Graham Masterton - The Doorkeepers

“Where’s Nancy, you bastard?”

“Oh, she’ll be here in a minute, don’t you fret about that. In fact – look – here she comes now.”

Two doors at the rear of the theater opened up, and a high surgical trolley was wheeled in by two hospital orderlies. A figure lay on it, draped in a white sheet, one arm dangling. As it was wheeled nearer, Josh saw that it was Nancy, very pale, her hair tied back and covered by a white surgical cap. She looked like Saint Joan, on her way to be martyred.

Josh tried to step forward, but one of the Hooded Men immediately grasped his arm with a gloved hand that felt like a bag full of crushed bones. “Stay here and observe,” the Hooded Man breathed. “Your turn will come soon enough.”

Now the two surgeons entered the theater, Mr Leggett and Mr Crane, both of them dressed in white surgical robes. There was a spattering of applause, but they stayed in the background.

One of the Hooded Men raised his arm and called out, “Pray silence for Master Gordon Spire!”

The theater became suddenly hushed. A thin man in Puritan costume descended from his place on the tiers, and stalked stiff-legged into the center of the theater. He had a sharp, ratlike face, with a hairy wart next to his nose, and when he took off his hat he revealed a mane of steel-gray hair, curled up at the back.

“What we have come here to do today is historical,” he said, in a sharp, penetrating voice. “We have come here to judge, yes. We have come here to punish, yes. We have come here to uphold the law. But we have also come here to perpetuate the consciousness that gives us rule and dominance over every manifestation of our Lord’s creation.

“This man that stands before you, Joshua Winward, stands accused of heresy, conspiracy, subversion and murder. We have deliberated and found him guilty. This woman who lies here, Nancy Andersen, is similarly accused of heresy, conspiracy, subversion of the Commonwealth, and deception. We have deliberated, and we have found her guilty as charged.”

“On what evidence?” Josh shouted out. “Where are your witnesses? Where is your proof? You didn’t even give us a chance to speak in our defense!”

The Hooded Man gripped his upper arm even tighter. “Quiet,” he insisted. “This is a court of law.”

“This isn’t any goddamned court of law! Where’s our defense? Where’s the goddamned jury? This is a total travesty, and you know it!”

“Quiet” ordered the Hooded Man, and crushed his arm harder.

Now Mr Leggett stepped forward. He paused for a moment, for effect, and then he said, “What you will witness here today will be a miracle of modern surgery. Out of justice, comes perpetual life. This woman who lies here on this trolley is convicted of mortal offenses against the Commonwealth. But now she will have the opportunity to give the greatest contribution possible to its welfare and its survival.”

“What’s he talking about?” Josh wanted to know. “What the hell’s he talking about?”

“Shh,” said Frank Mordant, lifting one finger to his lips.

Mr Leggett said, “The six doors which we all have sworn to protect for all eternity were created by one woman. Out of this one woman’s mind, out of this one woman’s consciousness – a flame that has been kept alight for two thousand years.

“She has outlived kings and emperors, uprisings and rebellions, invasions and conquests. She has survived so long because of the pharmacological skills of the Druids, and by mystical influences which we still cannot fully understand, even today, for all of our scientific advances. For century after century, she has been cared for by the finest doctors and surgeons and herbalists – still conscious today, where she is sustained by the latest in surgical techniques.

“This, gentlemen, will guarantee her survival through this new millennium, and into the next, and probably for ever. The six doors will never close!”

Josh tried to pull himself free, but another Hooded Man grasped his other arm, and all he could do was kick and twist.

Mr Leggett turned to Mr Crane, and said, “Shall we begin?” Then he looked around at the audience in the theater and shouted out, “What you are about to see now is a miracle! Praise the Lord!”

The doors at the back of the theater opened again, and a paler blue light suffused the auditorium.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr Leggett, his voice cracking with emotion. “I give you the queen of all queens. I give you Boudicca.”

Six hospital orderlies slowly pushed a black-draped carriage in to the center of the operating theater. It looked like a moving tent, because it was completely covered, so that only the lower half of its wheels were visible.

After the tent came a stainless-steel trolley, laid out with dozens of surgical instruments – saws, clips, scalpels, and some extraordinary devices which Josh had never seen before, and whose purpose he couldn’t even begin to guess.

The theater fell completely silent as one of the orderlies pushed Nancy closer to the tent-like affair. Then, like a waiter whipping off a tablecloth, he removed the sheet that covered her. Josh struggled again, but the Hooded Men were holding him far too tight for him to break free. Nancy was completely naked, her pale skin shining blue in the light from the clerestory windows. The orderly secured her wrists and ankles with leather straps, and tightened them.

Now – on a signal from Mr Leggett – another orderly tugged a string at the side of the black tent. It resisted for a moment, but then it abruptly dropped to the floor. Josh looked at what was underneath, and felt a prickling sensation of utter horror, like centipedes running up his back.

The carriage was an elaborate construction of slings and pulleys and supports. Suspended on all of these slings were layer upon layer of coarse dried-looking fabric, the color of rotten linen. Out of these layers hung scores of gnarled sticks, hundreds of them, like the legs of long-dead spiders crushed between the pages of an ancient book.

At first, Josh couldn’t understand what he was looking at, but gradually he realized that the layers of fabric formed a pattern, like a huge dead chrysanthemum. Toward the center of the chrysanthemum, the layers appeared to be thicker, and paler, and the sticks much less gnarled. Josh peered at them more intently, and then he saw that they weren’t sticks at all, but human arms, their skin dried out, their flesh desiccated. Between them, there was a distorted, twisted torso, thick with ribbons of scar tissue, and another torso attached to it, at an angle, and a third torso beneath them.

This enormous flower was nothing less than the mummified bodies of literally hundreds of people, all sewn together to form a single, immense being. And most terrifying of all was the face that lay in the very center of it. A woman’s face, as white as if she had been powdered with flour, her red-rimmed eyes staring out of this concatenation of arms and legs and bodies as if she were right on the point of screaming. Yet the minutes passed, and she didn’t scream.

She blinked, and that frightened Josh even more, because that meant that she was alive. She was actually alive, in the middle of all of these layers of atrophied skin and time-brittled bone.

There was no smell of decay, only a haunting mustiness. As each new organ was attached to her body, she must have drained it of all of its blood and all of its mucus, until it became nothing more than human paper. So this is why Julia had been emptied; and why all of the girls that Frank Mordant had murdered before her had been selectively dismembered. Their mutilations had depended entirely on this creature’s particular needs. New heart, new lungs, new stomach – whichever had been drained of all of its nourishment, and started to fail her.