[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

by Paul Magrs

  It was for the demonstrations of Exorcisms that we were there, however, as you well know, Doctor Watson. I guided my lumpen and somewhat sullen sister in the direction of the ballroom and there we were witness to a most peculiar performance. He was rather like a magician on that stage, with his assistant in a glamorous, beruffled frock. Denise and Wheatley, they were billed as and, when they got going with a volunteer from the audience, I saw that it was the female Denise who took the lead. She was the one shouting and exhorting the devil to hie himself out of the volunteer elf. Mr Wheatley simply stood to one side, mumbling verses from a black-bound Old Testament and casting worried sideways glances at the supposedly-possessed young man when he started vomiting on the stage.

  It was a revolting spectacle, but my sister was enthralled. When I turned to tell her that I thought we had seen enough, I was startled to see that Nellie had an avid expression on her face. Her whole, twisted body was rigid and on the very point of surging forward through that crowd. ‘N-nellie..?’ I asked.

  She looked at me and I saw a light in her eyes that I had never seen before. A wicked light, I thought.

  We were interrupted then by the next act. Denise and Wheatley had, apparently been successful in de-demonising the vomiting elf, and they were replaced by a formidably ancient Romany woman in hooped satin skirts and jet black hair. She was hard-faced and sinister and she appeared to be slipping into a trance.

  ‘There are devils among us,’ she intoned, in a curious accent. ‘Beelzebub walks among us.’

  I turned to my sister to make a dry and jocular remark and was startled to find that Nellie had gone. She had slipped neatly through the press of bodies and was hauling herself onto the stage area. There was a roar of approval from the crowd.

  ‘He is in me!’ Nellie declared. She held out her arms and faced us, with a beatific smile upon her usually rather miserable-looking and crumpled face. ‘The devil is inside me! He has always been inside me! I have always been his plaything!’

  The applause grew wilder, as if my unfortunate sister had won the approval of her fellow townsfolk; as if she were confirming the truth of something they had always suspected about her.

  There was a string of words stuck in my throat. I tried repeatedly to shout them out at the stage, but they wouldn’t come. I was suspended in horror, jostled in the crowd and helpless.

  Now the Romany woman was laying her coarse, dirty hands on my sister and chanting some very strange verses indeed. I watched as Nellie went stiff as a board and started to froth at the mouth. That made me sick to the pit of my stomach. I could feel the Seafood Surprise from our early dinner start to rise in my gorge.

  The gypsy woman’s chanting was reaching a crescendo. I could have sworn I saw Nellie’s eyes roll back and turn red.

  Then there was a round of applause and it was over. Nellie was helped down from the stage and she was smiling shyly and nodding, acknowledging the applause. She wandered back through the crowd towards me.

  On the stage the Romany exorcist flung up her arms and said, ‘The demon is powerfully strong! He will not leave this woman so easily. Nor will he leave any of you. All of you must buy…’ And here she produced a pink jar of some kind of snake oil that she insisted we must all queue up and buy for four guineas a pop. Well, I was having none of it, and practically dragged my still-shaking and frothy-mouthed sister home.

  So – thank you, indeed, Doctor Watson. As if you even needed Nellie and I to investigate those charlatans at the Christmas Hotel. Naturally they are fakers. We knew that even before attending this macabre charade. But Nellie needn’t have been frightened out of her wits in aid of your pursuit of knowledge. I wish you had never read those accounts in the first place, of the miraculous and mysterious events reported here in Whitby at the Christmas Hotel. I don’t know why a sensible man such as yourself would have been at all bothered in the first place.

  Dear Doctor Watson,

  This morning my poor sister was no better. She has gone a very odd colour indeed. Her usual hue isn’t all that healthy-looking, but this is downright alarming. I asked her if there was anything I could do for her.

  ‘Maude will know,’ she said, tremulously. ‘Fetch Maude.’

  Well, it turns out her friend Maude Sturgeon lives down by the docks and she is what used to be called a local wise woman. Actually, there is a whole family of wise women, as it turns out, and these sisters occupy a tall house not far from the harbour. Downstairs it is a kind of herbalist shop – reeking of spices and curious unguents. I cast my eye around with some interest at the things they had on display. But I was there on a mission. ‘Maude will be able to help me,’ Nellie had insisted.

  Now I was confronting the formidable Maude Sturgeon herself, in her witchy emporium. She listened disapprovingly as I described the previous evening’s events. She seemed to take a very dim view of anything that went on at the Christmas Hotel.

  ‘There’s always someone dabbling with dark forces and things they should know better about,’ said Maude gruffly. She was more like a schoolmarm than a witch, I thought, in her plain grey suit and her steel grey hair pinned up like so. It was reassuring to be in the presence of her stolid good sense. She asked me to come and sit in their parlour, where I found three of her rather more fey sisters engaged in a very odd task indeed.

  Maude was fetching her shawl off the hat stand. ‘Oh, don’t mind them,’ she told me. ‘They’re stuffing it for the Whitby museum.’

  I looked harder and realised that the slippery dark thing they were all sewing wasn’t some svelte garment after all. It was the gutted remains of the monstrous sea beast that had been landed yesterday. Those witchy sisters appraised me as they went on stitching, and I was very careful not to look into the behemoth’s eyes again.

  Then Maude was ready and I was glad to get out of the fishy smell of that back parlour. The wise woman led the way through the narrow streets towards Nellie’s house, pausing on the way to buy her a fancy cake from a favoured bakery.

  ‘How long have you been friends with my sister?’ I asked conversationally.

  ‘Ever since she’s been here,’ said Maude, beaming brightly, and brandishing her walking stick as we passed familiar faces. ‘Your sister has proved quite a reliable helper on a number of my more terrifying investigations and adventures here in Whitby.’

  Well, of course, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Our Nellie? Having adventures? Involved in investigations? Helping out a personage such as this Maude? For a second I experienced a slight dizziness. Did everyone I know get themselves involved in curious adventures behind my very back?

  ‘Do you mean… crimes?’ I asked, lowering my voice as we came within sight of Nellie’s cottage.

  ‘Crimes, indeed,’ nodded Maude. ‘Also supernatural and unexplained phenomena of all kinds. Whitby seems to be a kind of magnet for occult and devilish practices, schemes and unholy beings, y’know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ sniffed Maude, giving me a very dark look indeed as I fumbled for my keys to Nellie’s house. ‘It’s to do with the presence of an interstitial dimensional gateway known as the Bitch’s Maw in the grounds of the old Abbey, you see. A kind of gateway into hell. Very nasty indeed.’

  I’m afraid my mouth dropped open at her words and I busied myself with letting us into the cottage, which smelled reassuringly of newly-brewed coffee and fresh wood smoke. Convinced I was bringing a raging lunatic to the rescue, I was delighted to see that my sister had risen from her bed. She was shuffling about in the kitchen in her nightie and pouring coffee for us all.

  ‘I’m so sorry to call you out, Maude,’ she said, as her visitor produced the Victoria sponge from her shopping bag. ‘Ooh, lovely. I’ll fetch plates. No, I thought I’d better call you over, because of this funny do that we had last night at the Exorcism Extravaganza.’

  ‘You were fools to go to such a thing,’ Maude growled, slicing the cake and dolloping wodges of it messily onto dainty china. />
  ‘I know, I couldn’t help myself,’ said Nellie. ‘And we all know these things are about charlatans fleecing the public. But the thing is… I went there because Raphael was worried. He had felt a vibration. There was a genuinely powerful psychic up there at the hotel last night. He could feel them at work. They were malevolent. Harmful. Hiding their wicked selves away amongst the usual fakers. That’s why we were there last night. So I could flush this person out.’

  I sat there with my wedge of cake halfway up to my mouth, staring at my sister. My malformed and shy younger sister, Nellie. Nellie with one eye, a crooked back and a clubfoot. Nellie who would never say boo to a goose. My poor Nellie was sitting there in her nightgown, eating cake for breakfast, and coming out with all of this gobbledegook, easy as you like. And that bullish Maude woman was simply nodding at her. Nodding as if they had little chats like this all the time. Nodding as if they were discussing something entirely reasonable.

  Before they could carry on saying other things to uproot my sense of the stability of all things, I broke in, ‘Erm, who is Raphael?’

  My dear sister Nellie looked at me and I was astonished to see a hint of pity in her single eye. She was pitying me! ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Well. I suppose needs must. After all these years, I must come clean. I must tell you the truth. After a lifetime of concealment.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Maude. ‘It’s about time your sister knew the truth.’

  Nellie took a deep breath and looked at me dead in the eye. Both my eyes. With her single one. Which was wincing with pity. She said – in a very calm voice indeed – ‘You see, Raphael is my inner demon. And my spirit guide. He’s been inside me all my life and he’s been my little secret. It was he that that dreadful woman tried to exorcise last night. It gave Raphael quite a turn, I can tell you.’

  I stared at her. I really didn’t know what to say. What does one say, Doctor Watson, in circumstances like these?

  Dear Doctor Watson,

  I hope both your good self and our mutual friend, Himself, are faring rather better than I am this week. I have been in a whirl of perturbation for several days. Never have I been so steeped in strangeness and such eerie goings-on. Well, it turns out that my malformed sister and her bluff and hearty best friend are very well accustomed to all manner of supernatural things. Things I assumed simply should not be. I, being, like our good friend Himself, a creature of rationality and good, plain commonsense am having problems. Here in the North I am finding more things in my philosophy – as the Danish prince would say – than I could shake a stick at.

  Today is Thursday – honestly, I don’t know where the time is going; I’m being led around all passively by my sister, who seems to have a renewed vigour about her, now that she is embroiled in an investigation. I was compelled to attend an unveiling ceremony at the Museum in the rather elegant park across the other side of town. This was for the stuffed squid that Maude’s sisters had spent day and night stitching back into some semblance of life. When we arrived for the sherry cocktail reception this evening in that rather musty, dusty municipal establishment, the squid was suspended in a delicate cat’s cradle of silver threads, which gave it the appearance of swimming through the cavernous room. All of the guests – Whitby’s great and good in their finery – stood milling underneath, gazing up at the frozen tentacles and the shiny carapace of its purple skin.

  I nodded politely and smiled as my sister gabbled away at Maude’s sisters, who were attired in suitably witchy – and rather scandalous – gowns for the evening. They smiled demurely and seemed to be the toast of the town. I wandered about the other display cabinets, finding a bewildering selection of mouldering dolls’ houses and ragged bears. There were Valentine’s cards from the previous century; tiny gloves and shoes; stuffed woodland beasts and seabirds. It was a shabby miscellany, I thought, with hardly any rhyme or reason.

  Anyhow, there was a proper ballyhoo when the Mayor of Whitby got up in all his robes and chains made his speech. He stood on a podium – this oleaginous Mr Danby, as they called him – and he chuntered on about their town and its glorious heritage. I was staring into the eyes of the monstrous beast, but its celestial orbs had been replaced, naturally enough, with something less potent. They looked rather like green glass plates and, indeed, Maude leaned in to me and hissed that that’s what the squid’s eyes were: two expensive serving platters she had brought back from a holiday on the island of Murano, near Venice. Oh, my heart leapt up at the mention of Venice, dear Doctor Watson. And then I shivered as I recalled some of the deadlier details of our adventure there, last autumn.

  It was just as the Mayor was coming to the end of his windy speech that I noticed something rather odd happening to the suspended squid. One of its attenuated limbs seemed to flex and lash, of its own accord. There was a sharp cry as someone else noticed the same thing. Then, all of a sudden, all its limbs were moving and screams rang out inside the stuffy museum. It was at this point that I noticed it was all due to the wires which suspended the beast: they were snapping, one by one, and then the thick, heavy body of the squid was swaying and then galloping about in mid-air. There was such a pandemonium at this, and I felt Nellie grab me by both arms and drag me backwards into the alcove where the ships-in-bottles were tidily arrayed.

  With a tremendous crash of breaking cabinets and glass displays, the giant squid came toppling down. Some innocent bystanders had been transfixed with horror – including the Mayor – and they were soon pinned and wriggling under that giant, piscine form.

  After a few moments there was silence, and billowing clouds of dust.

  I heard Maude Sturgeon cry out, ‘Sabotage..!’

  And soon we were checking around, to see who was hurt. Maude’s witchy sisters were shaken, but not injured. The squid itself had barely a scratch on it. The Mayor’s ancient, wizened mother was hyperventilating and had to be taken home.

  Nellie and I went straight to the nearest hotel, where we sat in the bar and took a fortifyingly stiff nip of brandy. ‘Who would want to sabotage the unveiling of a squid?’ I asked her.

  She gave me a very dark look. ‘Perhaps it’s not the squid itself. Perhaps it is all about what was inside the squid.’

  I raised my eyebrow at her as she downed her drink. ‘What could be inside a squid?’ I laughed.

  ‘Whatever it was, it isn’t there now,’ she said cryptically. ‘The squid was, as we know, rammed full of stuffing.’

  She was mumbling rather drunkenly, I thought. And I also thought I could detect a touch of Raphael, her supposed spirit guide, in her eyes. ‘Are you saying something was removed from the squid? By those who did the stuffing?’

  She tapped her nose. ‘I am, indeed.’

  ‘Maude’s sisters gutted the thing. What did they take out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said primly. ‘I’m only surmising.’ Then she was peering across the elegant lounge bar of the Miramar hotel at someone who had just stepped in, alone. ‘Isn’t that Denise?’ she said. ‘From Denise and Wheatley?’

  And it was, Doctor Watson. Away from the stage and out of her finery, Denise was a rather shabby genteel figure, all bundled up in worsted and tweed.

  ‘She’s entering the bar on her own,’ I observed.

  ‘Oh, no one cares about that kind of propriety,’ said Nellie. ‘Not at the Miramar hotel, anyway. Look, I’m going to call her over.’

  I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be sociable with an exorcist, but voice my concerns about this I could not, for Nellie was on her feet and beckoning Denise by waving her skinny arms and winking at her with her one good eye.

  ‘My life is in tatters,’ Denise wept copiously, once my sister had started her talking.

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Nellie, agog at the spectacle of the blue-haired lady sobbing into her libation.

  ‘He can be terrible, terrible,’ she trembled. ‘When he’s in a fury.’ Fear made her shiver and the brandy glass tinkled against her rotten stumps of teeth.


  ‘Who, my dear?’ Nellie pressed.

  ‘Why, him. My husband. My terrible husband.’ Then Denise clapped a hand over her mouth, as if she had said too much.

  Nellie was intrigued and kept badgering the old dear, and I felt myself growing uneasy about this. What was Nellie doing, getting so close? Hadn’t Denise been one of the reasons Nellie had been up all night on Tuesday? All gut-churning and collywobbly as she was?

  ‘There, there,’ Nellie kept saying, and the elderly Exorcist burst into more violent tears. She put her head on Nellie’s hump and gave full vent to her feelings as Nellie patted her wispy blue hair. I didn’t know where to look.

  ‘He makes me do heinous things,’ she said, through heaving breath and muffled by Nellie’s hump.

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked Nellie.

  ‘In our room, upstairs,’ said Denise. ‘He has gone to bed in fury and disgust. All because of that fracas at the museum.’

  ‘The museum?’ I asked. ‘You mean, the cephalopod’s unfortunate collapse?’

  She sniffed. ‘Yes, I saw you both there. But you left with the crowd, shortly afterwards. You never saw him, berating those sisters. Getting me to cut open the thing. Feeling around inside those slippery limbs… Looking for… looking for…’

  Nellie was looking excited now. She had a fervid expression. Rather like Himself gets. You know, when the game’s afoot, sort-of-thing. ‘Looking for what, Denise?’

  ‘Those blasted jewels,’ cried the exorcist. ‘The Eyes of Miimon. Smuggled here in the body of that behemoth. The rarest of jewels. Possessed of untold occult powers.’

  Now, this was a surprise to Nellie. ‘Jewels?’ she said. ‘Where from?’