by Paul Magrs
I shrugged lightly. ‘I’m not sure. Especially after some of the things we’ve come up against recently.’
‘Darling,’ Effie smirked, ‘that’s as may be. But you really mustn’t go round suspecting the worst of Kristoff. He’s a very good man, and he’s done me a power of good. He’s given me a reason to get up in the morning.’
‘Really?’ I was surprised. Effie’s life before Kristoff hadn’t seemed so terrible to me. She hadn’t despised it.
‘He’s a darling, gentle man,’ she said.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Historical research,’ she said. ‘Up in my attic. He said he couldn’t wait to get his hands on my books. All that arcane lore. He’s going through all the catalogues and notes I’ve been compiling.’
The persistent buzzing I’d had in my head for days suddenly exploded into grand, crashing peals of alarm bells. ‘He’s going through your aunties’ books of magic?’ I asked. ‘You’ve let him get at them?’
‘Of course.’ She laughed. ‘Why shouldn’t I? I hope he has more success than I did. I couldn’t make head or tail of the nasty things.’
Suddenly I knew that Effie had made a dreadful mistake.
And I also knew that that was why Kristoff Alucard was paying court to her. He needed those books. He needed access to the precious information hidden somewhere inside them. That was what all this was about.
Effie had been duped. She had been wooed silly. Flattered daft.
And she had let Kristoff steal secrets she didn’t even know she had.
I watched him come and go. I peered down at the street from my highest window. It became something like an obsession with me, keeping tabs on Effie’s bloke. I would watch him leave her shop at the strangest hours: midnight, five a.m. seven o’clock at night. There was no pattern to his behaviour. He seemed to come and go at will, looking mightily perplexed. Often he had with him one of those thick, leatherbound books from Effie’s collection. To all intents and purposes, he was doing precisely what Effie had claimed: the kind of historical research that had him stomping through town at all hours of the day. He was searching for something, using fragments of clues from Effie’s books to get to it.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Effie, sharply. ‘And, what’s more, I won’t ask him.’
‘But don’t you think he’s behaving oddly?’ I said.
She shrugged. I bit my lip. After almost a week of study and tramping about, he had stopped taking Effie out. Things had gone quiet on that front. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was exhausting.’ This was as we had morning coffee in the Walrus and the Carpenter. ‘We couldn’t have carried on at the same rate. Gadding about like youngsters. No, perhaps this is a more sedate period when things settle down. It can’t be excitement all the time.’
I was wondering whether, in terms of our friendship, Effie and I were back on an even keel. Here we were, back in our old routine, coffee and shopping, with nothing coming between us. Certainly not fellas.
I didn’t believe what she was saying, though. ‘Sedate period’. ‘Settling down’. It didn’t look very sedate to me, whatever Alucard was doing. These days, he seemed excitable, clutching those vile books to his chest, dashing about. But it was an excitement that had nothing to do with Effie.
That afternoon we bumped into him as we headed back across the bay. The mist had crept in early, but it wasn’t so thick that he could brush past without noticing us.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m so sorry. How rude of me!’
Effie was quite piqued. She had shouted across the road at him several times. People had seen. Now she felt foolish. ‘Where are you off to now, Kristoff ?’ She sounded weary.
Poor Effie, I thought. The shine’s soon gone off the affair. She was so listless and pale. I wondered if she might be anaemic or something. Love does funny things to people. Neglect does even worse.
‘Ah, you know,’ he said jauntily, ‘more hunting about. More looking into the deep, magical past of this place.’ He grinned wolfishly and I saw that he wasn’t his usual spruce self. His hair was awry, greasy and lank. He wasn’t as suave as usual either: he was wearing an anorak and carrying an old string bag of Effie’s books.
‘The magical past?’ I asked, frowning. ‘I didn’t know that was what you were looking into.’ But, of course, it had to be that, didn’t it? What else had Effie’s aunties been interested in?
‘I think I’m on the brink of something,’ he said.
‘Really?’
Effie was openly sceptical now. ‘Go on, then. Tell us what it is. We can’t hang around all day in this freezing fog.’
‘I’d rather not say just yet,’ he whispered, ‘in case I’m wrong. But I’m almost sure I’ve found it. The clues in the books have led me to just the right spot. This is it! The whole reason I’m here in the first place! Almost at my fingertips . . .’
I heard Effie’s sharp intake of breath: that remark had stung her. He didn’t notice.
‘Well,’ she said, with a wave of her veiny hand, ‘you’d best get on with it, hadn’t you? We wouldn’t want to hold you up.’ She was dismissing him as she would a small child, sending him out to play.
Kristoff didn’t need telling twice. He grinned, then vanished into the mist.
‘He’ll be off up the steps,’ she said, ‘poking his nose round that church again. And the abbey. That’s where he seems to concentrate his searches.’
‘But what for?’ I said. We started walking again, heading for home. ‘What is it he’s looking for?’
She shrugged as if it meant nothing to her. As if she couldn’t have cared less. But that was a lie and we both knew it.
Effie invited me in. ‘Come and see what he’s been looking at.’
‘Hm?’
‘While he’s out I’ll show you what he’s been reading. Some of his notes are about the place, too.’ Effie was worried. ‘I don’t like it, Brenda. Remember when I said there were nasty, frightening things in some of those books?’
I followed her upstairs.
In just a few days, Effie’s home had fallen back into moribund disarray. The worst room turned out to be the one that Kristoff had taken to working in, at the top of the house. The oldest books were concentrated there and a battered dining-table was spread with a selection of them. Slips of paper held open pages, and there were crumpled notes written in Kristoff’s strange, barely legible hand.
‘Not much of this is in English,’ I said, peering at the books, stirring through the loose notes. I found myself reluctant to touch anything, not so much for fear of being found snooping but because there was something horrible and tainting about them.
‘Remember that stuff I read about creatures controlling us from other worlds?’ Effie said. ‘And some of the illustrations of those weird, crablike beings with tentacles and angel wings?’
I nodded, although that night I’d thought Effie had hit the sherry rather hard.
‘He’s been scouring those books. Old gods, he says, and old rituals.’
‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ I said. Then I glanced at Effie. ‘This must be horrible for you. He seemed like Mr Perfect.’
‘He still is Mr Perfect,’ she snapped. ‘I’m just not sure about his hobbies.’
We rolled up our sleeves then, and set to work examining the texts. I had to put aside my physical disgust at touching those books. As before, they reminded me of the ones that had lined the walls of my father’s laboratory.
Some time later, as evening wore on, and the light in the upper windows turned a pretty shade of apricot, I gave a falsely hearty laugh, which broke the silence. ‘You’ll never guess, Effie, but I’ve been fretting and worrying for days because of your Kristoff.’
‘Really?’ she said, turning pages carefully. ‘And why’s that? What’s there to worry about?’
I chuckled. ‘You know what I’m like. I see monsters and nefarious schemes everywhere. But . . . I did think he had you under his influence. Like a demon lov
er. He had swept into your life and taken you over absolutely . . .’
She smiled at me. ‘To be honest, that’s rather how it feels. Not that I’m complaining. I just assumed that that’s how love is.’
I laughed again. ‘And you’ll never guess what I’d started to suspect. You’ll think I’m ridiculous. But it was the way he went about, all regally. And his clothes and the pallor of his skin. And the way I found him skulking in that crypt and he seemed so at home there. And then I thought, Well, of course, none of that can be true, can it? Because he’s out and about in the daytime. He isn’t afraid of the sunlight. So, of course, I’m thinking nonsense, I decided. And I was relieved - so relieved!’ I gave another fake-sounding laugh.
Effie was staring at me. ‘What on earth are you on about?’
My face fell. ‘He’s a vampire, isn’t he?’
Effie smirked. ‘All that, for such a simple question! Really, dear. You should learn to spit things out.’ She tutted at me. ‘But, yes, of course he is. I thought that was pretty obvious.’
Her pallor! I thought, with a rush of sheer horror. Her listlessness and the changeable moods. He’d had a go at her!
‘And you,’ I said, very quietly, ‘has he bitten you?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘not really. It’s early days, you know. I mean, I might look like a silly old woman who’s lost all her sense. I might seem desperate to you, but I do have my self-respect, you know. I haven’t given him my all. Not yet.’
‘But has he bitten you?’ I insisted. ‘Are you . . . undead, Effie?’
She was scandalised. ‘Of course not! You’d be the first to know, Brenda. Do you think I’d keep something like that from you?’
I shook my head. How could she be so blithe about it?
She laughed. ‘I thought you’d worked it out days ago. It’s obvious. Think of his name, what it spells backwards.’
‘Oh!’ I’ve always been useless at anagrams and crosswords, things like that. You need a certain kind of analytical mind for such things. Same as doing research in mouldering books like these. I couldn’t make much sense of them. ‘So, he’s Dracula, then? That’s what you’re saying?’
Effie rolled her eyes at me. ‘You’re so slow, Brenda. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.’
Now that the secret was out, Effie was looking like the cat that got the cream, like a much younger woman who had managed to snag a famous pop star or a footballer. Maybe in her family of witchy old women, snaring the Prince of the Undead counted as much the same thing.
‘So how come he can go about in the daytime?’ I asked.
‘The same way he puts lots of garlic in his food, wears a crucifix - upside-down, of course - and has a reflection in the mirror. Those are all very old-fashioned ideas. He’s not stuffy and stuck in the past at all. He’s updated himself.’
I was impressed. I was amazed, too, at how sanguine Effie was. ‘Sanguine’ was an unfortunate word. I pictured him nibbling at her, drawing up bright beads of blood, her waving him away, laughing like a schoolgirl. What had Effie got herself into?
She had surrounded herself with monsters. She had invited him over her threshold, and welcomed him into her life. And next door she had me. Her best friend. We were the two people closest to her and we had these monstrous, unnatural pasts, stretching back through recent centuries. Poor Effie. Did she ever wish she knew some ordinary people?
‘I know what you’re thinking, Brenda,’ she said, ‘but you mustn’t worry. I have nothing to fear from Kristoff. He really does love me, you know.’
I tried to smile, wholly unconvinced.
‘He has a different relationship to time from the rest of us. He doesn’t see me as I see me, or you, or anyone else. He doesn’t see this sagging flesh and the wrinkles. That’s just the envelope, how I am on the outside at this moment. Because he’s lived so long - much longer even than you - he has learned to see in four dimensions, rather than three. He can see time itself within me, through me and behind me. He sees all the Effies I have been, right back to the cradle. All those much more youthful and vital versions of me, stretching out behind me. And that’s what he loves. All of me, going back into the past.’
I was mollified by this - a little. It sounded rather nice.
‘And my female forebears,’ she said, ‘he can see them, too. Their genetic influence on me, and everything they have passed down.’
Everything that had made Effie who she was, Kristoff perceived and understood. It made sense to me that his burning eyes could see all those things. That he could somehow see time.
Then I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. I wasn’t a consistent, coherent being like Effie, with a long line of ancestors. I wasn’t integral in that way. What did he see? What shape was I in four dimensions? Was I even more monstrous than I am in three? He said he was fascinated by me. Intrigued. Now I realised that he must know far more about me than I did. He would have seen everything at a glance.
A chill crept over me.
Both Effie and I jumped in our rickety chairs when we heard the door bang downstairs.
I was meant to be here, in this town, at this time. I’ve always known that. It is as if all my long life until now has been a prelude to coming here. To my purpose here.
It was that night, as Effie’s new fancy man stepped back into her house, that I started to find out what was expected of me in Whitby. Kristoff Alucard was in possession of some of the answers. And as he trod up the staircases and headed towards us, in his makeshift study, I knew that the truth of my destiny was closing in on me.
‘Look natural,’ said Effie, breathlessly.
‘What?’
‘Look as if we weren’t going through all his things.’
Too late. He slipped into the room like a shadow. He glanced at us narrowly, suspiciously.
‘I was having a tidy round . . .’ said Effie, in a rush.
‘Nonsense.’ Alucard sighed. ‘You needn’t make up stories for me, my dear. Naturally you wish to know more about my recent activities and researches. The texts belong to you. It is only right that I keep you informed. Forgive my reticence, my dear. But I had to be sure.’
Effie glanced at me. ‘Sure of what?’
‘I have found it,’ he said. His voice was trembling. ‘Your books gave me the few extra pointers I needed. And now I’ve found it!’
‘Tell us!’ cried Effie. ‘What is it? Treasure? A . . . weapon? A golden chalice?’ She was ransacking her memory for mythical objects.
‘The Bitch’s Maw,’ he said, in a low, thrilling tone.
A few bells rang in my head, clamouring for attention. I gripped the corner of the table. I knew he was speaking the truth. I had heard that name mentioned before, in this very house. During the seance, just a couple of weeks ago, that name had issued from the lips of Brian the psychic. My father had mentioned the Bitch’s Maw.
And we had been warned. We had heard dreadful things coming through the ether. But what had we done about it?
Nothing. That was the truth. We’d had enough to be getting on with, it was true. We had been set upon by all manner of strange events. But we hadn’t done a thing about the place my father had referred to as the Bitch’s Maw. Something about the misogyny of the term had made me flinch. It wasn’t something I had wanted to dwell on.
But here it was again.
Effie sat down heavily. ‘That again!’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised. What was it we were meant to do, Brenda? Watch over the souls exiled from hell? What did Brian say? That hell is bursting at the seams?’ I nodded at her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought he was talking nonsense. Rambling and ranting about nothing.’
‘The Bitch’s Maw is real,’ Kristoff said. ‘It has been here for almost a thousand years. It connects this town with the nether regions, and it can never be destroyed. So, it needs watching. It needs to be guarded. That is what your forebears did, Effie. It was their function here.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘No one ever
told me about it. Great Aunt Maud never said a word about any gateway to hell.’
‘Gateway is a good word for what it is,’ said Kristoff, gently. ‘It’s hidden from prying eyes. It’s invisible, until the correct phrases are said. All the clues are in those books, Effie, especially those left behind by Great Aunt Maud. And if she didn’t tell you about your duties here, there must have been a reason for that. She must have been taken from you too soon . . .’
‘A fishbone,’ Effie said. ‘It was a sudden, undignified death.’
‘In this more rational age,’ Kristoff sighed, ‘it would have been hard to convince you, anyway, of the Maw’s existence. And, throughout your life, it has been neglected. The entrance to hell has been untended—’
Now I butted in: ‘You - you’re one of the damned,’ I told him. ‘Are you one of those who escaped through this gateway thing?’
His eyes burned, and he looked offended. ‘Certainly not. I am earthbound, just as you are, Brenda.’
‘Then . . . why are you here? What do you want with the Maw thing?’
He cast an eager, hungry gaze over the splayed texts. He looked as if he wanted to reach out with those slender fingers, those pointed nails, and rake through the pages, rip out that secret knowledge and devour it in one go. Then he grew calmer. ‘I am working for someone else.’
‘Oh, no!’ Effie gasped. ‘Not a Higher Power! Not one of those terrible creatures!’
Kristoff seemed alarmed. ‘Certainly not. I am being employed by a rather more lowly, humdrum organisation. The Ministry of Incursions and Other Wonders.’
‘MIAOW,’ I said. ‘You’re working for MIAOW?’
He nodded, produced a plastic wallet and flashed a neat ID card at us.
‘You’re telling me Dracula’s working for the secret service?’ I said.
He shushed me. ‘Don’t use that name. It sets off alarms at all sorts of levels. Best stick to my other names.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said flatly. ‘What can they possibly be giving you to get you to work for them? You’re a free spirit, Prince of the Undead! You don’t need a salary, a pension, a career! What’s got into you, man?’