[Brenda & Effie 04] - Hell's Belles

by Paul Magrs

  The gateway to hell – or the Bitch’s Maw, as it has been so misogynistically called for centuries – doesn’t only spew out infernal beasts and nasties and demons.

  It also attracts them.

  Something in its wicked heart calls out a beating tattoo, raising sympathetic echoes in certain loveless chests. Over the years, many evil men, women and monsters have been drawn to this place to investigate. To plunge themselves into the heart of the fishy mysteries of this town.

  And also the good, the brave and the curious – intent on mystery. They have traipsed here to see what all the occult fuss is about. To do battle with dreadful monsters. They have been here too. And still they come.

  But now – and the locals can feel this awful idea stealing upon them intuitively – a terrible presence has come among them. One that is intent on causing misery and mayhem.

  She has only just arrived, but now she is here, she will take some shifting.

  Even she doesn’t know how much chaos she will cause. She is, in many ways, an unwitting vehicle for the badness that always, always surrounds her.

  Death and dismay dog her every step. They have done so for many years.

  She is like a goddess, descending from the heavens. Bestowing her marvellous presence on this cold, windswept place. Only today she was whirled out of the sky, out of that empyrean blue. And she brought the darkness with her.

  Tonight Karla Sorenson sleeps ever so peacefully in the turret high above the Christmas Hotel. High above the West Cliff. High above the endlessly heaving North Sea.

  She dreams of nothing. Unusual for her. Something in the sea air has calmed her mind. Pacified her restless soul. It will do her good. Prepare her for the rigours ahead. Karla Sorenson sleeps deeply.

  But all around her, Whitby is aware that she is here. And there is a dreadful sense of foreboding creeping about the place, subtle as the sea mist, and just as insidious.

  Up All Night

  Once again it had been a fantastic night at the Yellow Peril.

  Robert watched his guests streaming out of the basement club. They went peacefully and woozily, their ears ringing to the gentle strains of the final smoochy number. It was gone three in the morning and he was mad keen for his bed.

  The hotel staff went about their business efficiently, ushering out the guests in their rumpled glad rags, and starting to clear up the mess. As the house lights came on, Robert shuddered. Place looked like a bomb had dropped. This could wait until the morning. His staff were glad to hear it. With the extra work of seeing the film crew settled, it had been a very long day.

  Upstairs he found Penny tidying round the reception desk. With all her black and white make-up, he couldn’t tell if she was looking pale and drawn or what. All the same, he told her that she’d better get to bed.

  ‘I was going to watch my film,’ she told him. ‘But I think I’d fall asleep.’

  He was only half listening, locking up. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Did I tell you?’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘Look what I found in town today!’ She held the DVD case under his nose. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’

  He frowned. It looked like the same lurid horror stuff that Penny always seemed to go on about. It wasn’t really his thing. If Penny had seen some of the things he had seen in real life, maybe she wouldn’t be so keen on this kind of—

  ‘Hey,’ he said, realising. ‘But isn’t that the name of the film they’re about to start making?’

  She nodded, giving him a look as if he was slow to catch on. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But how can you have a copy now, before they’ve even started shooting?’ His mind whirled tiredly. Was it some kind of time thing?

  ‘It’s the old version,’ said Penny. ‘From 1967. They’re making a remake.’

  ‘Oh.’ Robert shrugged. Bit less exciting than a time anomaly, then.

  ‘But this shouldn’t exist!’ Penny gabbled breathlessly, waving the box around. ‘They never released it on disc. They put it out on video once, but after terrible things started happening, they withdrew all copies and deleted it from the catalogues, and swore that it would never come out again, so people could never watch the thing in their homes again.’

  Robert’s interest was piqued as he came back to the reception desk and slid along beside her to read the box. ‘What kind of terrible things?’

  Penny was pleased to have his attention. ‘Awful things. People going crackers. People wreaking havoc on crazy rampages. People making suicide pacts.’

  ‘All because of some film?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’ She lowered her voice spookily. ‘The film company reckon they’ve destroyed all the copies of the original print. They burned the negatives. All the footage that was shot. Even the film stills. Everything! And they buried the ashes under a motorway flyover, as it was being built.’

  ‘Sounds a bit extreme.’

  ‘Maybe. But there have been more accidents and pile-ups on that flyover in recent years than on any other stretch of road in the country. It’s cursed, they say.’

  ‘By some film?’ Robert shook his head. He’d had enough of the conversation now. Penny was just revelling in this rubbish. She liked anything a bit gory and horrible. It was the last thing he wanted to hear about at three in the morning.

  ‘The film is cursed,’ Penny said. ‘That’s what they say. They reckon that when they filmed the thing, back in 1967, the devil somehow got summoned up on location in North Wales in the slate mine where it was shot. They called him up and captured his . . . like, essence, on the film itself.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Robert said, but felt himself shiver involuntarily. ‘That’s just hype. That’s the kind of thing film companies say to drum up some kind of mystique.’

  ‘But there’s got to be something in it, hasn’t there?’ Penny said. ‘I mean, I’ve got a book with the statistics in. About who was killed at the location and the accidents that dogged the cast and crew in later years. And about the people who watched it on home video, and what happened to them.’

  ‘So where did this disc come from then?’ he asked her bluntly.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s a pirate copy. I found it in Save the Kiddies.’

  Robert rolled his eyes. ‘It won’t be real. Someone’s having a laugh.’

  ‘I’m still going to watch it,’ Penny said, firming up her resolve.

  ‘You do that,’ he said. ‘But don’t you start going on a rampage or wreaking havoc in here. We’ve enough tidying up to do.’

  ‘I’m going to watch it tonight,’ Penny said. ‘In my room. On my laptop.’ Gulp, she thought. Now I’ve scared myself. Trying to convince Robert, I’ve given myself the creeps. Damn. Never mind. Be brave. She tried to look braver for his benefit.

  ‘Well,’ said Robert lightly, ‘I’m for my bed. I’m dead on my feet. G’night, pet.’ He turned fleetingly to watch after her as she hurried towards her ground-floor bedroom. She turned and gave him a smile, and for a second he was worried. What if the film really did have something wrong with it? Suppose she really did unleash something weird, simply by watching it tonight?

  Penny paused to ask him, ‘I wondered if . . . you’d like to watch it with me?’

  ‘Me?’ Robert laughed. ‘Not on your nelly, lady!’ He felt a rush of cold anxiety go through him, and shrugged it off. ‘Listen, if you’re too scared to watch it by yourself, I suggest you leave it alone. I don’t want my best new receptionist getting the screaming abdabs in the night.’

  Penny flushed at the compliment. ‘I’ll be okay,’ she told him stubbornly, and hurried into the dark ground-floor corridor.

  It was only as Robert stepped into the lift, heading for his own third-floor room, that he realised that this might have been a come-on of sorts from Penny. It might not just have been a scared thing. She might have been asking for his company in a different way. Oh, surely not. That he could do without. A receptionist with a crush. Maybe he’d have to have a word with her.

  Up in his room he
moved about stealthily, without putting on the lights. He undressed hurriedly and tugged on a robe and moved to the tall windows. From here he had a wonderful view of the bay and the abbey and the higgledypiggledly rooftops of town. The moon was shining out as if through layers of gauze. There was something theatrical and fake about the whole vista tonight. It looked like a pop-up book; a perfect feat of paper engineering, opening out darkly for his delectation.

  He wondered briefly about Penny. Was she watching her haunted movie alone? He imagined her under her duvet, propping her laptop on her knees. Scaring herself silly, probably. Daft kid.

  Robert shook his head to clear it. Then he gazed down at the wide gardens at the back of the Miramar. There, the box trees and hedges had been replanted, and work was under way to restore what had once been a rather chichi beer garden. He dwelt for a moment on the hellishly awful events that had razed the gardens (and very nearly the entire hotel) to the ground a little while back. But at least soon it would be back to normal.

  Tonight he wasn’t inspecting the work in progress, though. He was watching for something quite different.

  Ah. There.

  By the tall blackened hedges. Sitting there so quietly you could hardly notice.

  Robert was surprised to see him. It was only on the off-chance that he’d peeped out through his curtains. This late, as well! How long had his fella been sitting there? Waiting so patiently? Robert’s chest flared with pity, and with pride, and excitement. This was something he was getting used to now, and he could hardly believe it. This . . . steadfastness. This patience. This amazing always-being-there-for-him.

  His fella – lit so handsomely in the meagre silver light of the early hours – was waiting for him. Knowing he would come. Perched elegantly and incongruously on a green velvet settee in the former beer garden of Sheila Manchu. A green velvet settee! In the open air? How bizarre was that? But Robert wasn’t complaining about his new fella’s quirks.

  He tapped on his window to draw the man’s attention.

  Those eyes! That hungry look!

  Robert turned to hurry out of his room, out of his hotel, to meet him.

  Belongings

  The only valuable thing Penny owned in the whole world was her laptop. She had never been any good with electronic things. She was even mildly superstitious about not getting too close in case she broke them. But she was happy with her laptop. To her it represented her new life. It stood for escape.

  As for expensive clothes and jewellery, and all that stuff, she couldn’t be doing with them. For most of her life she had watched her mother glam herself up in dear designer gear. All that conspicuous expense just made Penny nervous. She liked cheap stuff. Things she couldn’t spoil.

  That was why she was given to the Goth look, perhaps. It was all home-made, recycled stuff. Henna and old tea leaves for her hair, Oxfam jewellery and tie-dyed shirts. Her own look was kind of latter-day punk in its defiant makeshiftness.

  What she liked was having few enough belongings to fill her backpack and her bag-on-wheels. She liked to think that she could be up and out of here at a moment’s notice. Just say this new life of hers didn’t work out, she could just get up and leave. No problem.

  Her bedroom in the Hotel Miramar was so tidy it was as if no one was occupying it. There were only a few telltale paperbacks stacked on the bedside table; smudges of hair dye on the floral pillows.

  It was as if she was determined not to make herself at home, or to feel like she had found a home. She recalled behaving in a similar way when she had gone away to college – when? Ten years ago now. And guess what? She had felt out of place there too, had never quite felt she was fitting in. Funny that. Penny quickly got ready for bed, cleaning her teeth crossly, cold-creaming kohl and black lipstick away. She wondered why she never let herself settle properly. What was that about?

  Oh, come on, she thought. Don’t be so hard on yourself. What’s all the rubbish psychology about? You’ve just walked out on a marriage. You’ve just left Ken, after four years together. Of course you’re going to be jittery and weird for a while. You’re not going to know if you’re coming or going. It’s only natural.

  Perhaps. Or maybe this was her natural state. Maybe she was destined to be always a little bit alienated. Holding herself away protectively from the rest of the world. Maybe that self-centredness was what had ruined things for her and Ken, as well?

  Between the hours of three and four in the morning really wasn’t the best time to go churning over all this stuff.

  She pulled the laptop over the bed and on to her knees. She flipped the lid, watching the machine come swiftly to life, basking in its friendly glow.

  Her mother, Liz, had bought her this computer. Right at the end of that last, terrible year with Ken. When he was out all the time and Penny found herself at home. Wondering what she was doing there, in that new house full of his stuff. All that horrible masculine furniture he had chosen to suit his own taste, during one madcap dash through IKEA.

  Her mother visited and was appalled at the lethargy and the hopelessness Penny had fallen into. Typical of her vivacious mother. Flying into high dudgeon over the state Penny was in.

  ‘You were going to do so many things. What was your degree for? Where’s it all gone? You were going to write. See the world. You were going to make a name for yourself.’

  Penny had just pulled a face at this. ‘I should never have gone away and done a degree. All that studying. What’s it done for me?’

  Her mother was horrified. ‘What’s it done? I wish I could have done that, back in my day. You’re just throwing it all away.’

  ‘Degrees just make you think. Thinking just makes you unhappy. Dissatisfied. It’s no good for you.’

  Then her mother found out she was on antidepressants and went crazy about it.

  Penny wished her mother would just go away.

  But really, she found herself thinking, what was she doing with her time at home?

  She wasn’t being a housewife, that much was obvious. Ken would come back from work and go on about how mucky the place was. The dust and the heaped washing-up. The laundry half-done and thrown about just anywhere. He worked so hard. She was letting him down. What about her side of the bargain? What about their plan?

  She was staying at home because they had planned on having kids.

  They should be here by now, those kids, shouldn’t they?

  That was what Penny couldn’t tell Liz. She stopped up the words inside herself when her mother bombarded her with questions. This past year – the worst year in her life – was the time she and Ken had fondly imagined that she would be beatific and huge, about to pop. Or maybe breast-feeding already and swanking about with a top-of-the-range buggy.

  They’d had no reason to suspect that things might not go like that. They were both normal. All systems go. Everything functioning correctly. Or so they’d been told.

  They had a brand-new house, just built on an estate where you could still smell the plaster and putty and the clayey earth. It was all fresh and waiting for new life.

  And nothing had happened.

  Probably just as well, Penny thought. If I’d succeeded in having kids I’d be stuck there now, with Ken, on that horrible bloody estate near Darlington. Stuck for ever being his missus. I’d never be able to run away, to come here. To become someone else . . .

  Her mother had given her the idea of running away. Liz had always been very good at being able to change her own life and making herself brave enough to turn everything around. Penny – though she had spent much of her life exasperated by her single parent – also lived in awe of her mother’s courage. She had watched Liz reinvent her life again and again, in the restless search for happiness.

  Her own happiness was something Liz firmly believed she had a right to. And she wished her daughter felt the same about hers.

  ‘Leave him today. Just go. You can go somewhere and think. And write. Like you said you were going to. Write your novel! I�
��ll even buy you a laptop, so you can write on the run!’

  Penny had laughed. ‘What? Mam, I’m not you . . .’

  Liz gave her a hard stare.

  That day she had found her daughter watching DVDs at home. The blinds were pulled on the bright day. Penny was smoking and wearing pyjamas, working her way through a triple bill. The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby. She was nursing an emptied tube of Pringles.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of this home and this marriage, Mrs Danby,’ Liz told her firmly. ‘Where is it you really want to go? In all the world? I’ll help you. Just tell me. Where would you most want to be?’

  Penny smiled, remembering her mam’s earnestness. Her busyness, opening the living-room windows and chucking Penny’s fags into the bare front garden.

  Mam. She would have to write to her. She hadn’t come visiting yet. Penny wondered what she would make of this new place. Not as exotic as somewhere Liz might have chosen to run to, but still.

  She shook her head, clearing it of all the personal stuff. Too late to stew over this.

  Get that film on. Let’s watch some lovely, terrifying nonsense in the wee small hours. If you’re gonna be an insomniac, at least be a happily scared one. Let’s escape, she thought. Let’s escape into deliriously weird fantasy.

  She clicked PLAY.

  From Brenda with Love

  FROM: Brenda@Brendasbandb.com

  SUBJECT: HERE I COME!

  Dear Effie,

  Look at us two, on email! Who would have thought it!

  I’ve found myself a little cafe fully equipped with computers and what-have-you, so here I am. I’m in Manchester. And we are on our way home.

  Effie, thank you for your email, lovey. What a great surprise to find it in my inbox last night.

  I was up tossing and turning last night, thinking all about it.