by Paul Magrs
Why, some nights I even thought about calling out the police, or screaming for help on your account. I thought your Frank was going to kill you, Brenda! Many’s the time I’ve talked it over with Leena and Raf in the shop below the B&B. (The various fracas were easily heard through their walls, too, by the way.) And I’ve mulled over your domestic predicament with your good friend Robert as well. But he’s got his hands full, trying to run the Hotel Miramar single-handed these days, in the absence of its flaky owner Sheila Manchu (and we all remember where she ended up, don’t we? There’s another silly woman whose head was turned by an awful man. She went to the bad as well, didn’t she?).
Anyway, Brenda ducky, I hope everything is on a more even keel now and that you and your Frank have found a way to unwind and rejoice once more in each other’s company. It’s hard, I know, to sustain a relationship. I think that’s why I’ve never really tried. I’m much happier on my own, without some boorish fella trying to tell me what and what not to do.
I imagine the pair of you taking tea on that terrace in the hotel gardens on Lake Grasmere. (Very swanky it all looks too, going by the postcard.)
Oh, help, look – I’ve not even begun to tell you what’s going on here in Whitby, and all the news from home. There’s been quite a lot of fuss, what with Goth weekend approaching. They’re making a film up at the abbey. A horror film, of course. And there’s some glamorous movie queen arriving in town. They’re making such a big fuss about it. You’d think nothing interesting ever went on around these parts of ours . . .
And I’m thinking about going to this Cosmic Cabaret thing on Wednesday night at the Christmas Hotel. It looks a very glamorous, amusing affair. It’s a reason to put on my glad rags, anyway. I wouldn’t go if it were just me. But the girls are very insistent. By ‘the girls’ I mean the small circle of new friends I’ve been making recently. Oh, they are a good laugh. We have such lovely times, out and about in the evenings. You don’t know what you’re missing, Brenda!
Anyway, must go now. I seem to have a rush on customers this afternoon. All eager to snap up my humble vintage wares.
Yours ever,
Effie
Chopper
Penny’s favourite haunt on her afternoons off was a stylish coffee lounge on the long sloping road of cobbles in the old town. Spector was an ultra-trendy joint that hadn’t been open long, and didn’t have a regular clientele as yet, but she found it suited her tastes perfectly, with its smoked glass tables and cowhide chairs. Unlike the run-of-the-mill chintzy pensioners’ cafés that Whitby usually went in for, Spector provided a dizzying selection of gourmet coffees, teas and spirits. As well as fiddly lunches consisting of exotic ingredients and the tiniest portions. Alone in the middle of the room, Penny thrilled at having this whole fashionable venue to herself.
Soon enough Michael materialised at her side, flapping an oversized laminated menu.
Materialised? Did he really? Or did he just move around swiftly and silently like a great big . . . Celtic panther or something? She wasn’t sure. She liked the idea of him simply fading mysteriously into existence.
He arched his dark eyebrows at her quizzically and she gazed up at those eyes of his, those delectably firm, expressive lips.
‘Oh Michael,’ she smiled. Simpered, she thought to herself. I’m bloody simpering over him now. Or under him. Oh, do get a grip, Penny. She looked him up and down. He was in a faded denim shirt and jeans. He didn’t look at all scruffy, but it wasn’t his usual neutrally immaculate black poloneck and tailored slacks. His jet-black hair was awry, too. All in all, he seemed rumpled. Which looked well on him, Penny thought appraisingly. ‘What’s up, Michael?’ She smiled at him. There was something distracted in his manner as he gave her smoked glass table a hasty wipedown.
‘I’ve been over the other side of the harbour,’ he told her, dropping his tone and leaning in, even though there was no one else in Spector to hear his tale. ‘I’ve just dashed back. I had to close the whole place, just to go there. To see her.’
Penny frowned. He could be a bit oblique, could Michael. ‘See who?’
‘Penny!’ he laughed. ‘You mean you don’t know about the film? The great film that they’ll be making here this month? The great gory horror movie they’re gonna make here in our town?’
‘Oh, of course, yes.’ She nodded hastily, not wanting to appear slow. ‘We’ve had the crew checking into the Miramar all day . . .’ Suddenly her eyes widened. ‘When you say “her”, do you mean . . . ?’
He nodded at her, grinning broadly. He was wringing his tea towel unconsciously in both hands, and Penny couldn’t help taking in the way his forearms rippled with muscles. ‘I saw her, Penny. I saw her in the flesh!’
‘Karla!’ Penny gasped. ‘Karla herself ?’
‘I am surprised you never heard the rumours,’ Michael said. ‘I hear all sorts working here, you know. And word had it, this morning, that the great star was arriving this afternoon by specially laid-on chopper.’
Penny tried to picture how anyone could manage to land a helicopter anywhere near the narrow, intricate lanes of Whitby. It was a Victorian town, and not really made to cope with new-fangled vehicles that could suddenly descend from the skies.
‘They deposited her on the clifftop,’ Michael explained. ‘Near the crescent of all the big hotels. She drew quite a large crowd, who’d heard the whispers. Others, like me, had gone dashing over there, just to catch the tiniest glimpse of her.’
Penny was avid. She thought about the second-hand and mysterious DVD in her shopping bag. Karla Sorenson in the actual flesh. Less than a mile and a half from this very spot. And this lovely Irishman had even clapped eyes on her! ‘So she’s staying at one of the big hotels?’
‘The very biggest, and the very grandest.’ He nodded. ‘The Christmas Hotel.’ He pronounced the name with a flourish. ‘Mrs Claus, the owner herself, was outside in her motorised scooter with all her staff, and they were lined up outside the frontage of the hotel, waiting to welcome Karla like she was the Queen.’
‘She is!’ Penny said. ‘The queen of screen vampires!’
‘Quite,’ Michael chuckled. ‘And she holds this amazing fascination for men, you know. The crowd assembled around her chopper as it landed, they were all men. Drawn there by her sex appeal. Her aura, or something. We were all blown about by the wind as her chopper came down. Someone nearly went right over the cliff edge; he wasn’t looking where he was. But then the chopper was down and the blades stopped whirring. And out stepped Ms Sorenson’s private staff. Her bodyguard, her dresser, her personal hair stylist . . .’
‘Wow,’ Penny murmured. ‘What did she look like? Did she look like herself ?’
‘To be honest,’ Michael frowned, ‘it was quite hard to tell. With this crowd of crazy men bustling and pushing forward on the grass. The police were even out, to make sure no one got too close to the star.’
Penny sighed, wishing she’d been there to see all this. But . . . Karla Sorenson was at the Christmas Hotel! Less than a mile from her own place of work. How amazing was that? It was like a creature had stepped out of myth, out of fairy tale . . . to come and dwell in the same realm as Penny.
‘She was all wrapped up in furs and had these huge sunglasses on,’ Michael said. ‘But you could see it was her, all right. Something in the atmosphere . . . tingled when she paused to wave to all her fans assembled there. We all drew in an excited breath, and didn’t let it out until she had turned and gone across the road to meet Mrs Claus and her waiting staff of elves. Then she was taken into the hotel, to be given their best suite, I’m sure. The helicopter took off and whirled away, back over the sea, and it was finished. All done. So we all split. I came back here.’ His face was glowing. ‘But I saw her. I actually saw her!’
‘I never knew you were such a big fan of horror films,’ Penny said. She toyed with the idea of telling him of her rare discovery in the charity shop.
He frowned. ‘No, I didn’t think I was either.
Not particularly. But when I heard that Karla was coming here . . . when I heard that she was going to be here in this very town . . . I had to go to see her arrive. I remember watching her as a kid, in those late-night shows. Just hearing her name again reminded me of my childhood and watching films too late. Anyway, she’s a glamorous lady. She’s worth crossing town to take a look at. I was doing the sums. Did you know that she’s got to be over seventy?’
‘I did,’ said Penny, who had borrowed a slim biography of the woman from the town library a little while before. ‘She’s been going for donkey’s years.’ She was disappointed by Michael’s evident coolness towards the horror genre. ‘So you should get some business this Hallowe’en, eh?’ she asked. ‘With all these metropolitan film-making types in town. Just up the hill, shooting at the abbey.’
Michael drew himself up proudly. ‘Mine is the only trendy coffee lounge in town. The rest are all for old ladies. Of course I hope to see the film people here. I will treat them to my very best of everything.’
Penny raised an eyebrow. ‘You might get Karla herself coming in, to sample your gourmet specialities.’
She watched Michael gulp. She stared at the firm but somehow beautifully vulnerable bob that his Adam’s apple made. Oh, he’d be easy meat for Karla, she fretted.
‘Would you like your usual macchiatto frappe with whipped cream and syrup?’ He flashed her a grin.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, and fought off a simper. She could do with something sickly and sweet. She would sit by herself in Spector and look trendy. She could sugar-rush all by herself, and be shiveringly glamorous, at the end of her afternoon off.
Christmas Greetings
Tonight it was Seventies Night in the nightclub beneath the Miramar, which was always very popular. It would be standing room only at the Yellow Peril when Donna Summer came on. The hotel was bursting at the rafters with its usual freight of guests, plus the horde of crew members involved with the filming. They seemed to have brought a lot of their equipment with them, and were intent on getting it all into their rooms. All in all, this Monday was an extraordinarily busy one, and by early evening, Robert was frazzled.
He was at the main reception desk when the phone rang.
‘Yes?’ he snapped.
‘Ohhh!’ came an insinuating chuckle. ‘Is that any way to speak to a prospective guest? I thought you might have learned a thing or two, Robert dear, being left in charge of that gaudy fleapit.’
Robert shivered at the sound of the old woman’s fruity tones. It was Mrs Claus at the end of the line, no doubt calling from her grotto-like boudoir at the heart of her eternally festive establishment. There was no love lost between Robert and that decrepit old bat.
Once, not so long ago, Robert had been a member of her staff at the Christmas Hotel, and like most of her young, male staff members, had been expected to wear a horrible skin-tight elf’s uniform. He had become aware of certain untoward practices at the grandest hotel on the West Cliff – culminating in murder and cannibalism. This had been during the first of his involvements with Brenda and Effie, and though the events of that autumn had been terrifying, he looked back on them now with a kind of fondness, because they had introduced him to the company of Brenda and Effie.
Mrs Claus, though, was someone whose clutches he was glad to be out of.
‘What do you want?’ he said brusquely, turning away from the front desk.
‘Well, dear,’ she said, becoming businesslike, ‘you may not know something about this film company lately arrived in Whitby—’
Robert cut in. ‘Ah, but I do. I’ve got just about all of them staying here at the Miramar with me.’ Was that a touch of boastfulness in his voice? He couldn’t help it. He could just imagine Mrs Claus crowing about it, had she bagged the whole lot.
‘I see,’ she warbled. ‘So that’s where they got to. Karla did wonder. She was telling me, not half an hour ago, that she imagined her crew would be staying somewhere a bit more . . . shall we say, basic and insalubrious, and a lot less glamorous.’
Robert gritted his teeth. He’d walked right into that one. ‘Karla Sorenson is staying with you?’
‘Of course, my dear. Where else? Why, she is a big, big star. A huge star. Where else in this town is grand enough to cater to her every whim?’
‘We could have looked after her properly, here at the Miramar.’ Robert scowled. ‘And with us, she wouldn’t have had to pretend it was Christmas every day, either.’
‘But you don’t have a suite like we have,’ Mrs Claus said lightly. ‘I have given her the turret to stay in for as long as she needs it.’
Robert blinked. ‘The turret . . . ?’
Instantly his mind was back to Brenda, and how she had been given the turret suite at the Christmas Hotel for her honeymoon. Except . . . it hadn’t been the romantic occasion implied by that statement. Brenda had been forced – in return for her friends’ lives – to go ahead with her farcical marriage to that brute Frank. And it had been Mrs Claus behind the whole twisted saga . . .
Or had it? That had been in a different world, hadn’t it? A weird world that had looked like this one, and contained a number of the same people. An underworld, a parallel world. Mrs Claus was there, but she was beautiful and young in that reality. And even wickeder than the old trout on the other end of this phone. But now that whole infernal fandango seemed like some kind of flashback dream montage to Robert. One he had managed to push to the back of his mind. We went to hell, he thought wonderingly, listening to the buzz of the telephone wires. We went to hell in order to rescue Brenda. But on the way we lost my Auntie Jessie and we lost Sheila Manchu. And we brought back a terrible man-monster who is now Brenda’s husband.
And again, it was all, really, the fault of Mrs Claus . . .
‘You’re off having a reverie of some sort,’ she cackled down the line. ‘Stop it! I’ve got something to ask you. Karla has made a request.’
Robert shook his head and brought his attention back to the present moment. A request! ‘For me?’ he gasped. A request from the great film star herself. How did she even know who he was?
‘Listen up, dearie,’ Mrs Claus said. ‘Karla is very glad to be in Whitby. She wants to meet all the important people here. That’s how she put it herself. She knows more about this place, and the people here, than I would have expected.’
Robert’s heart was thumping now. He put it down to excitement, but if he’d thought about it, he would have realised it was a warning. There was danger in this. What did Karla know? How did she know it? What was she intending to do? But to Robert, at this stage, Karla was just a famous name. Nothing ominous. Nothing hazardous. And he was just flattered to be asked anything at all. He would have done anything just to get a look at the infamous vamp. ‘Yes . . . and?’ he said impatiently.
‘She wants to meet some local characters,’ Mrs Claus said. ‘So to that end, I am organising a little drinks do. And—’
‘When?’ He reached for his desk diary.
Mrs Claus laughed. ‘This Wednesday night. Late on. Before the midnight cabaret begins.’
Robert shuddered. This would be her much-touted Cosmic Cabaret. It sounded tacky to him, but because of its success he’d been feeling his own takings drop on recent Wednesdays. ‘I can be there,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t mean you, dear.’ She laughed heartily at his presumption.
Robert could have bitten off his own tongue in embarrassment.
Smoothly Mrs Claus continued. ‘You see, the person that Ms Sorenson is so keen to meet is a very great friend of yours. And someone we thought you might be able to contact, since she appears to be out of town at the moment.’
Robert knew what the old harridan was going to say next.
‘It’s Brenda. That’s who she wants to meet. Could you fix it up, Robert dear? I know you two are very close. And Ms Sorenson was so insistent. She seems quite fascinated by our mutual friend.’
Foreboding
But this town is used to being tossed around in storms, or drenched by bitter waves, or gripped by wicked frosts. Whitby is used to all kinds of inclemency.
Earlier this evening, as winds started to lash the black rocks of the harbour and rain stung the darkened windows of the hotels, guest houses, and public houses, all the residents peered up warily at the skies and wondered. Something was going on.
Bad things are coming to town.
It has to be said, this is something Whitby is also used to.
For almost thirteen hundred years the citizens of this town have been unconsciously aware that their place in this world hosts a most unusual natural feature. Or, rather, a supernatural feature.
A kind of nexus point for evil forces. A gateway to another world. To a dizzying vista of ever-darker worlds that lie beneath this one.
Or so the legends say.
Or so Effie Jacobs says. And she should know, because she’s had her fair share of encounters with the darker side of Whitby’s strange nature.
Tonight her beaky old nose quivers and goes cold. Her limbs twitch and tremble as she tries to lie straight in her bed at the top of the tall house bequeathed to her by her old aunties. Many generations of Effie’s female forebears have lived in this house of hers, close to the harbour. And each of those doughty women, those witchy daughters of Whitby, represented the town’s first line of defence against the dark powers that would occasionally come creeping out of that hellmouth in the grounds of the abbey.
Effie stirs and snores and gives in to terrible nightmares.
All over Whitby, nightmares are being had. Even Mrs Claus jerks upright in her sumptuous bed. When she rings her servant’s bell for attention, it plays a tinkly Yuletide tune, but even this can’t pacify her. Dark dreams are clinging to her and she sits there, helpless. Trying to imagine what’s going to come.