[Brenda & Effie 05] - Bride That Time Forgot

by Paul Magrs

  ‘What are pinking shears usually used for? Putting a nice edge on material, aren’t they? A kind of jagged pattern. Yes, my mother was a keen seamstress, I remember. These were the Blithe Pinking Shears, the professor said, and they were possessed of incredible, mystical powers.

  ‘They were not to be used willy-nilly, or for anything silly.

  ‘He had been saving them up for an exploit as important as this Qab business.

  ‘Because, you see, Mrs Mapp, and Brenda, as soon as I had read and digested The World of Qab, that very night I took it away with me from this place, I was hooked. I stayed awake until I had finished the whole story, and that night in my sitting room in Baker Street, I sat quite still, thrumming with excitement, until the sunlight was filtering in and the street noise was starting up. My housekeeper came in and shrieked at me for sitting there so quietly and giving her a shock. But I was in a kind of daze . . . This manuscript of yours, Mrs Mapp, it has a kind of hypnotic power to it.’

  I gave a sidelong glance then, and as I expected, Mrs Mapp was looking very satisfied at this.

  Mr Rupert continued: ‘Professor Quandary came crashing into my rooms that very morning. All unexpected, as usual, and keen for some new kind of adventure. He often calls upon me like this when he’s up in town. He’s supposed to be at one of the museums researching, or giving a lecture at some hall or other, but he slopes off and comes to see what his old chum Von Thal is up to, knowing that it’s bound to be some kind of adventure.

  ‘That particular morning he found me vague and blinking in the morning light. My mind was filled with images of wonderful Qab. The professor thought I was back on my opium habit, or at the sherry again. He marched me out of my rooms, down the stairs and into the street to get my circulation going and fresh air into my lungs. He took us down the street and for a brisk walk around the fragrant borders of Regent’s Park.

  ‘As we stopped to watch the ducks, I started to tell him about your book and he was suddenly rigid with excitement when I mentioned its title. His great curly beard seemed to bristle and drops of perspiration stood out on the bald dome of his head. ‘At last, at last someone has found it again,’ he said, which was a very curious thing to say, and I told him so.

  ‘ “Found what?” I asked.

  ‘He blinked owlishly. “The thread. The elusive thread. The thread that leads the way back to Qab . . .”

  ‘I knew at once that he had heard of the place before. I explained that this could not be so. The book – though compelling, though vivid – was a fantasy. A very recent creation of a great friend of mine. A gentlewoman. “So you see, you can’t possibly know about Qab! Nobody knows about Qab apart from Mrs Mapp and her servant and myself! It is a fiction, Professor! It’s like . . . Lilliput or Wonderland or . . .”

  ‘It was almost comical, the fashion in which Quandary went on shaking his head crossly. Now he was stomping away from me, leading the way back across the park. Even tramping over the grass and the flowerbeds in his eagerness.

  ‘ “No, no, no, Von Thal. You don’t understand at all. Qab is more than an invention of some single individual or entity. And certainly not some female! The world of Qab, you see, insinuates itself into the psyche . . . finds a way to be born again . . . it makes its portals on this earth and draws souls towards itself. . . those who will trust and believe in it . . .”

  ‘His words grew fainter as he gained a lead on me. I had to rush to catch up with him. He whirled around suddenly. “Where is the manuscript?”

  ‘It was in my study, where I had last put it down, of course. “Look, Professor, are you saying that Mrs Mapp was somehow . . . led into writing this book? That she wrote it while under some kind of influence? And that the bally place is real?”

  ‘ “Exactly!” he cried. “And I’ve been looking for a way into that particular land for a very long time. A very long time indeed.”

  ‘Now this surprised me. “You already knew about Qab?”

  ‘ “As a whisper. As a rumour. As the kind of place that I might possibly, if I was very fortunate, one day receive an invitation to. I might have bestowed upon me the slightest chance of making the journey there . . . I have the means . . . I believe I know the ritual necessary to make the hop across the interstitial gap. We must open up what is known to the cognoscenti as a Dreadful Flap.”

  ‘The rest of that day passed in a strange blur. The professor insisted we return to my rooms. While I asked Mrs Brick, my housekeeper, to prepare for us a hearty breakfast – devilled kidneys and all, as I knew the professor relished – Quandary set about examining the manuscript. Every aspect of it fascinated him, from the string you used to tie it up, to the very warp and weft of the expensive paper you wrote it on.

  ‘ “You’ve read every word?” the professor asked me.

  ‘ “I stayed up all night,” said I. “lt is marvellous. I believe that my friend, Mrs Mapp, has a singular talent—”

  ‘ “It isn’t her talent,” the professor snapped. “This book was dictated to her through the ether, by forces unseen.” He was on his feet and pacing. “I must read it at once. Will you allow me to take it with me?”

  ‘ “Where are you going?”

  ‘ “Back to Sussex, immediately. There is something I must fetch from home. I will return this evening, Von Thal. I will be bringing the pinking shears. You must be prepared.”

  ‘ “W-what for?”

  ‘ “A very long journey.”

  ‘I tried to get him to pause long enough to explain what the pinking shears were for, and to eat the delicious breakfast that Mrs Brick was unloading from her hostess trolley, but the professor would be delayed no longer.

  ‘Clamping the precious manuscript under his coat, he whirled out of my room and thundered down the stairs, pitching himself into the street and headlong into a cab that happened to be standing there. He had very good timing, did Quandary. He went around assuming that the world could be made to dance attendance on his every whim.

  ‘Aha! How ghastly! Do you hear me referring to him in the past tense, as if he is dead? Or perhaps . . . perhaps I am using the past tense to describe his actions because the past tense is where he belongs. He is trapped there, you see. The dawn of time, I would say, is where Professor Quandary now languishes, as a result of the actions we took that very day. The dawn of time, or somewhere bally well like it . . .’

  Mr Rupert didn’t allow the mistress and myself much time to express our incredulity. I could see that Mrs Mapp was positively glowing with impatience to ask him a hundred questions at this point. There was also something prideful in her manner. She was very pleased that all of this palaver was due to her. These two adventurers in a tizzy and all because of her mysterious manuscript. The mistress was keen to hear Mr Von Thal continue with his narrative – as was I – so she squashed all her queries down inside herself and waited for him to drain his coffee cup in one huge gulp. He crunched up the grounds with relish (I always made coffee rather strong) and went on.

  ‘As you may imagine, I spent the rest of the day in a perplexed fashion. Quandary had left with me a list of items he wished me to gather together. Some of his list included our usual equipment for adventures – pickaxes, ropes, hats, packed lunches, etc. – and so I sent my redoubtable Mrs Brick off to fill our knapsacks. She grumbled about it, as she always does. I, meanwhile toyed with the thought of nipping round here, to tell you about the professor’s extraordinary reaction to your invention. But then I thought, no: better not, not yet, in case there is nothing in it.

  ‘And at last, just before nightfall, Quandary returned, hotfoot from Victoria, lugging bags and equipment of his own. Upon arrival in my rooms he said barely two words to me, intent as he was about his business. He drew the heavy curtains and lit beeswax candles. He set some noxious incense burning, as if we were in some bally cathedral, and he explained that it was all in aid of getting us into the mood.

  ‘He said that the two of us should kneel before my cheval mirror, and stare int
o our own eyes in the smoky dimness. Well, by now I wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t lost his marbles. “And we must chant, Von Thal. The words are immaterial. It’s the state of mind that counts. Let me see . . .” He cast around the room, looking for some suitable printed matter. His eye lit upon the manuscript. He grabbed it. “Of course! What better?” And he made us chant together a passage plucked at random from your book.

  ‘I needn’t dwell for too long on the time we spent like this. It seemed to be the whole night that we were kneeling there, squinting at ourselves. My joints were aching and my eyes were streaming with soreness. The professor was undeterred. He has an iron will, of course. I was soon fatigued and quite ready to throw in the towel. But he made us go on. He had studied, of course, with yogis and shamen and all kinds of funny foreign fellows abroad. He knew all about the virtues of contemplation and meditation and so forth. He kept us at it, jabbing me with a finger whenever it seemed my focus was flagging.

  ‘And do you know, it might have been exhaustion or suggestion, but at last, after quite some time, I really did feel a trance coming on. That huge, sonorous voice of the professor’s worked its magic upon me. His vast bearlike arm clapped around my shoulder as we stared into the mirror kept me in its grip. My last cogent thought was that I hoped Mrs Brick wouldn’t come bumbling in and catch us at this queer occupation, though as a rule she knows better than to come barging in. “Concentrate!” Quandary thundered. “You must muse on Qab! Consider Qab! Give yourself over to Qab! Let Qab infuse every fibre of your being . . . !”

  ‘He said this as, with great ceremony, he stowed away your manuscript inside his coat and from the same deep pocket produced a pair of scissors. Not just any old scissors. The pinking shears, with their jagged teeth. And not just any pinking shears. This was the pair he had returned to Sussex expressly in order to fetch. I stopped chanting for a while to watch in amazement as he wielded these silver shears.

  ‘He reached out thoughtfully towards the mirror and plucked at something. I blinked and then I saw it. It was a single strand of thread. A silvery end of thread, standing up, seemingly in thin air. The professor tugged at it. There was a ripping noise. A fraying, silken noise. Then he brought those shears up and insinuated one of the blades into the tiny hole he had made . . .

  ‘Ssssshhzzztt ffssszzhhttt . . . rriiiiiiiiii-iiip . . . He was slicing away with those pinking shears. Until a rippling slash had appeared in the very air between us and my tall mirror. The light within was queer and rippling. I couldn’t quite focus on what lay beyond that Dreadful Flap . . .

  ‘Then . . . and then . . . nothing for a while.’

  By then the mistress and I were hanging on the very edge of our chairs. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘A vague swimming sensation. Immersion in a cool, unfamiliar element. It wasn’t unpleasant. But I knew I was no longer in my beloved rooms above Baker Street. The professor was with me and we were elsewhere. Swimming together through some eerie kind of ether . . . And then: WHAM.

  ‘The sun was bright upon my face. The heat was instant, cruel and wet. My clothes were sticking to me. I opened my eyes, startled and almost blinded by the sunlight.

  ‘I was lying on some dense, fleshy vegetation and my ears were ringing with insect noise and the rushing, sealike cacophony of an immense forest. I was still clutching our bags, and beside me Quandary was hastening to his feet. For a few moments, neither of us could say anything.

  ‘I looked up, and the sky above the hugely tall treetops was a rather outré shade of mauve. Just as you describe it in the third chapter of your book, Mrs Mapp. And then – even before I saw the lizard birds wheeling and screeching between the dense black clouds . . . I knew we had made it across. We were in your world, Mrs Mapp. We had made it over to Qab.’

  Mrs Mapp sat back in her chair and exhaled noisily. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘But you must! Every word of it is true!’ burst out Mr Rupert.

  I almost cried out myself: ‘You must, madam! Can’t you see how sincere he is? How could he lie about something as vital as this? Something so weird and uncommon?’

  ‘Brenda, bring us some sandwiches.’ As if to demonstrate that avidity had made her hungry, Mrs Mapp’s stomach gave a huge rumble at this point. I tore out of the room and threw together the fastest sandwiches of my whole career in service. By the time I had returned – with some very sorry-looking items ineptly stuffed with cold ham and hand-torn lettuce, I realised to my dismay that the tale had continued without me.

  Mr Rupert was describing his and the professor’s first days in the curious and alien world of Qab. They didn’t know if they would ever be able to return home, or survive for very long, or how hostile this new environment might even be. They foraged for food, finding fruits and berries upon which to breakfast, and they rested under a crude tent made from massive, rubbery fallen leaves. It seems that it was all very exciting to them at first. Mr Von Thal even said that they were like two small boys, making up a camp and exploring their close environs with a mounting sense of wonder. Qab was stranger and more exotic than any place either of them had ever visited before . . .

  Mr Rupert described the giant eggshells they discovered in the undergrowth, the offspring of monsters. They found one intact and roasted it on a fire and had their first decent meal. He described the shuffling and snorting and outraged cries of unseen beasts in the dark nights in that jungle. He described their fear, which the two men were careful not to disclose to each other. He described their first glimpse of the beasts of Qab, as the two of them decided to leave their place of arrival and set forth on a long hike to discover the lie of the land. And he described their first encounters with the intelligent humanoids, the natives of this place.

  ‘Natives?’ Mrs Mapp asked sharply.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Rupert. ‘And never fear, Mrs Mapp. They were precisely how you described them in your book, the lizard men.’

  Well, by now my hair was just about standing on end. The lizard men of Qab! It turns out they looked awful: gaunt and haggard, with eyes that stared coldly at you. They regarded humans with a kind of salivating contempt, Mr Rupert said. As if they were secretly keen to crunch on your bones and chomp on your warm flesh. The lizards had backed off in the face of Quandary’s bluster, luckily. I came back into the room just as Mr Rupert was chuckling, telling how the reptiles were made to flee from the British explorers.

  ‘I’ve brought the sandwiches,’ I said, in a thick voice. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, madam. You must eat. And . . . I’d like to go there, please! I want to go to the world of Qab!’

  Mrs Mapp jumped like I had pinched her. ‘Brenda! Stop it at once! What are you sayin’?’

  I clamped a hand over my mouth. ‘I-I’m sorry, madam.’

  ‘Mr Von Thal, you have made my servant overexcited,’ Mrs Mapp told him beadily.

  I couldn’t stop myself. ‘But it’s true! I want to go there! Just like the two gentlemen! And so do you, Mrs Mapp! Oh, you must do, surely?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mistress frostily. ‘I can’t think of anythin’ worse.’

  But I could see she was lying. And so could Mr Rupert.

  ‘It’s your world, Bea,’ he said softly, picking up one of my messy sandwiches. ‘Down to every last detail, precisely as you described it in your book. The city of the lizard men. They took us there. As prisoners. Those great towers. We saw the palaces of the women warriors, though we weren’t lucky enough to be shown inside. But that fact was more than made up for by our encounter with one single, special woman . . . the Queen who rules over them all . . .’

  Mrs Mapp gasped. ‘The Queen of Qab?’

  ‘We met her,’ said Rupert. ‘Her.’

  I gasped too. ‘You met Her!’

  ‘On more than one occasion. We were led into her throne room by her servile lizard men and forced to make obeisances to Her Majesty.’

  I had a very clear image in my mind of the Queen of Qab, gleaned from my night spent reading the
book. These men had been face to face with Her herself!

  Mrs Mapp still looked a little as if she suspected Mr Rupert of mockery. Was this all some cruel hoax? Was it a trick he was playing on her? ‘I can’t quite take this in . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘And I wouldn’t be blurting it all out like this if I didn’t think the situation was . . .’

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘As serious as it is. Brenda is quite right, Bea. We must go there. At once. The three of us. Back to the world of Qab.’

  Mrs Mapp licked her lips and gripped her chair arms very tightly. ‘But why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Because Professor Quandary is still there. He is still at the mercy of Her. I’m afraid I was forced to leave him there, in the palace.’

  Both the mistress and I drew in our breath at this, wondering what it would be like to be left in Qab . . . left behind by your sole companion, who had taken with him the only possible means of escape from that world. What must Quandary be feeling, lost inside that alien domain?

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ said Mrs Mapp. ‘What can we do? We’re women . . . feeble women, aren’t we?’ She looked at me and I knew that she was just casting around for excuses. She didn’t believe for one second in our feebleness or inferiority to any man. But I think I half glimpsed her vertiginous horror at the idea of attempting to emulate the men’s journey through the Dreadful Flap.

  For Mrs Mapp it would surely be like travelling into the wellspring of her own imagination, with the intention of encountering the spectres that haunted her own inner life. It would feel like madness, surely? And I knew that what my mistress feared above all things was the madness that had afflicted her brother and both her parents. She rarely spoke or alluded to it, but the thought was always there . . . that one day she might wake up mad . . .

  Now perhaps that day had come.

  But she looked to me. I was always as sane and pragmatic as anyone. I was the most down-to-earth person she had ever met, and in many ways she relied on me to keep her grounded. But here was I, mad keen to travel with Mr Rupert to this other place. All I could think was, Oh, put me in that trance! Let me chant along with you! Let’s give ourselves aching legs and smarting eyes and keep the candles and incense burning through the night! Let us meditate and cogitate on alien lands! And why don’t you whip out those magical pinking shears, Mr Rupert Von Thal!