[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

by Paul Magrs

  ‘This castle isn’t your ancestral home?’

  ‘This?’ he gives a bleak laugh. ‘No, that’s just my pretension. My silly, jumped-up, godawful pretentiousness. I am a very shallow, vain and venal fellow, Brenda. And you… it’s you, somehow… you’ve reminded me… of what is important. What I need to remember. And what I have left behind. My childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth. Only she is left alive of all those people I knew then. She writes every month, begging me to return and I have been caught up for too long in my work to take any notice of her at all…’

  ‘Your w-work..?’

  He nods and waves a dismissive hand. ‘Foolish work. Dirty work. Hubristic nonsense that flies in the face of God and all mankind. I have been living in a dream for too long… I have been living in a nightmare. But thanks to you, Brenda… I have been made to remember more vital things. I have remembered what it is like… to be alive. To know love.’

  I gasp at this. I have taught him all this? Just by chatting nicely with him? Just by lending a friendly ear?

  I watch him as he whirls about, giving instructions to his servants about the horses, his carriage, his belongings. I even laugh at his excitement. It’s infectious.

  ‘Brenda,’ he asks me, just before he leaves. ‘Will you remain here in my castle while I’m away? Will you stay and hold the fort for the weeks while I travel home? I intend to find my darling Elizabeth and bring her back here as soon as I can. I want you to be here when I return with her. So you can meet her. So that, perhaps, you can be here at our wedding?’

  He is almost shy and boyish, as if he is making a very onerous request.

  ‘Of course, I tell him,’ and once again I have pushed the pressing concerns about my real life to the back of my mind. ‘Of course I will, Victor.’

  He salutes me and grins. ‘You know, you really do remind me of my beloved mother,’ he tells me, just before he leaps into his carriage and the horses are stamping and steaming in the frozen air. ‘It’s so strange. It is almost as if you are an apparition. You have come to make my life better.’

  I bow my head as he kisses me. ‘I am so pleased to hear that,’ I tell him. ‘That’s so good to hear.’

  Then he is gone.

  And I am left alone in his place.

  I find myself mistress of Castle Frankenstein.

  It isn’t for very long, though.

  It’s me who spoils things. Me and my infernal curiosity, of course.

  I’ve been told several times that I may wander freely anywhere in the castle. But where I must not venture is into my host’s private chambers. The butler, the housekeeper, the maids: they’ve all told me this several times since I arrived in this place.

  Now I feel that my relationship with Victor has changed. We are on first name terms. He has entrusted his home to my stewardship until he returns with his intended bride. He wants my approval.

  Why shouldn’t I wander where I will?

  And so this is what I do, very late at night, when I find I can’t sleep.

  Secretly, I love the idea of being mistress of such a grand and mysterious place. I flit from landing to landing, always discovering new nooks and hidey holes. I even feel like I could be at home, here.

  Some times I hear voices. Disembodied cries and moans. They hail from the attic, or from the cellars. The servants assure me they are nothing. Echoes and memories. My ears playing tricks. The wild eastern wind playing fast and loose round the turrets and the ancient tiles. I am to pay these worryingly animalistic cries no heed.

  But still I wander through the darkest hours before dawn, wearing my polyester nightdress, carrying a candle like Wee Willy Winky. I try to block out the noises of the wind and the cries that I still feel sure come from within these walls…

  And so it is that I, almost inadvertently, find myself straying into a part of the castle I don’t recognise. The wall-hangings are unfamiliar. The twists and turns are new to me. And that queer aroma I noticed upon arriving here is much stronger. A reek of something rotting overlaid with that vinegary smell.

  At first I don’t understand that I’ve found myself in the forbidden chambers. And then it is too late. I decide that now I’m here I might as well have a good poke around.

  Victor’s rooms are terribly messy. Even dirty. The remains of meals and worn clothes lay strewn about his apartments, along with papers and opened books. Ink is splashed liberally across his pages of notes, spilled in his haste to scribble things down in his indecipherable hand. Strange, for one so fastidious – even dandyish – in his dress, to live like such a pig in private.

  Then I come across a door that needs a hefty shove.

  And within a find a roomful of treasure.

  Ladies’ clothes. Two whole wardrobes filled with sumptuous gowns and dresses. A cupboard stiff with old-fashioned wigs, suitable for every occasion. There’s a cabinet teeming with paints and powders and a dressing table with a mirror as tall as I am.

  For a while I am bewildered. Is Victor a dresser-up, I wonder? Is he one of those boys who likes to go about as a lady?

  With greedy fingers and envious eyes I go through all the cupboards and drawers. What a lucky lady – or lady-boy – to have all this stuff belonging to them. And I thought I had a lot of make-up!

  It hits me then. His mother. These are things belonging to his mother. Did she live here, at one time, then? Victor never mentioned her living here. He just said he left his family far away. He left them in the mountains and now they are all dead. He never said anything about hoarding all of these ladies’ things for his mother.

  All of the clothes are pristine, I realise. All the cosmetics and the wigs – everything here is new and never been used. It’s as if everything is still waiting for the mother that never came here to visit. It is like standing in an empty tomb…

  My heart goes out to him. The poor boy. No wonder he’s been glad of my attention these past few nights. He’s nervy and sweet. He needs mothering, of course he does.

  I am so nosey. And I love all these fripperies and necklaces and jewels. I should realise that this is heading towards disaster, but daft old Brenda can’t help herself, can she?

  I open every single cupboard there is.

  Even the last one.

  It’s up a little ladder and it’s hidden by a stiff, brocaded curtain. My stomach does a little flip of alarm, warning me even as I snap the flimsy padlock between my fingers.

  And I open the cupboard and gasp at the sharp scent of vinegar. Formaldehyde, rather.

  I hold aloft my guttering candle and I’m almost gagging.

  The flame is reflected off smooth, rounded glass. It’s a jar as big as my head I’m looking at.

  At first I think it’s my own pale reflection I can see.

  But the eyes in this woman’s face are closed. Her lashes are long. Her mouth is a perfect cupid’s bow, pursed as if she’s dreaming an old and complicated dream.

  I stare for a few long moments.

  It’s a woman’s head in a jar of soupy liquid.

  It’s his mother’s head.

  And she looks exactly like me.

  I reel backwards on the stepladder and lose my footing and the candleholder in the same instant. I glimpse a flashing arc of fire and, seconds later, feel a nasty bump on the back of my head.

  But I find that I’m not lying on the plush carpet of the dressing room of Victor’s mother.

  I’m lying on something much harder and unforgiving… and cold.

  And right now I’m toggled up in my heaviest coat and scarf and I’m lying flat out on the floor of the funicular .

  I’m back home!

  And the carriage is in motion. The whole machine lurches and descends and my heart and lights and offal go with it. I feel sick to the pit of my stomach. Sick with dread and relief all at the same time. Home! Home again at last! And I must only have been away for a matter of hours, or even minutes, perhaps. The fog is still cloying at the windows. It’s no brighter out there in Sandsend.
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  More alarming, there’s no sign of Effie. Is she still on the wires as the carriage clunks its way down the cliff face once more?

  I sit up and drag myself onto the nearest seat.

  I sneeze away the last vestiges of that horrible smell of pickled eggs. Did I really see what I saw? Victor’s mother’s severed head looking back at me? Looking back through the ages through these very same eyeballs?

  It was all a fever dream, I tell myself. I was all a lot of nonsense. I’m having a nervous breakdown, or something similar. Or I’ve fallen under the spell of a wicked enchanter. That flaming duck! I gasp out loud. Yes! The magic duck is evil, quite definitely. And he led me to dream about terrible and impossible things… Yes! That’s what happened here tonight…!

  There’s no sign of him anyhow, and I’m relieved. I’m on my feet and ready to dive out of the carriage door when it sets down – rather heavily – at the bottom of the track.

  The door flies open and Effie is standing there, wreathed in luminous fog!

  She’s battered and exhausted and she’s lost her hat and her face is smeared with oil and dirt – but she’s alive!

  She holds out her arms and we embrace with relief.

  ‘I did it!’ she cries. ‘I worked the controls by myself! Aren’t I marvellous?’

  I hug her so hard it’s like her skinny little body is going to snap. It seems like weeks since I last saw this irritating old woman. ‘Effie, you’ve no idea how marvellous you are!’

  It was the jolting of the carriage – knocking me to the floor – that brought me rudely out of my horrible fantasy. I know it now.

  But there’s no time to explain this to Effie now. We’ve a more terrible truth on our hands to deal with.

  She shows me what’s what in the funicular control room.

  ‘I had to work the controls myself,’ she says, gesturing to the far end of this room filled with complicated switches and levers and dials.

  The man who ran the funicular has skedaddled.

  She’s shivering. She’s about to have a funny turn. ‘He was gone when I came in here. I shinned all the way up to the top and then I ran down the steps and I found the place abandoned.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I tell her.

  We sneak away into the night, and find ourselves a taxi. We ask the driver to get us back to Whitby, to Harbour Street toot de sweet. And we tip him heavily to keep his trap shut. He never saw two old ladies, one oily and bloody, the other still ravaged by nightmares about castles and mothers and sons.

  And soon we are both back in our own beds.

  The next day I really want a quiet time of it.

  But I get an urge, first thing in the morning, to build a bonfire in my back yard.

  I notice Effie watching me from her back window, alarmed by my manic energy and determination.

  I’m piling up a lot of old rubbish that needs torching anyway. Some useless furniture, old papers, other bits and bobs I’m not wanting. But also, onto the heap goes everything – and I mean, absolutely everything – that I have ever bought from SAVE SAVE SAVE. Even the Magic Toilet Duck and the strange bottle of aromatic oil. Even the three polyester nighties in three different colours. All of it goes on, and it all burns quite satisfyingly when I put a match to it.

  There’s a bit of an explosion at one point, which makes a lot of noise and scorches my eyebrows and brings Effie running out of her back door.

  ‘Whatever are you up to, ducky?’ she shouts, over the roar of the flames, which for some reason are bright green. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I tell her. ‘Cup of tea?’

  She suddenly looks thirsty. I’m parched, too. ‘Do you have any of that Romanian vodka left?’

  It’s the one thing from the cheap shop I haven’t bunged on the bonfire yet. I know Effie’s developed quite a taste for it.

  ‘Dare we have some this early in the day, do you think..?’

  I nod firmly. ‘If you wish, Effie. I reckon we deserve it, don’t you?’

  The Woolworth Horror

  The dust settles gradually.

  It takes a few days to get my breath back after all that. I try not to think about it too much and, when Effie comes round for her supper on Friday night, we don’t talk a great deal about the debacle on the so-called haunted funicular .

  I shrug, and bend to take my casserole out of the oven. I shoot her a glance through the steam, meaning ‘let’s not talk about it now.’ And now, as we tuck into the beef stew and dumplings, and tear into the crusty loaf, Effie’s moved determinedly onto the next thing. She’s got that look in her eye again. Zeal, is what it is.

  ‘Not another poltergeist,’ I break in, sounding dismayed as I bisect a rather claggy dumpling.

  ‘No no no,’ she says impatiently. ‘Nothing so mundane as that. This is something of quite a different order, Brenda. Something much more peculiar and deadly.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I say, meaning to be ironic – which is wasted on my fellow investigator.

  But still, as she starts to burble on, I find I don’t mind so much, after all. Anything to take my mind off the curious astral journey I made last week to another time and another place. Though I wrote about all those appalling events in my secret journal, I haven’t gone back and reread those pages. I’ve tried not to think about any of those occurrences at all. They were far too shocking and unsettling. I’m happy to be taken out of myself by whatever it is Effie is suggesting.

  ‘Woolworths,’ she says.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Woollies. In the town. Right on the harbour.’

  ‘Yes, it’s been shut for years. Ever since the whole company went bust…’ I sigh a little then, thinking of how I used to like nothing more than getting a quarter or sometimes even a full half pound of fancy sweets from their Pick-n-Mix. Shovelling all the sweeties into a paper bag and queuing to get them weighed.

  Effie’s shaking her head. ‘No, if you think back, we had a pretty unusual Woollies here in Whitby. Every single branch in the country closed down. Every single branch in the world closed down. But our Woollies here in Whitby refused to die, remember? It stayed open for a full year after it was meant to have gone.’ She gives me a significant look and in the candlelight it’s quite ferocious. ‘It was like a Zombie Woolworths.’

  Actually, she’s right. It was a most peculiar thing. The staff members were bewildered, but grateful to keep their jobs. But the sweeties gradually became rather tasteless, and the toys became dismal and phantasmal on the shelves. If you bought a record or a cassette tape it played ever so quietly, even with your stereo turned right up loud. Eventually, everything they had in stock simply faded away. After a year, there was nothing left and the doors were locked up for the last time.

  ‘And nothing has ever taken over those premises,’ says Effie. ‘Not even one of your precious cheapy Pound Shops, Brenda. The windows have stayed dark. Darker than dark. If you peer in, right up close, there is simply nothing to be seen inside the old Woolworths. It’s like the whole of the inside has simply ceased to exist…’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I say. ‘How could that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’ve heard some very alarming things about it recently. Noises heard from within, late at night. Screams and so on, from deep within the building. Kids, teenagers broke into an upper window one night and barely escaped with their lives, they reckon. One kid’s hair turned white as a result of what he said he underwent in Woollies that night.’

  I roll my eyes at her. ‘That’s just daft kids. What are they coming to you, telling you stuff like that for?’

  ‘They didn’t. I overheard them. They weren’t bragging or trying to convince anyone. There were three of them, and they were in my shop. Good kids. But I overheard them talking about Woollies and a night of terror they had endured when they broke into the old shop.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I’m still sceptical, watching Effie slurping up the last of her stew. She’s been so caught up in telling this tale that she’s not been ap
preciating her supper at all. ‘Well, I suppose we could look into it,’ I tell her. ‘But between this and the Carroll Hotel and Hans Macabre, we’ve got a lot going on…’

  ‘We can handle it,’ she says.

  ‘Well, maybe we could talk to these kids,’ I muse.

  ‘It’s already organised,’ says Effie, smacking her lips. ‘Ten o’clock tonight, at the amusement arcade on the front. That’s where the young people enjoy hanging out. I’ve arranged for them to meet up with us and tell all.’

  I nod, and think sadly of the quiet night I had planned. Friday night post supper was reserved for a marathon of ‘Die Hard’ movies. Effie seemed keen on the plan earlier. She’s very partial to that kind of picture. But instead we’re donning our coats and hats and setting off down the front, where all the lights of Whitby are quivering in the dark harbour tonight. A chill breeze comes rolling in from the North Sea and I’m trying my hardest not to think of it as foreboding.

  Only one of the teenagers turns up to meet us. It’s the boy who reckons his lank, colourless hair was jet black last week, before he and his friends ventured into the abandoned Woolworth building. It’s true, the whiteness of his hair doesn’t look like it was caused by a bad bleach job. It really looks as if it was caused by a terrible shock. I have seen such things before.

  ‘The other two cried off at the last minute,’ says Devlin. We’re sitting in a grimy café by the arcades and he’s drinking a can of Fanta Effie’s bought. We’ve all got cans of pop with straws. He looks shifty and malnourished, as well as supernaturally blond. She’s bought him chips as well. ‘They were too scared,’ he adds. ‘They just don’t want to talk about it. About the… things… we saw in Woolworths.’

  As he sucks up the last of his orange pop Effie and I exchange a glance. Gut instinct tells me that this boy has been truly spooked and that he isn’t faking this or stringing us along. It’s taking a great deal of courage for him to meet us like this. I wonder if Effie is paying him cold hard cash for this information. She must be. He looks like he wants to run a mile.