Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

  “The gremlin trespassed upon Ms. Moss’s property and killed her goat.”

  The ram let out a gasp as the judge shook his head and said, “A goat, you say. And what remedy are you seeking?”

  “What the law not only allows,” said Josiah Goodheart, “but compels. We are demanding, I say, demanding monetary and punitive damages.”

  “The monetary damages I understand,” said the judge. “A good goat is worth its weight in goat meat. But what kind of punitive damages are you seeking?”

  “As my dear departed mother used to say,” said Goodheart, “what is good for the goat is good for the gremlin. To pay for its crime, the remedy we demand is simply this: that Topper’s gremlin be destroyed forthwith.”

  “Forthwith?” said the judge over Mr. Topper’s gasp.

  “Indeed,” said Josiah Goodheart.

  “Not my sweet little pet,” said Mr. Topper. “You couldn’t.”

  “Quiet in the court,” ordered the judge after a bang of his gavel. “I assure you, Mr. Topper, that I could, and I probably will. Well, let’s get to it, Mr. Goodheart. Call your first witness.”

  THE DEVOURING

  State your name for the record,” said Josiah Goodheart.

  “Cassandra Moss,” said the witness in a soft, breathy voice.

  “And what do you do, Ms. Moss?”

  “What do I do?” I had to lean forward to hear her. “I summon the sun in the morning and the stars at night, Mr. Goodheart. I reach my hand into the earth and touch the souls of all those who walk on its surface or swim in its seas. In short, I dance beneath the light of the cosmos and the universe dances with me.”

  “I meant as your profession,” said Josiah Goodheart.

  “Oh, I misunderstood,” she said. “I am a dental hygienist.”

  “Quite a useful occupation,” commented the judge before sucking on one of his undead molars.

  “And how long have you been living next to the defendant, Topper?” said Barrister Goodheart.

  “About a year,” she said in her whispery voice.

  Just then the front of the judge’s great desk swung open with a bang.

  Filling the space within the desk was a creature I had never seen before, huge and gray, with the face of a potato. His back was pressed against the desktop, and his legs were curled tightly beneath him. Before him was a little desk of his own with a lantern and an open ledger. In the thing’s thick-fingered hand was a feather quill.

  “The witness needs to speak up,” said Potato Man in a gravelly voice rich with annoyance. “I can’t hear a word. How can I keep a record if I can’t hear a word?”

  The judge turned to the witness. “You’ll need to raise your voice, Ms. Moss, so Bittman can hear what you say.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You’ll do more than try,” said the potato-faced Bittman, “or there won’t be a record. And without a record, where would we be?”

  “Indeed,” said the judge.

  Bittman gave us all a glare from his potato eyes before slamming closed the front of the judge’s desk.

  “So now, Ms. Moss,” said Josiah Goodheart, “tell us all, in a voice as loud as possible for the troll’s sake, the sad and terrifying story of your goat.”

  And so she did.

  Every year, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, Cassandra Moss celebrated the coming of spring with a bonfire and feast with friends and family. For last year’s celebration, in her new house, it was suggested she roast a goat for the holiday table, so she purchased a live goat to fatten for the feast. For a while she kept the goat in a makeshift pen outside the shed where he slept, but soon she let him run free, as free as the wind, the way goats were meant to run on this good earth. She fed him table scraps and rubbed his beard and in exchange the goat kept her yard neatly trimmed.

  She grew to admire and then love the goat. It was an old soul, she believed. She called him Magwitch. As the feast approached, when she was faced with the prospect of killing and eating Magwitch, she began having second thoughts, no matter how delicious roasted goat could be—especially when marinated in yogurt and orange juice and then spiced with coriander and cumin before the roasting. She ended up buying a lamb carcass at a warehouse store and roasting that instead, letting Magwitch chew on the scraps. Magwitch’s joyful bleats from outside had the effect of sanctifying the joyous festival meal.

  It wasn’t long before Magwitch became Ms. Moss’s closest companion. They sat out together in the sun, both she and the goat wearing sunglasses. She asked him questions and he answered with his right hoof, one tap for yes and two taps for no. Ms. Moss had been married for a decade once and she could attest that this was the better relationship.

  Occasionally Magwitch broke through the hedges of the yard and ended up on one or the other of her neighbors’ properties. The neighbor on the right simply placed a call and she went over to fetch Magwitch and bring him back. But when Magwitch wandered onto Mr. Topper’s property it was never so simple. The goat was seized, the police were called, insults were thrown about.

  She tried tying the goat to a post in the yard, but Magwitch was a wily little creature and had a developed a taste for rhododendron. Occasionally he would escape to snack in Mr. Topper’s yard. Ms. Moss offered to buy more plants for Topper, but all he did was call the police and complain about how long it took for rhododendron plants to grow.

  One day Mr. Topper came to Ms. Moss’s house and banged on her front door. He told her he had bought a beast of his own and that she should now take all precautions to keep her goat away from his yard. “Consider yourself forewarned,” he said ominously.

  After that visit, she could hear Topper’s creature growling from the other side of the hedge. Ms. Moss never really got a good view of the animal, just heard the sound of it and glimpsed the glowing light of its eyes, but the change in Magwitch was immediate. He bleated in fear and hovered by the house. He shook whenever the beast was loose in Topper’s yard.

  Then came the night of the devouring.

  “Tell us what happened that terrible, terrible evening, Ms. Moss,” said Josiah Goodheart.

  Cassandra Moss put a hand on her throat as if she was swallowing a sharp bone.

  “I know it’s hard, Ms. Moss,” said the judge. “But do try.”

  “It was a lovely summer night,” she said, “and so I left Magwitch outside his shed to enjoy the night air. To avoid any problem with Mr. Topper, I kept Magwitch on the rope. I remember looking out, and my sweet was lying down, his head high, looking around nervously. I went up the stairs to take a bath. I lit the scented candles, turned on the music. When I came back down, forty or so minutes later, and looked out the kitchen window, all I could do was scream.”

  “What had you seen, Ms. Moss?” said Barrister Goodheart. “Spare us no detail of the horror you witnessed.”

  “Magwitch was gone, just gone. There was a great puddle of blood, there were bones, there was a head, yes, with eyes wide and the darling little beard, but it was no longer attached to anything. It was just lying there on the ground, staring at me. And feasting on the grisly mass of bone and blood was the beast.”

  “What beast?”

  She pointed her finger straight at Mr. Topper. “His beast,” she said. “It was Topper’s gremlin, I tell you.”

  I stood up and said meekly, “Objection?”

  “What’s that, girl?” said the judge.

  “I think I’m kind of objecting?”

  “Then you need to do a better job than that. If you have something to say, say it like you mean it.”

  “Objection!” I shouted.

  “Better,” said the judge. “Much better.” And then he shouted back, “Overruled!” His voice calming again, he said gently to the witness, “Go on, Ms. Moss.”

  “But, Your Honor,” I said, “don’t you want to hear why I objected?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “But, sir…”

  “Oh, go ahead and
make your piddling little argument.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right,” I said. “Ms. Moss said she had never seen Mr. Topper’s gremlin, but then she is very quick to say that the thing she saw snacking on her goat was the very gremlin she never saw.”

  The judge stared at me with his bloodred eyes as if I had just said the stupidest thing ever uttered in his courtroom. I could see his face redden, and I was already flinching when he turned his head to stare at Mr. Goodheart. “Well, Counsel? What say ye to that? Seems pretty reasonable to me.”

  “We’ll withdraw the statement,” said Mr. Goodheart.

  The judge banged his knuckles on the desktop. The door of the desk opened and Bittman stuck his potato head out. “Be a good troll and cross out the statement about it being Topper’s gremlin,” said the judge. “It’s off the record.”

  Bittman scratched at the book with his feather pen. “Done.”

  “Splendid,” said the judge as the desk door slammed shut. “Go on, Ms. Moss, and just describe for us the beast you saw.”

  “It was horrible,” said Moss. “It was huge, at least six feet tall and hunched, its body a sickly brown and completely furless. Its hands were huge gnarled claws, its feet were even larger, and all along its back were razor-sharp spikes. When it heard me scream, it turned its horrible blood-smeared face toward me, a face as hairless as a skull, with long twisted teeth and yellow gums. And then there were the eyes, Mr. Goodheart, glowing red eyes that burned with hatred.”

  “You are sure of what you saw?” said Josiah Goodheart.

  “I will never forget it. The vision of that beast haunts my days and darkens my dreams. It was death itself that crawled into my yard and took my Magwitch. Death itself, I say, and it belonged to Topper.”

  MY ROLL OF THE DICE

  When it was my turn to ask questions of the whispery Cassandra Moss, I stood unsteadily at the table.

  It wasn’t just the witness’s story I was up against, there were also the pictures that Goodheart had put into evidence, horrible photographs of the blood and bones of poor dead Magwitch. And along with those pictures was a photograph of the hole in the hedge, through which, Josiah Goodheart had proclaimed in his most theatrical voice, the evil gremlin had journeyed from Topper’s property to seize the goat.

  And what did I have in defense? Not much, really, except maybe one little trick up my sleeve. But I hadn’t just been sweeping and filing in my time at Webster & Spawn, I had also been learning what my grandfather called the lawyerly arts, which always sounded to me like a bunch of lawyers trying to finger-paint. And one of those lawyerly arts was the art of cross-examination, for which there were all kinds of rules. Don’t blather on too long. Ask short questions that get you yes-or-no answers. Don’t ever ask a question you don’t know the answer to. I was lectured about all that by my two fathers, my grandfather, and Barnabas. At night, as I was falling asleep, I made up cross-examination questions for the ghosts in my dreams.

  But I was told by all my teachers that the Number One Rule of Cross-Examination—Number One!—was to never, ever ask the one question too many. I honestly had no idea what that rule meant, but I was about to find out.

  “You never really got a good look at Mr. Topper’s gremlin, did you, Ms. Moss?” I said.

  “Not until it ate my goat,” she said.

  “Something ate your goat, that’s for sure,” I said. “But you couldn’t have given a description of Mr. Topper’s gremlin before the night of the attack because you had never gotten a good look at it, isn’t that right?”

  “I said its eyes glowed and it growled.”

  “Could you describe its color or its size?”

  “No,” said Cassandra Moss. “Not its color or size.”

  “Are you aware, Ms. Moss, of the many precautions Mr. Topper took to keep his gremlin on his side of the property?”

  “As far as I know he took none.”

  “As far as you know? So you couldn’t testify as to what he did or didn’t do?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “The way he locked his gremlin in the house each night. The way he checked on her constantly.”

  “Objection,” said Josiah Goodheart. “Is the defense counsel testifying now? Are we going to let her reach a verdict, too?”

  “Is that allowed?” I said. “Because I’d be willing.”

  “Objection sustained,” said the judge. “You’re assuming facts not in evidence, Ms. Webster. Don’t.”

  “And I fail to see the relevance in this entire line of questioning,” said Goodheart. “What is the point here, Judge?”

  “Ms. Webster?” said Judge Jeffries.

  “It’s about that case, you know, the one about the cows.”

  “Cows?”

  “That Rylands v. Fletcher case thing?” I said uncertainly, wincing.

  “Rylands v. Fletcher?” said the judge sharply. He thought on it a bit and repeated the name to himself, “Rylands v. Fletcher,” before he turned to Josiah Goodheart. “Rylands v. Fletcher,” he said. “Overruled. Very good. We are talking about a gremlin here and not a cow, but continue.”

  “So, Ms. Moss,” I said, “your testimony is that Mr. Topper could have done everything a reasonable person would have done—that’s the standard, right, Judge?”

  “Indeed,” said the judge.

  “He could have done all that, and you wouldn’t know, isn’t that correct?”

  “Whatever he did, it wasn’t enough. His gremlin killed my goat.”

  “Your Honor?” I said.

  The judge nodded and knocked his desktop with his knuckles. The front swung open and Bittman said, “What’s that?”

  “Strike that last line, Bittman,” said the judge.

  “Will do, Judge,” said the troll before slamming the front closed again.

  “And the witness will only testify as to what she saw,” said the judge. “Go on, Ms. Webster.”

  “Why did you move next to Mr. Topper?”

  “A friend suggested the house for sale might be perfect for me.”

  “Was that the same friend who suggested you buy a goat?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And who was that friend, Ms. Moss?”

  “Objection,” called out Josiah Goodheart. “Relevance.”

  “Is this relevant to the case at hand, Ms. Webster?”

  “Well, don’t you want to know?” I said. “Doesn’t it all seem curious?”

  “Mere curiosity is hardly the standard for relevance,” said the judge. “Objection sustained.”

  “But, Judge—”

  “Move on.”

  “Fine,” I said with a pout. “Then let’s talk about your goat’s last night, Ms. Moss, shall we? You testified Magwitch was nervous but alive before you took your bath.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you went upstairs and got undressed, right?”

  “It was a bath.”

  “And took off your glasses.”

  “Of course.”

  “And with the candles lit and the water warm, you leaned back and relaxed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe even fell asleep.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But maybe? Possibly?”

  “It has been known to happen.”

  “And sometime after that, you climbed out of the bath, wrapped yourself in a robe, wandered down the stairs, and looked out the window to see a creature like something out of a nightmare?”

  Was the last word a bit much? Maybe it was a bit much, because Ms. Moss gave me a look like I was a piece of lint. “I was not asleep, I was wearing my glasses, and I saw what I saw,” she said, just as defiant and angry as I’d hoped she would be.

  “And the creature was six feet tall or so,” I said.

  “At least.”

  “With spikes on its back and a wide chest.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And this huge beast was strong enough to break through a hedge, and hung
ry enough to devour a whole goat, and hateful enough to stare at you with the eyes of death.”

  “That is what I said.”

  I gave her a little smile. This was the do-or-die moment of the trial. Everything had been leading up to this. Yes, Mr. Topper would testify next, but that wouldn’t matter much if this worked, and it wouldn’t matter at all if it blew up in my face. I was rolling the dice—I guess a little bit of Keir had rubbed off on me after all.

  I turned around and looked at Henry and said in a voice loud with false confidence, “Mr. Harrison, could you come up to the front of the court and bring the crate with you?”

  The ram on the wall sniffed the air as Henry came closer. When Henry finally stood beside me, with the crate lying on the table, the ram stared with a fearful curiosity as he chewed and chewed, a black twist of licorice leaking from his mouth.

  “This is highly irregular,” said Josiah Goodheart. “Highly irregular.”

  “As will I be if this goes on any longer,” said the judge. “What are you doing here, Mr. Harrison? Another ghost?”

  “He is our gremlin wrangler,” I said.

  “I hope you brought a helmet, young man,” said the judge. “I am not an admirer of gremlins, you know, but I’ll let you go on, Ms. Webster, just so we can finish up and be done with it.”

  “Thank you, Judge,” I said. “Now, Ms. Moss, I’d like you to look at this crate sitting on the table in front of me. Could the thing you claimed to see that terrible night, the big-skulled, broad-chested, six-foot-or-more spiked-backed beast that supposedly ate your goat, could that thing fit into this tiny little crate?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “And if I told you that Mr. Topper’s gremlin was small and cute and adorable and inside this crate, would you believe that?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Well, maybe, Ms. Moss, it is time for you to actually meet Mr. Topper’s gremlin,” and before Cassandra Moss could react or Josiah Goodheart could object, I reached for the latch of the crate.

  The ram’s head on the wall bellowed in fear as I swung open the door.