[Brenda & Effie 02] - Something Borrowed

by Paul Magrs

My spare parts are letting themselves down from the attic. They are furious and determined.

  The pale, slightly blue hands lead the way, spanning the rungs of the ladder and trailing gory tendons. The slithering dancer’s leg follows, as do various smaller bits and pieces – a bulbous nose, a greenish pancreas, several loose fingers.

  Henry presses himself against the far wall of the hallway and gibbers gently. He knocks an arrangement of dried flowers off a console table and leaves them where they lie. His wild eyes look to me for reassurance and I can only nod: yes, you really are seeing this. A mass exodus of body parts from my attic. We both watch a long string of glistening purple intestines undulate their elegant way on to the landing.

  They breeze right by us, that’s the funny thing. They aren’t doing their usual gleeful haunting and taunting. The spare parts are going straight downstairs, as if they are on some kind of mission.

  Henry gags. ‘What are they?’ he cries. ‘What in God’s name are you keeping up there, Brenda?’

  I frown at him for this. Hardly tactful of him. But I let it pass for now. ‘We have to follow them,’ I tell him.

  I have a hunch my parts know what they are doing. They are quite conscious of everything that’s been going on, and there is something that they feel they have to tell us. As I think I’ve already said, my parts are extra sensitive.

  The hands hover, waiting at my door. I step over the leg, the pancreas and the foot and I heft my front door open. Out they all tumble, into the misty teatime dusk.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Henry says, looking sickly. ‘Are we really going outside with these . . . things? With this ghastly menagerie?’

  I ignore him. He really isn’t trying to spare my feelings, is he?

  The street outside is deserted. There is a curious atmosphere, as if all of Whitby is holding its breath. Soon, I know, the revellers will leave their homes once more, and head towards the Hotel Miramar in order to worship Goomba again.

  And my body parts have something they want to tell me. I can feel their insistence, like an itch all over me. I tremble and twitch as I follow them, into the main street and . . . lo and behold! To the front door of Effie’s home and junk emporium.

  What’s in here, then? What is it we are being led to?

  The nimble leg dances forward and, quick as a flash, it kicks in a pane of glass in Effie’s front door. The hands spring through the smashed shards and deal with the lock. We’re in.

  ‘You’re like some, um, terrible version of Snow White,’ Henry whispers at me. ‘But whereas she had little singing birds and fauns and rabbits scurrying about her, um. You’ve got bits of cadavers fluttering around you.’

  I stiffen at his words. But I don’t reply. What a horrible thing to say. Does he even know he’s been so horrible? He is stunned and fascinated and repelled by my body parts and he hardly knows what he’s saying. That’s what I think, to excuse him for now.

  We snake through Effie’s downstairs junk shop. A hundred dragging, tap-tap-tapping noises. Tiny footsteps. The liquid slouch of the internal organs on the dusty boards. Upstairs we go, up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Three storeys up, to Effie’s top rooms.

  ‘Old Effie lives in a pretty Gothic style, too,’ Henry comments – again, rather rudely.

  The spare parts have led us to one of her rooms of books. These rooms are lined almost completely with shelves, as high as the tall ceilings. The collections housed here have belonged to generations of Jacobs women, and they are testament to the many and varied arcane enthusiasms of Effie’s female forebears. Most of these texts are about the supernatural, and about seemingly impossible things. They are all bound in supple leather and reek of old mould and mystery.

  ‘I wonder what they’ve brought us here for . . .’ I muse. I must have seen something once, when browsing these shelves. Something my conscious mind has forgotten. These spare hands of mine rove along an upper shelf, hovering and prying, and reading the gold embossed titles as if they are printed in Braille.

  ‘Quite a collection,’ says Cleavis. His voice has dropped to a reverent hush. He’s right. I’m sure the books that Effie has here would fetch a fortune from the right collector. I bet Effie herself doesn’t know half of what is concealed here. Henry is rapt with a bibliophile’s suspense.

  And it is one very obscure, fat black book that we are here in order to disinter this evening. The hands find it and they seem to dance a horrid little jig in mid-air when they come across it. It’s a plain, rather small thing but, as soon as I see what it is, I realise what my spare parts have been playing at, and I thank them with all my hearts.

  It’s The True History of Planets by Professor Reginald Tyler. Privately printed in an edition of twenty-five, in 1954.

  Henry Cleavis gives out an astonished gasp as the hands slide the book gently out of its hiding place, and present it to us.

  Together we take the book to the desk by the window. A green lamp casts a calming light upon the beautifully preserved pages. Both Henry and I draw up wooden chairs and we prepare to study.

  Their work done, my spare parts withdraw from the room. Subtle, expert servants, they don’t even wait to be dismissed. They slip into the shadows. I am vaguely aware of the tip-tap-tap of them. The slap-slap-slap of them. The squelch-drag-squelch of them, as they hop off back down the stairs. They make their careful way back to my house, and their place, roosting and waiting in my attic.

  But I put all thought of my disembodied bits out of my mind for now, as Henry flicks through the pages of Professor Tyler’s strange old book.

  Back then, when I worked for the professor in 1946, and when I was privy to some of those meetings of the Smudgelings, I thought the stories that Tyler told were marvellous. He had a knack and a zest for storytelling that would make the breath catch in my throat as I bustled about the place, quiet as a mouse, collecting up the crockery and the leftovers. He held his fellows enthralled with his supernatural tales.

  But this book . . . I shake my head sadly. No wonder the book never came out. No wonder it was privately printed in a strangely tiny edition. The pages that Cleavis is flicking through seem to bear very little relation to the full-blooded and fantastical tales that Tyler wove in those dimly lit studies of the past. What is this we are looking at? It’s not really a novel. It’s a parade of grotesques. It’s an episodic ragbag of images, thoughts and ideas. And such strange ideas! And sketches. Horrid little sketches in pen and ink, of slimy, tentacled, horned and shaggy, thorny and leafy gods from other dimensions.

  ‘Tyler must have gone crazy,’ I whisper.

  ‘This is what was transmitting itself right into his brain.’ Cleavis sighs. ‘I had no idea it was so awful. They are like the ravings of a madman. There’s no coherence here. No thesis or plot. Just wild speculations and ludicrous claims about how the cosmos is populated and controlled.’ I can feel Henry shivering, as he presses closer to me and to the nasty little book itself. ‘But Mu-Mu believed all this was true. He thought that something . . . something about Whitby itself . . . made Tyler and his head wound, his fractured skull . . . vulnerable and receptive to these secrets.’

  ‘Is the cosmos really ruled by . . . giant squid things and bamboo monsters?’ I ask him, not really expecting an answer.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Henry purrs. ‘It certainly looks like it, doesn’t it?’

  There’s a noise then, down in the street. I jump. I get up to see, to peer down through the musty panes and into the milky street light below. It’s my side door. Someone slamming it shut behind them. And then I see them. Moving like sleepwalkers, sure of purpose, chillingly docile as they glide along. Effie, Sheila and, bringing up the rear, Robert. All of them on their way to greet Goomba. Both Henry and I sigh at the sight, as our friends join other, similar figures in the main street.

  ‘I have an awful feeling that disaster is about to strike,’ Henry says. ‘They are building up towards something, at the Miramar. I just know it.’

  ‘We have to go
up there. We have to follow them and prevent it.’ Inwardly, I marvel at the steely determination in my voice. I’m rather proud of myself.

  ‘Indeed,’ Henry says. ‘But let’s finish our researches here. The precious pages about um. Goomba. We must learn what Reg knew about this entity. And see what Mu-Mu wanted to conceal . . .’

  And so we carry on searching the pages.

  We find one of Tyler’s demented, scratchy drawings, towards the end of his book. It appears to depict a prehistoric swamp in China, several million years before Christ. Rising out of the murky bog are huge, knotty spears of bamboo, spiking up in every direction. One particular plant seems to have a face. It is the most malignant face I have ever seen, and that’s saying something. Its eyes seem to glow right out of the page.

  Henry starts simultaneously translating and paraphrasing Tyler’s erratic text: ‘He says Goomba is a tree god of tremendous power and wiles. He slipped through to this dimension millennia ago. He floated through space, looking for somewhere to plant himself . . . and came to Earth in a terrible lightning storm at what we would probably call the dawn of time. Anyway. Um. A nasty piece of work. All he wants, though, according to this . . . is to go home. Back to his dimension.’

  ‘I’ve gathered that much,’ I say. ‘What does it say about sending him there?’

  ‘It says Goomba needs help. He can’t do much by himself. He is possessed of tremendous power – for good and evil – but can’t do a great deal of his own accord. And so he needs to enslave the minds of mankind. And his aim is to get them to send him back to the stars.’

  ‘How?’ I gasp. ‘Ritual? Sacrifice? Dancing and barbecues?’

  As Henry reads ahead, his eyes widen. ‘You’re almost right, Brenda. Um. He requires sacrifice. His old bamboo body needs to be burned up to cinders, and this will send him on his way to the stars.’

  ‘That sounds all right,’ I say. ‘If it just means sacrificing himself . . .’

  Henry shakes his head. He turns the page. Another picture by Tyler. This time showing the wickerwork man that the revellers have erected on the lawn of Sheila Manchu. It is remarkable for being faithful to the recent construction in every single detail, from its towering, imposing size to the hideous expression on that box-like head.

  ‘Look inside the hollow head,’ Henry says quietly. ‘There’s someone in there. Being burned to death, along with Goomba. Tyler calls this person the “pilot”. And they have to die, too, in order to help Goomba return home.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We’re not having that.’ I grasp Henry’s wrist, hard. ‘We’re not letting him do it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ says Henry, quickly surveying the rest of the chapter. There’s nothing further to add from the text. We have learned everything Professor Tyler seemed to know about our foe.

  ‘This has gone far enough,’ I say, getting up. ‘If that’s where it’s headed – to ritual murder – it’s time I went and put a stop to it.’

  Henry looks at me curiously. Admiration in his eyes, perhaps. I can’t be sure. He might be wary of me. Afraid, even.

  Meanwhile, I’m saying all this, but I haven’t got a clue, yet, how I’m going to go about it.

  As we approach the Miramar we realise that this particular night has its own distinctive smell. A woody, acrid scent that comes wafting down the hill and through the mist. ‘Bonfires . . .’ Henry whispers. This sends a jolt of panic into my heart. They have already started the burnings! We must hurry. The two of us double our pace, breathing raggedly.

  Henry leads the way straight round to the back of the hotel. He seems to know a quick way through the gardens to where Goomba has been built. Once we are over the low wall and edging round the box hedges we come face to face with the thick, curling smoke.

  ‘We’re too late . . .’ I say, but then I realise that it is all eerily quiet.

  Henry presses on.

  And then we can see them, through a gap in the foliage, where we crouch and observe for a few moments.

  A crowd of people, all ages and types, are waiting patiently. They are queueing to pay tribute to Goomba. Each of them has a piece of old furniture. They are carrying hat stands, foot stools, broken chairs. One poor old man has a whole door on his back, and looks as though he’s being squashed under its weight. They drag their tributes to the feet of the statue and pile them round his base.

  We have to crane our necks to see Goomba properly. When we do, I realise with a gasp that he is indeed already on fire. All the wooden detritus and old furniture stacked around him is crackling and glowing with golden flames. Suffocating grey fumes are rolling over all around the beer garden, but no one seems at all alarmed. Goomba himself towers above all of this. He is bigger than ever, it seems. He has swollen to monstrous size and malevolent godhood. Now those two hollow eyes are glowing a fearsome red. The weird thing is, though, that the savage, uprushing flames from his bonfire nest don’t appear to be affecting Goomba yet. He simply sits there, licked by them. It’s as if Goomba is basking in flame and relishing its fiery tang.

  ‘Look,’ Henry says. ‘The head. It’s like a cage. Big enough to shove someone in.’

  There’s a ladder running up to a little door in the side of Goomba’s head. None of this is aflame yet. There is still time for some victim to be dragged up there and shoved inside. But not if I can help it.

  As I prepare to dash into the deadly mêlée, I trip over something on the lawn. I pick it up. A kind of plastic gun thing. A nozzle! Attached to a hose. Yards and yards of cold, dripping hose. What luck! Some gardener has just dropped it here. ‘It’s got five settings,’ I tell Henry, with some satisfaction. ‘It’s really powerful. I can go in there and put out the flames and douse the wood and . . .’

  ‘They won’t let you,’ Henry says. ‘Look at them. They are out of their minds. They are enslaved to that hideous, wretched creature. If you try to spoil their fun, they’ll rip you to pieces, Brenda.’

  ‘Huh! What do you suggest, then?’

  ‘Perhaps . . . there ought to be a sacrifice. If we are to believe what Reg wrote in his book. Um. I see no reason to doubt him. If we want Goomba to leave Earth for ever . . . then perhaps one of us should make the um. Ultimate sacrifice.’

  I can hardly believe my ears. Cleavis looks like he means what he’s saying, though. His chubby features are grim in the dancing firelight. How can he be so glum and defeatist? I feel like giving him a blast with the cold water, to bring him to his senses. But maybe that’s it. Maybe Goomba is at last getting to him. Even Henry’s brilliant, iconoclastic mind. Even its barriers are being slowly eroded by the force of Goomba’s will.

  ‘Sacrifice indeed!’ I yell at him. ‘Not on your nelly, Henry!’

  No one is going to stop me trying. I heft the nozzle of the hose like a machine gun. I leave Henry in the box hedge shadows and I run full pelt into the deadly beer garden. I am amazed that none of the revellers try to stop me as I go dashing past them. ‘Right!’ I yell, and twist the hose nozzle to full.

  The flames hiss and roar with fury. The smoke turns black immediately as the wood gets damp. A mist of rain is flung everywhere around the beer garden and I find myself shrieking with laughter as the acolytes howl in displeasure. I am raining on their – well, not their parade exactly. I am raining on their pagan rites to an alien bamboo god. That’s what it is.

  And then Goomba himself shrieks out loud as the water lashes against his swollen wooden form and the flames are driven back. His branchlike arms flex and thrash; his clumsy, sinister fingers ward me off.

  ‘Brennnddaaaa! Noooo! You muusssst heeelllp Gooommmbaaaa!’

  Henry has run up right behind me. Hot on my heels he yells: ‘Brenda! You’ll make it worse!’

  ‘How can it be worse?’ I shout back. ‘Look, I’m doing something practical. I’m sick of all this fannying about waiting!’

  I try to make out the figures of the revellers as they surround us. They are pressing in on us, through the hissing smoke and steam. Rip us to p
ieces, Henry said, and I am sure he’s right. They are stamping and thrashing about in the mud. I drive them back with fierce blasts of freezing water.

  Then the water pressure gives out. All of a sudden, it just stops.

  I whip my head round, and there is Sheila Manchu. She is standing by the outside garden tap. She glares at me. Her eyes are a venomous, unearthly red.

  ‘You dare to jeopardise the apotheosis of Goomba?’

  ‘What?’ I’m on the point of really losing my temper now. ‘Sheila! Stop being possessed! Stop being so weird! You’ve got a mind of your own! This Goomba thing wants to destroy you! It wants revenge on you, remember?’

  ‘Goomba just wants to go home to the stars,’ Sheila says, in an ethereal voice. ‘I badly misunderstood Goomba. I wickedly tried to destroy him. But he was reincarnated as chairs and tables, and now I have a chance to make it up to him. By sending him home. By offering him unholy sacrifice . . .’

  I watch the zombie-like followers picking themselves up. Some are piling up fresh wood and attempting to light it once more. The rest of them are turning their attentions to Henry and me.

  Bumbling Henry pipes up then. ‘And this um, sacrifice. Goomba’s going to burn him up into a frazzle, is he? Use him as some kind of fuel. To help him slip through the dimensions and return home . . .’

  ‘It’s my fault.’ I curse myself. ‘I should have listened to Robert. He knew something funny was happening here. I should have known! And I had that voice in my head . . . Goomba going on at me . . . I should have known!’

  Suddenly I am aware of a deathly cackle, cutting through the fumes and the noise. Effie is standing there, baleful and beautiful as a high priestess. Robert stands by her and they both are glaring at me as if they hate my guts.

  ‘You are powerless to stop Goomba,’ Effie spits at me. ‘You always were. You foolish little woman. You were always nothing. A clay effigy of a woman, fashioned by a madman. Merely a rough approximation to human, female life. How could you ever hope to stop Goomba in his plans? How could you ever stand by your feeble promise to protect all life here in Whitby?’ The possessed Effie flings back her head and laughs like a madwoman. Robert and Sheila and all the others join in.