[Brenda & Effie 04] - Hell's Belles

by Paul Magrs

  Robert grimaced, but Penny was right. Sometimes he forgot that Brenda and Effie were two old ladies. He behaved as if they were indestructible. He quickly blinked away tears of guilt. ‘Listen, I was out of the room when Effie brought you round from your trance, but can you remember what she did or said to you?’

  ‘Bacon sandwiches!’ Penny burst out. ‘She had some bacon sandwiches brought up, to use as smelling salts, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, but she must have said something, too. Some kind of spell.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Robert, but I wasn’t conscious. I don’t remember.’

  He sighed. ‘I’ll try the bacon thing anyway. It’s worth a go.’ He was starving anyway, he realised. He asked Penny a few desultory questions about the running of the hotel. Things seemed to be fine up the hill at the Miramar. (Really, he marvelled at how Brenda managed to keep her own business going in the midst of her adventures.)

  Penny started telling him about how rowdy the film crew were at night, drinking at all hours in the Yellow Peril, but he wasn’t in the mood to hear that just now. He said his goodbyes and hurried over to have another look at his friends.

  There was no change. Those blank, staring eyes discombobulated him. It was as if the two women were astonished by something that he would never be privy to.

  He turned to the small attic window and drew open the curtains, just in time to see the light spreading across the harbour in fabulous banners of pink and baby blue. He craned his neck to see if those pale ribbons of magical lightning were still rippling over the rooftops, between Brenda’s and the Christmas Hotel.

  That was a point. What was that strange lightning? Was it connected with his friends’ predicament? And what was it doing going to the Christmas Hotel?

  He stiffened. Evidently this was some ploy of Mrs Claus’s. She and Karla were obviously in league.

  Perhaps they had stolen the minds and souls of Brenda and Effie and transformed them into rippling light and pulled them across the town, slithering like ghosts through the dawn skies.

  Brenda didn’t have a soul, though, did she? That was what she had always claimed.

  But Robert couldn’t see those strange Northern Lights any more, whatever they had been.

  Could his fella help? The thought struck him forcibly. Michael could zoom about, airborne on a settee, couldn’t he? He obviously had some pretty special magical powers. Even if Robert was unaware of their nature or their extent, they were still powers of some kind. Maybe Michael could help out here?

  But how trustworthy was he? After this evening, Robert wasn’t at all sure.

  Oh, anything, anything. He was clutching at straws. He couldn’t leave Brenda and Effie like this.

  He turned back to look at them. An awful feeling of desolation swept over him. He was the one who’d have to sort this out. They were depending on him utterly.

  What an absolute bugger.

  You Can Do Magic

  Karla had never been big on the magic rituals.

  In recent years she had even stopped going to the Brethren’s solstitial do’s at their Cricklewood sanctum. She liked the dancing, but it was the chanting that got on her nerves. Really, all those arcane rites and so on, mostly it was an excuse for a bunch of quite unattractive people to get their kit off and flaunt themselves about the place, and maybe indulge in some of the orgiastic revels that satanists were so famous for.

  Karla tended to find it all a bit embarrassing these days. Also, with magic, you never knew what was going to happen. Over the years she had seen people bite off more than they could easily chew. It was best not to go mucking about, was her view these days.

  Though she’d had a whole life steeped in black magic and its practices, it was something that still gave her the willies.

  As dawn broke over Whitby, here she was again, trying to do magic.

  Her servants, Bobby and Kevin, were intoning strange verses for her in low, tremulous voices. She had asked them to recite the room service menu backwards for her. It didn’t really matter what the words were about. It was the atmosphere that counted, and she had to admit, her boys were making the atmosphere pretty spooky with their chanting.

  Aromatherapy candles had been lit, rather than the regulation black ones. They had turned all the mirrors to the wall, just in case Satan popped by. He didn’t like to see his reflection, for some reason (though from what Karla remembered of her induction at the age of fifteen, he was quite a looker. That had been in Kendal, hadn’t it? Such a long, long time ago. A frisson of occult nostalgia went through her).

  And now she was swaying and undulating her supple limbs above the glass fruit bowl filled with ashes. She was chanting too, but she had no idea what she was saying. Some weird kind of language was coming out of her. She knew it was the Brethren speaking through her. They were using her, once more, as the vessel, the conduit through which their wills would be known.

  Karla hefted up the bucket of oily blood and held it steadily above the bowl.

  ‘As the Brethren will, so mote it be,’ she moaned. Bobby and Kevin moaned too, and the candles sparked and flared in response.

  She began to pour a thick stream of blood into the bowl. The smell was awful, and she almost gagged. She watched in fascination as the life blood mixed with the grey ash, making a kind of horrible satanic roux.

  She wondered if she should perhaps give it a stir, but as she continued to pour, the sauce thickened and quickened, and lumpy shapes stirred beneath the crimson surface.

  Kevin and Bobby drew nearer to see what was happening.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s something in there!’

  ‘Sssh,’ she calmed them, and emptied the bucket of blood.

  But it was true. The two men drew back, disgusted at the sight of the thing that was forming in the glass.

  Karla herself felt her gorge rise, but she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  A tiny man was forming in the reeking broth. A pale homunculus, all curled up like a hairy foetus. And he was growing, slowly but surely.

  Karla baulked and gagged as the realisation hit her.

  I-I’ve made a man . . . she thought.

  Ladies of the Canyon

  ‘Effie? Effie lovey, are you all right?’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘I think . . . I think we’ve arrived.’

  Brenda was getting shakily to her feet. She swayed unsteadily as she cricked back her head and stared about at their new environment. They were in a canyon of dark blue stone. The jagged walls stretched high above them on either side. Every move they made dislodged shards of slate, and the sluthery noise echoed about them.

  ‘Arrived where, ducky?’ Effie said crossly, opening her eyes and struggling to stand. ‘What are you talking about? We weren’t going anywhere. We were sitting in your living room and . . .’

  She couldn’t deny the evidence of her own senses, though. Effie was a pragmatist above all else. Suddenly it was daytime and they were in the open air. Or at least, in the chilly confines of this—

  ‘Quarry,’ Brenda said. ‘We’re in a quarry.’

  Effie drew nearer, as the realisation hit. ‘Just like the one in that film!’

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ Brenda said. ‘This chill in the air. The atmosphere of this place. It’s all so familiar. We’re in Wales . . .’ Her voice trailed off, and they listened to the sibilant echoes rolling away.

  ‘But how?’ Effie said. ‘By magic? Who would want to send us to Wales? What would be the point?’

  A shower of dust and gravel pattered about them, and instantly Brenda was on the alert. ‘Effie! Move, quickly!’

  Someone high above them had dislodged a chunk of rock. The two ladies barely had time to scurry away before it came crashing to the valley floor. They got themselves under a convenient overhang in the nick of time.

  ‘Someone’s trying to kill us,’ Brenda squawked. She tried to see, but the rock face was
too high, and the fall had sent plumes of blue dust everywhere.

  Effie was elsewhere. ‘Look. We’re wearing the same clothes that we were tonight, at home in Whitby.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well then, we really have been transported. This isn’t a dream, or anything like that. We’re really here.’

  They wandered for a while along the valley floor.

  Soon they could hear the not-too-distant sounds of others who had come to this desolate place.

  They came within sight of a film crew, working busily at the end of the valley.

  ‘You know what this means,’ Brenda said, grabbing her friend’s arm.

  Frankly, Effie didn’t. She was cold and confused and rather tired by now. She didn’t even know what day it was. ‘What does it mean?’ she snapped crossly.

  ‘We’ve come back in time,’ Brenda told her. ‘We’ve gone into the Making of the Movie. We’ve gone Behind the Scenes. We’ve ended up inside the DVD extras! I don’t know how we got here. Or whether it’s even possible. But somehow we’re back in 1967.’

  Effie was scandalised. ‘But how can that be?’

  ‘All I know is that over there, that’s the cast and crew of the original version of Get Thee Inside Me, Satan. Those are their caravans and everything. I was here, remember. And now I’ve come back.’ Brenda looked as perplexed as Effie had ever seen her. ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘But there’s no such thing as time travel,’ Effie burst out. ‘There can’t be. It’s impossible!’ What she meant was that if such things were possible, then people going willy-nilly into the past and future would mess everything up. It involved chaos theory and suchlike, which Effie had read about in the Sunday supplements. If one little thing was changed in the past, as it certainly would be, even by the mere presence of travellers, then that would put the tin hat on causality itself and the whole blithering cosmos would unravel.

  But Brenda was looking at her as if she was being obtuse just for the sake of it, so Effie didn’t go on and explain. She didn’t want to cause a row.

  ‘Why’ve we come into the past?’ Brenda was wondering aloud. ‘We must be meant to do something here. But what can it be?’

  All Effie knew was that she had found the late sixties quite hard work the first time round. And Wales was somewhere she had never been keen on, though Llandudno was nice.

  She really, really hoped they weren’t stuck here.

  Uncharitable

  When Robert went to their charity shop that morning, Teresa and Helen were in the window, dressing up mannequins Goth-style with an assortment of ill-matching black garments and accessories. They liked to enter the spirit of the thing when it came to Goth weekend.

  It had come round again so quickly. This time, its imminence made Robert shiver with foreboding. I’m getting as prescient as Brenda, he mused as he entered the shop. Inside smelled of air freshener and detergent, sort of starchy and preserved, and this in turn made him think of Brenda and Effie sitting frozen in their chairs. He had felt rotten leaving them like that, and locking Brenda’s B&B behind him. But what more could he do? The scent of frying bacon hadn’t roused them. There had been nothing he could do to bring them round. But they were safe enough, surely, locked securely in Brenda’s house, until he could find some kind of solution to their plight.

  But maybe that was it for them, he thought, as he gazed abstractedly at the shelves of knick-knacks and the rows of paperbacks. Maybe they were gone for good, their minds shattered by the experience of viewing that terrible movie.

  But what was it he had seen crepitating out of Brenda’s chimney and swooshing over to the Christmas Hotel? What was going on here? There were so many questions. Now he was determined to set about getting some answers.

  Teresa and her helper, Helen, were facing him across the glass counter of the charity shop. Both were glaring at him with undisguised dislike. What had he ever done to them? he’d like to know.

  ‘I’m here to make some enquiries,’ he told them, drawing himself up, and trying to look determined.

  ‘Enquiries, is it?’ Teresa smirked, and nudged her friend. ‘What would that be about?’

  ‘Two of my friends have bought second-hand DVDs from your shop in the past week, and I’d like to know—’

  Teresa interrupted him rudely, ‘We’ve had that Effryggia Jacobs in here asking similar questions already.’ She folded her arms under her hefty bosom. ‘And there’s nothing we can tell you. People donate these things. We price them up and put them on the shelves. That’s all there is to it. We can’t be responsible for the content, or what becomes of those people who buy our goods.’

  ‘Don’t you think it strange?’ Robert persisted. ‘Three Karla Sorenson movies turning up at the same time?’

  ‘She’s a very famous actress. Some people like that kind of thing.’ Teresa pursed her lips. ‘I can’t say I think she’s got much talent, but then I never liked those video nasties or horror films much, I have to say.’

  Robert wondered fleetingly whether it could be Karla herself donating these films of hers to the shop. Knowing they would have the weird, entrancing effect that they seemed to, she was planting them in strategic charity shops in Whitby, hoping to cause maximum chaos and—

  No. That would be ridiculous.

  Now both women were glaring at him as if they wanted him to go. He could see that he was drawing a blank here. Teresa was tapping her nails on the glass counter.

  ‘If there’s nothing else you want,’ she said, ‘perhaps you could leave. We don’t like your sort in here.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  Helen leaned across the counter and gave a long, deliberate sniff. She said, ‘You’re right, Teresa. I can smell it on him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  For a second he was sure that both shop volunteers’ eyes shone red. He blinked, and then they were back to normal.

  Helen, the meeker of the two, suddenly piped up, ‘You know, it’s the most incredible coincidence. But when I was sorting through some recently donated books in the storeroom upstairs yesterday, I am sure that I found an old hardback copy of Karla Sorenson’s memoir, The Sinister Sixties. Or was it The Spooky Seventies? One of them, anyway.’

  Robert clocked the vexed look that Teresa shot her. ‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a look at that, if I may.’

  Oh, Teresa looked furious. This Helen was a loose cannon. She had let something slip that she shouldn’t have. Surely the memoirs of Karla would contain some kind of clue? Something that would prove useful?

  Helen told him, ‘You’ll have to help me move some of the heavier boxes, young man. The book in question is buried under quite a monstrous stack.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said eagerly, turning to follow her to the stairs at the back, and completely missing the glance that passed between the volunteer ladies.

  Later, he was furious with himself at falling for such an old trick. But Helen seemed kind of innocent and good-tempered, at least compared with her bullish workmate. He watched her flutter nervously about the storeroom’s heaps of donated tat, peering into one crate and then another.

  ‘I’m sure it was here somewhere, with all these Jackie Collinses,’ she said.

  ‘Helen, you must know. Where is all this Karla Sorenson-related memorabilia coming from? Is the source of it Karla herself ?’

  She looked helpless. In the murky air of the storeroom she seemed almost scared. He knew at once that she was fretting in case Teresa downstairs heard her tell him anything.

  ‘We get things donated by all kinds of people,’ she said. ‘And of course we don’t keep track of who gives what. However . . .’ She turned to a work bench nearby, and hunted amongst papers, bills, a scattering of brown paper. ‘I do remember that those DVDs came a long way. Very unusually, they were sent by post.’

  ‘Really?’ Robert was sure he was on to something.

  ‘Aha,’ she said with satisfaction, and passed him a s
heet of crumpled brown paper. ‘The writing is so beautiful, I kept it. Look at that gothic hand.’

  Robert examined it. ‘Indeed. London postmark, look. But why would people in London donate Karla Sorenson films to a shop in Whitby?’

  Helen gave a cry of triumph. ‘Here it is!’ She delved into a deep cardboard box, almost toppling over in the process. ‘Her autobiography! I knew I had seen it!’

  As Robert reached out for it, he was distracted by a heavy tread on the staircase behind him. He turned to see the ungainly Teresa joining them in the storeroom.

  ‘We’ll have to hurry,’ she puffed. ‘I’ve left the till unattended.’

  ‘What?’ Robert scowled at her. He’d had enough of the belligerent woman.

  ‘We can’t let you out again,’ Teresa said softly.

  ‘Oh dear, can’t we?’ asked Helen. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t really mean any harm.’ She hugged the brick-thick memoir to her skinny chest.

  ‘We can’t let him run around asking questions,’ Teresa spat. ‘We just can’t. He and his friends have a bad reputation in this town. For getting in the way of things.’

  ‘I see,’ said Robert. ‘You’re in it up to your wattled old neck, aren’t you?’

  She ignored him. ‘And he reeks, too. You know why.’

  ‘Stop saying that!’ Robert shouted. ‘Why do you keep saying I smell?’

  Helen put in, ‘You have been touched in the night, haven’t you? We can smell faerie on you.’

  His stare moved from one charity volunteer to the other. ‘You’re both crackers. I’m getting out of here. Give me the book.’

  ‘We can’t let you just walk out,’ Helen warned.

  ‘You’ve let him touch you, haven’t you? We can’t let you go to him.’ Teresa was crooning softly, and advancing on Robert.

  His hackles were right up now. ‘Look, I don’t want to hurt either of you ladies.’ What could they do to him? These two ancient ratbags? He was in his prime. All he’d have to do was push past and dash down the stairs. They’d never be able to keep up with him. (But what if one of them fell and broke a hip? He’d feel terrible. They might even press charges, and then it’d look awful, wouldn’t it? A young bloke like him, assaulting charity volunteers in their own storeroom.)