Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

  Miss Myerscough stared at me for a moment and then gave another flick of her hand. An owl swooped down and pecked at my head.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Precisely,” said Miss Myerscough. “Mind your own business, child.”

  “But Keir McGoogan is my business,” I said.

  “And that should worry the countess,” said my father. “She might have heard of my daughter.” He looked at me in a way he hadn’t lately, without disappointment or worry. “Elizabeth Webster. The young barrister who stared down the demon Redwing in court and won her father’s release.”

  Miss Myerscough startled and then looked at me more closely. “You must come again, girl, and meet the countess. You two have so much to talk about.”

  “We’re not prepared to leave without Mr. McGoogan,” said my father.

  “If you insist on staying, we can make up rooms for you in the attic,” said Miss Myerscough. “The chains are a bit rusty, but they should fit.”

  “If we have to come back—”

  “You won’t,” she said, throwing her arms wide. And at that motion, the room exploded into a chorus of calls and flaps as the birds suddenly took flight.

  Miss Myerscough lifted her left arm and the birds all flew in that direction. She lifted her right arm and they changed course. Suddenly Miss Myerscough was moving her arms like the conductor of an orchestra, and the birds started flying in an intricate pattern around the room, swerving and diving, weaving, forming shapes, dancing to a silent symphony of insanity.

  My father and I jumped to our feet and stood there in fear and fascination as the birds flew about us. We were still staring as Egon walked into the room with a silver tray covered by a large silver dome.

  The birds broke from their intricate patterned flights and swerved around him.

  “Tea?” I said.

  “Hardly,” said Egon.

  He put the platter on the low table in front of us, grabbed hold of the dome, and lifted it quickly.

  A pile of live mice were climbing and writhing over each other. They froze for a moment, startled by the light, and then, seeing their opportunity, made a break for it as the birds descended like a mob.

  It was pure butchery. Blood and squeals. The flap of wings. Birds pushing and shoving, wrestling and clawing, fighting over their squirmy little meals. One clever mouse almost made it to the door until a raven swooped in and took it in its claws just an instant before the condor took hold of the shrieking raven.

  “They get so hungry, the poor dears,” said Miss Myerscough in a voice sharp enough to cut through the carnage. “Sometimes they’ll go for anything not yet dead.”

  Through the mayhem of shrieking birds and flying feathers, Egon grabbed a mouse for himself and bit off the head. With his hand still around the mouse’s headless body and blood leaking down his chin, he looked at us calmly and said in that high strangle of a voice,

  “You might want to run.”

  A STRANGE SOUND

  We bolted out of the sitting room like a pair of runaway rodents.

  A pack of birds gave chase down the hallway, zooming beneath the staircase and diving at our heads as we zigged and zagged across the checkerboard. Our shoes pounded the marble tiles and the birds screeched—or was that me? I think that was me.

  When we reached the door I yanked at the brass doorknob. It didn’t budge. I tried again, felt a wave of desperation, and then remembered the butler snap-closing the lock. While I fiddled with the bolt, my father spun around, swinging his briefcase at the birds.

  Thwak!

  A cloud of feathers exploded as two black birds slammed to the floor and skidded. The rest of the pack flapped away, like a parachute opening. My father swung his briefcase again as I finally turned the lock and pulled open the door.

  When we were both on the outside he yanked the door closed—

  “Awwwwkk!” screamed a white bird with a vicious beak, which was caught halfway out of the doorway. My father kicked the squawking bird inside and slammed the door shut.

  Safe at last, we both leaned our backs against the red door. As I tried to catch my racing breath and stop myself from crying in fear, I heard my father say, “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” I said. He was looking up, and so did I. The birds that had been circling high over the house were now much lower, a mass of wing and beak getting closer with each turn.

  “Time to go,” said my father.

  He dashed to the car, opened the passenger door, and dove inside. I leaped in after him, shutting the door behind me. When we were both seated, we turned to look at each other. There was a moment of calm before something thumped onto the roof of the car.

  I jumped and let out an “Eeep” before instinctively putting on my seat belt.

  We heard another thud. And then a bird landed heavily on the hood, one of the big black birds with little red heads. It waddled up to the windshield, looked left, looked right, and then pecked at the glass.

  They all dropped on us after that, one after another, until my father’s car had become a huge feathered mob. You could barely see out of any of the windows for all the flapping.

  “Can we go, please?” I said loudly and not calmly. Not calmly at all.

  “I was hoping to get a look inside the part of the château where you saw all those faces,” said my father.

  “You want to go exploring when that butler is inside chewing on a mouse and the car is being hijacked by birds?”

  “Vultures,” said my father calmly. “Turkey vultures, actually. I thought you loved Thanksgiving.”

  “Can you stop joking and just go? Please? Please?”

  “Well, since you’re being so polite,” said my father. He pressed the start button, put the car in gear, and moved forward slowly. As the birds flew off one by one, the windshield cleared and he was able to speed up. When we reached the woods, I heard a strange sound right next to me.

  I turned to look at my father. His raincoat was spotted with bird droppings, there were feathers stuck in his disheveled mop of hair, his glasses were on crooked, his cheeks were flushed, a line of blood was leaking down his temple. And he was laughing.

  Laughing?

  “What’s so funny?” I said, suddenly angry.

  He turned and tried to fight his smile. “Nothing.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “No, I’m not, I swear.”

  “Then what? You thought that was, like, fun?”

  “It wasn’t?” he said.

  “No, it certainly was not,” I said. “We were almost turned into bird feed. Bird feed! And I think one of the little devils might have pooped on my shoulder.”

  My father gave my coat the once-over. “No might about it.”

  “This was a disaster! And that Miss Myerscough—what a monster.”

  “She was certainly something. But you have to admit it was a little exciting.”

  “It was demented.”

  “Only in a punk rock sort of way. I thought you liked punk rock. The Misfits. The Vandals. The Dead Kennedys.”

  “Are they bands or clients?”

  “Now who’s joking?”

  “I’m being serious,” I said loudly, maybe too loudly. Okay, maybe I shouted it.

  “Calm down, Lizzie Face. If the countess wanted to hurt us, we would have been hurt. Instead she was letting Miss Myerscough give us a friendly little warning.”

  “Not so friendly.”

  “Maybe not, but this is the business we’re in. It’s more than just reading old books and shouting ‘Objection!’ in court, though that’s all fun. We also deal with the deranged and the demented and the undead. We’re attorneys for the damned, and it’s not all roses.” He gave me a sideways glance. “Maybe instead of talking to ghosts and ducking birds, you should be out, I don’t know, playing tetherball with your friends?”

  “Tetherball?”

  “You know, the ball on a rope attached to a pole. You knock it around and—”

  “I
know what tetherball is, Dad. I don’t want to play tetherball. Nobody wants to play tetherball. But if being a lawyer for the damned is so terrible, why were you laughing?”

  “Well, here’s the thing,” said my father. “I love it. I know it’s crazy, but helping dead people fills me. Do you know what that means?”

  “Like eating too much coleslaw.”

  “Sure, with maybe a little less gas. But I also know the price I’ve paid. I wouldn’t wish those costs on you for anything.”

  “Now you’re sounding like Mom. She wants me to give up working at the firm and concentrate on my schoolwork, which I admit hasn’t been so fantastic lately. After today I’m thinking she might be right. At least there are no vultures in middle school waiting to turn me into a meal.”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” said my father as we drove out of the woods. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and then said, “It’s too bad we weren’t able to search the château. We really need to find Mr. McGoogan before the hearing.”

  I thought for a moment and then said, “I think I can take care of that.”

  He stopped the car at the now-open gate and then looked at me. “How?”

  “Pull the car ahead,” I said. I waited until he was through the gate before saying, “Now stay here.”

  I pressed open the door, climbed out of the car, and walked back through the gate. I didn’t see the boy, but I knew he’d be there, somewhere, fake-raking and waiting. When my father got out of the car to watch, I put a hand out to make sure he stayed on his side of the gate. Then I walked up to the first line of trees.

  “You were right about that place being creepy,” I said out loud as if to the woods themselves.

  “We should have bet on that,” said the boy with the narrow face and crooked front teeth, stepping out from behind a tree—the boy who was not a boy, who was instead Keir McGoogan in the flesh.

  THE RAKE

  I didn’t realize it when I first met him. He was then just a kid who was trying to hustle me out of my lunch money. He had known I might be coming, sure, but he could have been told to look out for me by some old guy in the main house.

  Except there was something about those portraits of the countess in that long center hallway. She hadn’t seemed to age from one to the next. My father suspected they were each a new generation of countess, but the likenesses were too similar. I look like my mom, but I’m not a clone. I mean, have you seen my nose? I wondered if something had stopped the lady from growing old, and then I thought of the boy. Had something stopped him from aging, too? And I know you noticed he had red hair, like the banshee.

  “Do you want to come with us?” I said to Keir McGoogan. “My father has a court order that says you can leave.”

  “What do those two ladies care about some order?” he said. “They won’t ever let me go. Staying here forever and never getting old was all part of the dicker.”

  “Dicker?” I said.

  “I thought you talked with my mam.”

  “I couldn’t understand everything she said. She was apparently speaking something called Irish.”

  “Ah, that she does. But I guess she didn’t read the fine print when she signed the paper.”

  “Paper?” My eyes widened—the legal case had just gotten more interesting. “There’s a contract? Do you have a copy?”

  “Fat chance of that. I’ve never even seen it.”

  He stopped, lifted his chin, cocked his head. Just then I could hear something that sounded like an agonized shriek, followed by a pack of distant yelps and then a rumble closer by. I turned to see the gates closing behind my father.

  “That didn’t take long,” said Keir. “Time to go, Elizabeth.”

  “Come with us,” I said quickly.

  The yelps became louder, more frantic. My father grabbed hold of the iron bars of one of the closing gates and tried to stop the movement, but the iron bars pulled at him and kept pulling. His feet slid across the asphalt. He called out my name as the gates kept closing.

  “Go on, Elizabeth,” said Keir. “Go back to your father. And run when you do it.”

  I wanted to run, like he said. But something froze my sneakers in place. This boy who was not a boy, and who was stuck here till the end of time, needed our help, my help. I couldn’t run from that. And I had promised his mother.

  “I won’t go without you,” I said.

  My father called out my name as the gate kept closing, closing. He reached his arm through the gap, his fingers outstretched. I thought the closing gates would lop his whole arm off, but he pulled it back right before the iron shut with a clang.

  “That’s it, then,” said Keir McGoogan. “I guess you’ll be staying for dinner. We should bet on whether you’ll be eating or eaten. Four bucks, you said?”

  He laughed, maybe at something he saw on my face. My face gets all scrunchy when I’m scared, and yes, I was terrified. But there was a calm about this strange boy-man and his funny way of talking that comforted me.

  “I can shake the dogs,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Still holding the rake, he started striding toward the wall to the left. I turned to my father, gave him an I’m okay sign, and then ran off to catch up with Keir.

  We made our way between the woods and the wall that surrounded the property until we reached a mighty tree, still leafless, that stood right next to the wall. The yelps from the dogs were getting closer and the first branches of the tree were so high it looked to be unclimbable.

  “Now what?” I said.

  Keir gave me a sly smile before jumping high and banging the lowest branch with the rake. Something collapsed down from the branch, unwrapping itself as it fell.

  A rope ladder with wooden slats for rungs.

  “Pull her up behind you when you get to the top,” he said over the howls of the approaching dogs. He threw down the rake and scuttled up the ladder like a spider. As soon as he was high enough I started following, struggling my way up the swaying ropes and the tilting rungs. My feet kept slipping as I climbed, and then something grabbed hold of my sneaker and yanked.

  I looked down. A dog had my foot in its slobbering jaws. The dog snarled and pulled as my other foot came loose from the ladder, leaving me dangling by my two hands.

  With my free foot I kicked at the dog. He loosened his jaws just enough for me to snatch out my sneaker and start up again. Suddenly I was climbing like a pro.

  When I finally caught up to Keir, he was sitting on a level platform made of wide boards nailed on top of two thick branches. Next to him was an old canvas backpack, green and stuffed full. I sat beside him and looked out over a series of rolling hills splashed with sunlight. They seemed to go on forever. The dogs howled and barked beneath us.

  “Nice view,” I said.

  “This is the only place I feel free anymore.”

  “Is that why your mom hired me?”

  “She said a hundred years of serving a rich lady’s whims was enough. And then she met a girl on the other side who gabbed on about you.”

  “About me? Yikes. Who?”

  “She said her name was Beatrice.”

  “Ah, of course. We helped Beatrice. Maybe we can help you, too. Don’t you want to get out of here? See the world? Go, like, to the beach?”

  “Sand, water, little metal buckets. Nothing to it.” There was something just then in his voice, something sad and scared that made him suddenly seem very young.

  “You’ve never been to the beach, have you?”

  He looked at me for a moment, like I had seen through him, and then he looked down. “My mam didn’t have the money to take me, and since I’ve been here I’ve never been anywhere else. What’s it like?”

  “Amazing,” I said. “The sand is hot and strange on your bare feet. When you look out at the ocean you can see the whole curve of the world. And the waves are telling you a story that you never really understand, but you know is perfect.”

  “The way you talk about it, Elizab
eth.”

  “If you leave with us, I promise to take you.”

  “It’s a nice dream, but even with your court order thing they won’t let me go. My fate is to stay right here. Forever. And maybe that’s for the best.”

  “It’s not for the best,” I said. “And you can change your fate. That’s what the law is all about. You can win your freedom through the law.”

  He lifted his face to the sky like he was looking for an answer. “I would maybe want to see that beach,” he said. “All right then, we’ll leave it to Fortune’s call.” He reached into his pocket and took out a pair of red dice, which he handed to me. “Just give them a roll. You win, I’ll go with you. You lose, I get your four dollars.”

  “You really want my lunch money,” I said before shaking the dice in my palm and spilling them onto the planks.

  “The number’s four,” he said.

  “Is that good?”

  “It could be worse. Roll her again.”

  I did. A five and a two. “Well?”

  “Isn’t that a thing.”

  He looked at me and his crooked smile grew even more crooked. Then he grabbed the dice and stuffed them in his pocket.

  “You’re a lucky one, you are, Elizabeth Webster,” he said. “You get to keep your lunch money for yourself.”

  “So I won? Just like that? What a stupid game.”

  “Maybe it is, but a bet’s a bet.” He stood up, hoisted his pack onto his shoulder, and pulled the end of a rope off a hook screwed into the trunk. “This will swing us right over the wall.”

  “Funny how you just happened to have a pack in the tree and a rope right there.”

  “One never knows when it’ll be time to run. You convinced me it’s finally time.”

  “And after we swing, then what?”

  “Then we let go,” he said.

  THE LATE GREAT GENERAL TSO

  When my father and I showed up at my house after our strange visit to the Château Laveau, my mother smiled tightly before reminding me in front of everyone that my grades were falling and declaring that never again was I to miss school for Websterian purposes.