Paul Uses the Portable Door to Reach Venice

Paul Carpenter uses the J.W. Wells portable door to travel from the office to Venice, turning a forgotten object from a strongroom inventory into a working passage between places. The crossing begins with a faintly remembered set of instructions and ends beside a canal, where the open door, a wedged Long stapler, the city’s landmarks, and the physical sensations of the street confirm that Paul has arrived somewhere real.

Discovery and reluctant use

After Sophie Pettingell leaves, Paul has had enough of spreadsheets and remembers that the drawer contained more than beans. Among the items is a small cardboard tube and a plastic sheet he recognizes, though he cannot recall why it seems familiar. He suspects it belongs back in the strongroom, where he encountered it while compiling the inventory. His memory connects the object with instructions from Rosie, but he cannot initially remember having seen them.

The directions emerge on a very thin slip of paper tucked inside the tube. Their tiny writing becomes legible when Paul holds the paper close and squints. The printed heading identifies the device as the J.W. Wells portable door; patent dates follow, but they do little to make the object seem credible. The instructions, by contrast, are precise: remove the sheet from its tube, flatten it on a level surface, mentally picture the desired arrival, press it against a wall, and open it by turning the handle. They also advise using a weight to keep the door ajar and limiting each visit to no more than an hour of observed time.

Paul initially treats the idea as absurd. Yet the object’s familiarity is accompanied by an increasingly uncomfortable urge to use it. He experiences shaking hands, restlessness, hunger alongside a sense of being stuffed, and a salty, furry feeling in his mouth. He believes these sensations will disappear if he unfolds the sheet and presses it to a wall. Although he recognizes the feeling as another intrusion of supernatural strangeness into his life, he stands up and follows the directions rather than resist the urge.

Making a door

Paul lays the sheet out on the desk. Now that it is open, two tiny keyholes are visible, each surrounded by a baroque escutcheon, one above and one below the doorknob. He lifts the sheet by its corners and presses it to the wall. It adheres as though held by magnets. He smooths wrinkles and bulges with the back of his hand, brushing in a herringbone pattern as the instructions require.

The flimsy-looking sheet appears to grow until it is as tall and wide as a full-size door. Its handle acquires depth and becomes polished brass, cold and smooth beneath Paul’s fingertip. The transformation makes the instructions’ language literal: this is no longer merely a printed outline on plastic, but a door with weight, a frame, a lintel, and raised mouldings between its panels. When Paul turns the handle, the door opens.

The newly formed doorway shows only darkness and shadows. Paul wonders whether he is looking into the computer bay with its lights off and curtains drawn, but the view gives him no assurance about where the opening leads. By this point, however, he is painfully aware that stopping would bring back the withdrawal-like symptoms, worse than before. He checks his watch, which reads 01:09:56, and uses the Long stapler as the recommended weight, wedging it against the door so it will remain ajar.

Choosing a destination and crossing

The instructions call for Paul to form a careful mental picture of his desired arrival. He cannot immediately think of a place he particularly wants to visit. His thoughts connect that blankness to his sense that places are interchangeable, and to the image of his life as a Polo mint with the girl he has truly loved as its hole. Still, when he allows himself to choose, he has always rather fancied seeing Venice. The destination is not selected from a map or entered into the device; Paul supplies it by imagining where he would like to go.

Paul walks through the open door and catches his foot in a coil of rope, only just avoiding a fall into a canal. That awkward first step punctures any grand entrance: the passage delivers him into an unfamiliar place before he has time to compose himself. He turns to look back and sees the door, still slightly ajar in the middle of a crumbling red-brick wall, with the Long stapler wedged against it. A nearby theatre poster is in Italian. Beyond the doorway are the canal and the rope that nearly tripped him, with a small motor boat bobbing on the green water.

Arrival and significance

The surrounding street supplies further evidence of the destination. Three Japanese women walk past talking rapidly, followed by a businessman in an expensive-looking suit. In the distance, a yellow fingerboard fixed to an ancient building points toward Piazza S Marco. Paul has not simply opened a strange door onto a dark corner of the office: his chosen arrival has brought him into Venice, amid recognizable urban details and ordinary passers-by.

His body confirms the change as clearly as the view. The shaking, salty taste, and restless discomfort are gone, and Paul feels substantially better. His watch still displays 01:09:56, the reading he checked before crossing, while a clock high on a nearby church shows ten past one. He initially takes the unchanged watch reading to mean that it has stopped, then notices that the displayed seconds have shifted to 01:09:55 and considers the complication of the time difference. The reading does not by itself establish how time has passed; it does mark the oddness of measuring a journey through a magical doorway against an ordinary clock.

Paul tests the apparent arrival through physical sensation as well as sight: the pavement feels solid, a breeze touches his face, and the air smells of salt, fresh algae, and old fish. The door’s transformation, the open passage left behind, and the unexpectedly immediate Venetian setting together establish its operation through an enacted trial. The crossing also reveals that Paul’s neglected familiarity with the device and his urge to use it are bound up with its magic: he follows the directions despite his disbelief, and the symptoms lift once he has passed through. What began as an unexplained office object becomes a practical means of travel, with Paul’s mental choice of Venice determining where the doorway leads.