The Doorkeepers

Nine

Josh shouted, “Ella!” but Ella was ahead of him. She picked up the bowl of salt and threw it at the struggling vision of Julia in the air. With a sharp crackle-crackle-crackle every grain of salt flared into a tiny pinprick of sparkling blue light. The vision vanished immediately, leaving nothing but a thin swirl of bitter-smelling smoke. Abraxas let out a defiant bark, but still didn’t venture out of his basket.

“God, that was scary,” said Nancy, her eyes wide and her voice shaking. “That was so, so scary. My grandfather raised the spirits. Shadows, invisible finger-writing in the sand. But nothing like that.” She pulled out one of Ella’s chairs and sat down, while Ella herself leaned against the table, dabbing her forehead and neck with her scarf.

Josh stayed where he was. He still felt freezing cold, unbalanced, and nauseous, as if he were standing on the afterdeck of an Arctic fishing boat. He reached out for the back of the nearest chair to steady himself but he couldn’t move his legs. Ice-cold perspiration was trickling down the sides of his face into his collar, and coursing down his spine. He tried to take some deep, steadying breaths but he couldn’t. His throat felt congested and his stomach kept flinching in sickening spasms.

“Josh, what’s the matter? Are you all right?” Ella asked him, with a frown.

“I’m just … I’m just … sick,” he choked.

He had never felt so bad in his life. His body temperature felt as if it had dropped to zero, and every joint ached. His stomach made a disgusting gurgling noise, and his mouth was flooded with sour-tasting saliva.

“Here,” said Ella, taking his arm. “I’ll take you to the toilet.”

“That was Julia,” Josh gasped. “That was Julia, hanging.”

His stomach contracted as tight as a fist, and he felt a swelling in his throat that he couldn’t keep down. He tried to take another step forward, but he couldn’t. He doubled up over the table and something huge and slippery filled his mouth. It felt like an oyster, only twenty times larger. He tried to breathe but bile sprayed out of his nostrils and stung his sinuses. The thing inside his mouth was so large that he didn’t think he would be able to open his mouth wide enough to regurgitate it. He reached out for Nancy, desperate for breath, his eyes bulging, his whole body wracked with gut-wrenching heaves.

“Ella – call for an ambulance!” snapped Nancy.

“He has to bring it up,” Ella insisted. “It’s stuck in his throat. He has to bring it up.”

“Call for a fucking ambulance! He’s dying!”

“No, no, no! He has to bring it up.”

Nancy went to the phone herself and dialed 911. All she heard was a piercing high-pitched tone, and a polite woman’s voice saying, “The number you have dialed has not been recognized …”

“What’s the emergency number?” she shouted. “Ella – what do I dial for an ambulance?”

Josh bent so far over the table that his forehead pressed against the velvet cloth. He clutched his stomach with both hands, trying to stop the heaving. The only sound he could make was a tight, supressed cackle, like a man being pressed under tons of concrete.

“Tell me the number!” screamed Nancy.

At that moment, however, a greasy, blood-streaked balloon began to emerge from Josh’s wide-stretched mouth. He heaved, and heaved again, and more of it slid out. He felt so sick that all he wanted was a huge rush of vomit, but he could only force this thing out of his mouth an inch at a time, and it seemed to take for ever to slide between his lips.

“Oh God,” said Nancy. “Oh God, what’s happening to him?”

Ella leaned over Josh and rubbed his back. “Come on, now, Josh. You bring it all up. You bring it all up, man.”

Josh’s face was gray. But slowly the big slippery bulge came out of his mouth, further and further. It hesitated for a while, drooping, and then it dropped silently on to the table, like a monstrous grub. It was immediately followed by a sharp splatter of half-digested pizza.

Josh collapsed on to his knees, almost screaming for breath. He puked up a little more lunch, and some of it came out of his nose. Ella brought over a large box of Kleenex and gently wiped his face.

“What is that?” asked Nancy in horror, staring at the bloody yellow bladder on the table. “Is he sick? He’s not going to die, is he?”

Ella stood up, her bracelets and her necklace jingling. “No, girl, he’s not going to die. But I never saw that happen before, not like that. I’ve had ectoplasm, just a small blob, enough to fill an eggcup. I’ve had locks of hair. But I’ve never had the whole flesh.”

Josh tugged out another handful of tissues and wiped his shirt. He was still sweaty and shaking, but his color was coming back and his nausea was beginning to recede. All the same, he looked at the thing on the table and then back at Ella, and he couldn’t stop himself from retching.

Ella said, “Sometimes, when you call up a spirit, they want to come back to the physical world so much that they try to materialize. That’s when you see ectoplasm. It’s usually white, or gray, in clouds, or fingers, or little wisps, like chiffon.”

“But what is that?” Nancy demanded. “That isn’t a cloud, or a finger or a little wisp.”

“Well, I trained to be a nurse once, when I first left school, and I would say that’s a lung.”

“Oh, my God. One of Josh’s lungs?”

“No, no, it couldn’t be.” She took hold of Josh’s arm and helped him back on to his feet. “If that was one of Josh’s lungs, he’d be dead. That’s a lung from the other side. A message.” She paused, and then she said, “I would guess that’s Julia’s lung.”

“What?” said Josh, dabbing his mouth. He could still taste blood, like rusty iron, and he could still taste the fatty tissue that had coated the lung and made it so slippery. “How can that be?”

“Her spirit is very strong, Josh. She knows you’re here. She knows that you’ve come to England to find her. She wants to talk to you, she wants to get in touch with you. But she’s been cut to pieces. She can’t appear to you whole.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Josh. “How could I bring up my own sister’s lung? It just isn’t physically possible!”

“It’s possible, Josh. Things like this have happened plenty of times before. There was a famous medium in Edwardian times, Marthe Beraud, who called herself Eva C. She was able to bring human hands out of the spirit world, out of her mouth. Hands with nails and bones that investigators could actually touch. And there have been dozens of others. Some mediums have produced whole people out of their mouths.”

“I don’t understand what it means. If she’s trying to tell me something, what the hell is it?”

“You mark my words. She’s trying to tell you that she won’t be at rest until you find out what happened to her. She can’t find peace until every part of her body is brought back together, and given a proper funeral.”

“I seriously think we should call Detective Sergeant Paul,” said Nancy. “This has gone way beyond playing detectives. If this lung is really Julia’s then it’s important material evidence, isn’t it?”

“You can’t tell the pigs,” Ella protested. “They’ll think you’re insane. Worse than that, they’ll probably think that you had something to do with her murder, even if you weren’t in England when it happened. I mean, what are you going to say to them? ‘My sister’s lung came out of my mouth’?”

“Jesus, Ella. This séance has created more goddamned problems than it’s solved.”

“Will you trust me?” Ella demanded.

Josh said, “I don’t know … trust you? I can’t even believe this is happening.”

“Trust me. You have to trust me, or this isn’t going to work.”

“But what are we going to do with this lung? We can’t just–”

“Trust me.”

“OK,” said Josh, raising both hands in surrender. “I trust you.”

Nancy said, “I’m not so sure about this.”

“If it doesn’t work, then you can go to the police. But you saw what I did before … raising Julia out of the air. Now I can get you closer.”

She went across to her sink and produced a plastic Sainsburys shopping bag from the cupboard underneath. She picked up the lung and eased it into the bag. It slid to the bottom and hung in a heavy curve, bleeding. She left it in the sink while she folded up the tablecloth and took it into the bathroom.

“I really think that we’re messing with things that we don’t understand,” said Nancy.

Ella returned and then emptied the lung into the sink and washed it. “All right, if you want to call the police, call the police. But you’d be making a mistake. The way this lung appeared, it shows that your sister’s remains are not in this world, they’re somewhere else. Somewhere close, but different.”

“So what you’re trying to say is, there is a parallel existence, and this is the proof?”

“Where else do you think it came from, man, this lung? You didn’t eat it for lunch, did you?”

Ella filled a small copper saucepan with water and put it on the gas to boil. Then she lifted the lung out of the sink and laid it on a scratched wooden chopping board. She used a triangular-bladed kitchen knife to take off three thin slices, which she cut up fine. Then she reached for some of her glass jars of herbs.

“Is this a spell?” asked Nancy, coming closer.

“You’re an Indian. You should know about spells.”

“Yes, yes I do. My grandfather used to make a powder which was supposed to make the wind die down.”

“And did it?”

Nancy didn’t smile. “Yes,” she admitted. “Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it did.”

When the water began to boil, Ella scraped the slices of lung into the saucepan, along with angelica, dill, bay leaves, mugwort, pimpernel, marigold, rue and rosemary. She stirred it three times, and then she left it to simmer. She took out a clean white tablecloth and struck it three times with her wooden spoon.

Josh sat in the corner, underneath the sloping ceiling, feeling as bruised as if he had fallen out of a moving car. His common sense told him that he and Nancy should walk out of here right now and call the police. But the image of Julia’s legs kicking in the air had been too electrifying; and the trauma of regurgitating Julia’s lung had left him emotionally weak as well as physically bruised. Nancy came and sat beside him and took hold of his hand; and after a while even Abraxas hopped out of his basket and came across to sniff at his knees and give him a reassuring whine.

The smell from Ella’s potion reminded him of his mother’s herb garden when he was young. She used to rub lemon parsley between her fingers so that he and Julia could sniff it.

Ella knelt on the floor close by, fondling Abraxas’ ears. “Whatever happened to Julia, it took her spirit to pieces as well as her body. There are so many spirits like that – spirits who can never understand what happened to them, or where they are. That’s why they try so hard to find the people they used to know in their previous life … and, when they do, that’s why they try so hard to take on their previous shape.

“Usually, ectoplasm doesn’t last. There’s a dried-up shred of it, in a bottle, at the London Society for Psychical Research; and some French professor managed to cut a lock of hair from an Egyptian princess who was raised up by Eva C. But when you’re gone, you’re gone, no matter how much you want to come back.”

She stood up, and took Josh’s hand. “Come here,” she said, and led him across to the sink. The remains of Julia’s lung had almost completely disappeared, except for a thin twist of white membrane, and even that appeared to be melting away.

She turned off the gas under the saucepan, and strained the contents into three small thick-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pearl-colored, with a strange shimmer to it.

“We’re not supposed to drink it, are we?” asked Josh.

“Just a sip.”

“But, Jesus, this is like cannibalism. This is like the goddamned Donner Party, boiling children’s lungs to make soup.”

“There’s no other way, Josh. Julia gave you a message and this is the only way you’re ever going to know what it was.”

The glasses were so hot that they could barely hold them. Ella lifted one up herself and said, “Drink to the sights that the body can bring. Drink to the songs that the spirit can sing. Julia Winward, talk to us. Julia Winward, guide us. Julia Winward, we need to hear your voice.”

Josh lifted his glass closer to his lips. To his surprise, the steam vanished and the glass felt suddenly cooler. Ella chanted, “Julia Winward, open our eyes. Julia Winward, show us a sign. Julia Winward, Julia Winward, Julia Winward.”

Josh felt his gorge rising again, but he swallowed hard, and took a deep breath, and drank. The potion tasted of nothing but herbs, mostly rosemary, although there was something faintly spicy about it, too, like cloves. Nancy hesitated, but then she drank, too, and Ella followed her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever—” Josh began. But then he was walking quickly along a crowded street on a bright sunny day, with cars and buses all around, and the clouds flickering as quickly as a silent movie. He could hear the beeps of car horns and the sharp shuffling of feet on the sidewalk, but nobody spoke. He tried to look around to see where Nancy had gone, but the people behind him were strangers, none of them interested in anything else but pushing their way through the crowds.

“Where am I?” he asked, but his voice sounded deep and blurred, as if he were talking inside an empty metallic tank. “N-a-a-a-nnnnc-y-y-y, where ammmm I?”

He passed a stone pillar with a rampant bronze dragon on top of it. He passed a church. People wove around the sidewalk in front of him as thick as flies. Gray suits, pale faces, blank expressions. He turned a corner and began to walk beside a long iron paling. He reached another corner, and another. The light came and went, came and went. One second it was sunny and the next it was shadowy and cold.

Now he was making his way up a narrow alley with tall soot-blackened buildings on either side. The sharp shuffling of feet had died away, and all he could hear was his own footsteps echoing, and the distant rumbling of traffic. He didn’t feel frightened. In fact he felt almost elated, as if something exciting was going to happen to him. He wasn’t worried about Nancy any more. He was sure that she could find him. After all, this was probably a dream and he would wake up in a minute and Nancy would be lying right beside him, as still as death.

He followed the alley until he reached the corner. There was a narrow niche here, cluttered with rubbish and dead leaves. He paused, and peered into it. It was quite deep, as if it had been a space between two buildings, but it was bricked up, leading nowhere. All the same, he stepped into it, and made his way cautiously to the very end, where the leaves and litter were at their deepest. There, on his left, was another niche, just as narrow and just as deep, and equally cluttered with old newspapers and cigarette packets and leaves and broken twigs. That appeared to be a dead end, too, but he turned into it, and trod through the rubbish, until he found another niche, off to his right.

He looked up. The buildings on either side were very tall, with black-painted drainpipes running all the way down their black scaly brickwork, and window ledges clustered with diseased-looking pigeons. It was curiously silent here. He couldn’t hear the traffic. He couldn’t even hear the pigeons. The sky was gray, completely neutral, so that it was impossible to guess what time of day it was, or even the season. He carried on trudging his way forward, until he reached yet another niche, on his left. This niche wasn’t bricked up. At the far end, he could see people walking backward and forward, and he could hear traffic again.

He began to make his way out of it, high-stepping over the rubbish. But before he was halfway to the end, a tall dark figure appeared in the entrance to the niche, wearing a long black overcoat and a tall black hat. He stood facing Josh as if he were waiting for him – as if he had known all the time that he was coming. There was no drumroll, but Josh felt as if there ought to have been.

“Hallo?” called Josh. His voice sounded weak and flat. The figure didn’t answer.

Josh came closer and closer. He wasn’t sure why, but the figure disturbed him deeply. He was reminded of having to go to his father for a punishment, when he was small. He was reminded of a black robe that used to hang on the back of his door at his grandparents’ house – and which, at night, became a vampire. The inaudible drumroll grew more insistent: maybe it was the blood rushing in his ears.

As he came nearer, the figure spoke. Its voice sounded like somebody dragging a dead body over a concrete floor. “You came? You don’t know how delighted I am.”

Josh said, “Yes.” He turned around and looked behind him, wondering if he ought to run back into the niche – right, left, right – and back to where he had come from.

But he was too close now. In fact he wasn’t even conscious of the last six steps. The figure laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Welcome to your new job. And welcome to your new life.”

Josh looked up at him. His face was difficult to see, because the bright gray daylight was behind him. But then he stepped to one side, and Josh saw that over his head he was wearing a rough hessian hood, with torn-out slits for eyes. Over the slits were painted two larger eyes, black and slanted, like the eyes of a demon or a huge predatory insect.

Josh’s fear was so overwhelming that he felt as if his knees were going to give way.

“Trust me” said the figure, leaning so close that the brim of its hat almost touched Josh’s forehead, and he could see its real eyes inside its hood, glittering and greedy.