by Paul Magrs
I could hardly contain myself, truth be told.
‘Erm . . . Mrs Mapp,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you have a spare copy of your book? We’ll need some pages for the chanting part of the ritual.’
She looked flustered for a moment. ‘I believe I have some notes that we could use. But . . . but I do not have a whole copy of the entire thing.’ All of a sudden she looked panicked. She went ashen.
So did Mr Rupert. ‘Are you saying that you lent me the only copy of your book? The only copy in existence?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking grave. ‘Surely you haven’t . . .’
‘Left it there, yes.’ He nodded, very ashamed. ‘I thought it would be of more use to the professor than to myself, during his incarceration. As a sort of guide book. Never for one moment did I think that you would have given me the only copy . . .’
I stared at my mistress. I could hardly believe she would do something so foolish. She coloured with embarrassment, and I saw at that moment just how much she must trust Mr Rupert. And how much that was precious to her she longed to place in his care.
I watched as she struggled with these emotions and as a new clarity of expression, of determination, took over her whole visage. She stood up. ‘We have no choice, it seems. We simply have to embark upon a second expedition. Immediately!’
Could I help it if I felt like cheering at her words?
It was down to yours truly, of course, to make all of the preparations. I was counselled by Mr Rupert not to pack too much, as the going was rough in Qab, and chances were we would have to cover great distances, as he and the professor had. He listed a few things that would have come in useful on his first visit: bandages, insect repellent, brandy, etc., and made sure I took note as I busied about the house, filling a vast carpet bag that had belonged to Mrs Mapp’s grandmother. There was an excitement about both Mr Rupert and the mistress now. They were like children, dashing from room to room and making plans.
I went out to the area at the back of the house for a mug of tea and a few moments to myself. The daylight was fading early, I realised, squinting at the inscrutable backs of the houses that ringed our long, neglected garden. The trees were stirring in the wind and the leaves were starting to come down. The seasons were turning, it seemed. It was one of those strangely powerful changeover parts of the year, which played merry hell on my nerves and moods. I was rather glum, sitting there by myself, by the bins. Where on earth would I be by bedtime tonight? Was I ready to be whistled off to who-knew-where? Did the mistress even have the right to make me go with her?
I stumped off to get the whites off the line. Huge pristine bloomers and slips were buffeting and snapping like sails. I bundled them up in my arms. At least we’d have clean underclothes on this adventure! This I was determined to make sure of. We wouldn’t be like those grubby men.
Well, of course, all of these qualms and moods of mine – they were just worry turning itself inwards and making my stomach juices curdle. I was nervous, that’s all. Of course I wanted to go to this other land! Of course I wanted adventure. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my life in Tavistock Square, but the few shreds of memory I had remaining from my previous lives showed me all too plainly that I was used to a more hectic kind of pace.
So I packed a couple of bags, and kept it as spartan as I could. I even filled a flask with piping-hot tea. And then, as darkness came over the square, I lit the lamps and Mr Rupert was manhandling a tall mirror into the drawing room, in preparation for the ritual.
Fog was curling its way through Bloomsbury. Thick, twining yellow fronds of fog that came creeping round our house and rubbing themselves against the tall windows. I went to lock up the doors (who knew how long we’d leave our house empty?) and studied the suddenly impenetrable mist. We were leaving all of this behind. This smoky-smelling world, all damp at the edges and stewing in its own civilised melancholy. Time for a change. This had all become too familiar.
And then it was the ritual. Mr Rupert came thundering downstairs in clothes he had borrowed from the wardrobe of Mrs Mapp’s poor dead brother. Quite dandified 1890s clothes they were, long out of fashion. But he filled them out quite nicely, I thought. Somehow their extravagance suited him – that cravat and the waistcoat, the velvet cloak. Mrs Mapp and I both admired him as he strode about, making preparations.
Mr Rupert asked us to draw back the heavy furniture and bade us kneel on the rug that the mistress’s grandparents had brought back from Arabia. I was very familiar with its intricate arabesques from having swept it every morning since I had lived here. Now we were kneeling together as if pretending it was a magic carpet: one that could take our weight and bear us back to the magical land whence it came.
Mrs Mapp was very serious. Her face was pale and thin. She was intent now, as she produced the few scraps of her manuscript she had left. She gave us each a page to read aloud. I recognised my page as an early draft of one of the ritualistic songs from Qab, from a brutal, bloody sequence in which the Queen sacrificed the lives of a hundred young male slaves and drank their blood. I stumbled over a few of the more exotic made-up words, but I read along with the other two as they intoned their own verses. Oh, how Mrs Mapp’s voice rang out. She was always a very good speaker. There was a tremble in her tones, though, as if she was almost overcome by the magnitude of what we were doing.
Lights down, incense smouldering, candles like pale beacons in the gloaming. We had to stare at ourselves in the tall mirror Mr Rupert had brought in from the hall and leaned against the chairs. That’s when I almost started laughing – when the three of us could see ourselves, mumbling these nonsensical phrases and staring like loons. But soon the silly self-consciousness dropped away. The ritual went on and on and on and soon enough I had forgotten myself. This felt like magic. It also felt familiar.
I was starting to remember . . . I think . . . that I was no stranger to magic and queer rituals. The memories were seeping back. I felt tendrils of suggestion snaking through my mind . . . like that fog outside . . . creeping up on me . . .
But they were gone. The memories drew back to allow me to concentrate on the moment. A moment in which Mr Rupert took out his glinting pinking shears and brandished them proudly. He looked like St George before the dragon, wielding his lance. I blinked. I stared. I fixed my gaze on a flaw in the mirror’s glass. It looked like a silver scratch on the sheeny surface. But in polishing that mirror I had never noticed a long white scratch before.
Mr Rupert reached out and took hold of that fault in the mirror. He plucked at it and suddenly it was secure between his fingers. It was a thread, just as he had said! Like before! The tiny end of a thread, fraying apart from material existence. He tugged it. He pulled it harder. The fabric gave way with a satisfying ripping noise.
I heard my mistress sigh, short and sharply. She didn’t move, though, and neither did I. We were frozen with delight as up came the pinking shears and . . .
Whiisszzztttt fsszzzhhhtttt!
Mr Rupert slashed accurately and with aplomb. He sliced beautifully through the rippling silky material.
‘The Dreadful Flap,’ my mistress said, inching forward to peer into the coruscating darkness beyond. It was a wonderful darkness. Like none I’d ever seen. It was the darkness of good, welcoming sleep. I inched forward too.
‘Now,’ said Mr Rupert. ‘Do you feel drowsy? Do you feel safe? Do you trust me, ladies?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I answered for us both.
‘Then we must go. We must slip away. Qab awaits us . . .’
‘But how?’ asked my mistress. That anxious tone was in her voice. ‘How do we get there? Do we just step through? Do we . . . ?’
And that is all I remember, until we were waking up elsewhere.
Somewhere much brighter, much hotter than here. I thought I was having a funny turn, because the first thing I was aware of after the temperature was a tightness and a weight on my chest. Oh Gawd, not a stroke or a heart attack, I thought. Not in another, alien land. But
it was just one of the carpet bags resting on top of me as I lay in the jungle undergrowth. That’s all it was. So I sat up with some relief and glanced around at a wonderful scene.
It was a jungle out of prehistory. Everything was twice its natural size. It was humid and sticky and the colours were like something out of one of those Frenchmen’s splashy paintings. I loved it all at first sight.
Mrs Mapp and Mr Rupert were already standing up and examining our new surroundings. When I cried out in triumph and clapped my hands, they whirled round to look at me and Mr Rupert grinned. ‘What do you think, Brenda? Did you ever doubt me?’
Me? Doubt Mr Rupert? Never! Not even if we’d ended up down in Limehouse or Bexhill-on-Sea. I trusted him and believed him, and by golly I was glad he was right. Look at him in his dandyish clothes. What a gent!
‘You were right about the sky,’ said Mrs Mapp drily. ‘It is an appalling shade of mauve.’
I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much as I did that first day in the land of Qab. I went round exclaiming at everything. Millipedes as big as a mink stoles! Just look at that! Leafy canopies broad as the dome on the British Museum! I went about like some tourist, clapping and going ‘Cor! Lumme!’ while my superiors set to the actual practical tasks they felt were necessary upon arrival in a new world. They gathered wood for a fire, and fleshy leaves for a makeshift shelter. They were building a kind of camp at this, our point of arrival in Qab.
Ooh, that lovely humid warmth! I don’t know if I’ve said, but I was an ungainly thing back in that time, too. A big-boned woman is how Mrs Mapp would put it, when she was of a mind to be generous. In northern climes, in wintry wet days in the capital, I would cut an unfortunate silhouette in my heavy astrakhan-collared coat and my lumpy hat. I felt achy and stiff most days, with the London damp in my joints and niggling at old scar tissue. I realised then, upon arrival in the moist heat of Qab, just what I had been missing. I was made for other climes. I was buoyed by the warmth. I felt like I was floating on the soggy air. Which was hard to explain to my two companions, who looked cross and redfaced by the time they had erected a strange sort of tent and set a small fire churning acrid smoke.
My companions! Yes, that was how I thought of them now. The delectable Mr Rupert, and Mrs Mapp over there, looking vexed as a cat. No longer my social superiors. Not here, in another world entirely. Here we were on a level playing field, you might say. The whole world was turned upside down. This whole creaking, shrieking, chirruping world was completely topsy-turvy.
‘Brenda dear, do stop crashin’ around in the underbrush,’ Mrs Mapp sighed. ‘You’ll make every carnivore in the place alert to our presence. We’ll have enough bother fendin’ them off as it is . . .’
Ah, of course. Mrs Mapp knew this place better than anyone. She had invented it, after all. She knew the dangers that lurked in the velvety depths of this forest. With a smattering of natural history gleaned from day trips to the museum in Kensington and some weeks poring over the coloured plates in her grandfather’s library books, Mrs Mapp had designed a flora and fauna for her world of exaggerated bestiality and extravagance. Right now she was having a few misgivings, it seemed, as she reminded us of innovations such as the flesh-eating lilies and the sabre-toothed tortoises with which her imagination had furnished the Qab landscape.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ grinned Mr Rupert. ‘You aren’t to blame. I don’t think you are really responsible for the horrors and delights we are bound to encounter here, Mrs Mapp.’
She looked deflated. ‘Oh really?’ Then she seemed defiant. ‘But this is my world. Precisely as I imagined it. This is all familiar to me. The very breeze on my face. The reek of the fecund sod underfoot . . .’
She was getting a bit purple in her descriptions, which was always a good indicator of a dangerous mood. Mr Rupert was heedless, thrusting hand-made torches into the soil, in a ring around our camp.
‘What I mean is, my dear, this place has insinuated itself into your dreams. It has murmured to you over from across the aeons and over vast distances, This world pre-existed you. You never invented it.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking very cast down.
‘It is still a remarkable achievement,’ he said.
‘But . . .’ Mrs Mapp frowned. ‘Your Professor Quandary. He knew about this place. He saw my book as a kind of reminder, a bridge to this place. . . He knew far more than he had any right to, as far as I can see.’
‘Hmm, indeed,’ said Mr Rupert, flinging himself down upon the little nest of verdant leaves they had made. ‘There are many mysteries about the good professor that even I am not privy to. He knows about so many things.’ Now Mr Rupert went off in an abstracted pause.
‘I am sure he will be all right,’ said Mrs Mapp. ‘He can look after himself, from what I have learned. Your precious professor will have sweet-talked the wicked Queen of Qab. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had wrapped her around his little finger. Why, I bet she has already made him her king.’
Mr Rupert chuckled at that thought. ‘He’s an old charmer, you’re right.’
Mrs Mapp’s expression hardened. ‘I just hope he’s looking after my manuscript.’
I broke in then, suggesting that we crack open the flasks I’d filled with piping-hot tea. I’d brought some vegetable soup, too. Even though it felt too hot to eat, we all knew that we should take what sustenance we could, and we were all glad we wouldn’t have to go hunting after jungle prey or foraging for berries this first night.
Night came over the jungle treetops like someone pulling thick musty curtains against the skies. It was dark like dark falls in the tropics, with no qualms and great authority.
Straight away the jungle beasts set up their hullabaloo.
The three of us sat close together with our brass beakers of tea.
‘It’s like huddling in London Zoo after dark,’ Mrs Mapp said, suppressing a shiver, despite the warmth.
‘I live rather near the zoo,’ said Mr Rupert. ‘You’re quite right. Those beasts can make the most unearthly, chilling brouhaha.’ He jumped up to light the ring of torches to keep the night beasts at bay.
Camping out! My heart leapt up inside me with excitement. How far this was from our comfy, lumpy beds in Bloomsbury. All those sheets and pillowcases I scrubbed on Monday mornings, down in the scullery. How much more I preferred putting my head down here on fronds of gargantuan fern and slippery palm leaves, feeling the stink of leaf mulch and primordial decay tickling my sinuses . . .
I fell asleep quite happily, that first night in Qab, little suspecting the horrors that were just around the corner. Foolish Brenda. I seem to spend my whole like galumphing along heedlessly. And then everything suddenly goes to the bad.
It was such a difference to my usual routine, exploring this new world. I know that that seems like a ridiculous thing to say. But I had forgotten that I find change rejuvenating. I love a nice new set of horizons.
And so my heart was light as we went tramping around in the depths of the jungle. The light so dense and greenish blue it was like going about underwater, adrift in this soupy warmth. We advanced by clearing a path amid festoons of slippery vines and hacking through fibrous branches and monstrous stems. Suggestive flowers were bobbing and swaying, sticky with perfumed juices. Our eyes ached with glorious colour.
Mrs Mapp plunged headlong, brandishing her furled brolly like a sabre, cracking, thrashing . . . Our ears were filled with the slurping noise of uprooted shoots and fleshy fungi stamped on.
When Mrs Mapp looked back to make sure we were keeping up, her face was livid and gleaming with sweat. The sleeves of her print frock were dangling and she rolled them up with a businesslike air. She tucked the ends of her long skirts into her bloomers. She looked like a worker in the fields. There was a relish to the way she lashed out at the florid vegetation.
She cried out as she cut a swathe; she grunted with exertion. Grunted! I believe these were the most unladylike noises my mistress had ever emitted.
According to all the rules of chivalry Mr Rupert should have been going first into this mysterious Eden. Yet he was content to bring up the rear. He was happy to concede his rightful place to Mrs Mapp and simply lug along a lion’s share of luggage. He would pause now and then to take stock and direct us.
‘I have a rather vague sense of the lie of the land. We need to make for higher ground, so that I may orient myself . . .’
Black mud sucked greedily at our feet. It was seeping into my sensible shoes, and Mrs Mapp’s. What we could have done with were high boots like Mr Ruperts’s. We were quietly piqued at being inadequately shod.
I do think Mr Rupert might have warned us about the exploding mud. It was like attempting to walk on treacle toffee, as it comes up to the boil. Except that it stank like sour old bedpans . . .
Mr Rupert’s hunch was that we were not too far from the spot where he had first arrived with Professor Quandary, what seemed like a lifetime ago. This was interesting in itself, he mused, as we paused for a breather in a less rancid and claustrophobic place. ‘It is as if the fabric of the world itself is thinner here, and more permeable, in this particular region.’
I must say I was more interested in the fact that our drinking water was almost gone and I was becoming incredibly parched. The belting-hot sun in that mauve sky was pretty but it was merciless.
Around lunchtime, I suppose it was, my head was starting to spin as we set off again on our hike. I contented myself by remembering which household tasks I’d be up to were we still at home and that day was the same as any normal day. I’d be doing the silver, sitting at the dining table and rubbing away at the spoons. I’d be cleaning out the grates. I’d be giving the stair carpets some gyp with my old dustpan and brush.