Magda
A Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror Trilogy – Book 3
S. E. England
About the author: Sarah England originally trained as a nurse in Sheffield, England, before working in the pharmaceutical industry and specialising in mental health – a theme which creeps into many of her stories. To date she has over 160 short stories and serials published in magazines and newspapers; the most recent work being a trilogy of occult horror novels. If you would like to be informed about future books and audios there is an infrequent newsletter sign-up on Sarah’s online blog, the details of which follow here. Please feel free to keep in touch via any of the social media channels. It’s good to hear from you!
Also by S. E. England
Father of Lies – Book 1
Tanners Dell - Book 2
Copyright © 2016 Sarah England
Artwork: RoseWolf
Editor: Jeff Gardiner
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. Where particular places or institutions are mentioned, absolutely nothing other than the name of the building or local service bears any resemblance to reality
1st Edition: EchoWords 2016
www.echowords.org
www.sarahengland.yolasite.com
www.sarahenglandauthor.blogspot.com
Four and Twenty Blackbirds
‘Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Wasn't that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.’
Prologue
Ruby Dean
Drummersgate Forensic Unit
August 2016
The tube is hurtling through the subway at breakneck speed. Blurry faces flash past on blackened tunnel walls and alarm is beginning to spread. Something is badly wrong. One or two people lurch forwards, struggling to hold onto ceiling straps; others grab the seat in front. Still it accelerates – racing perilously along the track with carriages rocking dangerously from side to side - at times lifting off the rails.
This tunnel is going on for way too long…What’s happening? What is this?
A woman holding onto a pole by the exit turns to fix me with a stare, crimson painted lips catching in the flickering half-light. Silently she mouths a disembodied question that resonates around the black bowl of my head. “Don’t you know, Ruby?”
Know? Know what?
But there’s no time to think. We’re going to crash. Any second now. A loud bang sounds from somewhere further back and a window blows out. Still we pick up speed. Faster and faster, faster and faster, faster and faster…A woman falls to the floor and panicky shouts break out.
“Hey, what the hell’s going on? Pull the cord! Someone pull the damn cord.”
A man lunges for the emergency brake, but is thrown aside in the chaos.
Faster and faster, faster and faster, faster and faster.
Then suddenly the brakes screech to a halt. Bags and bodies catapult from seats.
And the carriage doors hiss open.
For several moments there is only the shocked mayhem of passengers and their belongings strewn across the carriage in a haze of burning electrics. Some people are crying and others are bleeding - beginning to reach out to helping hands - when a computerised voice echoes around the station.
“Step off the train, Ruby Dean. You have reached your destination.”
Everyone turns to look in my direction.
How do they know I’m Ruby?
This isn’t even a proper tube station – it has no name, no lights. It’s as black as a coalface.
But the hatred inside the carriage is now a living thing, growing with every accusing glare – a palpable, intensifying understanding that this hellish journey is somehow the fault of the girl by the window; that I am the one who has brought them here.
“You have to get off the train, Miss Dean. Get off the train.”
Their voices chime in. “Get rid of her. Get her out.”
Angry and peevish, they shove me in the back, down the aisle and off the steps to a crumpled landing on the platform below. Pain shoots up my ankle, but by the time I’ve turned round the doors have snapped shut and the tail lights shoot into the tunnel, leaving me stunned and alone in a hot, black, airless pit that stinks of rotting garbage and human waste.
For a full ten seconds there is nothing but silence.
And heat. An equatorial heat that’s dirty, oily and wet – impossible to withstand. Sweat bursts from every pore and panic blasts through my veins. This is the kind of blackness that renders you blind; without a pinprick of light. I can’t even see the track, visible only a moment ago. And the air is almost globular, forcing me to gulp down the rotting-corpse taste of it slithering down my throat, clogging my nostrils. This must be what it’s like to be buried alive, to swallow filth. I’m going to die. I am. I’m going to die.
Stop… stop…listen…shh…
A whisper… laughter…someone is here with me…“Oh no it’s far worse than that, Ruby… far worse.”
I whirl round. “Who’s there? Is someone there?”
Children: the sound of children snickering and giggling.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
Like a sleepwalker with my hands stretched out in front, I stumble towards the voices – and straight into something netted and sticky. It spans my face, tangling in my fingers, and suddenly I realise what it is…A huge cobweb…lacing over the whole of my upper body, threading into my hair. Frantically I back out of it, slapping at my arms, chest, and face…my heart rate off the scale. Please, please, please, not giant spiders…I’m going to be sick.
The giggling escalates. She…she hates spiders…she…shh…
Breathing hard now, crouching down low, panting, and trying to think. If only I could see some difference in shade or shape within this solidity of blackness – anywhere, in any direction. But there is nothing. Absolutely nothing. No stairwell. No lift. No sheen of a wall. Not the faintest glimmer of light or movement. Even the tunnel has disappeared. I cannot see a thing.
“Do you give up yet? Do you give up hope, Ruby?”
“Who are you? Who’s whispering?”
Something brushes the top of my arm – something light and fast and I swipe at it, a fresh wave of sweat breaking out, tears stinging my eyes. Spiders must be crawling everywhere, hanging in hammock cobwebs all ready for me to walk into. What if they’re in my hair right now? Or stuck to my back? I have to get out of here. Come on, find the exit…come on, Ruby you can do this. Which way to start walking, though? Which way?
An announcement comes over the Tannoy, “Ruby Dean, you have arrived at your destination. There is no exit. I repeat. You. Have. Arrived.”
The voice stops me dead.
Of course...I know where this is, don’t I?
Only now do the other occupants begin to show themselves.
They rise as spectres from the gutters and the drains – diseased corpses with fetid whispers, and empty eyes glazed with madness. Their gnarled fingers claw at my hair and face. Too close, too many…More and more of them materialise - stroking my arms, tugging at my clothes, excitement breeding excitement. But something else is fast approaching. Something that frightens them. The creatures pause, chests rattling with wet, rasping breaths. Whatever it is drenches them in terror. I hear it too…bestial howls now echoing through the subway, iron shackles clunking against the stones. The mad and the sick slither away in a hissing recoil; as shuffling forwards in their hundreds, no thousands, are those with no souls at all; the ones oozing with depravity and sadistic malice – those entirely drained of humanity. And it is with this group that he arrives.
“Ruby Dean to Platform One,” the intercom voice announces. “Your grandfather is here to collect you. Ruby Dean to Platform One.”
And in the next instant he is there before me – the rancid stench of him reawakening every single diabolical, abusive hate-filled violation he ever inflicted: Old Spice aftershave, stale urine, whisky…the snap of a nappy pin as I’m lifted from my cot…
His ice-hard eyes laser through the darkness as raw terror rips from my lungs.
“No, no, no. Help me please, help me someone, help me… Oh God. God help me!”
A woman’s laugh pours scorn all over my fear. She is the red glow of a cigarette butt, a coil of acrid smoke. “No one’s coming, Ruby. You are a bride of Satan, don’t you remember? Baptised and sworn in – just like us. Exactly the same.”
“God, please help me. God! Dear Lord, please, I beg you…”
Lucas Dean steps towards me.
“No. No. God in heaven, please–”
“Wake up, Ruby.”
She is a presence, a feeling – a tinny voice from the surface of a deep ocean. My spirit cries out to her with every atom of energy I have left. “Celeste?”
“Ruby…come on, Ruby. You must wake up.”
The power of her light wraps around me and I cloak myself in it, fighting my way up and up and up….to the tiny specks of glitter far away.
And when I open my eyes again the stars are back in the window, sparkling over open moorland; and I’m lying in bed on soaking sheets.
“You really must learn to protect yourself better,” says Celeste, already fading. “That was almost impossible – I nearly lost you.”
Swinging my legs over the side I put my head in my hands. I am Ruby Dean. I am Ruby. I thought I knew all the fragmented parts of myself – thought everyone in the system had been identified and we were safe. Clearly not. It appears there is a watcher – a Judas inside my own mind. And now I daren’t go to sleep.
***
Chapter One
Jasmine Cottage, Chesterfield
August Bank Holiday Weekend, 2016
Becky stopped chopping vegetables and stared out of the kitchen window. What a God-given evening – glorious, purple heather coating the moors for mile upon mile under a deep indigo sky still tinged with gold. The thick, stone walls of the cottage had baked in the Saharan heat; and their white cat, Louie, lay motionless across the windowsill amongst the flowerpots, snoozing; waiting for a cool breeze and the scent of dusk.
The piercing beauty was almost too much to bear. She took her fill of it. What a long way she’d come in the last eight months. Gone the dark days of winter when it seemed her world would disintegrate in a descent of lonely madness. She and Callum had married last month and unbelievably, at the age of forty-four she was going to have a child. She’d never thought it would happen and hadn’t even bothered to take precautions, thinking it never would, but it had. The baby in waiting was a girl and would be called Molly. They liked the name and so Molly it was. Her ex, Mark, had bought her share of the house in Doncaster and along with the divorce the transaction had gone through quickly. So now she had a new husband, a child on the way, and two teenaged step-children all in a very short space of time. Hmm…not that Callum’s kids were exactly thrilled about their dad having a new wife, but that would come. These things took time to settle.
“Well, Molly,” she said, talking to her as if she was in the room. “By the time you arrive in November we’ve to get this house ship-shape and I’ve an agency nurse to train up. Standing here staring at the scenery won’t get things done, will it? And your dad’s going to want something to eat before he goes to work tonight, as well.”
There was always a downer – Callum’s hours did leave her alone a lot but at least he’d recovered sufficiently to return to work and that was the main thing. As it turned out he’d been off for six months, having to learn how to walk properly again, the extent of his spinal injuries pretty severe. But he was on the mend now, almost as good as new, he insisted, with a war wound on the side of his head to show for it. She smiled as he passed through her thoughts. In her eyes the scar only made him more handsome.
“We ’aving tea anytime soon, or what?” he said, ducking under the lintel.
He seemed enormous in this poky kitchen, it always struck her. People in days gone by must have been tiny. The cottage was an end of terrace in a row of three, incongruously built in the middle of a field on the windswept Chesterfield moors. Driving past a couple of months ago they noticed the ‘For Sale’ board and Callum had pulled over. “Now why would anyone put those there?” he asked. “Just the three of them like that?”
Becky shook her head. “I don’t know but I kind of like it.”
They bought the end one. All three had long rectangles of garden with sheds at the bottom; and not too long ago they’d all had outdoor toilets tacked onto the back. These were lean-tos with roofs made of corrugated iron, now used for storage since the days of a weekly tin bath in front of the fire were long gone. It might be romantic to think of people mending and sewing by candlelight, she’d said to Callum, but in reality those freezing mornings with no heating and only a cold wash under the kitchen tap must have been tough.
The kitchen was crammed into a small, gloomy corner, which badly needed knocking through to the dining room and opening up. Locked in a 1970s time warp, it sported yellow Formica cupboard doors, peeling wallpaper and a free standing cooker; but the aspect was stunning and that’s what had clinched the deal. To wake up, throw back the curtains and breathe in an eternity of open sky with nothing but the sound of a kestrel hovering on the current of a breeze, was euphoric and all they could wish for after the darkness of the previous year.
On hearing Callum come in, she quickly tipped the board of mushrooms and peppers into a frying pan and pretended to dodge out of his way. “Get off you great brute, do you want to eat tonight or not?”
“Depends what else is on offer, wench.”
“Nothing else is on offer. Can you get the plates out – this’ll only be two ticks.”
“What we ’aving?”
“Chicken stir-fry.”
“Rice or chips?”
“Oh, very classy. Chips? With a stir-fry? It’s noodles – rice noodles.”
“They give you chips in the Chinese with stir-fry. If that isn’t class, I don’t know what is.”
“No, well you wouldn’t. You want educating,” she said from inside a cloud of steam. “Can you get some glasses as well?”
“I don’t know about a Chinese restaurant, it’s more like a Chinese laundry in here.”
Becky laughed, flushed from the heat as she served up. “Here you are. Now no complaints mind, or it’ll be lettuce for the rest of the week – that soggy dark green, home-grown stuff we used to be force fed as kids, with radishes.”
He bolted his food like a starving orphan, staring hungrily at her plate the second he’d finished. “Don’t you want that?”
“God, it’s dangerous to even put your fork down in this house. I just wanted a sip of water… Oh
, go on then.” She pushed her plate over. “Have it.”
Nurses ate fast but blimey, policemen were worse.
“I had a very deprived childhood,” he said. “Our Carol would ’ave it off me if I didn’t eat quickly enough. And she pinched me.”
“I’d have pinched you, as well.”
“By the way, do you feel like inviting Toby and his new girlfriend over for a meal at the weekend – bottle of wine, that kind of thing? It’d be good to ’ave a catch-up – I’ve ’ardly seen ’im since I’ve been back.”
“Girlfriend, eh? He never said anything to me about a girlfriend when I spoke to him on the phone. Is she new? What’s her name?”
“Amy, he said. I think it was Amy. Yeah, he just met ’er apparently. Said she had hypnotic eyes.”
They laughed.
“Ah, love’s young dream.”
“I’m glad for ’im though – he’s really been through it, the poor, little sod. I’ll be honest, I never thought he’d go under like that, though, did you?”
“No, but then these things can come back to bite you on the arse when you least expect them.”
“I’d like to bite you on the arse.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
The two of them bantered and bickered as if they’d been married for years, both of them, she thought as he sauntered down the drive to his car, ecstatically happy.
“That’s right,” she called after him. “Leave me with all the washing up!”
He looked over the car roof and waved. “Get it done, wench, and stop mithering.”
She laughed again, and after he’d driven away began clearing the table, startled for the zillionth time to feel a tiny kick inside her. “Oh hello, Molly, you okay in there?”
Concentrating on the washing-up while her thoughts flitted all over the place, not settling on anything in particular, it was therefore with some surprise that when she looked up the windowsill was empty. “Oh! Where’s Louie? Typical – I was just about to cook him some fish. Did you see him go, Molly? No, of course you didn’t.” She laughed. “Oh well, no doubt he’s off mousing – it’s a nice, clear night and the owls are out. Good hunting, I expect.”
Magda: A Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror Trilogy - Book 3 Page 1