[Brenda & Effie 07] - A Game of Crones

by Paul Magrs

  He blinks at me. ‘Don’t go thinking that I can rescue you and your old friend Effie from your current predicament. That’s not what wishes are for. Not my kind of wishes, anyway. I’m all about the more profound, deep down desires. I’m not about the immediate, localised problems. Sorry.’

  He’s gabbling away and I can’t really follow what he’s on about. But it sounds like he’s not going to help us. ‘Listen, you,’ I snap. ‘I’ve had about enough of your games. Last time you sent me into the strangest dream I ever had, and meanwhile there was murder and allsorts going on around me and poor old Effie had to face it herself…’

  ‘It wasn’t a dream, Brenda,’ he snickers, tossing his head like he can’t believe my rudeness. ‘It was all true. Every minute of it. I don’t take you into some kind of fantasy with my wishes. They are, as I say, very profound and real. I take you into the opposite direction: I take you into the truth about yourself.’

  I swallow hard at that, not wanting to confront the so-called truth of what I encountered last week in Castle F. I really don’t want to be bothered by the implications of that right now. All I want is to reverse this horrible expedition we have made this night into what feels like the very crust of the earth, and to get Effie safely back home…

  ‘Effie will have to look after herself,’ the duck tells me, jumping off his rock, and waddling away from me, deeper into the tunnel.

  ‘Wait!’ I call, running after him.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Brenda, dear. She’s going to be fine. Why, right at this very moment she’s having a very interesting chat indeed with a most fascinating person. She will tell you all about it over brunch tomorrow. I promise you, dear. She will be fine. All things will be fine.’

  ‘How can you know this?’

  ‘I just do.’ He boggles at me with those brilliant eyes. ‘You must learn to trust me, Brenda. I have your best interests at heart. I am your servant, remember. You summoned me to do your bidding and give you your heart’s desire.’

  I’m not even sure that I want my own heart’s desire. It seems to lead me into some very peculiar places indeed. What I could do with really is just going back to normal… and having a bit of peace.

  ‘Too late! Too late!’ squawks the duck, picking up his pace, so that I have to follow him at a stumbling run. ‘We are already on the point of discovering the nature of your second magical wish…!’

  I follow helplessly. And soon we are standing under another deep hole in the roof of the cavern. There’s a heap of undisturbed rubble on top of which is sitting the very last thing I expect to see.

  Woolworth’s Pick-n-Mix counter.

  It must have dropped through the ground and fallen as far as I have done tonight. It’s ludicrous but it seems mostly undamaged. Each of the transparent doors in the display unit is still in place, and in each little compartment are the brightly coloured sweets I would expect to see. Midget Gems, Dolly Mixtures, Jellied Fruits. Exactly as they ought to be. All at once I’m craving sticky, sugary, coagulated sweets. Fruit Gums and Liquorice Allsorts and Peanut Brittle.

  The duck points a wing at the display and commands me: ‘Fill your boots, Brenda. And then we will see what your second wish entails…’

  Even as I start filling a half-pound bag and chewing my way through a selection of favourite sweeties, I can feel his arcane powers working on me… I don’t even know what I’m wishing for, but it seems to be happening already.

  Dawn breaks over Whitby harbour and I am chilled to the bone.

  I am also absolutely filthy. All my outdoor clothes are streaked with horrid slime and sandy filth from the bottom of the pit. But – here I am! I can hardly believe it! I’m out of doors and lying at full stretch on the beach at the bottom of the West Cliff. The sea froths restlessly a dozen yards away. I can feel the cool of its lacey spume on my face as I wake and sit up.

  Everything is so bright. So bright and fresh and light. It’s all such a relief after being in that darkest and nastiest of abysses all night.

  But how am I here? I don’t remember escaping or climbing back out of that hellish hole or the ghostly Woolworths. I don’t remember anything after talking with that duck.

  In one hand I’m holding the crumpled paper bag that held a half pound of hand-picked sweets. My stomach roils at the thought of consuming that much in one go. EAT ME, it says on the bag. I have a vague memory of the magic duck encouraging me to fill the bag again, again… and of my eating an ungodly amount of sticky, multi-coloured sweeties.

  Visions from last night swirl through my over-stimulated brain. And Effie! How she fell all that distance down the hole and that was the last I heard of her. How terrible. What a disaster it’s all been.

  My wig’s come off. It’s lying in the damp sand beside me like a large and unkempt domestic animal. When I reach to instinctively touch my bare scalp I receive my next shock.

  There is hair growing on my actual head.

  Quite short, quite new. But silky and soft.

  My hair has started to grow again.

  It isn’t the only thing about me that feels different. My heart starts racing at once. I feel energised and crazily off-kilter. I don’t even feel like myself.

  I jump up at once and bundle my wig inside my heavy coat. What’s going on? Why do I feel so queer and different? Why are my limbs buzzing with energy now, as if the sun itself is making me fizz and warm through with some kind of mystical energy?

  It’s the wish. It has to be. Something is going on and I don’t even know what it is.

  It’s early. It’s dawn, with pink streaked through the skies like smoky bacon. Only a very few are awake in Whitby so early. I must get myself home before anyone sees me.

  I start running across the beach towards the stone steps that will take me back to the harbour.

  No aches, no pains. Hardly a shred of fatigue. But I don’t pause to marvel over these changes. I put my head down, clutch my wig and my filthy woollen coat about me, and I run like hell.

  Nobody sees me.

  Thank goodness, but town is eerily quiet this morning. It could be the aftermath of some ghastly disaster. The zombie apocalypse could have been and gone and wiped out the denizens of our beloved town overnight, and I’m just glad of no one being around to witness me looking a fright. I catch odd glimpses of myself in dark, reflecting shop windows and I’m barely recognisable.

  The gulls are wheeling and cackling above, as per usual. They’re like a laughter track on a cheesy sit-com, guffawing at my predicament as I go galumphing all the way home.

  At last I’m back on Harbour Street. I take the steep slopes with much more ease than usual. Must be desperation. I go yomping up the jumbled pathways and I don’t stop for breath in my habitual spots, which is very odd, but I don’t have time to mull it over.

  At last, at last I’m home again. Thundering up my side passage, clattering with my keys in the various locks. I fling myself indoors as if the hordes of hell itself are after me.

  Home! Home again! And I realise now I assumed last night I was never going to see it again. I’d assumed I was going to die in that infernal Chasm.

  Just like… just like poor Effie.

  I hurtle up the stairs and, halfway up, realise that I can hear the phone ringing in my attic. It’s shrill and persistent. Why, even noise sounds more clearly and crisply to me today.

  Who’s ringing me at this ungodly hour?

  Once in the homely confines of my attic room I snatch up the receiver.

  And I almost cheer when I hear that shrewish voice at the other end.

  ‘I just saw someone in your coat from my bedroom window, dashing up the street looking a frightful state. You dirty stop-out, Brenda! Where have you been all night?’

  ‘Effie…!’ I gasp, and tears surge into my eyes, almost blinding me for a moment. ‘You’re alive!’

  ‘Of course I’m alive, ducky. What are you talking about?’

  ‘But…! But… last night! You fell, Effie. You fell from
the rope into the pit and… and by the time I got to the very bottom you had gone! I thought you were dead!’

  There’s a long pause at the other end of the line. ‘The pit..?’ she says querulously. ‘What do you mean ‘the pit’?’

  ‘Under Woolworths! We broke into the shop last night, remember? It was one of the most terrifying ordeals of our supernatural careers. There was a beast underneath, at the bottom of the Chasm and you fell, Effie! The beast was chortling and laughing like mad and he shook the rope and… down you went!’

  Effie’s voice sounds hollow when she replies, following a few seconds of astonished silence. ‘I’m not saying you’re lying or hallucinating or anything, ducky…’ Her voice is quavery and odd. ‘But nothing of the sort happened to me last night! I had supper at yours and then we watched ‘Die Hard’ with Bruce Willis and then I came home at about midnight. We didn’t even go on patrol last night…’

  ‘What?!’ I can hardly believe what the old besom’s telling me. ‘Effie! You’ve been brainwashed!’

  ‘I have been nothing of the sort!’ she cries hotly.

  ‘You have! You’re mind’s been wiped! You’ve banged your head or something. Oh, can’t you remember?’

  ‘I’d say you’d been dreaming again, Brenda. Or you had too much of that yummy Romanian vodka last night. Did you drink more after I left? That’s a slippery slope…’

  My mind is racing. ‘Effie! Go and look at your clothes. Look at what you were wearing last night. Your adventuring cape and your balaclava.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ she snaps crossly.

  ‘They’ll tell you the truth. They’ll be covered in horrible slime. The interior of that shop was a right midden. You’ll see!’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she humours me. ‘Back in a moment.’

  I hang onto my receiver and wait.

  I haven’t even taken my coat off yet. I’m standing in the middle of my living room dressed in filthy rags, so I pop the receiver down on my telephone table and shrug off my coat. It’s ruined, of course. No amount of dry cleaning could get all of that nasty stuff – whatever it is – out of the fabric.

  My wig’s pretty beaten up, too.

  That’s when I turn to my living room mirror to take a look at this strange new growth of hair on my head. Where did it come from? And what does it look like?

  I stare into the mirror.

  I stare much harder into the mirror.

  That isn’t my face looking back at me.

  That whole woman in the mirror is a stranger.

  Somehow I am wearing another woman’s face. And, now I think about it: this whole body doesn’t actually feel like mine, either.

  ‘Brenda? Brenda!’ Effie’s voice comes tinnily out of the forgotten phone. ‘Are you still there? Are you there, Brenda?’

  Later.

  I have had a lot to take in. Forgive me if my thoughts are scattered.

  ‘Who are you, and what have you done with Brenda?’ Effie thunders. Her face is white with anger. Her lips have gone all thin. It’s her sucked lemon face and it’s out in full force.

  ‘Effie, it’s me, honestly. It really is me. I’ve just… changed a little.’

  ‘A little!’ she gasps, and looks me up and down. ‘You’re hardly the same woman!’

  I’m upstairs, round her place, in her living room, looking at her through new eyes. Wow, my vision is pin sharp, in a way it’s never been for years. I’m still getting used to feeling this way. I’m still discovering aches that are no longer there, and bits of me that work easily in a way they haven’t in the longest time. I feel like I’ve been uncrumpled, somehow. ‘I’ve been rejuvenated,’ I tell Effie. ‘All my bits and pieces have been given new life.’

  She glares at me as if I have done something untoward or tasteless, or worse – as if I am mocking her somehow. Then the spectre of alarm shoots across her face. ‘It’s not that Mr Danby, is it? He hasn’t gone and reopened The Deadly Boutique, has he?’

  She’s referring, of course, to a curious adventure we shared, early on in our friendship, when one of our most deadly enemies opened a somewhat unconventional spa in Frances’ Passage in the middle of town. ‘Of course not,’ I shudder. ‘Do you think I’d ever be so foolish?’

  Her brow furrows deeply and then she’s struck by another thought. ‘You haven’t been bitten by anyone, have you? Remember that time when I started looking much younger and fabulous? And the reason for that was almost worse than beauty treatments from Mr Danby. I’d been gotten at by a vampire’s kiss, remember.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ And then I smile. ‘So you think I look fabulous then, do you?’

  I’ve caught her out giving a compliment, which infuriates her. ‘A bit,’ she mumbles.

  ‘I’ve never been petite before,’ I say, and do a slow twirl in the dusty full length mirror she reckons is antique. ‘Look at me! And my hair… I swear, it’s grown like this just this morning. When I woke on the beach first thing, it was just a few soft tufts. Now it’s lavish and lustrous…’

  ‘All right, all right,’ she snaps. ‘Don’t act the giddy goat, Brenda. Yes, it’s all very nice, but it’s clearly the result of some kind of sorcery or warlockery. And it’s simply no good. We have to find out who it is who’s transformed you like this and get you back to your normal self.’

  I almost burst out: No! Don’t change me back! But I don’t say anything at all. I examine myself in the silvery mottled depths of the looking glass. No scars. No ragged stitching at all. My skin is soft and blemish-free. It’s like I’ve wandered out of one of those infomercials that seem so fake: the ones with all the bogus-sounding science about how they’re going to make your skin marvellous again. No scars, think of that!

  ‘How are we going to explain your changes to the people we know?’ Effie worries.

  ‘It’s none of their business.’

  ‘We could tell them that you’re your own younger, more attractive sister, who’s visiting, perhaps…’ She muses.

  ‘I don’t care what we say,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t have to explain anything.’

  Effie hurries off to get the tea things. She’s left the tea stewing too long. I sit waiting as she fetches biscuits and cake, luxuriating in my new self. Every fibre of my being is trembling and thrumming with life.

  This reminds me of years gone by, when I’d get new body parts or organs fitted. Especially if they came from the recently dead, the process could feel as refreshing as this. I haven’t been the recipient of anything new like that for such a long time. Ever since I became conscious of the ethical implications of snatching from graves (Henry Cleavis – my old friend - once talked it all through with me, a very long time ago) I’ve been eking out the life in all the spare parts I keep in my attic. But even with fresh bits of a cadaver the feeling was never as overwhelming as this. Every cell of my body feels like brand new me.

  ‘Ooh, Brenda,’ sighs Effie, hurrying in with the tea tray. ‘Stop rubbing yourself all over like that. It’s embarrassing. It isn’t natural.’

  I roll my eyes at her. ‘I’ll tell you what’s not natural, Effie Jacobs. And that’s you emerging unscathed and with no memories of last night’s adventures. That’s the most mysterious thing around here, as it happens.’

  She pours the tea and sits down carefully. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she says, in a quiet voice. ‘I just had a look in the cloakroom. My cape and my hat are covered in something truly disgusting.’

  ‘Slime?’

  She nods, pulling her face. ‘Something like ectoplasm. It smells awful.’

  ‘The whole of Woolworths is coated with it inside. I believe it’s some kind of demonic substance excreted by the creature in the pit.’

  ‘The creature in the pit again!’ she says. ‘Why can’t I remember anything about this?’

  I sip my tea worriedly, eyeing her. Funny how old Effie’s had a few lapses with her memory recently. Like up in Sandsend. When I quizzed her about the particulars, she couldn’t actually remem
ber climbing down from the wires. It was only days after our adventure that she confided this crucial bit of information to me. And now this. She’s lost the memory of everything that happened to us last night.

  ‘Someone is messing about with us, Brenda,’ she says, crunching a ginger biscuit. ‘They’re doing things to your body and they’re toying with the contents of my mind.’

  Well. Even though I’m not complaining, I can see that my friend certainly has a point.

  But what can we do?

  It’s all so intangible. We simply to have to get on with our lives and our current investigations. We can’t fret ourselves into a standstill over inexplicable doings.

  And I must admit, I am much more concerned at the moment with getting myself all dressed up and swishing about the town, showing off my new body and this lovely new face. Louise Brooks, that’s who I remind me of. When she was Lulu in the old movie. Cupid’s bow lips and all. I’m so dinky – not to mention slinky – all of my old, ordinary clothes for boring old hefty everyday Brenda are simply no good for me. Effie grumpily suggests that I raid her endless wardrobefuls of antique frocks. It’s like taking a walk back through the ages, flicking through the myriad fashions of Effie’s closets.

  ‘That’s evening wear,’ she snorts, eyeing the glitzy ensemble I’ve chosen for myself. ‘From the 1980s. Those shoulder pads and epaulettes! My god, Brenda, you look like a female impersonator.’

  My heart sinks because I was thinking that I looked pretty sophisticated in this get-up. Perhaps Effie is right. It’s a long time since I glammed myself up to any good effect. I surrender to her expertise and quite soon I’m glad of it. She puts me in a 1920s kind of affair. I look like one of the women off that show from Sunday nights, where they all live in the big house and look down their noses at each other. ‘Oh, look at me, Effie!’

  Behind me, reflected in the mirror, Effie looks like my ancient spinster aunt, or a witch who’s just come traipsing in to put a curse on. As if! I’ve never felt less cursed in all my life.

  It’s mid-afternoon before we brave the streets. ‘Remember,’ Effie warns. ‘If anyone asks, you’re your own sister, visiting from out of town.’