Death's Doorway

by Crin Claxton

  “Again, why? Not that they do, but if they did.”

  “Cast and crew of Little Shop of Horrors, this is your beginners call.” Beth’s voice pulled Tony back to the job at hand.

  “Whatever you need from me will have to wait,” she said firmly, going into preview and double-checking the cue stacks.

  She thought she heard a bit of whispering and something that sounded like “bag of blow,” but when she glanced toward the doorway again, the ghosts had gone.

  *

  Jade’s body hummed with pleasure on Suni’s couch. She was soothed by the slippery warmth of the oil; the sweet, heavy scent of the herbs; and the firm pressure of Suni’s fingers as she swept from Jade’s neck down her back to the base of her spine.

  The towel landed gently on her back. She felt a moment of sadness as she realized the second session was coming to an end.

  Jade stretched and yawned and then got back into her jeans and shirt. Suni was wiping her hands on another towel. She smiled and arched an eyebrow.

  “Please don’t think me forward. Could you recommend a gay bar or club? Somewhere friendly. I’m still pretty new in town, and I’d prefer to go on a recommendation.” Suni looked as relaxed as Jade felt.

  Jade took a quick breath. She had been downplaying the attraction, but whatever it was about Suni that got Jade’s pulse racing, it was up and running again.

  “There’s a nice bar in the center of town, in Old Compton Street. Do you know Compton Street, the so-called Gay Village?” Jade kept her voice measured.

  “I don’t suppose…well, I’ll just come out with it. Would you come with me? It’s so much nicer to explore a place with a local in tow.” Suni gave a cheeky smile, but her voice was shy. Jade found the combination hard to resist.

  She hesitated. Yes, she fancied Suni, but she was committed to passing on Felicia’s message. She didn’t feel she knew Suni well enough to blurt out something like that.

  So I should go with her to the bar. It’s important I get her to trust me.

  Jade reasoned that she was just doing her job. “Yeah, why not,” she answered Suni. “I’m free tomorrow night.”

  Suni grinned. “Me too. Write down the address. We can meet there.”

  Jade jotted down the details, grabbed her coat, and left the practice room. She wondered if Maya was at the clinic, but then wasn’t sure if they should reveal they knew each other.

  I’m sort of undercover, but it’s not like we’ve got Suni under surveillance. I should ring Maya and Tony and check.

  As Jade stepped up to reception to pay, someone cleared their throat right by her left ear.

  She jerked her head round.

  There was no one there.

  The guy on reception looked at her strangely, but was quickly absorbed in getting some change.

  “What are you doing?” Felicia’s voice had an angry, sinister edge.

  Jade tensed. She couldn’t respond; the reception guy was coming back.

  “You haven’t even mentioned me, have you?”

  Jade took her change and got out of the clinic as quickly as she could. She walked down a side street.

  “I can’t talk here,” she said under her breath, looking up and down the street to check no one was watching.

  There was a heavy silence.

  Jade sensed Felicia to her left.

  “You can keep your hands off her.”

  Part of Jade felt guilty, but she was annoyed at the way Felicia spoke to her. “I will pass your message on, as soon as it seems appropriate. That’s all I’ve promised you to do.”

  “You don’t want to make an enemy out of me,” Felicia said sharply.

  Jade was scared, but she squared her shoulders. “I don’t respond to threats.”

  “Don’t cross me, girl.” Felicia’s normally long tones were clipped. “That’s one hot mess you don’t want to dive into.”

  Jade swallowed. She sensed Felicia had gone. She hung back in the side street, waiting to see if Felicia said something else.

  She feared the ghost was still around. Watching.

  *

  Maya tutted with annoyance. The computer in her practice room had completely frozen. She had tried rebooting it, but now it wouldn’t start up. Thank God all her information was on the cloud server, so one individual PC going down wouldn’t mess up access to her files. She had a client in half an hour. She could take session notes the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, but she needed to read the previous notes.

  Danny at reception picked up on the first ring.

  “I’m having a nightmare with my computer. Can I get on yours for twenty minutes?”

  “Oh hi, Maya, well, maybe you don’t need to. Practice room three is empty today. Just log on there.”

  Neat. Practice room three was just down the hall.

  As Maya walked into the room that Suni, the new Ayurvedic healer, used she wondered how Jade was getting on. She’d been quiet for a couple of days. Maya hoped the nasty-sounding ghost wasn’t still giving Jade a hard time. She wondered what Jade made of Suni.

  Maya sat at the desk and picked up the mouse. As she moved it, the screen sprang to life. Maya made a mental note to send an email around. Everyone needed to do their bit to save energy, and that included switching off computers when they weren’t being used.

  She looked at the start menu. Suni was logged on. Well, she would have hoped Suni would be more energy conscious. Maya hit Internet Explorer to go onto the cloud server. It had been minimized.

  Maya glanced at the website as Internet Explorer resumed. It was an article on psychotropic drugs used for interrogation purposes. Maya read down the page, interested in the proposition that mind-altering drugs like LSD could be used to distort reality, confuse prisoners, and give interrogators greater control. Perhaps Suni had a client who had experienced something like that. Maya was aware that people sought political asylum in the UK who had experienced horrific regimes in their own country.

  She glanced at the clock over the desk. Hell! She had allowed herself to become distracted and now only had fifteen minutes before her client’s visit. Quickly, she logged on to the cloud server and brought up her patient’s notes.

  *

  Tony stole a glance at Jade, who was watching a basketball game on TV, and relished a rare moment alone with her best friend. Maya was off at a herbal talk, and Jade was round for dinner. Tony was over the moon to be in the new and very sexy relationship with Maya. But she had to admit, she missed special time with Jade. They had seen each other through several relationships. Jade loved her, in the way that friends do, not because they fancy you but because they really like who you are.

  The TV was blaring. Crisps, nuts, and popcorn were strewed across the coffee table, still in their bags and definitely not in the little bowls that Maya loved to put them in. The teensy bowls were ridiculously impractical. You had two handfuls and needed to fill them up again. Tony couldn’t see the point of traipsing to and from the kitchen all night. Jade agreed with her, in private. But when Maya had brought the snacks in and said, “See how nice it is to use these lovely bowls, I bought you, Tony,” Jade had nodded wisely.

  “They are lovely bowls,” she’d muttered, avoiding Tony’s eyes.

  Tony pushed the sixteen-inch pizza, still in its box, toward Jade. “More super-stuff-your-face-meat-feast pizza?”

  “You know it’s not really called that.” Jade’s hand hovered over the pizza, drifted to one of Maya’s tiny bowls filled with salad leaf, and then returned to the pizza box. She took a slice.

  One eye on the basketball game, Tony grabbed another slice herself before tossing the box back onto the coffee table. Her only real interest in sport was the occasional foray into women’s tennis at Wimbledon; however, now that she was with Maya, she was familiarizing herself with all things American. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she could sustain an interest in tall blokes bouncing a ball around a court for forty-eight minutes, no matter how many dribbling spins and t
ricks the players did. “They could call it super-weight-gain-meat-n-cheese pizza, but that might be seen as insensitive,” Tony said wryly.

  “Yes, it might.”

  “Could be called cardiac arrest pizza.”

  “Again. Might not be the best selling point ever.”

  “This is nice, though, yeah?”

  Jade pulled her eyes from the TV screen and held Tony’s. “What?”

  “Us. Like old times. Eating what we like, talking rubbish.”

  “Watching basketball…”

  “Okay, so we wouldn’t have been doing that, but the rest of it is like what we used to do.”

  “Tony, it’s only been a few months. And before that you weren’t single that long. You were with Amy for ages, remember? We weathered that storm.”

  “Ah, yeah.” Tony fondly remembered how Jade had been there all the times her ex, Amy, had broken her heart. After a brief attempt to get back together, Amy had retreated back to Manchester, taking their three-year-old daughter Louise with her. Tony swallowed. She tried hard not to think about Louise, especially when she was drinking. She took a swig of beer.

  “So what’s happening with Louise? Have you made proper arrangements yet?”

  Sometimes Tony swore that Jade was the psychic one. It was like she was reading Tony’s mind. Tony clenched her teeth. “No.” It hurt like hell to think how much she was missing out on Louise growing up.

  “Maybe you need to see a lawyer.”

  “God, really? Won’t that antagonize Amy? Surely it will cost a fortune?”

  “Tony, it’s not going to cost that much to get some advice. I’ll help you if you need it.”

  “You can’t afford to help me out. You’re not even working.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got a bit put by, and this is important. Tony, I don’t get on your case, because I love you, but, hon, you need to fight for your daughter.”

  Tony stared at her. She realized she had been pushing down her anguish about not seeing Louise, and burying herself in the exciting new relationship with Maya.

  “You just need to make regular arrangements to see her. Manchester’s not that far.”

  Tony nodded. “I know. I’ll call Amy tomorrow; see if she will agree to something. My God, she used to love drawing up schedules and rotas. Maybe she’ll get a kick out of it. It wasn’t like we left on bad terms.”

  “You need to push, and not do what you normally do: run away from anything uncomfortable.”

  Tony smiled and then spontaneously reached across to hug her.

  The air to the right of the couch went fuzzy, like air did in front of a heater.

  Seconds later, Deirdre materialized in a tight polyester top with a matching pink and white pleated miniskirt. Her hair was in high pigtails, and she wore pink tennis shoes with fluffy balls stuck on them. The teenage boy stood beside her, looking exactly the same as when he had appeared in the lighting box.

  “Perhaps you can grace us with an audience now, your royal lowness,” Deirdre said. “Hello, Jade, shame you can’t see my pompoms.”

  Jade opened her mouth to say something but clearly thought the better of it and just smiled weakly.

  Deirdre studied the seven-foot, fit, mainly African-American men in shorts and tight vinyl tops. “Am I interrupting something? You two appeared to be fondling when we dropped in.”

  “It was a platonic hug,” Tony said. “I don’t suppose you know what that is.”

  “What an assumption!” Deirdre huffed back her shoulders. “Just because I’m a gay man you think I don’t know what a platonic hug is. Well, you’re right. What the hell is it, what a waste of a second, and why would anyone with a feeling bone in their body want to have one?”

  The boy puffed his chest out. He looked like he was struggling with something. “Who’s that?” He tipped his head in Jade’s direction.

  “That’s the assistant,” Deirdre said.

  Jade’s head snapped in her direction. “Why am I the assistant?” she said.

  “Someone’s got to be the sidekick. You’re like Watson, or Robin, or Trigger,” Tony said, thinking being a character might pacify Jade.

  “Are you comparing me to a horse?” Jade’s voice shot up an octave.

  “No. Yes. Well, it’s just that I’m the one with the spirit guide aren’t I?” Tony wasn’t even sure why she was trying to justify Jade being a sidekick. It wasn’t her that had brought it up.

  “That’s a good point. Deirdre, why don’t I have a spirit guide? I’m seeing ghosts on my own now, after all.”

  Deirdre picked a bit of fluff out of an extremely long and obviously false, fluorescent orange nail. “Haven’t a clue, much like you two most of the time.” She yawned. “I don’t get to decide these things. And you should be careful seeing ghosts without proper representation. As I said recently to Tony, that kind of thing can bite you. And not the nice kind of biting neither.”

  “You never said she was black.” The boy balled his hands into fists.

  Tony frowned. “So what if she is?”

  His eyes darted to hers. He was furious. He glanced warily at Jade but didn’t say anything.

  Tony was about to say, “If it’s a problem, you can go find someone else,” but Deirdre spoke before Tony could.

  “Scott needs you to help his friend,” she said.

  Jade switched off the TV. “Who’s Scott?”

  “The young white boy standing next to Deirdre,” Tony said.

  “Young white racist, you mean.” Jade was bristling, and Tony didn’t blame her.

  “So what if I am racist?” Scott said. “No one black’s ever helped me, and I don’t expect you to. The Jamestown Massive Crew are racist too. Being white’s all you need to get shanked, if they catch you in their territory.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Deirdre asked.

  “Being shanked is being stabbed. Are you in a gang?” Jade tilted her head in his direction.

  “Yes. I’m in the Stepney Walk Boys, or I was, before the JMC took me out.”

  Jade frowned at Tony. “I don’t want to get involved with any gang stuff,” she said. She looked anxious.

  Scott pulled on Deirdre’s arm. “Take me somewhere else, man. I ain’t got time for this.”

  “Girls, please listen. Scott needs your help.” Deirdre’s voice was soft. Her eyes pleaded with Tony.

  Jade folded her arms and leaned back on the sofa, shaking her head. Tony was apprehensive too, but there was something about the boy. He looked very young, only fifteen or so, and he was clearly scared. His body was rigid with tension. Tony noticed a pool of dried blood in the chest area of his black top.

  “I moved the stash. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was before I got shanked. It’s a K of blow, and we’re supposed to sell it on. It belongs to some bad men.”

  Deirdre sighed long and hard. “Why do I keep being sent these cases? What does all that gibberish mean?” She threw her hands up in despair.

  “He’s moved a kilo of cocaine somewhere that belongs to some big drug players,” Jade said. She spoke quietly, but the disgust in her voice was clear.

  “Repo, Repo’s my blood. He’s a dead man if he can’t find that blow.”

  “His best friend, someone called Repo, is in trouble if he can’t find the drugs,” Jade told Deirdre. “You realize you’re talking black?” she threw at Scott. “Blood, bad men, shanked?”

  Scott looked confused. “It’s all the same. Everyone says them words.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Tony said to Jade. “I did that community show last year. Lawds of de Manor it was called. Everybody ended up dead at the end of the show. Very Shakespearian. All the kids spoke like him. Black, white, whatever. It’s not like when you were young.”

  Jade glared at her.

  “You need to tell Repo where the stash is.” Scott’s voice was clipped, like it was hard for him to get the words out. Tony suspected he didn’t ask for help much.

  “I don’t
think this is the right case for us,” Jade said firmly.

  Tony knew from experience, Jade wasn’t going to change her mind. Jade was easygoing ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, but when she fixed on something, there was no shifting her. Tony also knew that Jade had no time for gangs, whatever part of the world they came from.

  “What if we sent a text to your, what did you call him, your blood?” Tony asked.

  Scott shook his head. “No good. He’s always on a burner phone. Chucks it away and gets a new one every week. I’ve no idea what the number would be.”

  “Well, you must know where he lives. We could send him a letter,” Tony said.

  Scott laughed long and loud. “What century are you in? No one sends letters. He would just rip it up. He’d think it was the feds.”

  “Feds! What are you now, African-American?” Jade said sarcastically.

  “Email then,” Tony said.

  Scott shook his head.

  “Facebook? Twitter?”

  Scott carried on shaking his head. “We change accounts every week. Security. I ran a tight ship.” He sounded proud.

  “You ran it? You were the gang leader?” Jade asked.

  “Yep,” Scott said. “Repo is now.”

  “Did you kill anybody?” Jade asked.

  Scott dropped his head.

  “What about this Repo? Has he killed anyone?” Jade asked into the silence.

  Scott didn’t answer.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. That’s why I don’t want to help you, harsh as it may sound. Anyway, it wouldn’t be safe. We’d have to go and see Repo. Tensions will be running high, seeing as you’ve just been killed,” Jade said.

  Tony looked at her. Jade would normally help anybody. If she felt that strongly, Tony wouldn’t go against her. “Deirdre, I think you’d better take Scott to someone else.”

  “I knew this was a waste of time.” Scott turned away. His shoulders slumped, then he disappeared.

  Deirdre raised her palms upward, as if she didn’t know what to do, and then she vanished too.