[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

by Paul Magrs

He even seems unnerved by me. He won’t look me in the eye and directs most of his utterances at the melamine tabletop.

  ‘Tell us in your own words what happened to you and your friends, Devlin,’ I urge him, in my most reassuring and maternal tone.

  Much later that night.

  ‘Here, you hold the bag.’

  ‘Urggh.’

  ‘I know it’s heavy. It’s got the rope in it, hasn’t it? And all the other stuff you made us bring.’

  ‘Sssh.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Brenda. We don’t want anyone seeing us…’

  ‘Good point. But I can’t promise that this is going to be quiet, when I…’

  Crash. Tinkle.

  But, mercifully, the racket is short, sharp and soon over as I smash open the back public entrance of Woolworths. I tried messing on with pliers and a crowbar, but it was no use. Hefty brute force sometimes suits me better.

  Effie is wincing all over at the noise. She’s shrank back into the shadows, clutching our bag of tools. ‘Sssshh!’

  ‘All done now,’ I tell her.

  Tendrils of horrible, cool mist are wafting about between us. Her face is wreathed in them as she emerges into the lemon-coloured lamplight at the bottom of Silver Street.

  ‘There was no sea mist in the harbour tonight…’ she frowns.

  But the mist is emerging from inside the store. It’s issuing out the hole I punched in the glass like long, diaphanous fingers, coming to claim us.

  ‘Very strange indeed,’ Effie purses her lips. ‘Are you going in first, ducky?’

  ‘Perhaps I ought.’ My size and strength sometimes mean that Effie shoves me first into dangerous situations like this, but I don’t mind, particularly.

  I crouch and, protecting both hands with my sheepskin gloves, knock away jagged shards of glass, widening the new entrance. If anyone catches us breaking into this shop there’ll be a right fuss. People will wonder what we were trying to rob, from a shop that’s been closed for more than five years. But it’s three o’clock in the morning and the streets of Whitby are as still and deserted as ever they get.

  I shuffle forward through the broken teeth of glass and shine my pen torch into the swirling mist. It’s an unappetising shade of green.

  ‘What can you see, Brenda?’ Effie hisses at my back.

  ‘Nothing much at all. Just a few old display stands…’ They are empty and forlorn. These things that used to hold kiddies’ summer clothes and toys and stuff, just sitting there emptily for the rest of time. They strike me as looking like ships on a still and foggy sea. Their crews have jumped overboard and they are sailing adrift forever. They’re like the Marie Celeste of retail… In fact, that’s what this whole shop is, I decide as I advance further, into the corner where they used to have records and videos and all that electrical stuff. My feet kick against a couple of trampled and broken plastic cases on the gritty floor. When I touch them, they are sticky. This stuff smells. A horrible, slimy substance is coating the floor and, when I reach out to steady myself, I find that it’s on some of the shelves, too…

  ‘Effie, don’t touch anything,’ I warn her. ‘There’s a kind of horrible ichor on the lino. Sticky stuff that will give you the screaming ab-dabs…’

  Too late: behind me my companion lets out a screech of revulsion. ‘What the devil is it, Brenda? What has happened to this place..?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I chew my lip in consternation as I watch my pen torch’s feeble light flicker and dim. Bugger. When did I last check the batteries? ‘I think that Devlin was telling us the honest truth about his adventures in this place…’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ Effie sighs. ‘This mist… and the… what did he call it?’

  ‘The Chasm,’ I remind her.

  ‘That’s it. Over by the check-outs at the front of the shop…’

  Pasty-faced Devlin - and those two friends of his who were so terrified they couldn’t come to talk to us - had a very traumatic time in the haunted shell of Woolworth’s. They didn’t break their way in like we did tonight, but took advantage of a window high up at the back of the shop, which Devlin had noticed was open. A windy storm one night had blown open the small window of what turned out to be the staff toilets. As three nimble youngsters Devlin and his chums didn’t baulk at borrowing a ladder and clambering their way up to the fourth floor in order to steal indoors. (There was no way Effie and I were going to use the same route. My climbing days are over and Effie has had nightmares of late, about clinging to the wires of the Sandsend funicular which, as it turns out, she found a very nasty experience indeed.) Anyway, whichever way we managed to get inside Woollies, what we have found there so far tallies with the experiences of Devlin’s gang.

  ‘There’s something in there,’ he told us, hunched over the Styrofoam tray of chips we bought him. ‘Not a ghost, or anything like that. Something much worse. Something evil and alive. And it’s living at the bottom of the Chasm.’

  ‘There’s a Chasm in Woolworths?’

  ‘Oh yes. A hideous, endless black hole in the lino floor. About as big as the stationery department used to be. Near the checkout tills. There were… noises coming from down there…’

  ‘What kind of noises, Devlin?’

  He looked stricken, finishing the last of his ketchuppy chips. ‘Evil noises. Something inhuman. Something… eating noisily and greedily… and talking to us. I-it knew we were there…’

  ‘And did you… see this thing down the hole?’ Effie asked him sharply, impatient with all his stammering and prevarication. Effie prefers it when witnesses and the like cut straight to the facts. She hates it when she thinks someone’s getting theatrical.

  ‘We leaned right over the edge. It was all sticky and runny with this horrible goo. And then… then the thing down there let out this huge roar… like it was coming out! Like it was going to come flying out to get us! And so we turned… we turned and ran…’

  His hollow eyes stared at us over the melamine table in that tacky café. He looked grey and sickly under the fluorescent lighting.

  ‘I’ve heard that you two are monster hunters,’ he said, his voice going quieter, sounding strangled in his throat. ‘People say that you are the ones to go to. About this kind of thing.’

  ‘That’s dead right,’ Effie told him briskly. ‘That’s exactly who we are.’

  Poor Devlin didn’t have much more to tell us. He described the fearful flight that he and his friends made back through the darkened ground floor of Woolworths, convinced that the fiend from the Chasm was still at their very backs. They made panicked progress back up through the levels to the staff room, and then still had all the palaver of clambering out of the toilet window. They had to force themselves to calm down in case they fell off the ladder and killed themselves, but it was hard, he said. They could still hear the ravenous gibbering and cackling of the beast behind them. It was quite definitely a beast, he said. It was a huge and horrifying beast and it had crawled out of the pit in the ground in order to devour them.

  Effie nodded, still looking frankly sceptical, and thanked him for his information.

  ‘What will you do?’ Devlin asked us, as we made to leave him.

  ‘We’ll go and sort this awful thing out,’ I told him. ‘That’s just the kind of thing that we do.’

  And now, several hours later, we are in this tomb-like shop, with a bagful of tools, a heavy coil of rope and a fiery gumption in our hearts that’s rapidly cooling off.

  For here we are. At the very edge of the Chasm, at the heart of Woollies, and now we can hear the cries of the beast for ourselves.

  Inch by inch. It’s backbreaking work. And I’m too toggled up in layers of coats and cardies, really, to be doing this. Hand over hand. Inch by inch.

  It’s a sheer drop into darkness beneath us. Effie and I are lowering ourselves into a ghastly abyss and trying not to think of the danger we are putting ourselves into.

  A thin drizzle of th
at foul slime slides down the sides of the Chasm. It’s on the rope in places too, by now, and we have to grip even harder and pray that we don’t slip.

  It must be four, or five o’clock in the morning by now. What on earth are we doing? Elderly ladies like us? Abseiling into the lair of a monster. We can hear him muttering and rumbling down there, somewhere below. He’s talking to himself. Probably anticipating an unexpected meal…

  ‘There’s not many pickings on me,’ Effie chuckles bleakly. She’s several feet above me, clinging on for dear life. ‘You tell him, Brenda. I’d be no better than a toothpick to a monster with a taste for the flesh of old ladies!’

  Is this what we’re really expecting? A dragonish being underneath the parade of shops? Or a sea beast, perhaps? Washed into the harbour many years ago, growing up in an underground cave, perhaps. Growing to monstrous proportions and appetites… This has been a great fishing port for a very long time, of course. All kinds of deep sea creatures have landed up in Whitby. What if one of them, one time, was something out of the ordinary… Something that chuckled and gibbered and jabbered to itself and skulked at the bottom of a pit beneath Woolworths… As I inch my way down our tarred rope towards him, that doesn’t even sound all that outlandish to me.

  ‘Hello..?’ I call into the darkness below. I try out my friendliest tones. ‘Who are you, down there? Can you hear us? Can you speak English? Can you tell us who you are?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Brenda!’ Effie snaps. ‘It’s a monster! You can’t reason with it! We’re not going to have a nice friendly chat with it!’

  But we might be, I think. He might be a misunderstood monster. He mightn’t have intended to scare those kids or anyone else at all. He could be trapped down there. He could be living a life of misery alone and be unable to get out. We could be his saviours, and he might be overjoyed to see us…

  ‘Hello…?’ I try again. ‘My name is Brenda. And just above me is my colleague, Effie…’

  I listen hard to the dank emptiness and after a few moments I hear him. He’s chuckling throatily. This isn’t at all reassuring.

  But I persist. ‘We are sworn to help those in need. That is our role, here in Whitby, as laid down in many prophecies and fateful prognosticary things. All the monsters and erroneous creatures who find their way to this town via the Bitch’s Maw or other dimensional breaches are our responsibility, you see… and we are pledged to help them…’

  The laughter from below grows more hearty at this. It really doesn’t sound very jolly, though. It sounds a bit nasty, to be honest.

  ‘Pledged to help them – or to fettle them and kill them!’ Effie adds, sounding a caustic note. I try to shush her. She’s not helping at all, though she’s right. We are also pledged to protect the town from those beings and super-beings who come here to cause mischief and disaster. And I think our friend in the Chasm might be erring on the mischief side, by the sound of his now-raucous laughter.

  ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’ I call out, challengingly. My arms are just about breaking now. I’m stronger than most, but I can feel my sinews cracking under the strain of what feels like an endless descent. ‘Can you tell us who you are?’

  There’s just more laughter, tolling through the dark, slimy chimney.

  ‘Are you sure you want to carry on with this, ducky?’ Effie hisses at me. ‘He sounds awful. We could go back home, make some plans. I could look up some spells… maybe prepare some hexes…’

  She’s right, really. It would be much more sensible to start hauling our aged carcasses back up the Chasm and to retrace our steps through the misty store. With a few hexes and weapons we would stand a far better chance of fighting this creature. He’s proved beyond all doubt by now that he isn’t benign and reasonable. But still something nags at me. I don’t just want to hurl voodoo bombs and deadly things at him and blow him to slimy smithereens. There’s something more to this, that we don’t yet understand. And so I tell Effie: ‘No. We’ve come this far. We need to stick this out. We need to face this creature tonight and find out what he’s doing here.’

  The laughter has subsided, as if he’s listening keenly to every word we say.

  We are just about to recommence lowering ourselves down our rope when something shocking happens.

  The rope lurches violently from side to side. We are shaken along with it, jolted through the dark air. I collide with one of the chasm walls and cry out and hang on for dear life.

  ‘Brenda, stop it!’ Effie shrieks. ‘What are you doing..?!’

  ‘It isn’t me!’ I gasp. ‘How could it be me? It’s him. It’s the creature in the pit! He’s grabbed our rope! He’s pulling it! He’s… waggling it from side to side…!’

  ‘Then tell him to stop waggling it!’ Effie shouts breathlessly. She screams as she is bounced off the rocky walls.

  It’s as if we’re hanging onto a bell rope in a cathedral. The monster below is yanking us around and trying to ring and chime the hours.

  ‘Brenda…! I can’t hold on…!’

  ‘You have to hold on, Effie!’ I gasp and grunt and my limbs and all my muscles are burning by now. Goodness knows how skinny old Effie is managing to cling on. ‘He’s trying to shake us off! Don’t let go, Effie! If we let go, we’re dead..!’

  ‘I can’t, Brenda..!’ she howls, and now the laughter from before is mocking and hysterical. ‘Brenda… I can’t…!’

  Effie lets go.

  In that very instant I see her clawed hands fly free of the rope. With dreamlike slowness she drops away into the dark and empty air.

  I reach out to grab her as she falls past me like a bag of old rags.

  But it’s hopeless.

  My last glimpse of Effie is her outraged face and her wide open eyes as she falls beneath me, into the abyss.

  She doesn’t even screech. She’s silent as she falls, and I don’t even hear her hit the bottom.

  At first I think I’m going to fall, as well. The shock of watching my friend plummeting into the chasm is almost too much. But I recover my composure enough to take a firmer hold and suddenly the violent swaying stops, as if the creature below has achieved what he wanted to.

  I’m trying not to imagine Effie disappearing into the snapping jaws of some kind of monster below. Now it’s disconcertingly quiet. If she’d arrived at the bottom in one piece she’d be squawking and yelling by now, surely?

  I just have to face the possibility that she has perished in the abyss under Woollies. What a terrible night this is.

  And me? What can I do but continue to lower myself gingerly down the rope. For a moment I consider hauling myself upwards again, but that seems like a terrible defeat, and a betrayal of my friend. Even though my body is screaming out in pain and fatigue, I am determined to go on.

  Down, down and down: it seems to take hours. And all the while there isn’t any noise at all. The monster in the deep has fallen completely silent, as if he was never there at all.

  And at last my feet touch the bottom of the chasm. It’s warm and sandy and deserted down there. At first I can’t quite believe that the rocky ground is actually solid beneath my feet. Cautiously I step away from the rope and almost collapse onto the floor with relief.

  Above me there is very little to see. Perhaps a pale green disc, wavering in the far distance, representing the open mouth of the hole we have climbed down. What a terrible distance.

  The air is rather warm and stuffy. I kick my way through the dry sand, and there are bones underfoot. Some of them crack beneath my weight, with horrible splintering noises. There is a breath of air on my cheek and I follow its source. A tunnel, I’m guessing. Out comes my pen torch, but the light is wavering and unsure. In for a penny, in for a pound. If there’s a breeze – no matter how gentle – at least it means there’s an exit somewhere, and a route back up to the surface that won’t involve me clambering back up that rope. Hopefully. I daren’t start fretting that I’m going to be stuck down here until the ages whittle my bones
skinny.

  Then it strikes me: someone has dragged Effie away. Her body, whether living or dead, is nowhere to be seen.

  This tunnel with the breeze warm as breath is the only way out. And so I push forward, shambling along in my exhaustion.

  I should never have let Effie out of my sight. Just lately she’s been putting herself into terribly dangerous situations. Really, as the strongest and most indestructible of the two of us, I should be thrusting myself forward in her place and protecting her a bit more, perhaps? Have I let her down, I wonder? Though this time, there was surely nothing I could do? It was as much as I could manage to cling onto the rope myself. Poor Effie never stood a chance…

  Our adventures and investigations here in Whitby have become decidedly more dangerous and violent of late, I realise. Perhaps they are just too much for two old dames like us to cope with? Perhaps we have both become too feeble and ancient for all this business anyway?

  Poor Effie. I really hope she hasn’t been dragged off and eaten somewhere in the dark. She really does deserve better than that…

  Strange… but is the tunnel lightening up somewhat? I could swear I can see the roughness of the walls around me. If I hold up my hands before my face I can actually see my fingers as they tremble with tiredness and fear…

  ‘Ahem.’

  I freeze on the spot. ‘What? Who..?’

  ‘Quack,’ says a vaguely familiar voice.

  I cast about for the source of the noise and it must be getting lighter in this tunnel, for I can pick out the shape of the duck plucking at his tail feathers with his beak. He looks languid, sitting on a rock, happy as you please, seemingly waiting for me.

  ‘Oh, hello there, dear,’ he nods. ‘You took your time, didn’t you?’

  ‘It’s you!’ I gasp, sounding foolish, I know.

  ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’ he suggests. ‘I’m not keen on hanging about underground. It’s a bit dry down here for my liking.’

  My old heart is hammering away at the sight of him. He’s come to save us, I know he has. If he really is as magic as he seems to be, then he could rescue me and save Effie’s life all in one fell swoop..!