WEBSTER & SPAWN
To get to the offices of Webster & Spawn from Willing Middle School West, you walk past the bus circle, keeping your head down to ignore all the kids ignoring you, and then head off to the train station, where you pick up the Willing-Pattson local to Center City Philadelphia. After arriving, you climb the station stairs, trying not to glance at the City Hall tower, where a great iron Pilgrim stares down at you with an accusing glare.
Though, to be fair, after all you and the Pilgrim have been through together, you can’t say you blame him.
You walk through the City Hall courtyard, the tower looming over you all the while, and glance uneasily at the passersby—the cop twirling her billy club, the old man playing the saxophone, the guy in black with an eye patch and cane who looks like he could have come right off the tower himself—before you head for a boarded-up gray wreck of a building just north of Chestnut Street. Go around the back and slip through a gash in the chain link fence, trying not to let your coat catch on a sharp piece of wire. You’ll see a knob poking out beneath the boards nailed over the rear doorway. Open the door and duck under the boards.
When the door slams shut, you need to use the flashlight on your phone as you climb the stairwell to the fourth floor, where the door is kept open just a sliver with a wedge of wood. Step through the doorway into the bright green hallway. The offices on either side are locked and the rooms are empty, but at the end of the hallway, with light leaking through its frosted-glass window, is a door.
Or, I should say, the door.
Think of a world where right side up is upside down. Think of a playground for the weird and the fabulous, where ghosts mingle with the living, where demon plots are foiled by lawyers in wigs and robes, and where long-buried judges with red-marble eyes hand out sentences like sandwiches. Think of everything you’re certain about in this life and then throw it out the dusty window, because the offices of Webster & Spawn, Attorneys for the Damned, are not of this world or the next, but of someplace in between, with a single goal for the living, the dead, and the undead alike: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE UNCOMMON LAW.
“There you are, dearie,” said Avis to me from behind the front desk.
This was a few days after my encounter with the banshees. Avis squinted at me through narrow glasses as she used her long red nails to hunt and peck, peck and hunt on the keyboard of her old black typewriter. The typewriter was so old it didn’t have a power cord. How did they even do that?
“We’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “For you!”
“What did I do this time?” I said. Another thing about the offices of Webster & Spawn: everything I do there is wrong.
“Oh, nothing this time, dearie, though there are files to be filed and floors to be swept. But your grandfather needs to speak to you right away.”
“I’ll get on it.”
“Right away.”
“Yes, Avis. Right away.”
The chairs beside Avis’s desk were half filled with clients waiting to see my father or grandfather about their cases. There was a short, thin man wearing a hat and round glasses, almost like goggles, with a small animal crate resting on his lap. There was Sandy, who was often waiting in the office and had become something of a friend. She had tried to use a witch to give her blond hair a lovely sheen and was now hairy as a Sasquatch. And then—so cute—there was a little girl in a pink dress sitting alone on a chair, her shiny red shoes swinging beneath her.
Beyond them all, in his usual corner of the room, Barnabas sat on what looked almost like a lifeguard’s chair, working on a document at his high desk. He raised an eyebrow, letting me know he wanted to have a word.
I smiled at Sandy as I made my way through the rows of chairs. Snuffing and whimpers came from the carrier on the lap of the man with goggle glasses.
“Decidedly not,” he said, as if I had just insulted him. “It’s a gremlin.”
“Ah,” I said.
“But a friendly gremlin.” A low growl came from the crate, along with a glowing red light. “Would you like to pet her, my dear?”
“I’ll pass.”
“She’s had her shots,” said the man.
“That makes one of us.”
I tried to smile nicely as I moved on. When I reached the toddler, I knelt before her. “Hey, nice shoes. Is your mommy or daddy here?”
“They would be,” she said with the hoarse voice of an old lady who’d smoked two packs of cigarettes every day since she was twelve, “if they hadn’t been dead for twenty years. The name’s Mildred. You got a match, honey? I’m dying for a cig.”
I turned to look at Sandy, who shrugged. “Mildred went to the same witch,” she said.
“Somebody should sue.”
“Exactly!” said Sandy.
“I’m sorry, Mildred,” I said, “but the sign on Avis’s desk says no smoking is allowed in the office.”
“Or combusting,” said Sandy helpfully.
“What kind of joint is this, anyway?” said Mildred.
I couldn’t help but laugh. It hadn’t been long since I’d discovered my hidden history and the very peculiar office of the family firm, but somehow I was getting used to it all. Did that make me a bit peculiar, too? I was trying to figure it out when a yell came from my grandfather’s office.
“Is she here yet, Avis? Has she come?”
“She’s here,” called back Avis. “She’s come.”
“Well, send her in,” called back my grandfather. “What are you waiting for?”
I stood and raised a hand at Avis’s exasperated expression before I headed straight over to Barnabas. “Any news on our banshee case?”
“Some,” said Barnabas, “but it is quite puzzling. I had the county clerk check the records for a Keir McGoogan. One such person, a boy by that name, who resided at your friend Young-Mee’s address, died in 1918 of influenza.”
“The flu? Who dies of the flu?”
“Oh, it was a worldwide pandemic that year, Mistress Elizabeth, worse than what we just went through. Millions died. They called it the Spanish flu. I remember it well, another era of masks and quarantine. I volunteered my services in the wards, along with others far braver than me for obvious reasons, and I saw firsthand the toll of the sickness.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It was, yes. Along with the war in Europe and the crackdown on those protesting the slaughter, it was a dark time in the city.”
“But if that Keir McGoogan is our Keir McGoogan, why would his mother have turned banshee to contact me to try to save her son, who had already died?”
“It is a puzzle, as I said. But we did find one interesting tidbit that makes us—”
“Avis, you pickle-headed shrike!” shouted my grandfather from his office. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”
“She’s coming, she’s coming,” said Avis.
“You had better go to your grandfather, Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas, “before Avis flies off the handle and we’re picking feathers out of the air.”