Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

Ella said, “Sometimes, when you call up a spirit, they want to come back to the physical world so much that they try to materialize. That’s when you see ectoplasm. It’s usually white, or gray, in clouds, or fingers, or little wisps, like chiffon.”

“But what is that?” Nancy demanded. “That isn’t a cloud, or a finger or a little wisp.”

“Well, I trained to be a nurse once, when I first left school, and I would say that’s a lung.”

“Oh, my God. One of Josh’s lungs?”

“No, no, it couldn’t be.” She took hold of Josh’s arm and helped him back on to his feet. “If that was one of Josh’s lungs, he’d be dead. That’s a lung from the other side. A message.” She paused, and then she said, “I would guess that’s Julia’s lung.”

“What?” said Josh, dabbing his mouth. He could still taste blood, like rusty iron, and he could still taste the fatty tissue that had coated the lung and made it so slippery. “How can that be?”

“Her spirit is very strong, Josh. She knows you’re here. She knows that you’ve come to England to find her. She wants to talk to you, she wants to get in touch with you. But she’s been cut to pieces. She can’t appear to you whole.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Josh. “How could I bring up my own sister’s lung? It just isn’t physically possible!”

“It’s possible, Josh. Things like this have happened plenty of times before. There was a famous medium in Edwardian times, Marthe Beraud, who called herself Eva C. She was able to bring human hands out of the spirit world, out of her mouth. Hands with nails and bones that investigators could actually touch. And there have been dozens of others. Some mediums have produced whole people out of their mouths.”

“I don’t understand what it means. If she’s trying to tell me something, what the hell is it?”

“You mark my words. She’s trying to tell you that she won’t be at rest until you find out what happened to her. She can’t find peace until every part of her body is brought back together, and given a proper funeral.”

“I seriously think we should call Detective Sergeant Paul,” said Nancy. “This has gone way beyond playing detectives. If this lung is really Julia’s then it’s important material evidence, isn’t it?”

“You can’t tell the pigs,” Ella protested. “They’ll think you’re insane. Worse than that, they’ll probably think that you had something to do with her murder, even if you weren’t in England when it happened. I mean, what are you going to say to them? ‘My sister’s lung came out of my mouth’?”

“Jesus, Ella. This séance has created more goddamned problems than it’s solved.”

“Will you trust me?” Ella demanded.

Josh said, “I don’t know … trust you? I can’t even believe this is happening.”

“Trust me. You have to trust me, or this isn’t going to work.”

“But what are we going to do with this lung? We can’t just–”

“Trust me.”

“OK,” said Josh, raising both hands in surrender. “I trust you.”

Nancy said, “I’m not so sure about this.”

“If it doesn’t work, then you can go to the police. But you saw what I did before … raising Julia out of the air. Now I can get you closer.”

She went across to her sink and produced a plastic Sainsburys shopping bag from the cupboard underneath. She picked up the lung and eased it into the bag. It slid to the bottom and hung in a heavy curve, bleeding. She left it in the sink while she folded up the tablecloth and took it into the bathroom.

“I really think that we’re messing with things that we don’t understand,” said Nancy.

Ella returned and then emptied the lung into the sink and washed it. “All right, if you want to call the police, call the police. But you’d be making a mistake. The way this lung appeared, it shows that your sister’s remains are not in this world, they’re somewhere else. Somewhere close, but different.”

“So what you’re trying to say is, there is a parallel existence, and this is the proof?”

“Where else do you think it came from, man, this lung? You didn’t eat it for lunch, did you?”

Ella filled a small copper saucepan with water and put it on the gas to boil. Then she lifted the lung out of the sink and laid it on a scratched wooden chopping board. She used a triangular-bladed kitchen knife to take off three thin slices, which she cut up fine. Then she reached for some of her glass jars of herbs.

“Is this a spell?” asked Nancy, coming closer.

“You’re an Indian. You should know about spells.”

“Yes, yes I do. My grandfather used to make a powder which was supposed to make the wind die down.”

“And did it?”

Nancy didn’t smile. “Yes,” she admitted. “Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it did.”

When the water began to boil, Ella scraped the slices of lung into the saucepan, along with angelica, dill, bay leaves, mugwort, pimpernel, marigold, rue and rosemary. She stirred it three times, and then she left it to simmer. She took out a clean white tablecloth and struck it three times with her wooden spoon.

Josh sat in the corner, underneath the sloping ceiling, feeling as bruised as if he had fallen out of a moving car. His common sense told him that he and Nancy should walk out of here right now and call the police. But the image of Julia’s legs kicking in the air had been too electrifying; and the trauma of regurgitating Julia’s lung had left him emotionally weak as well as physically bruised. Nancy came and sat beside him and took hold of his hand; and after a while even Abraxas hopped out of his basket and came across to sniff at his knees and give him a reassuring whine.

The smell from Ella’s potion reminded him of his mother’s herb garden when he was young. She used to rub lemon parsley between her fingers so that he and Julia could sniff it.

Ella knelt on the floor close by, fondling Abraxas’ ears. “Whatever happened to Julia, it took her spirit to pieces as well as her body. There are so many spirits like that – spirits who can never understand what happened to them, or where they are. That’s why they try so hard to find the people they used to know in their previous life … and, when they do, that’s why they try so hard to take on their previous shape.

“Usually, ectoplasm doesn’t last. There’s a dried-up shred of it, in a bottle, at the London Society for Psychical Research; and some French professor managed to cut a lock of hair from an Egyptian princess who was raised up by Eva C. But when you’re gone, you’re gone, no matter how much you want to come back.”

She stood up, and took Josh’s hand. “Come here,” she said, and led him across to the sink. The remains of Julia’s lung had almost completely disappeared, except for a thin twist of white membrane, and even that appeared to be melting away.

She turned off the gas under the saucepan, and strained the contents into three small thick-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pearl-colored, with a strange shimmer to it.

“We’re not supposed to drink it, are we?” asked Josh.

“Just a sip.”

“But, Jesus, this is like cannibalism. This is like the goddamned Donner Party, boiling children’s lungs to make soup.”

“There’s no other way, Josh. Julia gave you a message and this is the only way you’re ever going to know what it was.”

The glasses were so hot that they could barely hold them. Ella lifted one up herself and said, “Drink to the sights that the body can bring. Drink to the songs that the spirit can sing. Julia Winward, talk to us. Julia Winward, guide us. Julia Winward, we need to hear your voice.”