The Doorkeepers Read online

  Josh unlocked their car, and they climbed in. He switched on the windshield wipers and a parking ticket was dragged backward and forward across the windshield in front of him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going to tell Detective Sergeant Paul. The first thing I’m going to do is find somebody who knows more about these six doors.”

  Nancy kissed him on the cheek; and then on the lips. “What was that for?” he asked her.

  “Because you’re always trying to make out that you’re such a logical, rational person when all the time you’re crazy and spontaneous and you follow your instincts just like one of your dogs.”

  “Woof,” he said, and shifted into reverse by mistake, colliding with the car parked behind him.

  Eight

  They went back to Ella’s that evening, uninvited, but taking two chilled bottles of California Chardonnay with them. Josh didn’t think that Ella could really help them any, but they needed somebody else to talk to, and she was the only person who would listen. He knew what DS Paul would think about them if they tried to discuss the six doors with her. His old schoolfriend Steve Moriarty had joined the SFPD and was always griping about the “X-Filers” who pestered him after every unexplained disappearance.

  There was the old man whose false teeth had been found in the bottom of the toilet bowl: his wife had immediately assumed that he had been devoured by a giant anaconda that was lurking in the sewer system. Seven months later he was found alive and well and living in Santa Cruz. His wife’s cooking had always made him physically sick, and the very last time, when he had lost his dentures, he had walked out and vowed that he would never go back.

  Other absconders were said by their relatives to have been sucked off their sundecks by the slipstream of passing UFOs; or to have walked through mirrors, to be trapped for ever in back-to-front land. A parallel world from a Mother Goose rhyme sounded just as insane.

  Ella didn’t seem surprised to see them. She was wearing a black headscarf and huge silver hoop earrings. “Come on in,” she said. “I’m just cooking up some sancoche.”

  Abraxas came running over and threw himself up at Josh’s knees. Ella said, “Down, Abraxas! How many times have I told you, you disobedient mutt!” Abraxas barked and kept on bungee-jumping up and down, so Josh popped his fingers and gave him his famous obedience stare. Abraxas immediately whined and hung his head and went trotting back to his basket under the sink.

  “How do you do that?” asked Ella, shaking her head.

  “It’s an unarmed combat technique. Eye-karate, they call it. They teach you how to do it in the US Marine Corps. I guess I’m the only person who thought of trying it out on dogs.”

  “You were in the marines?”

  Josh looked up at the ceiling. “Briefly.”

  “He doesn’t talk about it,” Nancy explained.

  “You don’t mind if I carry on cooking?” asked Ella. She went over to her stove and lifted the lid of a large orange casserole pot. A strong smell of meat and peppers and vegetables wafted into the room. Josh went over and peered at the bubbling brown stew inside. “Sancoche,” said Ella. “It’s a traditional Trinidadian dish, with salt pork and beef, thickened up with yam and dasheen and cassava root and sweet potatoes, with coconut cream and hot chili peppers.”

  “Smells pretty nourishing.”

  “My grandmother taught me how to cook it. She always used to say that it brought you good luck. Whenever you cook sancoche, they can smell it in the spirit world, and it reminds them of the good times they had when they were alive. They gather round close, just to breathe it in.”

  “You’re not expecting anybody to supper, are you?” asked Nancy. “We can always come around tomorrow instead.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was expecting somebody. Here, I kept the cards to show you.”

  “The cards?”

  Ella led them across to her dining table. Arranged on the purple velveteen cloth were twelve greasy, worn-out playing cards, with a thirteenth card in the center. Seven of the cards had been turned over so that their faces were visible. They bore tiny representations of each of the traditional playing cards in the top left-hand corner, and a large colored illustration in the center.

  “These are French fortune-telling cards, la Sybille, from Martinique,” said Ella. “Handed down by the women in my family from one generation to the next. Whoever uses them gives them a little of her power, so they are very powerful now, very knowing. You both carried such a strong aura that I laid them out yesterday, after you were gone. I wanted to find out what would happen to you.”

  “You’re determined to make me into a believer, aren’t you?” said Josh.

  Ella gave a thick chuckle. “You don’t have to believe if you don’t want to. You may not believe in tomorrow, but it’s coming all the same.”

  She picked up the center card and showed it to them. It was the three of hearts, illustrated with a woman in a brown silk dress sitting on a chair. “That’s me, la consultante, the person who’s asking the questions. But here, this is also me, the queen of clubs, une amie sincère. This means that I’m your friend and that I’m going to help you in whatever is going to happen to you.”

  Josh picked up the next card, on which a man and a woman were being offered a chair. “La visite,” he said. “This told you that somebody was coming. But how did you know it was going to be us?”

  “Look in the corner of the card. The jack of hearts. A man called Jack looking for something close to his heart. It had to be you.”

  “Well, maybe it is. My mother always calls me Jack. So what do these other cards mean?”

  “Here,” she said, and showed him a card with a woman looking startled as a man in a tailcoat and a Napoleonic hat put a letter on the table in front of her. “Révélations importante, important revelations. You’re going to find out something tonight that will change your whole life.”

  “I see … and what about this fat guy with the pipe, and the fellow behind him carrying all that luggage on his back?”

  “Voyage, the ten of diamonds. What you learn tonight will send you on a journey to a very different place, where you have never been before.”

  “And do the cards say what’s going to happen when I get to this different place?”

  “You will meet two people. One of them is your enemy … here, this one.” She showed him a card with a man swathed in a cape, waiting around a corner with a club in his hand, while an unsuspecting passer-by walked toward him. “This one, the king of clubs, this is your protector, whoever that is. But you have to watch out for this one, pièges.” This card showed a man sitting in a field snaring songbirds. “This means that you could walk into a trap.”

  Josh picked up the last card. “You don’t have to tell me what this one means.” It depicted a grinning skeleton in a black robe, carrying an hourglass. The nine of spades, mort.

  Ella plucked it away from him and tucked it back into the pack. “The nine of spades doesn’t always mean death.”

  “Oh, yeah? What else does it mean? I’m going to buy an eggtimer?”

  “It can signify mourning. The cards have probably sensed that you’re grieving for your sister. Or it can mean that somebody very close to you will try to deceive you.”

  “On the whole, though, not a great card?”

  Ella gave him a long, steady look. “You don’t believe in it, so don’t let it worry you.”

  Nancy said, “This card, révélations … what are we going to find out tonight that’s going to change our whole lives?”

  “You came back tonight because you wanted to ask me something. That’s what the cards are telling me. You wanted to ask me about locks and keys and doors and getting through doors.”

  “How did you know that? There’s nothing like that in any of these cards.”

  Ella said, “When I turned up the revelations card, all the keys in my key box started to jump.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She went over to th
e bookshelf and brought down a battered black tin box. She shook it hard, and then put it down on the table. “This was something else I learned from my grandma. Never throw a key away. Every time you find a key, keep it. You never know when you’ll come across a clock you need to wind up or door that you badly need to open.”

  Nancy pulled a stool across and sat down next to the table. In the muted light from Ella’s lamps, she looked even more Modoc than usual, her hair drawn back into a blue and white beaded headband, her eyes slightly hooded, her cheekbones distinct. She was wearing jeans and fringed suede boots, and a necklace of silver medallions and colored beads. That necklace carried its own magic: it was said to have belonged to the Modoc shaman Curley-Headed Doctor.

  Nancy’s medallions jingled as she sat down; and there was an answering rattle from the metal box. Josh looked at Ella cautiously.

  “This has only happened once before,” she said. “And that was when I met a man whose brother was in prison, and he desperately wanted to get him out.”

  Nancy’s medallions shivered again, almost excitedly; and the box rattled again, much more furiously this time. Abraxas lifted his nose over the edge of his basket but he didn’t venture out.

  “Are you ready for this?” asked Ella.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready or not. It depends what it is.”

  “It’s the power of artefacts, that’s what it is. Like pots and pans. Like keys. On its own, metal’s just metal, isn’t it? But when we make it into a shape, we teach it something, don’t we? In a very spiritual way, the metal learns what we want it to do. The pot understands that it was made for cooking. The key understands that it was made for opening doors. That’s why these keys are making such a noise, Josh. They know that you need them.”

  She unfastened the catch. From inside the box came a clicking, stirring sound, as if a collection of live crabs were trying to climb out. She hesitated for a moment, and then she threw back the lid. In a clattering rush, twenty or thirty keys hurtled out and stuck to Josh’s right hand as if it were a magnet. He shouted out, “Jesus!” but it was out of surprise, not pain. He lifted up his hand and it was bristling with keys of all sizes and shapes – clock keys, padlock keys, trunk keys, music-box keys and some keys that were so old and blackened that it was impossible to tell what they might ever have opened.

  Josh turned his hand this way and that, staring at the keys in disbelief. He shook it two or three times, and two or three of the keys dropped off onto the table, but they immediately jumped back onto his hand again. Ella grinned and shook her head in sheer pleasure.

  “You must want those doors opened so bad,” she said. “Even that fellow who wanted his brother out of prison, the keys didn’t stick to him like that.”

  Abraxas barked once, but when Josh turned to look at him, he ducked his head below the edge of his basket. Josh said, “This is static electricity, right? This is a trick? Like Uri Geller or something?”

  “Perhaps it is. Perhaps Julia’s disappearance was a trick. We won’t know, will we, unless we find out?”

  “And how do you suggest we do that?”

  “We do what you really came here for. We ask the one person who knows the truth.”

  Nancy whispered, “You mean Julia, don’t you?”

  Ella shrugged.

  “You want to hold a séance, is that it?” Josh asked her, sharply.

  “Moi? Oh, no. You’re the one who wants to hold a séance. You came here to see me tonight because you need so badly to find out what happened to Julia and you didn’t know where else to turn. Why don’t you admit how overwhelming your need is? Why don’t you admit that you’re willing to believe in anything and everything? The cards told me you were coming, the keys told me why. You might as well carry a placard.”

  Josh took a breath. “We went to the library today and found out a whole lot more about the six doors. All kinds of different theories about what they were.”

  “And?”

  “There was one theory that the doors led through to a parallel world,” said Nancy. “A kind of alternative existence, like the Happy Hunting Ground.”

  “So that’s why you came here, instead of going to the police? You thought that I might believe you? Or at least, I wouldn’t laugh at you?”

  “Yes,” said Josh.

  “And you thought that perhaps I could help you find out what the six doors really were, and if they had anything to do with Julia’s disappearance?”

  “Yes,” said Josh, irritably, even though he knew that Ella was provoking him only because she wanted him to ask for help. “Now how do I get these keys off?”

  Ella plucked the keys off his hand one by one and dropped them into the box, quickly snapping the lid shut every time. “When that old lady spoke to you in the hospital, you knew that she was telling you something very important, didn’t you? Oh, you tried to think of a rational explanation for it. But sometimes it’s dangerous to rationalize. A whole lot of bad things happen in this life because people don’t pay any attention when somebody gives them the warning.”

  She took the last key off the end of Josh’s thumb and closed the box and locked it. “If it tells us nothing else, it will tell us if you’re right to go looking for the six doors, or if you’re simply clutching at straws.”

  “So what do we have to do?”

  Ella took hold of Josh’s hands. He could feel all the rings on her fingers, silver and gold and studded with stones. “First of all you have to realize that this isn’t a game. You’re going to be hearing from Julia, from the other side. You might hear her voice. You might even see her, in some form or another.”

  “She’s my sister. I’m not afraid of her.”

  “The only thing you have to be afraid of is your own emotions. It’s easy to say that you won’t be frightened, but we’re dealing with the dead here, Josh. We’re dealing with people who have lost everything: their loved ones, their friends, the world they lived in. It’s the sense of loss that’s so hard to deal with. The grief. Even if we can manage to talk to them, they’re gone, and they’re never going to come back.”

  Nancy came up and laid her hand on Josh’s shoulder. “You don’t have to do this, Josh. The chances are that it’s only going to hurt you.”

  “I have to know,” Josh told her. “Besides, what else am I going to do? Sit in that hotel room all day, waiting for Detective Sergeant Paul to call me?”

  “We could go back home.”

  Josh shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s try this first.”

  “And if this doesn’t work? If you still don’t know what happened to Julia, one way or another?”

  “Oh, you’ll know,” said Ella. “I guarantee it. One hundred and ninety percent.”

  She switched off all of the lights but one – a standard lamp draped with a beaded crimson shawl – and she lit an odd selection of differently colored candles, some of them scented with vanilla and myrrh and strawberries.

  On the table beside her she set a silver dish full of salt.

  “In Africa, salt is the sign of deepest friendship,” she said. “A bowl of purest salt must always be offered to your guests when they arrive. It is an offering to the spirits, too. A token of affection. It is also a token of grief. Many people believe that we shed tears to dissolve all of the salt that we have accidentally spilt.

  “Salt also protects us from evil. You should always keep a bowl of salt by the door or any other entrance that demons might use. When you walk through the house at night, you should always carry a handful of salt. If you see a demon lurking in a corner, you can throw salt in its face to blind the evil eye.

  “Tonight I’m using this salt to encourage Julia to come to talk to us. A gift of purity.”

  She stood in the center of the room and offered a hand each to Josh and Nancy, and told them to hold hands, too. Abraxas stared at them pensively, but didn’t make any attempt to join them.

  “He’s behaving himself,” Josh remarked.

  “He doesn’t
like séances. They spook him. If he wasn’t a dog, he’d be a chicken.”

  “Don’t you sit around a table for séances?” asked Nancy.

  “That’s always a mistake. Almost every medium makes it. How do they think a spirit is going to manifest itself in the middle of them, if they’re all sitting around a piece of solid wood? Wood is a non-conductor, and spirits are formed of electrical energy. You might just as well have a television with a wooden screen, and expect to get a picture on it.”

  “Do we have to close our eyes?” Josh wanted to know.

  Ella smiled. Her skin gleamed in the candlelight like polished bronze. Her eyes shone white. “All you have to do is relax, and breathe deeply and gently. Think about the times you spent with Julia, the really good times. Try and picture her face. See it as clearly as you can. The color of her eyes, her eyelashes, every detail of her skin. Any freckle, any little wisp of hair. Try to imagine that she’s living and breathing, living and breathing, just like you are. Her body’s warm and her lungs are going in and out, in and out.

  “Her eyes are closed; but her eyelids are fluttering because she’s dreaming, Josh. She’s dreaming of you. She’s dreaming of coming back and talking to you, and telling you where she’s been. Can you see her now, Josh? Can you smell her now? Remember that perfume she always used to wear?”

  Nancy, beside him, took a deep breath, and suddenly said, “Anaïs Anaïs.”

  “What?” said Josh, with a prickling feeling all around his scalp.

  “Anaïs Anaïs. That was the fragrance that Julia always used to wear. Can’t you smell it?”

  Josh sniffed. He could vaguely detect a light, floral scent, but he couldn’t be sure that it was Julia’s. “I don’t know … it could be the candles.”

  Ella said, “She’s close, Josh. The spirits are always close, especially when they’ve only just left us. She misses you, Josh, as much as you miss her. She wants to talk to you. She wants to touch you. She wants to tell you what happened to her.”

  Josh glanced at Nancy. He was beginning to feel that they had made a bad mistake, coming back here to Ella’s. As if she could really bring Julia back from the dead. Julia had been hung and mutilated and dumped in the Thames and that was all there was to it. Ella was simply fueling his grief, so that she could exploit him. He wondered how much money she would ask him for, once this “séance” was over.