by Paul Magrs
‘Professor Quandary,’ gasped Mrs Mapp. ‘How dare they treat you like this? We must make them get you down at once. Unfortunately we have had some difficulties communicatin’ with the brutes, but this situation cannot be allowed to go on!’
Professor Quandary was getting shakily to his feet, clinging to the bars and making his cell rock back and forth. ‘Beatrice Mapp? Is it really you?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said my mistress, very proudly. ‘We have come a long way to see you, sir.’
‘My dear girl! You came all the way to Qab!’
‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ said Mr Rupert, and his voice was bursting with pride.
‘This is your world, my dear,’ the professor said. ‘The world that you have worked to bring back into being. Everything is just as it is in your book. It is amazing, Beatrice. What you have done is simply—’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said brusquely. ‘But where is the manuscript? Mr Rupert tells me that you have my only copy still about your person.’
Professor Quandary looked alarmed at this. ‘The only copy?’
I suddenly saw how shabby he was, as a burst of flame leapt higher than the others and illumined us all brightly for a few moments. He cut an even more ragged and filthy figure than had Mr Rupert, when he turned up that night in Tavistock Square. The professor had been beaten soundly and drubbed in muck, it was plain to see. He had suffered terribly through his incarceration.
‘Where is the book?’ hissed Mrs Mapp, in a voice tinged with anxiety. Far more anxiety than she had shown throughout any of our misadventures thus far, I noted.
‘I don’t have it,’ said Quandary, in a strained voice. ‘She has it. I mean, her. Her has it.’
None of us needed to ask who he meant.
Now it was Quandary’s turn to ask an urgent question. This time, of Mr Rupert. ‘And you, Rupert? Did you bring what I asked you? What she commanded me? Our part of the bargain. Our freedom to return home safely . . .’
Mr Rupert nodded. Shiftily, I thought. ‘The Source, she said. Yes, Professor. I have made sure that we brought the Source. To Her. For Her to do with what she will.’
I stared at them. What source? Whatever were they talking about? Mrs Mapp?
But then one of the lizards was bashing an old brass gong. A huge booming drowned out our furtive chit-chat with the captive. We were chivvied with swords and spears and daggers and led around the pit of emerald flames to stand before the throne.
It was obvious who was next on the bill. We three glanced at each other. My throat was jammed silent with terror. The other two didn’t look much better off as we faced front and were forced to our knees by the scaly henchmen.
Oh, Brenda, I told myself. When – or if – you get back to Blighty, you’re going to swear off adventures of all kinds, all right? Never again. No more excitements for you, my dear.
Just at that moment a figure emerged from the darkest recesses of the royal chamber. She moved with great purpose and finesse on to her stage like an opera singer making her entrance for the grand finale.
She was wearing gorgeous black robes. Goodness knows where she did her shopping in a wilderness like this. Maybe she ran them up herself.
I was babbling to myself, I knew.
She – Her – was a beautiful creature. A youngish woman. Perhaps approaching middle age. Very pale and well preserved. Like a white lily shrouded in black foliage. That small, wry expression looking out at us.
When she spoke, I don’t know what I was expecting.
Certainly not a broad Yorkshire accent.
‘So. You’re back, then. Very good. I like a man who keeps his word. I shall consider keeping mine as a result. Do you have the pinking shears? I think I’d better look after them, don’t you? And this is Mrs Mapp, is it? I’ve got your manuscript, ducky, don’t worry. What a remarkable thing that was. Fancy you being able to write it. Really, really amazing. Quite spooky, in fact.’
I looked at Mrs Mapp and she was staring dumbstruck at the queen of the world she had apparently invented. I don’t think Her was quite how she had imagined Her, either.
And then Her looked straight at me.
Her livid eyes seemed to bore right into me. Deep into my secret heart.
‘And here you are, Brenda. Brenda, my dear. Here you are in my new home. They brought you! They brought you here for me!’
‘H-how do you know me?’
‘Ah, but you’re so young, ducky. So very young.’
I felt myself blushing. I stammered, ‘I’m not so very young! You’d be surprised! You don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me you’re already over a hundred years old.’
I gasped. ‘What?’
Mrs Mapp gasped as well. ‘Whatever does she mean?’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh yes, I know all sorts of things about you, lovey,’ said the Warrior Queen of Qab. Her, in all her glory. ‘But the important thing is, you came here to help me. Like friends always should.’
‘Did I?’ I asked. ‘Is that why I’m here? I don’t know who you are! Outside of the mistress’s story, I’ve never encountered you before in my life . . .’
‘But you will, ducky. You certainly will! You see, Brenda, you’re going to save me. You’re the Source, you are. The source of my deliverance. My salvation. You’re going to save the life of your best friend! Even if you don’t even know her yet! You haven’t even properly met her yet!’
‘But . . . who are you?’
‘Here, as you know, I am Her. Her who must be worshipped. But you know me by the much more ordinary name of Effryggia Jacobs. Effie for short.’ She raised her glittering black sleeves into the air and commanded her guards thus: ‘Take my guests to somewhere they can rest and recuperate from the rigours of their journey! At once!’
They dragged us apart then, and it came as a dreadful wrench. The lizard men were upon us before we knew it, and they were taking Mrs Mapp and Mr Rupert away, somewhere deep inside this palace. I cried out, but the servants had me locked in a terrible grip and there was nothing I could do. It flashed through my mind in an instant that the mistress and I had never been parted from each other for a very significant portion of time, and certainly never forcibly, like this. Mrs Mapp did a certain amount of kicking and protesting, but it was no good. She was taken away, her cries still ringing in my ears. I suddenly felt bereft, standing there, with this queen who called herself Effryggia.
‘Effie for short,’ she had added, Her affable tone at odds with the regal gown and haughty mien. ‘And I wouldn’t be too cut up about being separated from them two, Brenda. I really wouldn’t.’
I snorted back my tears and said rudely, ‘What would you know about it?’ And the guard holding my arms gave a sibilantly menacing hiss. I must remember that I was talking to Her, and she must be respected and obeyed.
‘Oh, look,’ she was saying now, ‘we can’t stand about all day in this throne room. It’s a bit clammy in here. And it’s a bit ghoulish with that old fella up there in his cage.’ She cast a disparaging glance at Quandary, now unconscious above the licking flames from the pit. ‘Why don’t we go and sit in my parlour, Brenda, eh? We can have a proper talk there . . .’
I almost spat back at her: what do we two have to talk about? What did the likes of Her have in common with me? But I bit my tongue and nodded dumbly. ‘Y-you won’t hurt Mrs Mapp, will you?’
Her tutted. ‘Why should you care? She has exploited you for years, Brenda. This is your chance to liberate yourself, ducky. Have you never read Marx? Have you never thought that she was taking more than she was giving?’
I followed the woman known as Effie through a honeycombed warren of dark passages. I felt puzzled and quite alienated by now, and rather passive, as if all my energy had flowed out of me. I had no idea what was to become of me, for it was clear that there had been machinations and wheels turning behind my back. Things I hadn’t been aware of. . .
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‘They betrayed you, Brenda,’ said the queen. ‘Can’t you see that? They engineered all of this. They brought you here as an offering to me. They want to swap you for their musty old professor and for Beatrice Mapp’s manuscript. And trusting as you are, you just wandered in. Good-hearted, daft as a brush. Too honest for your own good.’
‘No!’ I burst out. ‘Mr Mapp would never . . . She’d never betray me like that . . . for whatever price!’
Now we were sitting in the somewhat more homely room that Effie described as Her private living quarters. I was surprised to find it decorated bizarrely, as if for Christmas. Blackened pine trees stood in a ring around us, covered with rudimentary carved Christmas decorations. I was given a tankard of some strange sticky liquor – brewed from jungle creepers, she told me brusquely, ‘Drink it down, it’ll do you good. No, don’t sip. You don’t want to taste it.’
I thought about the moment that the lizard men had seized hold of Mr Rupert and my mistress in order to separate us. At the time the severance had seemed the worst and cruellest thing. Now I looked at Queen Effryggia in the flattering glow of the prehistoric Christmas lights. ‘They offered me as a . . . sacrifice, you say. But why? Why on earth would you want me?’
Her smiled. ‘You don’t know how important you are, do you? Hm? Especially at this stage in your very long life. The times have been cruel to you, Brenda. They have made you into a servant. Made you a drone. You have been crushed underfoot so thoroughly that you have forgotten what a singular and important creature you are.’
I felt the irksomeness rise in my breast. ‘I am not a creature.’
‘Nor are you fully human.’
I flinched at this. However, I knew intuitively that she was not intending to insult or upset me.
‘I wish I could take the time to remind you of all your past, of who you are and where you came from. But that will have to wait. We must proceed with my plan. I have so very little time.’
‘Why?’ I said harshly. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
She paused and licked her lips. ‘I’m not a well woman, Brenda.’
It was true, I thought. This close to, sitting in her parlour and getting a good look at her, you could see that she wasn’t right in herself. That complexion wasn’t just for glamorous effect. She looked deathly pale. She looked emaciated.
‘As your employer might have told you, my appetites are very unnatural. I feed off . . . well, off blood. I was infected with a rare condition some time ago, and ever since, I have been trying to sustain myself with the blood of living beings.’
‘A vampire!’ I gasped. ‘So it’s true. I read Mrs Mapp’s book and I know everything. Everything she wrote is true, isn’t it?’
‘We can still make up our own destiny,’ said Her darkly. ‘We are not bound up in the inventions of that dreadful Bloomsbury bint. We are free to change our scripts for ourselves. Why, your coming here has even changed the ending Mrs Mapp was proposing for her story.’
I stared at the woman. So calm, she was: telling me that she was a true vampire. Well, naturally I knew such things existed. I had met them before, hadn’t I? Ah, there was a frayed end of a faded ribbon of memory tickling at me. Yes, indeed, I had encountered her hellish type before. Somewhere, some time in the previous century . . .
But there was no time to tease out that strand right now, for suddenly I could feel terror sneaking up on me. This was surely no mere fireside chat. I was in the most dreadful danger.
‘You would think I would have endless supplies here, wouldn’t you?’ said Effie. ‘Being queen, I have the pick. I can take the cream of the crop. And it’s true, my boys work very hard for me. Harvesting the primitive human beings. Offering their own – rather thin and chilly – blood for my delectation. It’s rather like sipping cold coffee, though. And they hunt those hideous bloated bat things that go swooping about the quagmires of this benighted land . . .
‘Oh, but it’s a dreary diet, Brenda. I can feel myself ailing, weakening . . . turning lackadaisical and wan. This isn’t my world, really. This place cannot sustain me.
‘I came here looking for escape. I thought it would be all I would need. I was fleeing an awful man whose sights were set on destroying me, like he does with all my kind. But he is out of the picture now. I have fettled him. Though I don’t suppose you’ll be glad to hear that, if you knew yet who he was. Ah, but that’s all in your future, isn’t it? I must try harder to keep the timelines from tangling, otherwise things become too complicated . . .’
She was raving, I was certain. This was nonsense she was talking. She was iller than she seemed. Her mind was addled.
‘Do you know, when I first came to this queer land I felt this huge sense of relief?’ she told me. ‘For the first time in my entire life I wasn’t haunted. It’s hard to believe. All my life I have heard the voices of my aunts in my head. All of them witches, generations going back and back. All of them knowing more than me, knowing better than me. Until I came here, to be queen over all of Qab, I had never really known a day of perfect peace and quiet, without their ghostly intervention. They wanted me to reach my full potential as a witch and become a fitting successor to them all . . .’
Oh help, I was thinking. Now it’s witches as well!
‘I relished that quiet for the first few weeks and months in my new world. I never missed them one bit. Them with their mithering and chuntering inside my head. Time went by . . . and I had a few misgivings. It was hard work being queen. There were decisions to be made. Quandaries to be . . . shall we say solved. Sometimes I actively wanted my aunts to come back to me. I wanted their counsel.
‘I was lucky. I should have known I couldn’t fully escape. I should have known I could rely upon them. And so it was my favourite who came to me one sleepless, hot and sticky night. My Aunt Maud materialised in my queenly bedroom, looking spectral, mannish, and piqued.
‘ “It’s taken all our collective psychic energy to project me through the ether to talk to you, Effryggia,” she glowered. “We had better be quick.”
‘Sitting up in my sumptuous bed, I could have wept at the sight of my dear old aunt.
‘ “Ach, don’t get sentimental, girl. Who was it left us behind? Who ruined everything by letting that cadaver bite her in the first place? Who delighted in becoming a creature of the night? Who schemed to get herself into a new world, far away from her phantom relatives and those who were close to her and cared for her?”
‘I hung my head. “Me. All of that was me.”
‘ “I told your other aunts. You’ve got more of your bloody mother in you than any of us had reckoned on. Headstrong and selfish. And fond of being treated like a queen. Anyway. As I say, I haven’t much time. I won’t spend it all admonishing you. You want our help, don’t you?”
‘ “Yes.” No use denying it. Aunt Maud always knew what I was thinking.
‘ “The bloodlust is wearing a bit thin, is it?” she taunted. Not cruelly. She was never cruel. She simply looked like the person who always knows better than you do. The person who expects to be proved right in the end. “Sick of bloodsucking are you? Cheesed off with eternal youth, eh?”
‘ “I-I don’t feel right,” I told her. “I feel dreadful, actually. Thinned out. Sickly.”
‘ “They don’t call it being undead for nothing, you know. After the initial bloom and excitement, I’ve heard tell it’s meant to be a bit of a miserable existence. Your chum Alucard never told you that, did he?”
‘ “I would give anything to go back,” I burst out, all of a sudden. “To return to my normal state. To return home. To my house. Our house. By the sea. In my own time and place. And to be old again. And normal. Tell me, Aunt Maud . . . please! Tell me! Is it possible?”
‘“A cure?” My aunt mused and stroked her bristly chin. “A cure . . . Well, you must know that such a thing is difficult. It’s well nigh impossible.”
‘ “Oh, please! I’m tired of it here. The climate is so awful, and all I’ve g
ot to talk to are lizards . . .”
‘That was when she told me that I might soon have human company. That Rupert Von Thal and his mysterious mentor Professor Quandary were about to arrive in my world. Most intriguing, I thought.
‘Then my Aunt Maud confided in me that her powers were failing. She was flagging and so were her sisters. She would return home to Whitby along the astral plane and I was to rest assured: my spooky aunts would put all their efforts into finding me a cure. They would discover a way to bring me back home, to where I belonged.’
I was agog, listening to Effie. ‘And did they? Did she come back? Did she have a cure for you?’
Effie smiled grimly at how involved I was in her tale. ‘I should have known that my witchy aunts would not let me down. I was a fool for trying to leave them behind. I felt rather ashamed of that.’
‘Sometimes it is necessary to move on in life . . .’ I said.
‘Not me. I know where I truly belong. And I would do anything, and sacrifice anything, in order to get back there, Brenda.’
I shivered at these words, I don’t know why.
‘It was thirteen nights later,’ Effie resumed, in her story-telling voice, ‘and I had started to suspect that my aunts had forgotten me. Or they had elected to let me stew in my own juices and to take my punishment in this dreadful land that time has ostensibly forgotten. I was tossing and moaning miserably in bed one night when my Aunt Maud came shimmering evanescently on to my veranda and called me awake, none too gently.
‘ “Effryggia, you must listen. Help is at hand. Your aunties have worked long and hard. We have consulted the old books of magic in our house. We have even delved into the forbidden volumes of the Books of Mayhem for the knowledge you require. We have spoken to creatures and spirits we would normally think twice about consorting with. All of this we have done for you, Effryggia, last daughter of our house . . .”
‘ “Th-thank you, Aunt Maud,” said I shakily.
‘ “Don’t thank me yet,” said the spectre gruffly. ‘You might not like what you’re about to hear. In fact, I am sure that you will baulk at what we have learned. For we have uncovered a secret lost in time. A valuable, incredible secret.”
