Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

  Was it my hair? Was a piece of kale stuck in my teeth? I turned to look at my grandfather as he talked with Barnabas, but all the time I could feel Mr. Topper’s gaze. It was so cold it made me shiver.

  And then, finally, Mr. Topper spoke.

  “As you must be aware, Ms. Webster,” he said, his mouth pursed in disappointment, “losing Althea was one of the most distressing moments of my life.”

  “Let’s not go on about that now, Topper,” said my grandfather. “This document Elizabeth found changes everything about your case with the Stygian Transit Authority. We must move on this immediately, or sooner. Let us focus on the future.”

  “I want her to know this first,” said Mr. Topper. “To see something so precious disappear from my life so quickly was a trauma. I tried to blame that nasty Mr. Goodheart, who brought the goat into court, but he was just doing his job. I had to wonder, Ms. Webster, if you were doing yours.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. Oh sure, like you would have come up with something better.

  “I continued to wonder, until your father came to my house one night to offer his condolences.”

  “My father?” I said.

  “Yes, your father. He told me you had violated the cardinal rule of trial practice. He said you were hoping the evidence you presented would help, instead of being sure of it.”

  I nodded. “My father.” Of course he had gone to Mr. Topper to complain about me. Maybe the guy who sells him his coffee in the morning was sick of hearing it and his dentist wasn’t in the mood. So he went to Mr. Topper to complain about his daughter so the two could have a why-is-Elizabeth-ruining-my-life party, swapping disappointments over a pot of tea and a plate of cookies.

  “But then, Ms. Webster,” continued Mr. Topper, “he told me that your gambit in the courtroom was one of the bravest pieces of lawyering he had ever seen. Based on the law, he said, if you’d played it safe the only thing you could have been sure of was defeat. Most lawyers would not have dared what you attempted, your father included, but they would have been wrong, because your maneuver was the only possible way to win the case.”

  “But we didn’t win.”

  “No,” said Mr. Topper, “we did not. But only because Althea was not what we thought she was and our opponent knew it. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law—and frankly, who would want to?—but I can tell when a father is proud of his daughter, and that was clear.”

  “My father?”

  “And that’s when he told me what you had discovered with your grandfather at Nascha’s House of Special Pets, that I was maneuvered into buying that chupacabra by Redwing himself to torpedo my candidacy for Portal Keeper. Which meant there was nothing that could have saved our case. Althea was going to the other side one way or the other, but you, at least, gave her a chance.”

  “Indeed,” said my grandfather.

  “And so what I want to say,” said Mr. Topper, “what I have wanted to say since your father’s visit, is thank you. Thank you for being so brave in court in your attempt to save my Althea. And thank you for continuing to work for me even after the case was closed, interrogating Nascha and now finding this document your grandfather is so excited about. If there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

  I was so flabbergasted, my jaw had dropped. I pressed it closed with my fist.

  “You should be very proud, Ebenezer,” said Mr. Topper.

  “I am,” said my grandfather. “More than you could know.”

  “And just to put your mind at ease,” said Mr. Topper, “I’ve been looking in on my Althea with the Lens of Fate. She is doing wonderfully on the other side. She has found herself a pack of chupacabras to play with and she is frolicking. Yes, frolicking. She is happier there, I can see it, and that makes me happy. And here’s a secret: they eat goat every night. Goat—that scamp!”

  I looked at my grandfather, and he was beaming. Beaming.

  I looked at Barnabas, and he was staring. Staring. Then he raised an eyebrow and the idea struck me at once.

  “Actually, Mr. Topper,” I said, “there is one thing you can do for me.”

  S’MORES

  We took the Sturdy Baker to the Portal of Doom.

  “It was quite an honor having a Lens of Fate in the office,” said my grandfather as he drove, leaning forward in his seat, barely able to see above the dashboard while he stomped pedals and pushed levers. I sat beside him, buckled tight in more ways than one. “That was the first time, and I daresay the last, for such a grand opportunity. And we owe it all to you, Elizabeth.”

  I was too busy staring out the window to respond.

  “I have to admit I peeked in on our great ancestor Daniel Webster himself,” said my grandfather. “He was giving a speech. A real stem-winder, from the looks of it. Apparently there are lectures on the other side given by the greatest orators of all time. How thrilling that must be.”

  “Did you hear that, Keir?” I said, still looking out the window. “There are lectures on the other side.”

  “Be still, my beating heart,” said Keir from the back seat.

  Of course Keir was in the back seat. Why else would we be going to the Portal of Doom? And of course we were both in a mood. Inside my pack was Keir’s death certificate and a transit permit authorizing him to pass to the other side to reside with one Caitlin McGoogan. A one-way ticket.

  “Be sure to give my regards to your mother, Keir,” said my grandfather. “And you can assure her that all her fees have been taken care of by the funds the countess left. Regards to your father, too. It must have been something to see him after all this time.”

  “It truly was, Mr. Webster,” said Keir. “A sight for sore and misty eyes. They’ll be mighty gratified for all your help in getting me back to them.”

  “Well, you were a wonderful client. And we’ll miss you mightily. Won’t we, Elizabeth?”

  “Can we, like, not talk for a bit, Grandpop? Please.”

  “Of course, dear.”

  “Thank you.”

  He waited a beat for effect, just to show that, yes, he was trying, and then he couldn’t help himself. “But Keir will be surrounded by his loved ones. And he hasn’t seen his father since the Great War. What I wouldn’t give to—”

  He stopped talking when I finally looked right at him. I wasn’t in the mood for my grandfather’s chitchat. I wasn’t in the mood for anything other than my own sadness. I should have realized this was the inevitable destination from the very beginning. I mean, it wasn’t as if the banshee hadn’t told us what she was after from the start.

  “Are you going to do what your mother wants?” I had asked Keir as we were sitting in my grandfather’s office, waiting for Mr. Topper to bring in the Lens of Fate so Keir could see his mother on the other side.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking about your mother’s plea to me in the courtroom before she disappeared.”

  “I told you, it was just her thanking you for all you did.”

  I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and his head bowed.

  “I should have known you’d figure it out,” he said. “You look smart, Elizabeth Webster, but you don’t look half as smart as you really are.”

  “It wasn’t so hard. You can translate Klingon on the web if you want to.”

  “What’s Klingon?”

  “A lot less common than Irish, is what it is.”

  And this is what the banshee Caitlin McGoogan had pleaded to me before she vanished to the other side. Send him across, she had said. Send my little boy back to me. After a hundred years of missing her son, she wanted Keir to join her on the other side. Freedom was choice, and Keir now had to choose. This side or the other side. What was a young vampire to do?

  “Well?” I said as we waited for Mr. Topper. “Have you decided?”

  “I’m thinking on it,” he said. “It’s why I need to see her.”

  “What about working on that thing Mr. Armbruster suggested
? That might be a reason to stick around.”

  After Keir’s Spanish Lady speech, I was sure that Mr. Armbruster was onto him, and I still think he was. But instead of putting Keir in handcuffs as a fraudulent middle school student, the teacher did something much more devious and Mr. Armbruster–like: he encouraged him.

  “He says he never had a student perform little plays about history before,” Keir said after sauntering out of the classroom that day. “He wants me write my stories down and create more. He told me it would take a lot of work, but it could be a book and he would help me get it published. I could be an author, imagine that! Maybe I’ll get myself a pipe.”

  Deep down, I hoped Keir would write his book, Keir McGoogan and the Great Parade. He would surely ask me to ghostwrite it for him—who better? But it also might be a reason for him to stick around for a while, and for some reason I really, really didn’t want him to leave. I suppose by living with my family, he had become like part of my family.

  When Mr. Topper brought in the Lens of Fate, Keir spent a long time in my grandfather’s office peering through it. I wondered at what he was seeing, what he was feeling. But when he came back through the doorway I wasn’t wondering any longer. His decision was written as if in ink on his face, and it nearly broke my heart.

  So now, as we drove to the Portal of Doom, I couldn’t help but sift through my memories. Keir with the rake at the Château Laveau. Keir sauntering down the hallways of Willing Middle School West. Keir duct-taped to the wall. Keir on the beach.

  That’s right, on the beach.

  I had promised Keir I’d take him to see the ocean, and that was a promise I wouldn’t break before he vanished to the other side. So after the final court hearing, a bunch of us had headed east, through the wilds of New Jersey, to a state park on a spit of land just north of Atlantic City. It was too cold to swim, of course, but the sun was shining, and the ocean was big and blue, and the wind was stiff enough to set the waves crashing and send the kites Charlie and Doug brought high into the cloudless sky.

  We took off our shoes and slapped around in the freezing-cold water, laughing and running away from the surf as it came for us. We built castles in the sand and walked up and down the beach with the kites, yanking on the strings when they turned and started to dive. While I took my turn with the spool, I looked down the shoreline and saw Keir and my mother talking, talking as if they had been talking together for a long time.

  After Stephen lugged the wood out of the rental van, Petey helped Young-Mee build a bonfire and we huddled around it eating sandwiches my mom had made and drinking hot cocoa from thermos bottles. Natalie played her guitar and Henry banged his bongos and Juwan blew his harmonica and we sang songs that Keir didn’t know. Then we taught him the words to “Yesterday.” By the end he was singing like he had paid the Beatles to write the song just for him. His voice was high as a bird’s and surprisingly sweet.

  Then it was time for the chocolate. We had to show Keir how to do the marshmallow-graham-cracker-and-chocolate thing, especially the roasting-the-marshmallow-without-burning-it thing, but he got the hang of it, except for the eating-it-neatly thing. We all laughed at the white and the dark and the light brown crumbs smeared all over his cheeks.

  “What do they call this little treat again?” he asked.

  “S’mores,” we told him.

  “Why do they call it that?”

  We laughed and laughed and never told him. And when it was over and we were back home in Willing Township, Keir had a moment with each of his new friends. He hugged them and told them he was off to live with relatives, but he’d keep in touch, and he made a joke here, and a touching comment there, and tears were shed, a few even by Keir himself.

  To be honest, it was a little unfair taking him to the beach just before he was about to pass into the other world. Like taking a kid to Disney World before moving her to Ohio. But a promise was a promise, and as Keir would have said, it seemed to go over.

  “It is something, it is,” he said as we stood, just the two of us, with the sun setting behind us and the orange light spreading across the rough surface of the water. This was just before the bonfire, when we grabbed some time alone. “What did you say about the ocean, Elizabeth? You said the waves are telling you a story that you can’t understand, but that you know is perfect. It sounded like nonsense to me then, but not now. Now I might use it in my book.”

  “Then stay and write it,” I said, surprising myself.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You can. I’ll even help you do it.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be my book. Don’t look so shocked there, Elizabeth. Maybe I learned something in middle school after all. Me staying might sound good now, but for how long? You’ll grow older and have a life of your own and I’ll still be the boy forever. That would just be sad.”

  “You’ll be Keir forever. That would be wonderful.”

  “I made a promise, Elizabeth. My mam, she didn’t come to you on her own. I begged her to get me out of that old creepy house. I promised her I’d pass over to be with her. That was the point.”

  “I thought it was about freedom.”

  “Ah, that was your father saying that. And maybe, to be truthful, that’s what I had in mind when I convinced my mam. Staying on this side, but no longer under Miss Myerscough’s thumb. That sounded like a plan until… until…”

  “What happened?”

  “You.”

  “I’m that terrible?”

  “And them,” he said, waving his arm at our friends playing with the kites or building the bonfire. “Leaving you and them is the hardest thing I’ll ever do, but I am what I am, Elizabeth. And the hunger, when it comes, it takes me over. In the flophouse they were able to keep it at bay, but on my own I would become the worst thing in me.”

  “You could fight it,” I said.

  “Until I couldn’t. I’d sooner pass over to the other side than do something bad to you, or to them, or anyone like you or them, which I suppose is everyone. There are enough bloodsuckers loose in the world as it is. I don’t want to be one of them. The end.”

  “Nice speech,” I said, and it was.

  “Maybe I’ll put it in the book,” he said.

  Even though there were tears in my eyes, I started laughing. But he was right, and I knew it in my bones. It was what everyone had been telling me through this whole adventure. Still, none of that made our trip to the portal any easier. All I wanted was for this stupid drive to never end.

  “Ah yes,” said my grandfather. “At last. We’ve arrived.”

  THE PORTAL OF DOOM

  Here you are,” said my grandfather, waving a hand toward the doorway to the portal about fifty yards away. I can’t tell you where it is, rules are rules, but my grandfather had driven us right past it before he parked the Sturdy Baker and stepped out with us onto the street. “Go on,” he said. “No use dillydallying.”

  “Aren’t you coming, Grandpop?” I said.

  “Oh no. Not me. Even when young I couldn’t handle the tipsy-turvy of the portal. You can take it from here, Elizabeth.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Exactly. Nothing to it. And good luck to you, Keir. All I can say to you as you begin your journey is to be ready for surprises, for there is more to be gained in the detours than you could ever imagine.”

  “I’m getting the idea,” said Keir. He turned and shook my grandfather’s hand. “Thank you, sir. You’ve been most kind.”

  “Hurry, now,” said my grandfather. “Never keep the Portal Keeper waiting.”

  As Keir and I started walking toward the entrance, I swiveled my head to look back at my grandfather. He gave me an encouraging smile that was the saddest encouraging smile I had ever seen.

  “When we say goodbye,” I said to Keir, “nothing sappy. I couldn’t bear anything sappy.”

  “I’ll be as stoic as a statue.”

  “Good,” I said, “even though I’m not sure what that means.”
>
  On the other side of the doorway we found ourselves in a small frigid room with fluorescent lights and green walls. A wooden desk was set against a wall. A huge ledger was cracked open on the desktop. And, of course, behind the desk sat a clerk. Remember what I said about paperwork? The clerk was wearing a uniform with bright buttons along with a familiar orange knit hat with a fuzzy ball on top.

  “Name of traveler,” said the clerk.

  “Ivanov?” I said.

  “Ivanov who?” said the clerk.

  “No, I mean, hello, Ivanov. It’s me, Elizabeth? Elizabeth Webster?”

  “I need the name of the traveler,” said Ivanov coldly.

  “Uh, okay, sure,” I said. “Keir McGoogan.”

  “Documents?” said Ivanov.

  “A death certificate from 1918 and a transit permit allowing the passage.”

  I zipped open my pack and took out the papers. Ivanov looked them over with his stern face and then from a drawer took out a stamp with a big wooden handle. He pounded the stamp into an ink pad and then onto the death certificate. Pound pound. He did the same to the transit permit. Pound pound. Then he took out a small red slip of paper and filled it out with a feather pen.

  “Sign here, Mr. McGoogan,” said Ivanov, offering the pen and pointing at a line on the red paper.

  Keir stepped forward and signed.

  Ivanov examined the signature, compared it to the large ledger propped open on his desk, and stamped the red slip twice before handing it to Keir.

  “This is your ticket,” he said. “Don’t lose it.”

  And then he smiled broadly at me. “Hello, Elizabeth. Sorry for all that rigmarole, but I must maintain my professional face when dealing with the paperwork. Nothing is more important than the paperwork.”

  “Ivanov, what are you doing here?”

  “This is my day job,” said Ivanov. “I’m only needed at the court when it is in session, and that is so infrequently the position barely pays for the pool.”

  “You have a pool?”

  “You think I would do all this if I wasn’t paying for a pool? Mr. McGoogan, good travels to you, sir. I expect you haven’t eaten too big a breakfast.”