The Doorkeepers (10 page)

Nancy said, “That's some legend. You jump through the door and you're someplace else!”

Jack touched the illustration with his fingertip, tracing and retracing the outline of the door. “Yeah. Wild, isn't it?”

Nancy narrowed her eyes. “I know that look. Just a minute ago you were telling me that the old woman was senile. Just a minute ago, you were telling me that the nursery rhyme was just a coincidence.”

“A hundred to one it probably is.”

“But?”

“I don't know. I seriously don't know what to think.”

“We have a parallel world in Modoc and Klamath mythology, too. A world without white men, where we still hunt, fish and farm without interference from you palefaces.”

“Sure. But you've never actually
been
there, have you? And you don't know anybody else who's been there, either?”

“I've never been there because I don't believe in it, I mean not as an actual reality, and anyhow I like palefaces and I've never wanted to fish or farm. Apart from that, I wouldn't have the first idea how to get there.”

Josh looked down at the illustration. “But supposing you
did
know how to do it?”

“Josh … you don't seriously think this could have anything to do with Julia's disappearance, do you?”

“What? No, how could it? This is nothing but a children's rhyme.”

“But?”

“But, like you said, Ella thought that it was important. Ella thought the old woman was trying to tell me something.”

“But a parallel world? A
real
parallel world? Come on, Josh!”

“Sure, you're right, you're absolutely right. I'm tired. I'm still jet-lagged. I'm letting my imagination run away with me. It's crap.”

“But? Look at you, your whole face is saying
but!”

“But it really clicked with something I was reading a couple of weeks ago, in the
Chronicle.
They had a scientific convention down in San Diego, and they were talking about parallel worlds. About two hundred of the world's greatest eggheads. And they decided that the likelihood of a parallel world
not
existing was so remote it was almost impossible. In fact, they thought there could be an infinite number of them, because the universe is all about an infinite number of choices, an infinite number of alternatives. It simply wouldn't make sense if there
weren't
any parallel worlds.”

“That's easy to say. But where are they, these parallel worlds? And how do you get to them?”

“How the hell should I know? In 1491, they probably used to say that about America. But it's a possibility, isn't it? Julia disappeared for ten whole months, and in all of that time nobody saw her and nobody knew where she was.
Nobody.
She was supposed to be working for a company that doesn't exist, and she left an address that doesn't exist, either.”

“This is the great skeptic speaking, remember.”

“And I'm
still
skeptical. But that doesn't mean I have to close my mind off altogether, does it? OK, the Wheatstone letter could have been a practical joke. That's the most likely explanation, even if it isn't a very
good
explanation. So what are the other possibilities? Maybe Julia left London altogether. Maybe she left
England
altogether. Maybe she was still in London but she was abducted and kept tied up in a cellar someplace. But then again …”

Nancy said, “Go on.”

Josh slowly closed the book. “Maybe there
is
a parallel world, where Wheatstone Electrics really exists, and Kaiser Gardens really exists. Maybe there
are
six doors, and Julia found out how to get there, and that's where she's been.”

They left the library and walked down the steps. The rain had stopped and the streets were glistening with reflections, an upside-down world of blackness and lights beneath their feet.

Nancy said, “Even if these six doors exist, how did Julia find them?”

“Search me. They can't be easy to find, or everybody would be jumping through them.”

“You're not going to tell Detective Sergeant Paul about this, are you?”

Josh unlocked their car, and they climbed in. He switched on the windshield wipers and a parking ticket was dragged backward and forward across the windshield in front of him.

“No,” he said. “I'm not going to tell Detective Sergeant Paul. The first thing I'm going to do is find somebody who knows more about these six doors.”

Nancy kissed him on the cheek; and then on the lips. “What was that for?” he asked her.

“Because you're always trying to make out that you're such a logical, rational person when all the time you're crazy and spontaneous and you follow your instincts just like one of your dogs.”

“Woof,” he said, and shifted into reverse by mistake, colliding with the car parked behind him.

They went back to Ella's that evening, uninvited, but taking two chilled bottles of California Chardonnay with them. Josh didn't think that Ella could really help them any, but they needed somebody else to talk to, and she was the only person who would listen. He knew what DS Paul would think about them if they tried to discuss the six doors with her. His old schoolfriend Steve Moriarty had joined the SFPD and was always griping about the “X-Filers” who pestered him after every unexplained disappearance.

There was the old man whose false teeth had been found in the bottom of the toilet bowl: his wife had immediately assumed that he had been devoured by a giant anaconda that was lurking in the sewer system. Seven months later he was found alive and well and living in Santa Cruz. His wife's cooking had always made him physically sick, and the very last time, when he had lost his dentures, he had walked out and vowed that he would never go back.

Other absconders were said by their relatives to have been sucked off their sundecks by the slipstream of passing UFOs; or to have walked through mirrors, to be trapped for ever in back-to-front land. A parallel world from a Mother Goose rhyme sounded just as insane.

Ella didn't seem surprised to see them. She was wearing a black headscarf and huge silver hoop earrings. “Come on in,” she said. “I'm just cooking up some
sancoche.”

Abraxas came running over and threw himself up at Josh's knees. Ella said, “Down, Abraxas! How many times have I told you, you disobedient mutt!” Abraxas barked and kept on bungee-jumping up and down, so Josh popped his fingers and
gave him his famous obedience stare. Abraxas immediately whined and hung his head and went trotting back to his basket under the sink.

“How do you
do
that?” asked Ella, shaking her head.

“It's an unarmed combat technique. Eye-karate, they call it. They teach you how to do it in the US Marine Corps. I guess I'm the only person who thought of trying it out on dogs.”

“You were in the marines?”

Josh looked up at the ceiling. “Briefly.”

“He doesn't talk about it,” Nancy explained.

“You don't mind if I carry on cooking?” asked Ella. She went over to her stove and lifted the lid of a large orange casserole pot. A strong smell of meat and peppers and vegetables wafted into the room. Josh went over and peered at the bubbling brown stew inside.
“Sancoche,”
said Ella. “It's a traditional Trinidadian dish, with salt pork and beef, thickened up with yam and dasheen and cassava root and sweet potatoes, with coconut cream and hot chili peppers.”

“Smells pretty nourishing.”

“My grandmother taught me how to cook it. She always used to say that it brought you good luck. Whenever you cook
sancoche,
they can smell it in the spirit world, and it reminds them of the good times they had when they were alive. They gather round close, just to breathe it in.”

“You're not expecting anybody to supper, are you?” asked Nancy. “We can always come around tomorrow instead.”

“As a matter of fact, I was expecting somebody. Here, I kept the cards to show you.”

“The cards?”

Ella led them across to her dining table. Arranged on the purple velveteen cloth were twelve greasy, worn-out playing cards, with a thirteenth card in the center. Seven of the cards had been turned over so that their faces were visible. They bore tiny representations of each of the traditional playing cards in the top left-hand corner, and a large colored illustration in the center.

“These are French fortune-telling cards,
la Sybille,
from Martinique,” said Ella. “Handed down by the women in my
family from one generation to the next. Whoever uses them gives them a little of her power, so they are very powerful now, very
knowing.
You both carried such a strong aura that I laid them out yesterday, after you were gone. I wanted to find out what would happen to you.”

“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.”