switches.
    She made her way along the corridor.
    It was low roofed, but some dim illumination filtered from somewhere, so gradually she realized she was walking on trampled earth, and that the walls were painted a dingy green. Here and there they were stained as if by past water leaks, and scuffed as if many people had rubbed and run their hands along them.
    Was this a school?
    Some sort of theater? A slum?
    At the end was a door that creaked open at her touch, revealing a stairwell. She leaned over and looked up. The stairs turned in a wide square into the dark. Sarah waited, listening. The building was utterly silent around her. Then, on some higher floor, something made a small popping sound.
    â€œHello?” she murmured.
    The stairwell took the word and sent it back to her, fading into nothing.
    Her hand on the greasy banister, she started up.
    It was a bare, bleak stair. She could smell damp, and a sweetness, and a faint but reassuring hint of onions. Twice more the popping noise came; she paused to listen to it, and it was distant, as if outside.
    By the time she reached the top landing she was breathless, and her calf muscles were tight with strain.
    Facing her was a dilapidated door, with one phrase on it, scrawled in red paint, vivid as blood. It said
VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION!
    â€œOh no,” she said, very softly.
    She forced down the handle; the wind snatched the door from her and flung it open.
    She stared in delight and dismay.
    She was standing on a narrow balcony and before her spread the massed rooftops of a great city. Gray stone and red tile glittered under a cloudless blue sky. Sunshine blinded her; she had to shade her eyes to look, and she saw balustrades and gables, a crammed tangle of alleyways and streets and lanes pierced by the high spires of countless churches, the twin towers of a mighty Gothic cathedral, the silver flash of a river under its bridges.
    Where was this?
    Not London, she knew. The sun was too bright, the design of the buildings all wrong.
    Was this Paris?
    The cathedral must be Notre Dame.
    She looked for the Eiffel Tower but obviously it didn’t exist yet—she had only seen pictures of it and the TV transmission of its ruined end, when Janus’s troops had entered the city at the start of his career. If it was Paris, it was old and dirty and its streets narrow.
    Directly below her was a mean boulevard, lined with trees. Carts and carriages rumbled along it, noisy on the cobbles. The popping noise made Sarah grip the rail and look down carefully; there was a market of some sort going on. Voices and vendors’ cries, the bleat of ewes and crowing of a caged cockerel rose up to her, the stench of a city without drains or sewers. But beyond that a gang of drunken men were firing muskets wildly into the air, and a barricade of tattered furniture and broken timbers had been heaped haphazardly across the street. She stepped back quickly.
    The clothes of the women told her this was the eighteenth century. She knew little about that period in France, except that there had been a great revolution, and rich people had been guillotined, hundreds of them.
    That was all she needed.
    She turned, ducked back inside, and ran down the stairs. Jake would know more. Passing a broken banister, she went back and