[Brenda & Effie 04] - Hell's Belles

by Paul Magrs

  So, where is he?

  This morning he looked very perturbed. I tried to talk to him during the breakfast rush, when everyone was dashing about looking after the film people. All he would say was that something terrible had happened to Brenda and Effie. After they watched that film I watched, the one I bought from Save the Kiddies. Apparently they have gone into a trance just like I did, only much worse. I think what Robert was saying was that he was going to find out where the film had come from in the first place, but I was so busy running things at this end that I didn’t get all the details.

  And now he’s gone! It’s evening again and we’re about to serve dinner and he’s still not here. I try to jolly along the staff, but they know something is up.

  But then, of course, there has been another development to take our minds off Robert’s vanishing act. Guess what?

  There’s been an accident on the film set today.

  The curse of the movie strikes back!

  I mean, it wasn’t a massive thing, like someone’s head getting cut off or someone getting electrocuted. Nothing like that. But Mimsy Stark, one of the supporting artists, choked on a sausage-and-egg bap on location at the abbey this morning. She closed up one of her passages and there was a right panic on, because she couldn’t breathe for about ten minutes or something. They had to get an ambulance out and everything, and she’s still in hospital now, so the filming is held up and everyone’s furious.

  The crew and technical people came trogging back here at teatime, muttering and complaining about poor suffocated Mimsy. She wasn’t very popular amongst them in the first place. She’s proper stuck-up, apparently. Anyway, they’re all saying it’s the dreaded curse starting up again. In the form of sausage-and-egg baps.

  I must finish up, Mam. I wonder what you make of these strange letters of mine.

  Tonight I was going to go over to Spector, to have a drink with the divine Michael. But I don’t think I can now. Not with Robert missing. I’ll have to ring Michael, and explain. And before you ask, or rush to assumptions, I don’t think there’s much chance of anything blossoming between me and Michael. It seems really weird, but ever since the night of the cabaret, he’s been fixated on that old woman from the Christmas Hotel. She’s the only woman he’ll talk about. So I think he’s probably some weirdo, actually. I’m best off out of it. Anyway, I’ll write again soon!

  Love,

  Penny

  Epiphanies and Pie and Peas

  It was Pie and Peas Night at the Christmas Hotel, and Mrs Claus was sitting at her favourite table. High table, from which she could survey her festive kingdom, watching the pensioners slurp up their peas and gravy, and fork up mouthfuls of glistening mince.

  ‘There’s no elves in my pies!’ she cried out, laughing, tapping Michael on the shoulder playfully. ‘You cheeky thing! Where did you hear that? What makes you think we go in for cannibalism round these parts, eh?’

  He grinned ruefully.

  Oh, but he looked a sight for sore eyes tonight. He was in a green paisley shirt, the exact shade of his eyes. His hair looked blue-black in the fairy-lit ambience of the dining room. ‘I don’t know,’ he laughed. ‘Just general gossip. Penny, I think. That girl who hangs out with Robert and that lot.’

  ‘Ooh, they do say awful things about me. But it’s all in fun, you know. At least, I hope it is! They don’t really hate and fear me. They just say silly things for a joke. I don’t know why. They know I’m big enough and old enough and ugly enough to take a joke.’ She sighed and waved a cracker at him, which he pulled energetically. She let him have the hat.

  ‘You’re not ugly!’ he protested. ‘I think it’s plain for anyone to see that you have been a very beautiful young woman in your time. And that you’re a beautiful person inside.’

  He sounded so earnest. So ridiculous. Mrs Claus thrilled at his voice as he leaned over the table to tell her this. She flushed and turned back to her pie and peas, keen not to betray her own emotions.

  Because she didn’t know what he was playing at yet. Was this all real? The way he had latched on to her? She couldn’t trust him. Just as she couldn’t trust anyone. Her days of snaring men were long gone, she had accepted that. Faced with this puppy-dog attachment from Michael, she was starting to think he was mocking her somehow. Maybe it was all some horrible plan of that Effie and Brenda’s. To draw her into a compromising situation. To expose her. To ridicule her.

  Why would a young man like this think anything of her? She spooned up suet and gravy and thought hard as carols crackled over the tannoy and the pensioners in her care mumbled along with the old, sentimental words. Maybe it was all for real. Stranger things had happened, surely? Maybe Michael really was starting to feel something for her.

  After all, she had so much to offer.

  She chuckled inwardly at herself.

  He loved her story. She knew that much. That was what kept him coming back to sit by her. To make himself comfortable at her side in her Christmassy boudoir.

  She had been telling him a little more about how her sisters had been scandalised when she met her fancy man. All those years back.

  They forbade her to leave the house in case he came galloping by again. The twelve days of Christmas ticked by and she sat stewing indoors. Snow came down heavily over the harbour town, freezing the place solid. Jamming them into their homes. But she would lie in her bed at night and hear hooves clanging through the streets. No one else was about. It had to be him, braving the weather. Reminding her that she was his.

  Every morning until Epiphany there was a new present left on the doorstep of the sisters’ shop. A teddy bear. Hot peppermints. A bunch of blood-red roses.

  Maud was furious. ‘We will put a hex on him, sisters,’ she announced over breakfast. ‘We’ll prepare a spell to make his eyes pop out and his tiddler drop off. And then where will he be, eh? This awful seducer. This mucky, disgusting, perverted man?’

  All the sisters laughed at this. But Maud caught her youngest sister’s eye. Maud knew it was serious. She could feel the power bristling about the place. She could sense this man’s determination. Her sister’s steely will. Angela stirred golden sugar into her hot, thick porridge and smiled enigmatically.

  ‘I picked up the presents each morning from the doorstep. I stared at the hoofprints he had left in the snow. I’d hide the offerings in my room and stare at them when I was alone. A doll that could walk and speak and give marvellous advice. A mandrake root. A golden ball that bounced so high it took a full day to come back to earth. A bell that when you tinkled it thinking of a certain person, you could blight them with double incontinence.’ Mrs Claus threw back her head and laughed at the memory of her Christmas gifts.

  ‘No wonder you went to him,’ Michael said. ‘With temptations like these.’

  ‘It was a poor time,’ she said. ‘This town is so spruced up and lovely now. But you have to understand that back in the thirties, I suppose this was, it was still filled with warrens of filthy back streets and tumbledown shacks. The place reeked of fish and unwashed human beings who never changed their clothes from one season to the next. They just put extra layers of filthy rags on themselves.

  ‘Oh, it was a mucky old place. And here was this man, leaving me tiaras and necklaces. Dolls that could talk. I was a greedy child. And it was as if he was all made out of spices and sweets. His skin pale as fondant cream. His lips like cherry-red boiled sweets. His eyes were peppermint green.’

  Mrs Claus darted a look at Michael. ‘So I went with him. I defied my sisters and I clambered out of their house one night in a snowstorm. The walking, talking doll had told me where and when he would be waiting. On the way out of town. The road leading north. So I went. And he took me away for a year and a day.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘His home? His mansion? Where did you say it was?’

  ‘Oh, dearie. We galloped so far that night. Through the blizzard. I don’t know how far it was. I alwa
ys understood it was somewhere north of Newcastle, but he once explained how geography was immaterial. In leaving with him, I had left this realm. I had entered the world of faerie.’

  Michael raised both eyebrows.

  ‘He was the faerie king, was what he told me on that long ride through the night. Epiphany night, in more ways than one. And his castle was in a different land.’

  ‘Oh come on.’ Michael smiled, suddenly sceptical.

  ‘We dismounted somewhere near Hexham. On a high and windy hill. He fetched out of his saddle bag a pair of bright, shining pinking shears. I asked my talking doll, who I had kept clutched close to me, throughout the escape: “What’s he doing, Mrs Claus?” And my doll said, “Why, those are his magic pinking shears. Now he’s slicing through the very fabric of time and space. Into another land. His land. And that’s where he’s taking you.” And then she started laughing at me. A not-very-nice laugh, I thought. She jumped out of my arms and – I swear – landed on the snowy ground and ran away, into the night.

  ‘My husband turned to me. Beckoned me and the horse towards the gap he had cut in the air itself. It was a scintillating space of darkness. A glittering miasma lay beyond.

  ‘All he said was “Come with me.” They were his favourite words. So in I went, after him. To his kingdom of faerie, north of Newcastle.’

  Michael was gawping at her.

  Maybe I’m telling him too much, she mused. She snapped her fingers at the elf waiting on their table. Time for Christmas pud. Time for sherry. Time for the next hook in her tale.

  ‘So there I was. In a new land. I’d seen nothing like it. I was his queen. I was untouchable. Until . . . until my downfall. Some would say it was inevitable. I’d stop finding favour in his eye. But it came as a shock to me, I can tell you.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, nine months on I had a baby. And they wouldn’t let me keep it. They stood me before the whole faerie court and he was up on his throne, looking aloof and like he’d lost all patience with me. Like giving birth to a human child, a daughter, was in such bad taste. Less than a year and he was out of love with me. You know how it is.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Michael said.

  ‘Help yourself to the brandy butter, dearie,’ she told him. ‘I was arguing back. Wanting to keep my daughter. Of course I did. She was beautiful. Perfect. But they said that if I was to remain in their wondrous land, I had to give her up. I had to send her back to my sisters to raise. Well. What could I do?’

  ‘You gave her up?’

  Mrs Claus smiled sadly. ‘In his realm of faerie, north of Newcastle, it was Christmas every day. Like I say, I was a greedy child. It wasn’t some sappy, religious-type Christmas. It was a Christmas where you got given presents all the time. Where you ate and drank to your heart’s content. Until you popped. I was still only a child. I wouldn’t leave it all behind.’

  ‘You gave her up?’

  She nodded. ‘I was so ashamed of myself. But I hardened my heart. I was greedy, but only because I had been starved in the world I had come from. Starved of sweet things and affection. In the land of faerie, I had it all. One screaming baby seemed such a little thing to give up, really. I mean, it wasn’t as if we had even bonded yet. She thought nothing of me, this twisting, crimson mite in my arms. She’d be better off with my sisters, with Maud, who knew so much more about bringing up kiddies than did I.’

  ‘I can’t believe you gave her up.’ Michael frowned.

  ‘There was silence in his throne room. Then the sound of hollow plastic legs marching into the room. I turned, and there was my mechanical doll striding across the flagstones towards me. Mrs Claus, in a bright red robe with ermine trim. The doll had come to take my baby from me, and all the faeries watched. My fancy man watched too. As I gave her up, they clapped and laughed. And I watched the doll bear her away, back to the dreadful, dingy world and the town by the sea where I had grown up.’

  Mrs Claus pushed her unfinished pudding away, her appetite spoiled by the recounting of her bitter tale.

  ‘But you came back here eventually. To this town.’

  ‘That’s another story,’ she said primly. She was disappointed in his reaction tonight. He wasn’t sympathetic enough. She thought he might understand better than this.

  ‘And the baby? Did you see her again?’

  She gave a huge sigh. ‘Much later. A long time later, when I stole those pinking shears of his from under his pillow. I set off into the freezing night winds. I cut me my own hole in the fabric of time and space. I was homesick. But it was much too late for me and my baby. She hated me. She still does.’

  Her voice was drowned out for a moment, as the other diners put down their cutlery and pushed away their bowls, all in one mass movement. An elf had announced the commencement of bingo-calling in the main lounge, to be followed by a dance. The hokey cokey, March of the Mods, all their silly favourites. Mrs Claus offered Michael her arm.

  ‘I hope I haven’t horrified you with my tale of Christmases past?’ She smiled. Needily, she thought. I’m being too needy with him. What am I doing, offering all my secrets? I’ll scare the young fella away.

  He guided her around the table, wheeling her steadily towards the ramp and out of the dining room. ‘Not at all,’ he said stiffly. Too stiff, she thought. Too polite. Then he bent to kiss her softly on her cheek, which burned at his touch. ‘I love hearing all about your life,’ he said.

  Bound

  Dear Brenda,

  I am writing this to you with no legs.

  In fact, I am writing this to you with no paper and no pen. It is all in Frank’s head, my love. I hope my words will get to you somehow.

  Even in Frank’s very darkest days he was never as lost as this. Here I am in the same town as you. I am only a few streets away from your guest house, from the home where we have lived together these past few months. But Frank feels so far, far away.

  They have taken Frank’s legs, Brenda. They have made him a prisoner. They have tied him with ropes and chains and put him in this attic. My spirit feels crushed. My soul’s squashed small. I have been treated like this before. The fight has gone out of Frank. Something terrible has happened to me.

  The bleeding has stopped.

  The madwoman’s servants have been checking on me. Staunching my wounds. They have the decency to look appalled at what they have done to me. They were under some kind of enchantment. That’s how they try to excuse themselves. But Frank clams up. He won’t forgive them. He won’t engage in conversation with these two men, these lackeys of the Sorenson witch.

  They sit across the attic from me now, staring at me. We’re all prisoners together now.

  Brenda, hear me, will you? Come to my aid?

  You’re sensitive. My beautiful bride. You will hear me, won’t you?

  Later . . .

  Another prisoner for the attic.

  Unbelievable.

  I fear all is lost.

  Robert. Your friend Robert is here.

  He was pushed in about fifteen minutes ago. Shoved up the stairs to sit with us. Came in at a stumbling run. Woozy. They’d clobbered him round the head. Two old women from Save the Kiddies, evidently more servants of Karla Sorenson.

  And now here he is. Looking sick with dread. His eyes just about popped out of his head when he saw me. And me with no legs.

  ‘What are they doing, putting us up here, Frank? What’s happening?’

  Frank doesn’t have any answers for him.

  A terrible feeling of dread has swept over Frank. Frank has a sense that something even worse is to come. Worse than being locked up. Worse than no legs. Worse even than being separated from the beloved bride of Frank.

  What is it?

  I feel a presence.

  Something in the hotel below. In the suite below belonging to the evil Karla. She has someone there. Someone I haven’t seen for a very long time.

  Frank’s hackles are up. The hairs are standing up all over his body. Frank’s
got gooseflesh bumping up everywhere. The tiny alarm bells ringing even overwhelm the steady, heavy throb of pain from his gory stumps and his ghostly limbs.

  But who is it down there?

  Who has Karla got with her now?

  Fox in His Den

  ‘I must say, my dear, I find you absolutely fascinating,’ Fox purred. He sat down gracefully behind his gilt-edged desk and surveyed his guests. ‘You, too, my dear,’ he told Effie. ‘But Brenda even more so. Absolutely fascinating.’

  Brenda shifted uncomfortably. ‘There’s nothing so fascinating about me. The important thing, Mr Soames, is that you see the sense in what we’re saying. We believe that we have been brought here, to this time and place, to prevent this film from ever being made.’

  ‘So you say.’ Fox steepled his stubby, typewriter-key-scarred fingers and propped his heavy chin on them. ‘And you came through time. From the twenty-first century. Forgive me, dears, but you hardly look to me like twenty-first-century ladies. You’re not exactly futuristic, are you, now?’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Effie snapped. ‘Jane Fonda?’

  There came a snort from Magda Soames, Fox’s surly and slightly-stoned-looking wife. She was at the art deco minibar, mixing a row of martinis and dishing up bowls of olives, smoked oysters and nuts. It was as if they were here for a cocktail party. Effie found herself revolted by the imperturbable Soameses. She didn’t like the look of the kid, either. He was propped on a priceless armchair, glaring at the visitors from under his fringe.

  Fox said smoothly, ‘I could almost believe that the dinner lady from the catering van was having a silly joke with me, for what purpose I know not. And that she had roped her elderly friend in to help. Well, I suppose there is one way of finding out, isn’t there?’ He snatched up a golden phone on his desk and spoke urgently to the person at the other end. When he was finished, he smiled at them both and carried on with his interrogation. ‘My dears, this is only a movie, isn’t it? What possible harm can a movie do? Indeed, surely it can do a lot of good, hmm? If it warns audiences around the world about the dangers inherent in flirting with the powers of darkness?’