[Brenda & Effie 05] - Bride That Time Forgot

by Paul Magrs

  ‘I’m sorry, Raf. I didn’t think he’d do that. He knew she’d been infected, but I never thought he’d be so . . . brutal.’ Brenda bit her lip, realising that she had known no such thing. She knew that Cleavis was capable of anything. His quest to destroy all monsters knew no bounds. Of course a couple of shopkeepers wouldn’t give him pause for thought. ‘I should have been here,’ she said. ‘I could have stopped him.’

  ‘He’s like a man possessed,’ Raf said. ‘He fought me like a demon.’

  ‘What happened? Where’s Leena now? He didn’t . . . ?’

  ‘No, thank God,’ Raf gasped. ‘She saw what was going on. She saw that Cleavis would kill me too, the way he leapt at me and was throwing me about. Look at the state of this place! Our little palace! Our treasure trove! I only built this place up for Leena. It was all for her, Brenda. Without her . . . it means nothing.’

  ‘We’ll get her back,’ Robert said firmly.

  ‘He’s right,’ Brenda told him. ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘She saw that Cleavis wouldn’t be deterred. She did the only thing she could, to stop him attacking me. She knew that I would stand in his way before he could get to her. And she saved me. Even . . . changed as she is . . . there’s still enough of the old Leena in her to know that she wanted to save me. And so she fled. She took off into the night.

  ‘She smashed through those doors and screamed at Cleavis that he had to follow her. Chase her. If he wanted her, he’d have to come running . . .’ Raf started to break down again. ‘I’ll never forget her, standing there in her ripped pinny, just before she turned and fled. Her hair hanging down all over the place, her throat scratched where he’d grabbed her. Then Cleavis let out this huge roar and threw me down against the chilled cabinets. She led him out into the night and that was the last I saw of the two of them . . .’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘It’s been an hour. I . . . I dread to think what’s happened . . .’ He clutched at Brenda’s sleeve. ‘You’ll go after them, won’t you? You’ll help her?’

  Robert and Brenda exchanged a glance. Both knew they had more pressing concerns that evening.

  ‘Of course,’ said Gila, surprising them all. ‘We’ll help you. She’ll have gone straight to the nest, though, you know. That’s what she’ll be doing. Seeking strength in numbers . . . finding the other infected ones . . . She’ll be leading Cleavis there . . .’

  Brenda drew herself up to her full height and determinedly took charge. ‘We’ll sort all of this out. Rafiq, you make this place secure and get yourself to bed. Hot tea with lots of sugar. Spicy tea. You’re in shock. Let us deal with this.’

  Once they were upstairs in her attic she told the two boys that no, they weren’t going straight after Leena and the vamps. ‘We’ll have to see to that afterwards, when we come back.’

  If we come back, Robert thought. She was writing Leena off, he realised. It was already too late for her.

  Brenda looked at him. ‘We can’t go chasing vamps through the night, Robert. We’d be hopelessly outnumbered. Henry Cleavis knows what he’s doing. We just have to hope both parties don’t do each other too much harm.’

  She got Gila to pack a bag with some essential supplies. He was filling an old flask with hot tea and popping a sponge cake and some ginger biscuits into Tupperware. It felt to Robert that they were treating it like some kind of day trip. He couldn’t get his head round the idea that they were going to another place . . . immeasurably far away . . . this very night . . .

  Then came the moment when Brenda set down Mrs Claus’s beribboned parcel on her dining table. She took a deep breath and stripped away the layers of paper.

  ‘I wonder how long she’s had these. And I wonder how she got hold of them in the first place,’ she said, lowering her voice to a hush as she took the lid off the box.

  Inside: a pair of scissors, almost as big as garden shears. They were encrusted in a kind of glittery substance. It was hard to tell what colour those shears were as Brenda took them up with both hands and held them reverently before her.

  ‘The Blithe Pinking Shears,’ she said. ‘Only one pair in existence. I’ve seen them before. Many years ago. No one knows where they came from. No one knows how they were made. These are legendary, these things.’

  Gila had a very strange look on his face. ‘Our legends tell of them too.’

  Robert said nervously, ‘What do we do?’

  Suddenly Brenda was full of purpose. The whole rigmarole of what to do was very clear to her from her memories recovered under hypnosis. She instructed the boys to bring her largest mirror in from the downstairs hallway and to prop it up in her attic sitting room. When they came wrestling it in, they found she had lowered the lights.

  ‘I thought about lighting candles,’ she mused, ‘but I don’t want to leave them burning when we go off to another dimension. The whole place could catch fire.’

  She had found her copy of her Qab book and located the particular passage that had been so effective during the first expedition to Qab. It was a passage that appeared in every Qab novel: a poetic invocation.

  ‘We have to repeat this verse again and again, all three of us, staring into the mirror. Now, don’t worry, boys. It won’t hurt. It’s just a little bit disorienting at first . . .’

  ‘I’ve been through the Dreadful Flap that Marjorie Staynes made,’ said Gila. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘Ah, of course you have, lovey,’ said Brenda. ‘See, Robert? You’re with two old hands here.’

  He tried to smile. ‘You still haven’t said much about what it’s like and what happened to you when you were there.’

  ‘There isn’t time,’ she said brusquely. ‘Besides, we’re not going to see the sights, are we? We’re going there to grab Effie and bring her back. Only she can stop these vampires running amok in Whitby.’

  He nodded. Of course. Brenda was capable of much better focus than he was sometimes.

  So they crouched in front of the mirror, chanting and intoning the verses about Qab. Robert thought they were awful doggerel, but he had to admit there was something strange about the stupor they seemed to inflict . . . the sonorous buzzing in his ears . . . the sudden drowsiness . . . though really, that could be the effect of another late night and a certain amount of high tension and . . .

  There was smoke inside the mirror. Weird-tasting lilac smoke that came rushing out of the silvery depths to meet them.

  ‘Brace yourselves, boys,’ Brenda whispered. ‘Don’t let your concentration lapse. Ahh, here we are.’

  Robert thought there was a crack in the mirror. But it was a white thread sticking out of the glass that Brenda, with great confidence, took hold of. She pulled it hard.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he gasped.

  Gila touched his arm. ‘No, it’s okay, Robert. She knows what she’s doing. She’s found the beginnings of a Dreadful Flap.’

  Like a badly stitched seam, the Very Fabric of Time and Space began to fall apart at Brenda’s insistent tugging. Beyond, there was a shimmering miasma that Robert felt drawn to, though he could barely look straight into it.

  This is it, he thought. Another threshold into another world. Somehow it was so much more frightening than looking into hell.

  ‘Come on,’ Gila urged him, and they clambered up off their knees.

  ‘Let’s hold hands,’ Brenda suggested, with an oddly shy smile. ‘All right, fellas? Shall we go?’

  So saying, she led them through the magical fissure between the worlds.

  He didn’t remember much about the actual journey. To him it felt a little like it had scurrying through the warren-like Whitby streets, with Gila and Brenda outpacing him and him trying to get through to Penny on the phone. Only a little more swimmy, somehow. He still felt like he was lagging behind and preoccupied.

  Then it was all over and he was waking up on a floor that felt disgustingly springy and moist. There was a curious smell. Compost, he realised. Like they had been magi
cally transported to the bottom of Brenda’s well-tended back garden.

  But no. When he opened his eyes they ached with vibrant colour. The forest floor around him was a riot of purples and blues. Even the foliage didn’t look very natural. It was twisty and vinelike.

  All the noises were wrong too. Forests in England were creaking, crackling, hooty places. The occasional snuffling, burrowing, tweeting noise perhaps. The noises here were monstrous and absurd. It was like being inside the gurgling, shrieking intestines of somebody not very well at all.

  He looked at his companions. He cursed them for looking blasé. Brenda was brushing herself down. She’d even taken off her woolly hat, it was so warm. Warm! He was lathered in sweat already. His tank top was sticking to his shirt, which was sticking to his back. He was dressed all wrong. He was dressed for January on the north-east coast. And here he was in . . .

  ‘Welcome to Qab.’ Gila grinned at him, helping him to his feet. He held him in a quick embrace. ‘Welcome to my home, Robert.’

  ‘Err, thanks,’ Robert said. Once again he sighed and tried to keep his expression neutral. But he was wondering why he could never find a boyfriend with just a nice, normal background.

  ‘Robert’s still acclimatising,’ Brenda pointed out. ‘I remember. I was completely gobsmacked when I first came here. One hundred years ago, it was.’ She looked around breezily, staring into the canopy of scarlet creepers above. She looked bizarrely content, Robert thought.

  ‘Is it just how it was?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, exactly. I can’t believe I ever forgot about coming here. But you know me and my memory.’

  ‘Can you remember where we have to go?’

  ‘The palace of Her is deep inside the jungle. I think, if we can find a hilltop, we’ll be able to suss out the lie of the land. That’s how Mr Rupert did it.’

  ‘Mr Rupert?’

  ‘I’ll have to tell you the story as we go along, I think.’ She smiled. ‘The story of my first visit to this world. When I came here with my mistress and her friend, the adventurer Mr Rupert Von Thal. I was a servant then, Robert, working in Bloomsbury for the esteemed novelist Mrs Beatrice Mapp . . .’

  As she spoke, she gathered up their few supplies and belongings, and led them through the trees into the jungle. She made it seem as if she was chatting to them on any ordinary day, and the three of them were strolling along Church Street simply window-shopping.

  Sometimes Brenda still amazed Robert.

  The journey was further than she was expecting. A long time had passed since Brenda was last here and she hadn’t reckoned on the sheer size of this land. Gila had to gently remind her that it wasn’t a simple case of popping down the valley to the palace. Their journey might take them some considerable time. The lizard boy shinned up a strange-looking tree to sniff the evening air and came down looking pleased.

  ‘Actually it’s not too bad. I’d say we were about a day’s walk away from the city of Her.’

  They set up camp for that night in a clearing, and Robert brought all of his boy scout skills to bear on building them a shelter and a camp fire. It reminded him a little of a TV show at home, in which celebrities had to survive in the jungle.

  Gila returned from a trip into the undergrowth with a dead animal. It looked like a cross between a rabbit and a badger and Robert wasn’t at all keen to roast it over his tidy fireplace, but his stomach made up his mind for him.

  That evening Brenda was rather quiet and glum. It was as if she had talked herself out during the course of that day, describing what she could now recall of her first visit to Qab.

  ‘We don’t know how much time might have passed in this world,’ she said, chewing delicately on a piece of meat. It actually tasted all right, the three of them had decided. (‘What do you call this beast?’ Robert asked Gila. ‘Err, it’s a rat.’)

  ‘You mean,’ said Robert, ‘that time moves differently here to home . . . so we’ve no idea how long it’s been since you were here with Mrs Mapp and Rupert. It could be a hundred years, like it is on earth . . . or . . .’

  ‘It could be no time at all, as well. Rather than a hundred years, it might be mere decades or months or even days,’ said Brenda. ‘I think you’re right: our worlds don’t seem to keep pace with each other. I think you could leave our own era and go further back in Qab’s history than someone from centuries in our past. Or vice versa. I think Qab somehow brings you to the place and time you need to be when you travel here. Does that make sense? It’s a very inexact science, all this world-hopping, from what I remember.’

  ‘Those pinking shears . . . Where did they come from?’

  She shrugged. ‘All I know is that Professor Quandary was in possession of them back then, and Mrs Claus has them in our time. But wouldn’t you know she’d be wrapped up in it somehow?’ Brenda took the glittering shears out of her bag and waved them in the air so that they caught the firelight. You could tell just at one glance that there was something weird and magical about them. The air seemed to ripple about them, as if the fabric of reality itself was longing to be sliced into by those enchanted blades.

  ‘They’re sort of legendary,’ Brenda said. ‘I’ve heard whispers of them, over the years. They seem to get passed hand from hand. Very, very sought after in some quarters, as you can imagine. They are capable of opening up holes throughout the multiverse.’

  ‘The multiverse!’ Robert said, suddenly amazed at the way Brenda was speaking. Like she knew a thing or two about this whole spacey business.

  ‘At home we’ve got the Bitch’s Maw, haven’t we? And we know what kind of bother that can cause. Well, imagine having the power to create gaps in reality wherever and whenever you liked. That’s what these shears give you. That’s why they’re so sought after and so dangerous. With them, you could turn all of existence into a great big . . . doily.’

  Robert burst out laughing. ‘A doily? Is that the best analogy you can come up with?’

  She frowned. ‘It’d sound better if I said a piece of antique lace, wouldn’t it? Or something clever and mathematical.’

  ‘A doily! Typical!’

  They ate in companionable silence for a while. Then Gila said, ‘I think you are very brave, Brenda. I am starting to appreciate how very many adventures you have had. How many decades you have spent getting caught up in things like this . . .’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, yawning and stretching. ‘I’m getting on. I feel like I should be slowing down somewhat.’ She grinned at both boys, but they could see that she actually seemed less tired and worn than she had of late. She looked invigorated by her arrival in this land.

  ‘I am in awe of you,’ Gila said, with his usual embarrassing directness. ‘When you came to our savage land before, you faced dangers . . . and now you return, to face them again, in order to bring home your friend.’

  ‘I’m sure Effie would do the same for me,’ she said. Though thinking about it, she wasn’t at all sure that was right. Effie could be downright selfish when she wanted to be. She was easily put off, at any rate, especially by physical danger. ‘I like to think we’re a team. All of us. And we’d always be there for each other. You too, Gila,’ she added generously. ‘You’re part of our gang now.’ She smiled benignly and pulled on her cardy, since the cold was creeping in with the encroaching gloom.

  Gila thanked her graciously. It was true, he had never felt so included before. His cool heart glowed at her words. Then he spoiled it. ‘Still, it must bring back awful memories, this place. The way that your friends Mrs Mapp and Mr Rupert betrayed you . . .’

  Robert shot his fella a glance. The same thought had struck him, as Brenda was telling her story that afternoon. The fact that Brenda had only been brought here the first time as part of a hidden agenda. Effie had told Professor Quandary that she needed Brenda’s blood. Rupert had been set free to return to Bloomsbury to fetch it. Even Mrs Mapp was in on that ghoulish mission. Or at least that was the way it looked to both Brenda and the Queen of Qab.
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  ‘I was indeed betrayed by them.’ Brenda nodded sadly. ‘Or so I thought. By Mr Rupert, certainly. I don’t think Mrs Mapp knew what was happening, not really. She couldn’t have been in on it. I was more than a servant to her. And besides, when would Mr Rupert have had a chance to appraise her of such an awful plan? I was always there, by my mistress’s side.’

  The boys nodded. She had convinced herself that Mrs Mapp was innocent. And for all they knew, perhaps she was.

  ‘At any rate,’ Brenda contined, ‘as far as Mr Rupert – who I had idolised! – was concerned, they had brought me here as a bargaining chip. A mere belonging. A big bag of blood.’

  Robert said, ‘I’m sure there was more to it than that.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I hope so, lovey. Remembering that bit left a nasty taste in my mouth, I don’t mind telling you. When I came here with Mr Rupert and Mrs Mapp, I really felt that we were suddenly equals. Away from home and the restrictions of polite society, it was like we were on a level playing field. We could see each other for who we really were, unbound by convention. I loved that. For the first time I was free. Free in the world of Qab. That must be one of the attractions of this savage world. That’s how it hooks all those readers and cultists.’

  ‘But what happened?’ Robert said. ‘Did they take your blood? When they brought you to the palace of Her?’

  ‘I don’t know. That was as much as Henry could learn through hypnosis. I couldn’t go any further in the story. It was like some thick veil came down.’ She sighed and tossed the gnawed remains of her supper on to the fire. ‘Typical, isn’t it? My recovered memories are so melodramatic that they come complete with blummin’ cliffhangers.’

  ‘Well,’ said Robert cheerily. ‘At least we know that they can’t have killed you. You can’t be dead, back there in your past.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ said Brenda.

  ‘Because you’re here with us! We know you survived!’