Elizabeth Webster and the Portal of Doom

by William Lashner

  “Any louder and it would wake the dead,” said Young-Mee.

  “Isn’t that the point?” said Henry Harrison.

  At the party there were six of us from good old Willing Middle School West, a crew sworn to secrecy about the whole I-talk-to-the-dead thing. There was Young-Mee, of course, since it was her basement and her ghosts. Then there was Natalie, my best friend since kindergarten, along with Charlie and Doug Frayden, two sixth graders who were my teammates in Debate Club. Henry Harrison, the eighth-grade swimming star and king of our middle school hallways, was also there, still recovering from being visited by his own personal ghost. And then there was me, moi, the teller of this tale.

  “Will our ghosts want some snacks?” said Natalie.

  “Snacks?” said Doug Frayden, Charlie’s twin, who had become our resident ghost and ghoul expert after being given my grandfather’s copy of White’s Legal Hornbook of Demons and Ghosts.

  “It could be all they want is a snack,” said Natalie. “I brought some caramel popcorn.”

  “I don’t think banshees eat popcorn,” said Doug.

  “Just souls,” said Master CF Vici.

  Young-Mee’s parents, gone for the evening, had been only too happy to let their daughter host the crew for a Shakespeare-themed educational event in their basement. That’s why we were pretending to throw a Julius Caesar party taking place on the fifteenth of the month, the date that Julius was poked to death and the only night each month the ghosts appeared. The fruit punch was dark as wine, the music was punk, and a square was marked by tape in the center of the floor. Within that square we danced like a pack of Roman fools while we waited for the ghosts to come so I could ask them what they wanted.

  It seemed a simple enough plan.

  “Maybe they won’t come at all,” said Henry in the quiet between songs. “Maybe we scared them off just by being here.”

  “Nothing scares them off,” said Young-Mee. “Not the dog, not my parents being upstairs, and certainly not the Fraydens.”

  “The Fraydens would scare me off if I was a ghost,” said Natalie. “No offense, guys.”

  “None taken, Natalie,” said Doug. “I think.”

  “But if these ghosts are Irish banshees, like Doug says,” said Young-Mee, “why are they haunting us?”

  “Maybe they’re not haunting your family,” said Natalie. “Maybe they’re haunting the house. The place of some long-ago tragedy. A dead boy. A girl still in love from beyond the grave. How romantic would that be?”

  “Pretty romantic, actually,” said Young-Mee.

  “So, what’s the plan, Webster?” said Henry.

  “You do have a plan, Elizabeth, don’t you?” said Charlie.

  “Sort of,” I said, before turning to look at the corner of the room, where the seventh member of our party sat alone in one of a row of chairs. No toga there. “I’m kind of following his lead.”

  “Barney doesn’t look very happy to be here,” said Natalie.

  “His name is Barnabas,” I said. “And that’s the way he always looks. But I’ll go talk to him. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

  I was wrong.

  BARNABAS BOTHEMLY

  Barnabas Bothemly sat rigidly in his chair as if he was frozen in time, which, sadly, he was.

  He wore a long frock coat as black as his ruffled hair, and his long gloomy face and bony hands were so devoid of color he might have been a ghost himself. His expression could have fooled you into thinking he was terribly frightened by the impending arrival of a pack of screaming banshees, but for a very tragic reason Barnabas Bothemly, chief clerk at the firm of Webster & Spawn, was afraid of very little in this world or the next.

  It’s a sad story that I’ve told before, but the gist of it is that Barnabas’s fiancée, Isabel, was tricked to the other side by the demon Redwing, and the two could only be together again when Barnabas himself died. But Barnabas, against his wishes, had been turned into an immortal by Redwing, so the two lovers were forever yearning for each other across the boundary line of death. Talk about a tragic romance.

  “It is quite a party you and your friends are tossing, Mistress Elizabeth,” he said when I sat down beside him. His accent was very British.

  “It’s sort of cool, I admit, even with the sheets. Don’t you like parties, Barnabas?”

  “Oh, there were some superior parties in Sussex when I was still practicing the law.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  “The parties were not about fun, Mistress Elizabeth, they were about seeing and being seen. They were about maintaining one’s position in society.”

  “That doesn’t sound like fun at all.”

  “I avoided such events like the plague. I was much more content by the fire with only a book and a cup of tea to keep me company. At least until I met my Isabel. But it is good to see you and your friends enjoying yourselves before the evening takes its turn.”

  “Do you want to join in?”

  “Certainly not. And even if I were willing to strut like a heron in a white sheet, tonight would not be the night.”

  “Why not tonight?”

  “Because, Mistress Elizabeth, when a banshee comes, normally she comes to warn the household that one of its members is soon to journey to the other side. That means someone, possibly in this very room, is likely to die in the near future.”

  I turned my head and scanned my friends, who were talking and laughing and dancing. Suddenly I felt just as sad and scared as Barnabas looked.

  “Do you remember the Latin words I taught you?” said Barnabas.

  “Yes, of course.” I was about to repeat them when Barnabas raised a hand.

  “Not now, Mistress Elizabeth. Wait until I tell you. We wouldn’t want to summon the wrong spirit, now would we?”

  “No, we would not,” I said.

  “When we hear the first mournful cries I will set this up”—he patted a long rectangle covered with black velvet by his side—“and you will recite the words I taught you and perhaps then we shall learn what these sad spirit women from the other world are trying to say.”

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  “Not for me, I don’t believe,” he said without cracking a smile.

  That was the thing about Barnabas, he never laughed at his own jokes, and so you never really knew if he was joking.

  Just then the distant caw of a raven rose above the song Master CF Vici was playing through the speaker. The sound was so distant I wouldn’t have noticed it if Young-Mee hadn’t turned to us with frightened eyes.

  “I believe the time has come,” said Barnabas.

  I stood and slashed a finger across my neck to signal Charlie to cut the music. In the sudden quiet the caw swelled, coming now from one, two, three black-winged birds, growing louder as if the ravens were swooping toward us with claws bared.

  Along with the cries of the birds came the telltale breezes, swishing about us with a sulfurous stink.

  “Yikes alive!” said Natalie.

  “Here they come,” said Young-Mee. “And they always smell like this.”

  “Maybe someone’s making egg salad,” said Henry.

  “With deviled eggs,” said Charlie.

  The caws grew louder, harsher, turning into screeches of misery that twisted into our ears like corkscrews. The cries shot through me with such wild abandon they shook my heart, filling me not just with their bitter, painful sound but also with a sea of emotions.

  It felt as if my best friend had moved away, as if my dog had just died, as if every color in the world had turned to ash.

  I lost myself in the sadness and closed my eyes for just a moment to stop my tears. When I opened them again the room had changed, as if my eyes had been shut for a very long while.

  THE SCRYING MIRROR

  The ghosts were still screeching and the stinky drafts were still whooshing, but the room now was lit only by the tiny flames of four candles set down on each corner of the marked square and fiv
e others held by my friends, who stood against the walls. I was alone in the middle of the square, next to my backpack, with Barnabas’s black-velvet-covered rectangle set on the floor in front of me.

  Barnabas recited something in Latin, the official language of the dead, and the others, their faces glowing eerily in the candlelight, read from loose pages as they translated his words into English.

  “Protecti sumus,” Barnabas called out from a dark corner of the room.

  “We are protected,” my friends read in unison.

  “Nos autem secure,” recited Barnabas.

  “We are secure.”

  “Spirituum quid quaeris.”

  “Spirits, tell us what you seek.”

  “Et vade in domum tuam.”

  “And then return to your world.”

  While they repeated their chants, I walked slowly up to the rectangle and lifted the black velvet from the front, letting it drop behind. Beneath the velvet was a stained and spotted mirror, what Barnabas had called a scrying mirror. Following Barnabas’s instructions, I sat on the floor in front of the glass and stared at my image flickering in the candlelight. Not much to see: mussed pink hair, beady eyes, funny-looking nose, a wrinkled sheet draped over my narrow shoulders. See what I mean about mirrors?

  As I continued to stare at my reflection, the screeching grew louder as the foul-smelling breezes whipped my hair and billowed my sheet. A strange fog rose to cover the edges of the room where Barnabas and my friends stood, while the square within which I sat became its own world, a landscape as gray and sad as the sound of the banshees’ call.

  “Now, Mistress Elizabeth,” I heard Barnabas call out as if from a great distance. “Say the words I taught you.”

  I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and then recited a swarm of Latin. In English the words meant: “Come to me, all that are bitter in the soul.”

  As soon as the words left my lips, my image in the mirror faded as something seemed to dart behind the glass. The back of the mirror was still covered with black velvet, but another thing seemed to flit behind it, and another, as if the glass was now providing a window into some other world. It wasn’t long before I saw them clearly: three women covered in black, swirling around each other like wisps of smoke while they sang their screeching songs.

  Banshees.

  Two were ancient, with spotted, wart-ridden cheeks and mouths as toothless as a baby’s. But the third was young, with a lock of bright copper hair escaping from the black cloak covering her head and eyes as green as emeralds.

  For a moment it was as if I could see them but they couldn’t see me. Then one of the old ghosts pointed at me, and all three quieted. Barnabas and my friends were now so distant I couldn’t see or hear them. All I could see was the wide gray landscape, all I could hear was the whipping of the wind.

  The youngest of the women floated closer to the mirror and leaned forward to stare right at me.

  “Cé tusa?” she said.

  She reached for the mirror, as if to touch it with her forefinger, but then her arm broke through the surface. While her skin behind the mirror’s glass was pale and freckled, the hand on my side of the mirror, reaching out from her drooping black sleeve, was nothing but bone.

  “Cé tusa?” she hissed.

  “Do you speak English?” I said. “Eeeng-liiish?”

  Her bony finger shook at me as she said, “Táimid ag lorg, Elizabeth Webster.”

  Hearing my name in the midst of her babble felt like being shocked by a spark. Had the banshees come to warn me of my own death?

  “I’m Elizabeth Webster,” I said as I leaned away from her skeletal finger. I looked around for some sort of refuge, but all I saw was that gray landscape stretching out as if to the ends of the earth.

  The young banshee kept pointing at me as she spoke. I didn’t understand her words, but they still somehow grabbed me in the gut, filling my body with a deep sadness. And then, in the middle of it all, I thought I heard a name.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Keir McGoogan, mo leanbh.”

  “Keir McGoogan?” I said. “Who is Keir McGoogan?”

  When I repeated the name, her sad face cracked into tragedy. She pulled her bony hand back to her side of the mirror and hugged her chest as if she was pulling a baby close. Was Keir McGoogan her son? Was her son going to die? Was that why she had been haunting Young-Mee? Was that why she had called my name?

  “You want me to save your baby?” I said. “You want me to save baby Keir?”

  With tears in her eyes she nodded, as if she could understand what I was saying, though the only words that were allowed to pass her lips were ancient and strange to me. At the same time, even though she was a frightening apparition from another world, I wanted to help her. In fact, I needed to help her. That might have been my curse for being a Webster, but there it was.

  “If I can help Keir,” I said, “I will.”

  “Seol trasna chugam é. Keir McGoogan. Seol mo bhuachaillín ar ais chugam.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said, “but I can see in your eyes that you understand me. I will try to find your Keir and then help him however I can. You have my promise. But in order to do that, I will need two things from you.”

  She tilted her head, puzzled.

  “First,” I said, “you need to stop haunting my friend Young-Mee. If I need you, I will find a way to summon you. But this house now is off-limits to all three of you.”

  As the two old banshees shook their heads and cried out, the young ghost lifted her arms as if Young-Mee’s house was somehow special to her. Then her hands dropped, and she nodded in agreement.

  I took hold of my backpack, opened the top zipper, and pulled out a scroll of paper along with a pen. I waved the scroll in front of the mirror.

  “Second,” I said, “if you want me and my family’s firm to help you, you need to sign a fee agreement.”

  As the two old banshees screamed in outrage behind her, the young ghost simply stared.

  “I’ll need your full name on the top and your signature at the bottom,” I said over the howls of the older banshees. “As for the fee, once we save your son, either Keir can pay us in this world or we’ll have someone collect our fee on the other side directly from you.”

  The young banshee stared for a moment longer before she, too, started to scream, a savage cry of outrage, baring her twisted teeth at me as if I was a bloodsucking demon. And, to be fair, I was a licensed barrister before the Court of Uncommon Pleas, so I could see how she could confuse me with such a thing.

  As the three banshees kept up their screeching, I sat calmly and waited. My grandfather had told me it would go like this. And as my grandfather had also predicted, it wasn’t long before Keir’s mother quieted and her face took on a sad resignation. Once again, she reached her arm through the scrying mirror.

  For a moment I thought she was reaching for my neck. But then her bony hand took hold of the pen.

  As soon as the fee agreement was filled out and signed, the banshees disappeared with a final, ear-denting shriek. The breezes died, the wide gray landscape grew quiet, and my own image appeared once again in the mirror, smiling back at me even though I didn’t think I was smiling.

  I put my hand up to feel my mouth. No smile on my face. No hand raised in the mirror.

  I waved at myself and the mirror image shook her head back at me.

  I blinked twice and then everything went blank.

  When I opened my eyes again my friends were huddled over me as if they were scribbling a football play with a stick and I was the dirt.

  “She’s awake,” said Henry.

  “Are you okay, Lizzie?” said Natalie.

  “What just happened?” I said, sitting up and looking around. I was back in the basement and the scrying mirror was gone.

  “We were hoping you knew,” said Charlie Frayden, who was gripping a pitcher of water with both hands.

  “Why are you holding that pit
cher of water?” I said.

  Charlie looked at the pitcher, then back at me. “I was thirsty?”

  “You were going to dump it on me, weren’t you.”

  “No, Elizabeth, I would never think of doing such a thing. Look,” he said, and then he began to gulp from the pitcher, a wave of water rolling down his chin. “Boy, that feels good,” he said before gulping some more. We couldn’t stop looking as he drank and spilled, spilled and drank.

  Finally I shook my head and turned to the others. “What did you guys see?”

  “We were outside the box, chanting with Barney,” said Natalie, “when everything grew foggy and then, bam, a second later the screeching ended and you were, like, sprawled on the floor.”

  “Only a second passed?” I said.

  “It was quick as a snap. Then you stayed asleep for a couple of minutes.”

  “And Charlie got a pitcher of water,” I said as I struggled to stand.

  “We had to do something,” said Doug.

  “And that would surely have been something,” I said. A wooziness swept through me, weakening my knees, before I eventually made it, with a hand on Natalie’s shoulder, to my feet.

  “Did you see the ghosts?” said Young-Mee. “Did you talk to them?”

  “I did, actually,” I said.

  “What did they say? Anything about me?”

  “Anything about me?” said Henry.

  “Why would my ghosts talk about you?” said Young-Mee.

  “I have an old friend over there,” said Henry.

  “No, they didn’t mention you, Henry,” I said. “But they agreed to stop haunting Young-Mee.”

  “They did? Really? Oh, Elizabeth, thank you so much,” she said before giving me a hug. “You don’t know how much that means to me!”

  While Young-Mee continued her hugging, I looked up and saw Barnabas staring at me. He had one eyebrow raised, asking about the fee agreement.

  I lifted a thumb.

  WEBSTER & SPAWN

  To get to the offices of Webster & Spawn from Willing Middle School West, you walk past the bus circle, keeping your head down to ignore all the kids ignoring you, and then head off to the train station, where you pick up the Willing-Pattson local to Center City Philadelphia. After arriving, you climb the station stairs, trying not to glance at the City Hall tower, where a great iron Pilgrim stares down at you with an accusing glare.