[Brenda & Effie 02] - Something Borrowed

by Paul Magrs

‘That before long, one of our next ports of call should be Limehouse,’ Henry says, and his smile fades gently away. ‘And a whole lot of even more dangerous bother, if I know anything.’

  A little later, when we’re both chockablock with eggs and fatty bacon and my sides are aching and squashed with too much delicious bubble and squeak, we amble back to the riverside. It’s still very early. The sky is streaky and pink and the seabirds are dive-bombing bravely and raucously. We talk a little about the previous night: about Alucard’s nerve in hovering outside our window like that, trying to spook the pair of us. What we don’t talk about is that chaste, burning little kiss we shared. The searing, frozen light of morning doesn’t seem the right time to expose that moment to discussion. We both bury the memory for now and bustle along.

  Henry has gone into lecturing mode. ‘From what he has read to the Smudgelings over the years . . . during our weekly meetings and so on . . . From what I have, um, gathered during that time, Reg’s book is a scientific fantasy of sorts. It has, for its setting, a vast number of other worlds. Each with their own complicated systems of flora and fauna, history, politics, natural laws. Reg has spent a long time working out all these devilishly complicated things . . . They stagger me every time I, um, contemplate the scale of such an undertaking. He calls it The True History of Planets.’

  I nod, watching the oily water and the traffic sliding over the bridges as we pass under and around them, one by one. ‘I knew it was about different worlds,’ I say. ‘And what did Alucard say? He has been stealing it in order to prevent it from ever being finished and published? And sent out into the world? Why should he do that? To a made up novel about other planets?’

  ‘There is other stuff in Reg’s book,’ Henry says, frowning. ‘Stuff I was never all that comfortable with listening to, as a Christian. Darker things. Sacrilegious things. About wicked gods. Other planes of existence where these unholy creatures dwell, and from which they are continually trying to escape . . . into our world . . .’

  A shudder passes through me as Henry says this. I ignore my own shivers and decide to bait him instead. ‘ “As a Christian” indeed. Is your faith so shaky it can be rattled by a few spooky stories?’

  ‘Sometimes, it is,’ he says gloomily. ‘Yes.’

  I know what he means, though, from the few lurid bits of text that I’ve managed to take in, just flicking through Reginald Tyler’s book. There’s some rum stuff there, all right. I’m sure it would give me the willies too, if he was reading it out to me by the firelight on a winter’s evening in that rumbling, professorial voice of his. I’d believe every word of it.

  ‘Someone else takes it very seriously too,’ Henry says. ‘Whatever it is that Tyler is conjuring up with his words. It’s dangerous stuff. Edith has died because of his book. That will hit Reg Tyler very hard.’

  We walk in silence for a while.

  Cleavis has the address on a tatty old card in his wallet. He’s never been there before. He’s never been invited. He’s simply corresponded with Freer. Those exuberant, ideas-filled letters flying back and forth between the two of them make Cleavis feel foolish now. ‘We gabbled together about the possibility of life on other planets. And all manner of things. Freer was always banging on about the other dimensions.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I say, loping alongside him.

  ‘Planes of existence that are very close to us. We could penetrate the gauze between the worlds. Quite easily, if we tried. Freer said it was like the beaded curtain that shields the back room of a shop.’

  I’m trying to follow his metaphor. I can hear excitement in Cleavis’s tone. Freer has stirred his imagination. Cleavis is still under the thief ’s charlatan spell.

  We trudge the early morning streets, looking for Freer’s humble digs, and hawkers are setting up their barrows, and yelling out their wares. Street vendors are frying vast pans of spitting, dancing shrimps and serving them in paper cones. My eye gets caught by tailors’ racks of petticoats and chemises, all frothing lace. I want more than anything for this to be an ordinary morning jaunt, and not an adventure at all. I want to be on the arm of my gallant beau, toddling happily along. Instead we are on the trail of monsters and madmen.

  At last we find the right door. Freer’s landlady is a withered, pickled-looking creature, instantly on the alert. Cleavis buys her off with crisp notes out of that wallet of his. The ghastly hag takes his bribe and ushers us into the dark hall and up the stairs. We follow her hallowe’en turnip head and her stooped, cadaverous body through the filth and the grime and the shadows.

  Freer’s room makes me sad, when we see it. He doesn’t have much to show for his life. I can’t help comparing this shabby mess with Tyler’s grand residence, or the ramshackle, cosy bachelordom of the Cleavis brothers’ rooms. There seems to be nothing in this room of Freer’s that is worthy of a second glance.

  The old landlady leaves us to it.

  ‘Blood on the bed, look,’ Cleavis hisses, stepping closer to the rank, twisted sheets and hairy blankets. There are large dark drops of blood on the thin carpet, too. I shiver as Cleavis dips his fingertips into one of the larger pools to see how fresh it might be. But my attention is snagged then by the desk and the papers scattered and crumpled across its surface and hastily shoved into unlocked drawers. Some instinct makes me dig deep through all of these papers. I glance at a few and can make neither head nor tail of Freer’s scribbles. It’s all gibberish to me. But I keep hoiking the papers out and, sure enough, I find one, two, three, four pages that are written in Reginald Tyler’s distinctive hand. They have been hidden away at the very back of this drawer. Whoever has ransacked the room and spilled blood here has missed these particular Tyler originals. Cleavis claps my back and grabs them off me. ‘Oh, well done, Brenda! What a team! What a team!’ He squints at Tyler’s script in the squalid light. ‘What’s this about? Something something. His apotheosis. Blah. Something. Ancient of days. Something and . . . Goomba? Goomba? What’s Goomba?’

  At this single, apparently meaningless word, spoken thrice by the perplexed Henry Cleavis, I have what I can only describe as a sort of seizure.

  It’s a moment or two before Henry realises that I am standing there, frothing and lockjawed as if I’ve contracted rabies. I’m swaying on my heels and I’m about to keel over. And in my head I can hear the voice – ghostly, implacable – ringing hollowly through the millennia: ‘Goomba waits! Come to me, Brenda! Come and help me! You can hear me, can’t you? Goomba! Goomba!’

  Henry slaps me sharply across the chops. This jerks me out of the trance and shocks me so much that I punch him back. Pow. Right in the mush. When I come to my senses, there’s my companion on the tangled, blood-spattered bed, ruefully rubbing his jaw.

  ‘Sorry about that, Henry,’ I tell him. ‘But something was speaking to me. Inside my head. Trying to contact me. You broke the contact.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says Cleavis, looking at me with wariness and respect. I’ve got quite a hefty punch on me, I admit. I still feel woozy, though, after having that Goomba thing echoing in my noggin. Henry gets a portable stove going. He’s brewing up tea in a silver-plated pot.

  ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t have proper English tea,’ the professor sighs. ‘Just this, um, spicy muck.’ He holds up a purple and orange packet that catches my eye immediately. The aroma, as he brews up, is delicious, too: I can smell ginger, cardamom, garam masala, black pepper and lemon . . .

  ‘Mm,’ I clutch the mug to my face as if it’s some special kind of remedy. ‘Spicy tea. Where does it come from?’

  Cleavis examines the packet. ‘There’s an address. In Limehouse. A tea shop. Hm.’ Now he’s tearing open the cardboard packaging, because he’s found something scribbled hastily, in pencil, on one of the inner flaps. ‘It says, “Goomba waits”,’ he tells me.

  I nod. ‘I thought it might,’ I say, and slurp the deliciously heady brew.

  It’s a fair walk to get there, and we have to pass through some of the dingiest and most horrendo
usly mucky back streets I have ever seen. And me, from the nineteenth century! But the East End takes the biscuit, really. Filthy place. And they’re all looking at you, out of the corners of their eyes. They’d stab you in the back and ransack you, soon as look at you. Luckily, I’m like a giantess in these tiny streets, shuffling through the muck and detritus. The villainous poor round here are dwarfed by me. They skulk away, all sly and suspicious, and they leave us in peace.

  ‘Terrible place.’ Cleavis shudders.

  ‘I’ve never liked down south much,’ I tell him.

  Then, at last, we find the tea shop we’re looking for. Deep in the heart of Limehouse. There are colourful banners, flags and ethnic decorations almost everywhere you care to look, but there is still something dingy and depraved in the very air. It’s not a very cheery place at all.

  The shop’s window display is of various types of tea and their multicoloured packets. ‘This is the sort of place that could easily be used as a cover for something else,’ Henry says. ‘Opium and whatnot.’

  He doesn’t half enjoy coming across as the man of the world, does Henry. I think he’s showing off for my benefit, so I flash him an encouraging smile as he opens the shop door and sets the little bell tinkling. In we go.

  And I can hear the voice again: ‘Goomba waits! Come to me, Brenda! Set Goomba free!’

  I get an instant headache. Like a weight of some kind, pressing down on my mind.

  The shop’s interior is dusky and there’s a musky incense burning, possibly to cover up other, inscrutable smells, and this ambience doesn’t help my headache one bit.

  Tiny little wrinkled Chinese feller, weighing out tea at the teak counter. Behind him are shelves of jars and tins. It all looks very proper so far. He welcomes us cautiously. Henry gives a smart little bow and offers our greetings. ‘My lady friend is rather taken with your spicy tea. We’d like to purchase a quarter.’

  ‘Spicy?’ asks the man. ‘You want special spicy tea?’

  I’m not sure what Henry’s game is. So, Freer bought his tea from here. What does that prove? He had a hankering for exotic spices, same as I have. Doesn’t mean anything untoward is going on. There’s a bead curtain over the doorway to the back room, though. Henry obviously thinks something far more interesting is going on back there. He knows more about these things than I do.

  And Goomba. Freer – or someone – had written Goomba on that packet. What is Goomba? Is it Goomba’s voice inside my head? Goomba wants to be free, doesn’t he? Is he some kind of captive here?

  ‘That’s slightly over,’ says the man, examining his scales.

  ‘That’s all right,’ says Henry. ‘Actually, I wonder if you could help us. We’re looking for a friend of ours who was a customer here. A William Freer? Long, stringy feller, rather refined way of talking, all put on. Have you heard of him at all?’

  ‘No, sir,’ says the shop owner quickly.

  I’ve had enough of letting Henry do all the talking. ‘What about Goomba, eh? Does that name ring any bells, sunshine?’

  This does the trick. The little man’s eyes widen and he starts to gibber. ‘Goomba! Goomba!’ he cries, scattering bits of loose black tea all across the counter.

  ‘Oh, really, Brenda.’ Cleavis tuts. ‘Not very subtle that, was it?’

  I shrug. ‘It got results.’ Now the man is juddering and frothing, just as I did when Goomba’s haunting voice was resounding in my head. Except this feller looks absolutely terrified. ‘I’m liking this less and less,’ I tell Henry. ‘I’m not even sure I want to know who or what Goomba is.’

  ‘These Eastern peoples.’ Henry sighs. ‘They are so damned excitable.’ He reaches calmly across the counter and takes the little man by both shoulders, shaking him roughly. ‘Now, look here, little chap. I wonder if—’

  And then: CRACK. That’s it. Someone has come up behind us and coshed first Henry, and then myself, right across the back of our heads.

  With something hard.

  We’re out sparko.

  Obviously we’ve been asking too many questions. It’s often the way in situations like this. Shove your nose in too far; make one too many query; haplessly mention the name of the malign semi-deity at the root of the deadly trap – and you’ll get right up the villainous nose of Mr Big. He’ll have one of his lackeys come after you with a big stick. And WHAM: out you go.

  You’ll wake up in a dripping, nasty, pestilential cellar deep underground. One of those vile, cavernous spaces far, far beneath the slimy streets of Limehouse. Way underneath that old tea shop. Hidden away where no one could ever find you. You are lost to the world, grimy, sore, bruised and rueful. Henry and I regain our consciousness in a prison cell with only a little, feeble light coming through the slatted door.

  ‘Sorry about this, Henry,’ I tell him, reaching across to pat his arm. ‘It’s my fault, letting my mouth run off like that. I should have let you handle it.’ We are lying on damp and dirty straw. I can feel his warm breath on my face and it still smells of his full English breakfast. It’s weirdly reassuring, lying here with my Henry: my fellow adventurer.

  ‘Never mind, old thing,’ he says. ‘You came straight to the point, and asked about Goomba. I have to admire your directness.’

  ‘Now what?’ I ask.

  ‘We have to marshal our, um, strength. And set about getting out of this cell.’ Slowly, Cleavis’s features become apparent to me in the gloom. He looks so serious, bless him. ‘And we have to find out whose underground base of operations this is. Who it is that Freer, and Alucard, have been working for.’

  ‘Good plan,’ I say. ‘Shall I try to force the door?’ Ouch. I sit up and find that I am aching more than I thought I was.

  ‘Sssh,’ Henry says. ‘We’re not alone in here.’

  He’s sensed something. Someone. Lying on a pallet of straw on the other side of the dank room. Now I can see them too, stirring and sitting up. Their frightened eyes catch faint sparks of light. Before I know it, Cleavis is on his feet. He darts across the cell and then he’s boxing the poor feller’s ears.

  ‘Cleavis! Stop it! That’s not helping anyone!’

  The man is yelping and trying to pull himself away. And then, as I join them, I see who it is. Freer. Holding his head in his hands and moaning now.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve got a point,’ I tell Henry. ‘I think I’ll give him a slap, too.’

  ‘Nooo!’ cries Freer, eyeing my pan shovel hands.

  ‘We are going to have a little talk, you and us,’ Cleavis says in a very calm voice, kneeling down beside our fellow captive. ‘We want to know all about what’s going on. We want to know what it is you’ve been doing with Tyler’s manuscript.’

  At this, Freer bursts into loud, viscous sobs. ‘I should never have done it! I was an idiot! Taken in by their promises, their compliments . . .’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Cleavis. ‘I imagine you lapped up every single drop of their noxious flattery. Such is your wont. You are a very shallow, very dangerous little man. But why, Freer? Why did they want Tyler’s book so badly? Why have you let it fall into the hands of scum like Alucard? And these Chinese?’

  Freer is wrestling with himself, twisting and sweating on the straw. He gasps and shudders, as if the truth is trying to force its way out of his body. He is sweating and heaving and I wonder what it is that’s wrong with him. He’s never been like this before. Poison? Opium? And then I realise. He’s so pale. He’s fading away to nothing. Alucard has been at him, hasn’t he? He has sucked him almost dry. His own devoted servant, and that bloodsucker has drained him nearly blue.

  At last Freer gets his thoughts together enough to tell us: ‘Tyler’s book is dangerous. Alucard . . . and our master . . . believe that Tyler has come too close to the real truth of the universe. In his writings . . . his researches . . . he is giving away the secrets of the diabolical creatures who . . . exist . . . in the beyond . . .’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Cleavis sneers. ‘It’s all out of his head. Tyler has to
ld me that much himself. He dreams half of it up. When he’s out on his bike, or half asleep. It’s not real, you fools! How can it be real?’

  ‘It is truer than Tyler himself knows,’ Freer whispers.

  ‘Cock,’ says Cleavis, and laughs in Freer’s blanched face.

  Freer chokes in frustration and he coughs explosively. Blood appears at the corners of his mouth. I feel something warm and wet spatter my cheek. ‘Henry,’ I break in. ‘Let’s just listen to him, eh? You might find it ridiculous, but . . .’

  Henry nods reluctantly, and Freer continues, shakily: ‘When Tyler was wounded, at the end of the Great War. It was a head injury. He had a hole in his skull. Under that thin skin of his. His brain, though, was open to the elements. He was nursed back to health in a hospital near Whitby, on the north Yorkshire coast. They thought the fresh air would be bracing, healing, and so it was. They thought his skull would knit back together. But it didn’t. It never did. It was open. His brain was open to . . . whispers, echoes, hauntings . . . suggestions . . .’

  I’m nodding, I realise, as I listen to Freer. I know he is speaking the truth.

  ‘Whitby,’ says Freer, ‘is a very odd place. So close to the many openings. To the gateways and gauzes. To hell, and other lands. It’s so near to them all. And Tyler – lying there, sensitive, that delicate mind of his so receptive. Well. He just drank it all up. He was laid open, there in Whitby, to the vibrations and the secrets of the cosmos.’

  ‘My God,’ Henry Cleavis says, after a pause. ‘I always knew there was something a bit . . . off key about Reg Tyler. Are you saying that everything he writes really is true? That he really is writing down the secrets of the universe?’

  ‘I think that’s exactly what he’s saying,’ I say. ‘And I think he means that certain people aren’t too happy with Tyler because of that. They want to stop him.’

  ‘Alucard,’ Freer bursts out, spitting more of that ominous, dark blood. ‘He betrayed me. He has slain me, I think. Unless I rise again. I don’t know. But I have been a fool, Cleavis. I repent of it all now. And I am sorry. I have betrayed us all to Alucard . . . and his devilish master. His demon lord. I am so sorry. You will have to clean up my messes. You must stop them.’ Freer is in some great discomfort now and I don’t think he is going to last. He starts to thrash and gabble.