Much the same in all respects as the doors in the remainder of the house, it was built from dark brown wood and black metal nails with a thumb latch to hold it fast.
Dumar reached out with a shaking hand to touch the surface, which, although marginally warmer than it should have been, was as normal and ordinary as any other door here.
"What...?" Dumar managed to whisper, turning to face the old man who had a more than slightly smug expression on his face. "The actual fuck?"
"Necromancy is not just manipulating the dead," Grethron rumbled in his deep voice before he reached down and opened the door. Stepping inside he turned. "Coming, Dumar?"
He started to follow but hesitated as he noticed the form of the old man had become blurred as if seen through glass over which water poured.
Just inside the open doorway was some kind of distortion through which Grethron had already passed.
"You are safe, Dumar," M'thar rasped from behind him.
Taking a deep breath, the big man stepped through the door. A momentary chill rippled through his body as he passed through the disturbance, he was, however, seemingly unaffected by it and stood, gaping, into a room which should not exist here.
Built from the same materials as the rest of the house, the ever present and unadorned grey stone, Dumar could identify at least two things as being massively wrong here.
To begin with, sunlight flooded in through the open window even though it was still dark in the corridor outside.
Grethron allowed a slight smile to play across his bearded lips as he watched Dumar glance in confusion between the two areas.
Dumar himself moved cautiously to the window, almost sure the light source was something other than the sun.
As he looked out, however, the big man almost recoiled in shock as he saw into the clear blue daylight and the old necromancer's garden.
Even this, though, was somehow wrong and it took Dumar's confused mind a second to decipher what it was.
Like looking at a photo of the garden, he could make out everything in fine detail but none of it moved. Not one leaf twitched in the breeze, not one animal stirred, in fact he could just about make out the koala sized Pree in mid leap at the top of one of the trees.
Unlike a photo, however, he could feel the sun warming his face and knew there was no way it was some picture. He looked askance at the old man.
"Go on then, explain," he ordered in an uncertain voice.
Grethron raised one eyebrow, unused to being told what to do, especially in his own home, but allowed it might just be another way in which Dumar spoke.
"I have pulled this room and all its contents out of time." He explained, as if that explained anything.
Dumar widened his eyes and gave a minute shake of his head as if to say he thought Grethron had lost his mind.
"Okay," the big man said in a voice which left no confusion as to what he thought.
Dumar turned his attention to the other things in the room which were just plain wrong.
A row of grey, metal shelves rose in the middle of the room, shelves which held an assortment of items familiar to Dumar.
The big man turned slowly towards Grethron with one eyebrow raised.
"And, ah, how did you come by all this then?" He asked in a deceptively light tone.
Grethron's response was short and clipped.
"I acquired these items shortly after transferring your soul," the old Necromancer stated quietly.
Dumar made a circuit of the shelves, realising they had been appropriated from the Company's storerooms, making a mental inventory of the items he could see.
Weird objects had found their way here and Dumar wondered what, if any, their significance might be.
Working on the assumption he had actually been brought to another world, it could be taken that the old man did not know what use some, if any, of the objects had.
If, however, he was in any of the other states he had considered as an alternative to actually being here, why would an AI, or his subconscious, choose to place seven, hand pump cannisters of fly killer upon the top shelf?
The thirteen palmtop computers, each missing a battery, were also perplexing.
Luckily, among the items of no use were things Dumar could make good use of; ammunition for the machine pistol along with a small maintenance pouch, large capacity backpacks with numerous pockets and rings onto which items could be clipped, a range of self sharpening utility knives had been left atop a small stack of magazines and books.
Sadness choked Dumar as he gazed at the pages of the books full of Manga before him, knowing they had belonged to Smitty, the one person he had called a friend at the Company.
A lump formed in his throat when he remembered the horrific fate his friend had suffered because of Dumar himself.
"What is wrong?" M'thar asked in his hissing whisper.
Dumar cast a glance at the Pat'nathoor with his pained eyes yet shook his head.
"Nothing," he replied in a dead voice. "Just some bad memories come to haunt me."
Dumar busied himself with taking items from the shelves and stuffing them into a black and grey backpack he selected, the lizard like creature looking on.
M'thar asked what some of the objects were yet got no reply from Dumar who, after making one final circuit of the shelves, removing a few more small items and throwing a set of clothing over his arm, strode wordlessly towards the doorway.
He paused just before leaving and turned to stare at an object nestled in one corner. Approaching it with a sense of dread, the Dumar project squatted before the silver case and reached out to touch the cold surface.
Brushed aluminium met his fingertips and a tiny vibration crept up his hand as if he could sense the object within.
"Can you send this back?" He asked the old man as Grethron watched him with curiosity.
"Not really," Grethron replied. "It is a manner of a one way trip. Why?"
Dumar let his fingers fall to the catches holding the case closed and flicked them, hoping not to see what he expected to see when he opened the box.
A tiny sucking sound issued as he opened the lid and looked down. Within the case sat a set of controls, a digital display, three keyholes and a DNA analyser. Dumar swallowed and looked at the old man.
"Is there anything you can do to get this away from here?" He asked. "Anything at all?"
"I could arrange for a courier," Grethron said. "Where would you have it put?"
"In the deepest part of the sea," Dumar replied. "But I really don't think it's a great idea to give it to anyone. This is incredibly dangerous, Grethron," he added, clipping the case closed.
"It appears harmless," M'thar observed in his low voice.
"Appearances can be deceptive," Dumar pointed out. "This is an explosive device capable of vaporising everything within a mile."
The old man gasped and walked over to peer at the harmless looking object.
"Whatever would possess someone to build such a device?" The old man asked, his voice sad.
"Sheer fucking idiocy," Dumar spat. "And as soon as one country had one, they all wanted one. The course of history was changed by a primitive version of this, one country dropping it on another and killing around two-hundred-thousand people in a single attack.
"It destroyed the city up to eight miles from the impact point and is counted as one of the events that ended the Second World War.
"Technology made it so they could be added to rockets capable of reaching the other side of the world as well as shrinking them to this portable size," Dumar explained.
Grethron stared into his reddened eyes and Dumar saw he knew the big man spoke the truth.
"Get rid of it," Dumar said. "But don't entrust it to someone else. They're difficult to set off accidentally but nothing's impossible," he added standing.
Dumar passed through the cold disturbance at the threshold of the room and moved along the short passageway, down the stairs two at a time and into the door to the room in which he had been sleeping.
Throwing the kit he had taken from the room upstairs unceremoniously on the floor, the big man strode to the window and gazed at the unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, wondering if one of the pinpoints of light was Sol.
Spending too much time thinking about whether he was here or not would eventually drive him mad, if he were not already so, Dumar thought.
The fact was he was here, in this situation and it did not make much difference if here was a real world, vastly different from his own, or some construct of his, or an artificial, mind.
At the very least, he had been fed, was not a prisoner and had not been tortured in an attempt to make him into something he was not, so here was already an improvement on where he had come from.
At the moment and for the foreseeable future, this was going to be his life. Dumar grunted a small, derisory laugh.
The Dumar Project had been designed to be adaptable if nothing else. That adaptability would just have to be extended to off world exploration.