Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

“You’re determined to make me into a believer, aren’t you?” said Josh.

Ella gave a thick chuckle. “You don’t have to believe if you don’t want to. You may not believe in tomorrow, but it’s coming all the same.”

She picked up the center card and showed it to them. It was the three of hearts, illustrated with a woman in a brown silk dress sitting on a chair. “That’s me, la consultante, the person who’s asking the questions. But here, this is also me, the queen of clubs, une amie sincère. This means that I’m your friend and that I’m going to help you in whatever is going to happen to you.”

Josh picked up the next card, on which a man and a woman were being offered a chair. “La visite,” he said. “This told you that somebody was coming. But how did you know it was going to be us?”

“Look in the corner of the card. The jack of hearts. A man called Jack looking for something close to his heart. It had to be you.”

“Well, maybe it is. My mother always calls me Jack. So what do these other cards mean?”

“Here,” she said, and showed him a card with a woman looking startled as a man in a tailcoat and a Napoleonic hat put a letter on the table in front of her. “Révélations importante, important revelations. You’re going to find out something tonight that will change your whole life.”

“I see … and what about this fat guy with the pipe, and the fellow behind him carrying all that luggage on his back?”

“Voyage, the ten of diamonds. What you learn tonight will send you on a journey to a very different place, where you have never been before.”

“And do the cards say what’s going to happen when I get to this different place?”

“You will meet two people. One of them is your enemy … here, this one.” She showed him a card with a man swathed in a cape, waiting around a corner with a club in his hand, while an unsuspecting passer-by walked toward him. “This one, the king of clubs, this is your protector, whoever that is. But you have to watch out for this one, pièges.” This card showed a man sitting in a field snaring songbirds. “This means that you could walk into a trap.”

Josh picked up the last card. “You don’t have to tell me what this one means.” It depicted a grinning skeleton in a black robe, carrying an hourglass. The nine of spades, mort.

Ella plucked it away from him and tucked it back into the pack. “The nine of spades doesn’t always mean death.”

“Oh, yeah? What else does it mean? I’m going to buy an eggtimer?”

“It can signify mourning. The cards have probably sensed that you’re grieving for your sister. Or it can mean that somebody very close to you will try to deceive you.”

“On the whole, though, not a great card?”

Ella gave him a long, steady look. “You don’t believe in it, so don’t let it worry you.”

Nancy said, “This card, révélations … what are we going to find out tonight that’s going to change our whole lives?”

“You came back tonight because you wanted to ask me something. That’s what the cards are telling me. You wanted to ask me about locks and keys and doors and getting through doors.”

“How did you know that? There’s nothing like that in any of these cards.”

Ella said, “When I turned up the revelations card, all the keys in my key box started to jump.”

“I don’t understand.”

She went over to the bookshelf and brought down a battered black tin box. She shook it hard, and then put it down on the table. “This was something else I learned from my grandma. Never throw a key away. Every time you find a key, keep it. You never know when you’ll come across a clock you need to wind up or door that you badly need to open.”

Nancy pulled a stool across and sat down next to the table. In the muted light from Ella’s lamps, she looked even more Modoc than usual, her hair drawn back into a blue and white beaded headband, her eyes slightly hooded, her cheekbones distinct. She was wearing jeans and fringed suede boots, and a necklace of silver medallions and colored beads. That necklace carried its own magic: it was said to have belonged to the Modoc shaman Curley-Headed Doctor.

Nancy’s medallions jingled as she sat down; and there was an answering rattle from the metal box. Josh looked at Ella cautiously.

“This has only happened once before,” she said. “And that was when I met a man whose brother was in prison, and he desperately wanted to get him out.”

Nancy’s medallions shivered again, almost excitedly; and the box rattled again, much more furiously this time. Abraxas lifted his nose over the edge of his basket but he didn’t venture out.

“Are you ready for this?” asked Ella.

“I don’t know if I’m ready or not. It depends what it is.”

“It’s the power of artefacts, that’s what it is. Like pots and pans. Like keys. On its own, metal’s just metal, isn’t it? But when we make it into a shape, we teach it something, don’t we? In a very spiritual way, the metal learns what we want it to do. The pot understands that it was made for cooking. The key understands that it was made for opening doors. That’s why these keys are making such a noise, Josh. They know that you need them.”

She unfastened the catch. From inside the box came a clicking, stirring sound, as if a collection of live crabs were trying to climb out. She hesitated for a moment, and then she threw back the lid. In a clattering rush, twenty or thirty keys hurtled out and stuck to Josh’s right hand as if it were a magnet. He shouted out, “Jesus!” but it was out of surprise, not pain. He lifted up his hand and it was bristling with keys of all sizes and shapes – clock keys, padlock keys, trunk keys, music-box keys and some keys that were so old and blackened that it was impossible to tell what they might ever have opened.

Josh turned his hand this way and that, staring at the keys in disbelief. He shook it two or three times, and two or three of the keys dropped off onto the table, but they immediately jumped back onto his hand again. Ella grinned and shook her head in sheer pleasure.

“You must want those doors opened so bad,” she said. “Even that fellow who wanted his brother out of prison, the keys didn’t stick to him like that.”

Abraxas barked once, but when Josh turned to look at him, he ducked his head below the edge of his basket. Josh said, “This is static electricity, right? This is a trick? Like Uri Geller or something?”

“Perhaps it is. Perhaps Julia’s disappearance was a trick. We won’t know, will we, unless we find out?”

“And how do you suggest we do that?”

“We do what you really came here for. We ask the one person who knows the truth.”

Nancy whispered, “You mean Julia, don’t you?”

Ella shrugged.

“You want to hold a séance, is that it?” Josh asked her, sharply.

“ Moi? Oh, no. You’re the one who wants to hold a séance. You came here to see me tonight because you need so badly to find out what happened to Julia and you didn’t know where else to turn. Why don’t you admit how overwhelming your need is? Why don’t you admit that you’re willing to believe in anything and everything? The cards told me you were coming, the keys told me why. You might as well carry a placard.”

Josh took a breath. “We went to the library today and found out a whole lot more about the six doors. All kinds of different theories about what they were.”

“And?”

“There was one theory that the doors led through to a parallel world,” said Nancy. “A kind of alternative existence, like the Happy Hunting Ground.”