Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

“I don’t know. You should see Abraxas whenever I hold a séance. He goes crazy, chasing around the room and barking. It’s the spirits, you know. I’m sure that Abraxas can actually see them.”

“You’re a medium?” asked Nancy.

“Sort of. I do a bit of fortune-telling and a bit of your spiritual conversation. I learned it from my aunt. She came from Martinique and she was heavily into voodoo and black magic and all that stuff. She taught me how to tell fortunes and how to raise up spirits so that they can talk to their loved ones that they left behind. Well, I make a little pin money doing it. It helps to pay the rent.”

Josh lifted both hands. “Whoa, don’t look at me. I’m the skeptic around here. I believe that dogs can hear things and smell things that are way beyond human capabilities. But spirits? I don’t think so.”

“What about that old woman at the hospital?” Nancy challenged him.

“That wasn’t anything supernatural. She could sense what I was thinking about, that’s all. She tuned in to my anxiety.”

Nancy explained to Ella what had happened at St Thomas’s. “Ah!” said Ella. “She didn’t just read your mind, though. She tried to tell you something.”

“She told me a Mother Goose rhyme, that’s all I know.”

“But that’s the way these things work. The spirits always speak in a kind of code, right. They tell you things in messages that you can’t immediately understand. Snatches you pick up from the radio. Or a song that you only half-hear. How many times have you come across an unusual word, right, or maybe a reference to something strange, and after that you hear it again and again? That’s the spirit world, talking to you, guiding you, warning you, when it’s necessary, and it’s so much closer than you think. The spirit world is totally mixed up with ours. You can’t say where one world ends and the other begins. Sometimes you feel as if somebody’s touched you. That’s not a human hand, that’s a spirit.”

Josh said, “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe in it. I believe in the wind, and I believe in radio waves. They’re invisible, too, but they’re scientifically measurable.”

“But that old woman gave you a message. Six doors they stand in London Town. Six doors they stand in London, too. She was trying to tell you something, put you on the right track.”

“Well, yes. Maybe she was – although I still can’t be persuaded that there was anything supernatural about it. I’m going to check it out. I’m going to find out what that rhyme actually means. Just like I’m going to go to the Great West Road and find the Wheatstone Electrics Company. And I’m going to find Kaiser Gardens, too, and the mysterious Mrs Marguerite Marmion. I don’t believe that any of this has anything to do with spirits. Julia’s disappearance was pretty damned strange, I admit. But there’s a totally rational and scientific explanation for it.”

“Which is what, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. But one day, somebody’s going to discover what it is, one day, and then all you mediums are going to have to hang up your crystal balls.”

Ella poured them all another cup of tea. She was silent for a while, but then she said, “May I ask you something? If you do all of that, and you still can’t find out where Julia went, will you come back here, and ask me to try?”

“So what could you do that Nancy and I can’t do?”

“I’m very sensitive, Josh,” she said, and tapped her forehead just like the old woman in the hospital had done. “If you can bring me a clue – a name, a place, even a piece of clothing – I’ll do whatever I can to find out what happened to Julia. If I succeed, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in spirits or not, does it? And if I fail, well, there won’t be any mischief done, will there?”

She paused, and held up her hands in front of her face, so that only her shining brown eyes looked out. “I was very fond of Daisy. She was your sister but she was also my friend. I don’t like to think that any part of her life was lost.”

She slowly took her hands away, but she kept staring at Josh as if she could see right inside his head. Abraxas, who was standing close beside Josh’s thigh, suddenly shivered; and even Josh felt as if something cold had passed through the room. He looked at Nancy, and by the expression on her face he could tell that she had experienced it, too.

Ella said, “You felt that? You know what that was?”

Josh shook his head.

“That was your fortune. A cold wind, blowing through your life. A cold wind, coming tomorrow maybe; or maybe the day after.”

She sipped her tea, still without taking her eyes off Josh. “Better to wrap up warm against it. That’s my advice.”

Seven

Detective Sergeant Paul rang them at seven thirty the next morning. The response to the television appeal had been disappointing, she said. Only seventy-eight people had called in, saying that they had seen Julia sometime during the past ten months, and already the police had weeded out sixty-two of those as definite cases of mistaken identity.

“But it’s early days yet. We’re putting a lot of faith in Crimewatch.”

After Josh had put down the phone, Nancy said, “Why didn’t you tell her about Ella, and the Wheatstone letter and everything?”

Josh climbed out of bed. “I don’t know. I don’t think any of it amounts to material evidence, do you? I’m beginning to think that Ella’s friend was probably right. It was just a practical joke.”

“I can read you like a book, Josh Winward. You want to investigate Julia’s disappearance yourself, don’t you? I mean, you’re so well qualified. You’ve served three and a half weeks in the military police and watched every single episode of Columbo.”

Josh said, “OK. I do want to investigate it. But it needs imagination. It needs an alternative point of view. If I give it to the cops, they won’t see the wood for the trees.”

“But supposing you investigate it, and don’t find out anything at all?”

“Then, fine. I’ll hand it over to Detective Sergeant Paul. But not just yet.”

Nancy knelt up on the edge of the bed and put her arms around him and ruffled his hair. “OK … I guess you need to keep busy, to stop you from grieving.”

“It’s that Wheatstone Electrics that’s bothering me. The letter looked so bona fide, and yet it couldn’t have been. And there’s another thing. Julia was supposed to be starting work as a secretary on the Great West Road, yet her new employer wanted to meet her at a quarter after eight in the morning in the middle of town. I looked up Star Yard in the A-Z and it’s miles away from Brentford. It’s even miles away from here, if she lived around here. Why should he want to meet her someplace so goddamned inconvenient?”

“I don’t know. But let’s have some breakfast, shall we? And then we’ll go find out.”

That morning Josh had his first encounter with a traditional English breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, grilled tomatoes and black pudding.

“Black pudding?” he asked the waitress at the servery. “What’s this black pudding?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t eat it.”

“Tell me, I can take it. I’ve eaten hot dogs.”

She told him and he left it on the side of his plate until the very last. Then he poked it with his fork and tried a tiny taste of it.

“It’s good,” he said, after a long and cautious chew. “You want to try some?”

Nancy shuddered. “I wouldn’t put that near my lips if I was dying of starvation.”

“You used to pick your knees and eat your scabs when you were a kid. What’s the difference? This is just a gourmet scab.”