Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

  Though, to be fair, after all you and the Pilgrim have been through together, you can’t say you blame him.

  You walk through the City Hall courtyard, the tower looming over you all the while, and glance uneasily at the passersby—the cop twirling her billy club, the old man playing the saxophone, the guy in black with an eye patch and cane who looks like he could have come right off the tower himself—before you head for a boarded-up gray wreck of a building just north of Chestnut Street. Go around the back and slip through a gash in the chain link fence, trying not to let your coat catch on a sharp piece of wire. You’ll see a knob poking out beneath the boards nailed over the rear doorway. Open the door and duck under the boards.

  When the door slams shut, you need to use the flashlight on your phone as you climb the stairwell to the fourth floor, where the door is kept open just a sliver with a wedge of wood. Step through the doorway into the bright green hallway. The offices on either side are locked and the rooms are empty, but at the end of the hallway, with light leaking through its frosted-glass window, is a door.

  Or, I should say, the door.

  Think of a world where right side up is upside down. Think of a playground for the weird and the fabulous, where ghosts mingle with the living, where demon plots are foiled by lawyers in wigs and robes, and where long-buried judges with red-marble eyes hand out sentences like sandwiches. Think of everything you’re certain about in this life and then throw it out the dusty window, because the offices of Webster & Spawn, Attorneys for the Damned, are not of this world or the next, but of someplace in between, with a single goal for the living, the dead, and the undead alike: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE UNCOMMON LAW.

  “There you are, dearie,” said Avis to me from behind the front desk.

  This was a few days after my encounter with the banshees. Avis squinted at me through narrow glasses as she used her long red nails to hunt and peck, peck and hunt on the keyboard of her old black typewriter. The typewriter was so old it didn’t have a power cord. How did they even do that?

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “For you!”

  “What did I do this time?” I said. Another thing about the offices of Webster & Spawn: everything I do there is wrong.

  “Oh, nothing this time, dearie, though there are files to be filed and floors to be swept. But your grandfather needs to speak to you right away.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  “Right away.”

  “Yes, Avis. Right away.”

  The chairs beside Avis’s desk were half filled with clients waiting to see my father or grandfather about their cases. There was a short, thin man wearing a hat and round glasses, almost like goggles, with a small animal crate resting on his lap. There was Sandy, who was often waiting in the office and had become something of a friend. She had tried to use a witch to give her blond hair a lovely sheen and was now hairy as a Sasquatch. And then—so cute—there was a little girl in a pink dress sitting alone on a chair, her shiny red shoes swinging beneath her.

  Beyond them all, in his usual corner of the room, Barnabas sat on what looked almost like a lifeguard’s chair, working on a document at his high desk. He raised an eyebrow, letting me know he wanted to have a word.

  I smiled at Sandy as I made my way through the rows of chairs. Snuffing and whimpers came from the carrier on the lap of the man with goggle glasses.

  “Puppy?” I said.

  “Decidedly not,” he said, as if I had just insulted him. “It’s a gremlin.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “But a friendly gremlin.” A low growl came from the crate, along with a glowing red light. “Would you like to pet her, my dear?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “She’s had her shots,” said the man.

  “That makes one of us.”

  I tried to smile nicely as I moved on. When I reached the toddler, I knelt before her. “Hey, nice shoes. Is your mommy or daddy here?”

  “They would be,” she said with the hoarse voice of an old lady who’d smoked two packs of cigarettes every day since she was twelve, “if they hadn’t been dead for twenty years. The name’s Mildred. You got a match, honey? I’m dying for a cig.”

  I turned to look at Sandy, who shrugged. “Mildred went to the same witch,” she said.

  “Somebody should sue.”

  “Exactly!” said Sandy.

  “I’m sorry, Mildred,” I said, “but the sign on Avis’s desk says no smoking is allowed in the office.”

  “Or combusting,” said Sandy helpfully.

  “What kind of joint is this, anyway?” said Mildred.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. It hadn’t been long since I’d discovered my hidden history and the very peculiar office of the family firm, but somehow I was getting used to it all. Did that make me a bit peculiar, too? I was trying to figure it out when a yell came from my grandfather’s office.

  “Is she here yet, Avis? Has she come?”

  “She’s here,” called back Avis. “She’s come.”

  “Well, send her in,” called back my grandfather. “What are you waiting for?”

  I stood and raised a hand at Avis’s exasperated expression before I headed straight over to Barnabas. “Any news on our banshee case?”

  “Some,” said Barnabas, “but it is quite puzzling. I had the county clerk check the records for a Keir McGoogan. One such person, a boy by that name, who resided at your friend Young-Mee’s address, died in 1918 of influenza.”

  “The flu? Who dies of the flu?”

  “Oh, it was a worldwide pandemic that year, Mistress Elizabeth, worse than what we just went through. Millions died. They called it the Spanish flu. I remember it well, another era of masks and quarantine. I volunteered my services in the wards, along with others far braver than me for obvious reasons, and I saw firsthand the toll of the sickness.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “It was, yes. Along with the war in Europe and the crackdown on those protesting the slaughter, it was a dark time in the city.”

  “But if that Keir McGoogan is our Keir McGoogan, why would his mother have turned banshee to contact me to try to save her son, who had already died?”

  “It is a puzzle, as I said. But we did find one interesting tidbit that makes us—”

  “Avis, you pickle-headed shrike!” shouted my grandfather from his office. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  “She’s coming, she’s coming,” said Avis.

  “You had better go to your grandfather, Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas, “before Avis flies off the handle and we’re picking feathers out of the air.”

  THE RAINMAKER

  Is that you, Elizabeth?” said my grandfather when I finally stepped into his office. “Where have you been? There is much to be done.”

  “I know, Grandpop,” I said. “There are files to be filed and floors to be swept.”

  “Right you are, my dear. No use complaining, the chores always need doing. That is the first rule of the legal practice.”

  My grandfather’s office had two desks, a fireplace, a human skull with a mop head on top, and a painting of some old dead lawyer, who happened to be a distant ancestor named Daniel Webster. The smaller of the desks, with an empty top, was mine. The larger desk, covered with towering stacks of old papers and older books, was my grandfather’s. He was sitting somewhere behind the tilting piles, rummaging through his papers like a mouse.

  “In my father’s apprenticeship he fed the horses and mucked the stables. In your father’s apprenticeship he scrubbed the front steps of this very building. We all did our chores, and they have much to teach us. How to start a job, how to finish, how to pick up horse droppings with a pitchfork. But the filing and the sweeping are not why I was so anxious to see you. What was keeping you, by the way?”

  “I was in school.”

  “You need to get your priorities straight, girl. Will it be school or will it be the law? I know what I chose, and I never r
egretted it.”

  “You didn’t go to school?”

  “Oh, pish-posh, I showed my face when they needed to see it—the truant officers were rabid in those days—but I learned all I needed to learn at my father’s knee. And so could you.”

  “Even if I wanted to skip school, my mother would never let me.”

  “Ah yes, the fly in our ointment.” I heard a chair scrape the floor and then the tapping of a cane. “Nowadays, your mother has no tolerance for our practice of the law, but there was a time… oh, there was a time.”

  My grandfather appeared just then from behind the desk, short and bald, with a bent back, a round pink nose, and bushy gray eyebrows. He wore a scruffy black suit and his eyes twinkled as he looked up at me through those eyebrows. I couldn’t stop myself from running over and giving him a hug.

  “Careful, these bones are not what they once were. But the reason I was so anxious to see you is to offer my congratulations.”

  I let go and stepped back. “On what? My sweeping?”

  “No, my dear, your sweeping is terrible. My congratulations come because you have made it rain.”

  I looked out the window. “Is it raining?”

  “In a way, yes.” He did a strange little jig and, with his hands in the air, said, “It’s raining cases!”

  My grandfather just then looked like an elf dancing at a bar mitzvah. I tried to keep myself from laughing, but I failed.

  “What is so laughable?” he said as he calmed himself and patted his chest. “Business is business, always has been, always will be, and sometimes a celebration is in order. Barnabas told me about your banshee. It is one thing to see a ghost—any fool can do that—but to get the ghost’s signature on a fee agreement, that takes a lawyer of the first rank.”

  “She wasn’t happy about it.”

  “Of course not. Getting a fee agreement from a banshee is like getting paid by pulling gold teeth from a leprechaun, a long and bloody process. It is a wonder that Irish lawyers, in this world or the next, have any fingers at all. But you, I see, aren’t missing a single digit. Well done!”

  “I promised we’d help her son.”

  “I already put your father on it. He’ll crack that nut, he always does. If he needs your help, he’ll surely ask you.”

  “Which means he won’t.”

  “He never liked me interfering in his cases, either. And I believe he doesn’t want to burden you any further than he already has, though how the practice of law can be a burden is beyond me. The key, I suppose, is to make yourself somehow indispensable. You’ll figure it out, Elizabeth, but until then I have a special treat for you. A case of your own.”

  “A case for me?” Did my voice squeak? Yes, I think it squeaked.

  “Your reputation is rising like a rocket ship.” He raised a fist into the air. “Bazoom! A new client came in just today asking specifically for you. A Mr. Topper, it is. A bit of royalty in our field. His father was the Portal Keeper many years ago, the first African-American Portal Keeper in the whole of the country, as a matter of fact. The Thurgood Marshall of Portal Keepers.”

  “What’s a Portal Keeper?”

  “There are doorways between this world and the next—portals, they are called. The superstitious call them Portals of Doom, but they are merely passageways between destinations on the ever-twisting journeys of our lives. And one of those portals happens to be quite close by. That is why we left Boston to set up our practice here in Philadelphia so many years ago. And also, the rents were low.

  “Now, as I said, our new client’s father was once the keeper of that portal, determining who can come and who can go. His term ended in scandal, as they usually do, but it is still quite an honor that his son has come to you for help. You might have seen him in the waiting area.”

  “Goggle glasses and a gremlin on his lap?”

  “Precisely. And the gremlin is the root of it all.”

  “I didn’t even know gremlins were real.”

  “Real as ghosts, my dear. But very rare, and ownership is tightly regulated. Now, as the son of a former Portal Keeper, he was allowed purchase of such a creature. And that is the root of your shining new case.”

  “But he seems so serious. And there’s so much sweeping to do. I don’t think I’m ready for this—”

  “Of course you are. Confidence is all. Avis!” he called out. “Avis, come quickly!”

  “What is it?” she said as she hurried into the office, her head swiveling. “Where’s the fire? Where?”

  “No fire. Work! Do us a favor, please, and bring Mr. Topper into the office.”

  A GOAT STORY

  She is just the gentlest little thing,” said Mr. Topper as the creature inside the carrier growled and scratched at the plastic floor. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Would you want to meet her?”

  “No, no,” said my grandfather. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “She can be quite affectionate.” Another growl. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  Mr. Topper sat on a chair in front of my grandfather’s fireplace, the small pet carrier on his lap. My grandfather stood before him, leaning on his cane. I sat on the edge of my desktop, trying not to throw up.

  From where I was sitting I could just catch glimpses of the thing in the carrier: a patch of green skin, a glowing red eye, a yellow horn. But it wasn’t the gremlin that was clawing at my stomach. What really scared me sick was actual responsibility. And now here was this adult in serious legal trouble who for some strange reason had picked me to save him. Why would he do something as harebrained as that?

  “I didn’t recognize you when you first walked into the office, Ms. Webster,” said Mr. Topper. “I assumed you’d be older. But I heard what you did to that nasty demon in court and I thought, who better to defend my poor Althea than you?”

  Anybody else, I thought.

  “Who is Althea?” said my grandfather.

  Mr. Topper patted the carrier. “My sweet. I’d be so lost without her.” He turned his attention to the carrier and spoke as if to a baby. “You’re not a demon, are you, Althea?”

  A snarl came out of the carrier, rough and high-pitched, like the quack of a deranged duck, that sounded almost like “No.”

  “That Moss woman who sued us, she’s the demon.”

  Another snarl from the carrier, this time sounding like “Yes.”

  “Just tell us the facts, Topper,” said my grandfather. “In cases like this it is only the hard facts that matter.”

  “The hard facts are these, Mr. Webster. About a year ago, for some unfathomable reason, Moss moved into the house right next door to me. And soon after moving in she bought a goat, an old bearded scallywag intent on clearing every piece of green in the neighborhood. There was a hedge between our properties, but the goat just chewed his way through. I was constantly asking Moss, in the most pleasant of voices, to keep that little monster on her own piece of dirt. She would use a stake and a rope and that would work for a day or two until the stake came loose or the rope was gnawed in two. Next thing you’d know, the goat was back to snacking on my rhododendron. My poor rhododendron. And they take so long to grow!”

  “So what did you do?” said my grandfather.

  “I did what I had to do. I got a creature of my own. I found her at a very special pet store, you know the one, Mr. Webster, in Fishtown, run by a skinwalker named Nascha.”

  “Oh yes, Nascha. What a delightful young lady. I met her once dressed as a groundhog.”

  “Why were you dressed as a groundhog?” I asked.

  My grandfather looked at me like I was still wearing pajamas. “You don’t know what a skinwalker is, I presume,” he said. “No matter now. Go on, Topper.”

  “I asked Nascha for a special pet that would scare the goat away from my plants, that’s all. And Nascha said she had just the thing, flown in that very week from Puerto Rico. A sweet little gremlin that goats are terrified of, for some unearthly reason. Of course I bough
t her, and it turned out she was the sweetest little creature. I keep her in the house mostly, she’s quite the homebody. She drinks tea and watches the Shopping Channel. How adorable is that?”

  “That is pretty adorable,” I said.

  “I named her after my mother, who was not so sweet, let me tell you. And after Althea came into my life, I’m happy to say, I had no more problems with Moss’s goat. None at all.”

  “Until you were sued,” I said.

  “It is the goat’s fault. It died. Goats die every day. It could have been some fast-acting goat disease. True, the beast was found in a puddle of its own blood, but what does that prove?”

  “What does the complaint say?” asked my grandfather.

  “Moss insists on blaming Althea. She wants me to pay for the goat and is asking for punitive damages. Punitive. That does not sound good.”

  “No indeed,” said my grandfather. “That is compensation over and above the cost of the goat. Used to punish the offender. And what is her evidence?”

  “Moss claims she saw something in the yard that night, something huge and fierce with glowing red eyes and long claws, something hairless and as big as a lion. I don’t believe her, who would? But even so, it couldn’t have been my Althea. She is such a sweet little girl.”

  The thing inside the carrier purred.

  “But her eyes do glow,” I said.

  The purring slipped into a growl.

  “They might,” said Mr. Topper, “but with such an appealing color. Not really red, almost pinkish. Her eyes have a pinkish hue.”

  “And she does have claws, I presume,” I said.

  The growls turned into yaps and something slammed against the side of the carrier, making my stomach lurch.

  “Little tiny things, that is all.”

  “Don’t worry, Topper,” said my grandfather. “Whatever it was that really happened, Elizabeth will the get to heart of it, I’m sure. One final question, if I may. How did the simple case of a dead goat end up in the Court of Uncommon Pleas?”