Elizabeth Webster and the Court of Uncommon Pleas

by William Lashner

  “Then we have the complaint we’ll be filing with the court,” I said, snapping my fingers again. Natalie handed me an irregularly shaped piece of stiff brown paper that was covered with fancy handwriting.

  “What kind of paper is this?” he asked.

  “It’s called vellum,” I said. “It’s made from goatskin. The court is strict about its documents. We need you to read it carefully, make sure it’s all correct, then sign it.”

  “In blood?”

  “Ink will do. For now.”

  He stared at me nervously for a moment before turning to the document.

  “It basically says that your family owns the house,” I said, “and that the ghost haunting your bedroom has no right to trespass on your property, and that you want to eject the spirit from the premises.”

  “I have to tell you, Webster, I don’t understand this whole thing. What good will a court be? She’s a ghost.”

  “It’s a different type of court. I don’t really get it, either. But you want the ghost to leave you alone, right?”

  “I think, yeah.”

  “Then read and sign.”

  He read through the complaint, dipped the feather pen in the ink, and signed where he was required to sign.

  “And we have another complaint for you to sign for the files. It’s the same as the other one, but on regular paper.”

  As he was signing that one, I snapped my fingers and Natalie gave me a third copy, this one on vellum, too. “One more and we’ll be done.”

  “Who’s this one for?” said Henry.

  “The ghost,” I said.

  “Have you done this before?”

  “No.”

  “You seem pretty good at it.”

  “I guess it’s in my blood. But you’re the one who has to give the complaint to your ghost.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll tell you. But first, sign.”

  Just as he finished signing, the doorbell rang. Henry was so startled he scrawled a line of ink off the document and onto the table.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A friend.”

  When Henry pulled open the door, Barnabas was standing on the porch, tall and mournful. His long frock coat was black, his face was pale, his lips were dark, his hair was darker. A tangle of vines dripped from one hand, and clutched in the other was a two-foot-long wooden stake.

  “Is everything executed as I instructed?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. And do you, young man, have anything of the deceased that I can use to summon her ghost?”

  “Uh, no,” said Henry. “Nothing.”

  “’Tis a shame,” said Barnabas. “It makes everything a bit more difficult, but not impossible. So now, children, are we ready to raise the dead?”

  “Audi haec verba, audi haec lamenta, daemonium a regno spirituali,” recited Barnabas in his crisp British accent.

  The rug of the solar system was rolled up and pushed to the wall in Henry’s bedroom. The room was lit by a small candle in Natalie’s hand and five candles flickering on each point of a large five-pointed star called a pentagram, which Barnabas had marked on the floor in chalk. Natalie and Barnabas stood in the far corners of the room. Henry and I stood together facing the pentagram. Henry gripped the alder stake in both hands like a baseball bat. Wrapped tightly around the stake, and bound with a vine that had been growing on the Harrisons’ property, was the signed complaint.

  In response to Barnabas’s incantation, Natalie read from a strip of parchment that Barnabas had given her. “Hear these words, hear these cries, spirit from the other side.”

  Barnabas let out another line of gibberish and Natalie read again from the parchment. “Come to us who call you late, cross to us through the elemental gate.”

  “What language is he speaking?” whispered Henry.

  “Latin,” I whispered back.

  “What if the ghost doesn’t know Latin?”

  “I think it’s a required course for the dead,” I said.

  Barnabas intoned ever more Latin, and each time Natalie recited from the parchment:

  “Bound you shall be by the points of the star.

  “Come to obey us and to do us no harm.

  “Hear these words, hear these cries, spirit from the other side.”

  As Natalie finished, Barnabas let out a final howl of Latin that shook the trophies on the shelves. “Dimitte me, ut mihi sepulcrum, O daemonium, te obsecro!” The howl was so personal and full of grief that I grabbed hold of Henry’s arm. There was something more than legal babbling behind that howl.

  A breeze picked up and whipped around the room like a bouncy ball. It zoomed here and there until it blew out all the candles, plunging the room into darkness.

  There was a cry of surprise, a gasp.

  Someone called out, “Yikes alive.”

  Someone called out, “Who has a match?”

  Someone shushed us to be quiet as there came the smell, soft and ripe, not of flowers now but of rotting flesh, foul and vinegary.

  A pale light sizzled to life in the air above the pentagram. The light took off for the far corner of the room but something stopped it and the light burst into a cloud of sparks before dimming again. It zipped the other way and burst again into sparks.

  It was trying to get out, to free itself, but it was locked within invisible walls rising from the shape marked in chalk. It tried again and again, and failed again and again, until from within the star rose a bitter moan.

  Then bit by bit, starting with the eyes, she appeared. Young and whole, with that beauty mark beneath her eye, dressed and posed just as before, poodle skirt and all. She stared at Henry and smiled, scanned the rest of us in the room with the disdain of a cheerleader examining the chess club, and then turned her attention back to Henry.

  “Go ahead now, Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas.

  “Are you…” I said, shaking so hard I could barely get the words out. “Are you…”

  “Speak up, Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas in a voice so calm it gave me the courage to say the words he had instructed me to say.

  “Are you the spirit who haunts this house?”

  The ghost ignored me as she continued staring at Henry.

  “Now accept the silence as confirmation,” said Barnabas.

  “We accept your silence as a confirmation,” I said, “and therefore we serve unto you this Action in Ejectment.”

  The ghost turned her head and sneered at me before trying again to dart outside the pentagram’s bounds. Sparks flew as she failed and failed again. Then she calmed herself, smiled, and reached her arms toward Henry. She flicked her hair with a twitch of her pale transparent neck. A ghostly tongue emerged to lick see-through lips.

  The girl, dead as she was, still had moves.

  “Now,” said Barnabas. “The stake.”

  I used my grip on Henry’s arm to shove him toward the spirit. He hesitated. In the spirit’s glow I could see him staring at her even as his hands tightened on the alder stake.

  “It’s dangerous to wait,” said Barnabas. “Do it now.”

  Henry took a step forward. The ghost brightened her smile and rubbed her hands down her sides. Henry took another step forward and, without him knowing it, a sneaker landed on one of the pentagram’s lines, smearing the chalk.

  The ghost let out a vicious laugh and zipped through the gap, darting over Henry’s head, whooshing around Barnabas, rising to the ceiling before dropping in front of Henry and wrapping her spectral arms around him.

  And pulling him close.

  And kissing him.

  A head-turning, breath-sucking kiss.

  As she kissed him she began to change, growing brighter, more substantial, as if she was stealing substance from Henry. Even as her hair fell to the ground in handfuls and her skin mottled and blistered until it fell off the bone, she became more dense, impossible now to see throu
gh.

  And at the same time Henry, lit by the ghost’s own glow, also began to change. His face, locked on to the ghost’s skull, became gray. His solid torso started shaking. His body withered and turned misty. The alder stake fell from his fingers and rattled onto the floor as more of Henry Harrison flowed into the ghost’s gaping mouth.

  Natalie screamed.

  “It’s turned into a succubus,” shouted Barnabas. “Stand back.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. He must save himself.”

  “How?”

  “An act of will. Master Henry has to want to be free of her.”

  But Henry didn’t look like he wanted to be free of her. I remembered the way Henry had talked of the ghost as if she were a friend, or even something more. He had told me how he wanted so much to help her, and maybe part of him thought this was the way.

  It could only end badly. I had signed on to this whole ghostly thing to help Henry, but it was turning wrong before my eyes. Barnabas was frozen in the corner, as if something was forbidding him from stepping in. And Natalie was still screaming, as if that would help. It was up to me. I had to do something, I needed to do something.

  I didn’t think it through—I wouldn’t have moved a muscle if I had. Instead I picked up the fallen wooden pike and in one swift, savage motion jammed the stake into the heart of the ghost.

  The sound that pierced the night was like the shriek of a cat that had swallowed a siren. Through the stake I felt the rush of something dark and swift pouring into my body. Something electric and foul and full of pain.

  I let go with a shriek of my own. As I fell back, I could see that the stake was still stuck in the body of the ghost.

  The ghost now unlocked her lips from Henry’s and staggered backward into the pentagram, screeching madly. As her body convulsed, she lifted her skull off her neck. I thought she would roll it at me again, but what happened was even weirder.

  A pair of ghostly lips appeared around her skeletal teeth and the lips started speaking. To me. She repeated herself three times. After a startled moment I realized what she was saying.

  Save me, save him. Save me, save him. Save me, save him.

  Then the ghost lifted the skull into the air and started spinning wildly. Her agonized moan rose and fell with each turn. Until, in a wild explosion of sparks and swoops of blue light, the spirit, detached skull and all, disappeared.

  The alder stake fell whole and undamaged to the floor, along with a loose bundle of vines. The signed complaint, a single page of vellum, hung in midair—as if nailed into the emptiness—before it burst into flame and vanished.

  “It is done,” said Barnabas before flicking on the room’s lights. “The Action in Ejectment has commenced.”

  When I could tear my gaze from where, just a few instants before, the ghost had spun off into some other dimension, I turned to check on Henry. Poor Henry. He was passed out on the ground, his head cradled on Natalie’s lap.

  “Oh, Henry,” said Natalie. “Wake up, Henry.”

  The first of the nightmares came that night.

  This was after we had recovered from the high craziness of the alder stake. When Henry finally opened his eyes, his head was still cradled on Natalie’s lap, and he could barely recall his name. He didn’t remember anything that had happened once the candles had been blown out.

  It was up to me to tell him that the ghost had come, that she had been served with the complaint, and that the lawsuit had begun.

  “I feel like I’ve been drugged,” said Henry. “Did anything else happen?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Nothing other than a wild kiss and Lizzie’s thrilling act of heroism,” said Natalie.

  “What kiss?” said Henry.

  “Your kiss. You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “It was some kiss,” said Natalie. “A real lip locker. You really don’t remember?”

  “Who kissed me? You?”

  “Not me,” said Natalie, giggling. “The ghost. If you want, I can show you how she did it.”

  Henry sat up right out of Natalie’s arms. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No.”

  He sat there thinking for a moment. “Did I like it?”

  “‘Like’ is not quite the right word, Master Henry,” said Barnabas. “You were being consumed by it.”

  “Wow.”

  “And then Lizzie stuck the stake in the ghost’s heart and saved the day,” said Natalie. “Our brave Lizzie, the ghost slayer. They should make a video game about you.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Thanks, Webster,” said Henry. “I wish I could remember. It sounds like quite the party.”

  “You should lie back down, Henry,” said Natalie. “You need to rest.”

  “There’s been enough excitement for the night,” said Barnabas, raising his chin and an eyebrow at the same time. “I think it best for all of us if we let Master Henry sleep it off.”

  “That’s an idea,” said Henry with a yawn.

  Outside the Harrison house, as Barnabas, Natalie, and I walked together down the long drive, Natalie did a little skip. “How great was that?” she said. “And it ended just like I imagined, didn’t it, Lizzie?”

  “Although you weren’t the one swooning,” I said.

  “But he wondered if I had kissed him,” said Natalie. “Doesn’t that mean something? It has to mean something. I’m so glad I wore these shoes.”

  “We just had a near catastrophe and you’re thinking about your shoes.”

  “Well, the ghost was pretty cool, I have to admit, in a mean-girl kind of way. And you were amazing, ripping that stick right into her heart. But Henry Harrison was lying down with his head in my lap, staring into my eyes. Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither do I, but I’m going to find out.”

  “Barnabas, is he going to be okay?”

  “It appears so,” said Barnabas. “But it was a good thing you acted when you did, Mistress Elizabeth.”

  I looked up at him, tilted my head. “Why didn’t you act?”

  Barnabas, his pale face glowing in the night, said, simply, “I’m not permitted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It is enough to know that any direct contact I initiate with the spirit world could have disastrous consequences.”

  “She said something to me three times,” I said. “‘Save me, save him.’ What does that mean?”

  “I couldn’t say. Maybe Master Henry’s fate is somehow connected with that of the ghost. We don’t yet know, but all will be discovered at the trial. Now, Mistress Elizabeth, I am sorry this simple matter slipped out of hand, but I must be going.”

  We watched him stride away from us, off the driveway and straight down the hill before he disappeared into the darkness. There was a secret there, a story about Barnabas that I would find out someday. But tonight I was too tired to care. It felt like the ghost had drained half my energy through the stake I jammed into her heart.

  “I have to get home,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m not,” said Natalie, skipping into a spin on the driveway. “I feel like I could dance the whole night through.”

  “Please, don’t,” I said. “Just the thought of all that dancing is making my knees shake.”

  And when I did finally reach home, I didn’t so much turn in as collapse into my oh-so-comfy bed, fully clothed. I was dead asleep before the pillow hit my head.

  Then I had the dream.

  I am running low to the ground, darting here to there, back and forth, filled with terror. I push aside dead leaves with my nose as I run. Behind me I can feel it getting closer—the yellow hound that is chasing me.

  I glance back, past my furry gray side, and see the dog gaining ground. Its mouth is open. Its long yellow teeth drip saliva. I veer hard to the left and lift my tail just enough so that the hound, as it snaps its jaws, takes a hu
nk of fur instead of flesh and bone.

  A V-shaped split opens in front of me. I leap through a gap between two tree trunks. I keep running, sprinting, squealing. Ahead I see a boulder shaped like a gray sailing ship. I dive into a narrow space between the ground and the rock, safe for the moment. The moist dirt is cool on my stomach, and the jagged rock presses against my back and skull. I turn to face the woods and take a few quick breaths.

  The black-and-yellow muzzle of the dog jams into the gap.

  The dog sniffs, pokes, bares its teeth. I back away until I am deep enough below the rock so that even the dog’s tongue cannot reach me. Slowly the terror fades. The dog snaps its jaws, growls in frustration. My breath evens out, my little heart slows. Beneath the rock I feel safe, but I am wrong.

  Something slithers behind me, something dark and electric that raises my fur. I try to spin away, but the weight of the rock presses down, holding me in place, and then a double dose of pain shoots through my thigh and sends me skittering out from under the rock. I am free for an instant, shaking in pain, before the dog’s jaws clamp down on my head.

  I try to scramble free. My arms flail, my legs shiver. The dog shakes his head with me in its teeth. My bones rattle as the dog tosses me into the air and catches me again. In the spinning of the world around me I see, beneath the rock, a triangular head sticking out, coppery, splotchy, its mouth hissing open.

  And then the dog’s teeth are released and I am gently pulled free. I try to twist and turn, to free myself from the gentle hold, but my muscles aren’t working. Even as my heart beats wildly my muscles grow slack. Whatever is holding me is doing it gently, petting my side, rubbing my neck.

  I am saved.

  I feel drowsy and calm, until I am lifted toward a boy. He is large and hulking, with a scar on his upper lip and a flat nose. In the boy’s hand is a cage.

  The boy opens the cage and I am placed inside. The hand that was holding me pets my side before the door is shut. I try to turn to see who was petting me but my muscles are useless and I can see only the boy. My chest heaves and my heart churns faster and faster, like a little engine about to explode.

  I woke with a start in my still-lit room, fully clothed and covered in sweat. My heart was racing.