[Brenda & Effie 02] - Something Borrowed

by Paul Magrs

  But what we can see, straight away, is that the window is open. On the sloping ceiling, right under the roof, the large window has been wedged open, and the raggy old curtains are billowing inwards. The temperature is lethally cold. It’s the kind of sudden drop that makes you want to turn tail and run like hell. Something unearthly has got into the house.

  Scritch scratch. Tap tap tap.

  They are still here. Moving around in this room. Either they don’t know that we have cornered them, or they don’t care. Brave souls. Strong and hardy spirits. They don’t give a toss that they have been rumbled.

  Scritch. Tap. Tappity-tap.

  Squawk squawk. Squawk. Ting! Ting!

  Effie seizes my arm. Then I realise. Someone’s typing. Someone’s tapping away on Effie’s old typewriter. The carriage squawks again. Tap tap tap. Ting!

  We’ve got them red-handed. That’s what the pressure of Effie’s grip on my arm means. We’ve got them! We’ve caught them! Don’t you realise? The culprit! At the typewriter! We’ve got them now!

  And before I can think twice about it, I slam my hand on to the ancient light switch.

  One single bulb comes on, over the desk. We round the corner and its brightness is startling. The cobwebs and grime and accumulated clutter leap out at us with hideous clarity. But we stagger into the light to face our enemy and . . .

  There’s the desk. There’s the heap of white paper spread out on the blotter. There’s the rusted old typewriter.

  And there’s the culprit.

  Effie gags at the sight. I’m no less alarmed, but I am silent in shock. We stand there swaying, watching, mesmerised.

  It’s two hands. That’s all it is. Two disembodied hands hovering in mid-air. They pause with fingertips at the keys of the typewriter, as if considering their next words carefully. They give the impression of knowing they have been seen. They flex their fingers and I am horrified to catch a glimpse of the ragged, bloody stumps of the wrists, with tendons hanging out like old knitting wool.

  Effie starts to wail. I nudge her hard.

  The hands fly up and yank the page out of the typewriter’s carriage. They dive for freedom and land heavily on the dusty floorboards. Scatter! Tappity-tap tap THUD THUD THUD. And there are other things moving about. I jump heavily to one side as a foot comes blindly nosing across the floor, following the nimble hands like a faithful guard dog. Now I let out a shriek, and two moth-like ears come fluttering down from the light bulb, where they have been transfixed for a few moments. The dirty light shows up the blood vessels inside their waxy skin and looks almost pretty. I shriek again and fall backwards.

  We are blocking the exit – the open window – for these disembodied parts.

  Before we know it there’s a great crash as another window gets kicked in. There is a whole naked leg there, doing the kicking. A dancer’s leg, high-kicking its violent way to freedom. It’s performing a macabre cancan: clearing the shards that hang in the frame. And then all the bits and pieces – hands and ears and feet and who knows what else – go jumping out into the night. How many storeys up are we? But these body parts are heedless. Off they go. Into the dark.

  And, in seconds, Effie and I are left alone. It is as if we have disturbed a roost of starlings, and they have fled with noisy alacrity.

  Effie and I pick ourselves up and we’re mute with shock. At last she moves to her desk and turns over some of the typed sheets. ‘More letters,’ she whispers. ‘Drafts of more hideous, threatening, poisonous letters. To you, and me, and Sheila, and . . .’ She crumples them up and sobs. ‘What were they, Brenda?’ she cries. ‘What on earth have we disturbed here?’

  ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Um.’

  She turns and there is a shrewd look in her eye. ‘You know, don’t you, Brenda? You know what those hideous . . . remains were, don’t you?’

  ‘Um,’ I say, in a not particularly helpful fashion. I move over to the smashed window. In my mind’s eye I’ve still got the image of that long, pale, dancing leg kicking in the smutty pane. And all the smaller body parts jumping through the frame after it.

  I peer through the broken window, feeling the full force of the night breezes on my face. My whole head feels slack and putty-like. And I can see them – those horrible body parts – dexterously finding their way down the walls. They clamber down drainpipes. They hop from sill to sill. They rustle through the long grasses of the gardens at the back. The ears flitter-flutter and superintend the escape. The long leg slinks along like a snake. And they are making their way home, up the walls of the dark house next door. They clamber and toil up its walls, from handhold to foothold, to the attic sanctuary of their own house. My house. That’s where they belong.

  My heart feels so heavy in my chest. I feel sick with dread and . . . a weird kind of loving pride.

  ‘What were they, Brenda?’ Effie asks, in a determined tone.

  I can’t lie to her. I turn to her in the silence, as the bare bulb swings above our heads. I tell her: ‘They are my spare parts.’ I give a small cough of embarrassment.

  She sits heavily on her swivel chair. Under the stark light her features are hawk-like and her fluffy hair seems almost transparent. ‘Your what?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘They come from my attic. They are under lock and key usually. I don’t know how they have . . . come to life like this. I don’t know how they’ve got out.’

  Effie’s eyes are wide. You can see all the white around her irises. ‘You have spare body parts in your attic?’ she asks, very slowly.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘When my father abandoned me in his castle . . . I was left alone, half dead, half finished. I had to look after myself, didn’t I? I took whatever I could from his laboratory. I filled two big cases with what I could find. Things that I knew would come in handy.’

  ‘Hands? Legs?’ she gasps.

  ‘Of course. Things wear out, when you live as long as I do. Some thick twine, that’s all I need. I’ve become quite adept at, erm, putting myself back together again.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Effie says. ‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

  I hasten over to rub her back, but she pulls away from me. All I can think is that it’s just as well she didn’t see any of the other spares. The internals. They would have made an even less palatable sight, hopping about on the rooftops in the night – the hearts and lungs and kidneys and so on.

  ‘But they’ve got a life of their own . . .’ Effie says.

  I frown. ‘Yes, that’s quite disturbing. Before, they used to twitch and jump about a bit. Give the odd spasm. But this is new. All this . . . escaping and breaking and entering. And writing letters to people!’ In a sudden, hysterical moment I feel like laughing. I was being haunted by my own spare parts! That was all! These weeks of night terrors and sweats and wanting to scream. Now I know what it was! Just my own hands and feet and bits and pieces. Nothing that could really do me any harm.

  ‘So then . . . it was you, really, wasn’t it, writing the letters . . .?’ Effie looks at me uncertainly.

  ‘No!’ I cry. ‘Of course not! I never knew anything about it!’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘They just got out. They escaped and they . . . ran amok. They caused mischief. They tapped into my unconscious dreams and desires and they . . .’ A terrible shudder goes through me. I feel nauseous at the thought of those hands and other parts going about in the night, blindly and unconsciously acting out my hidden desires. Tap-tap-tapping into my baser instincts. It is a truly horrible thought, and one that dries the words up in my throat.

  ‘Lock them up,’ Effie says. ‘Get stronger locks on your attic. You have to make sure they don’t get out again.’

  ‘I will,’ I say.

  ‘Another mystery solved,’ Effie says, almost sarcastically. ‘Now we know, at least, who it was, plaguing the town with those letters.’

  We are both shivering in the harbour winds that are rushing through the attic. I close one window, and find some old cardboa
rd to cover the smashed one.

  All the while, as I work, and Effie sits there trembling, I am still thinking about my spare parts. So is Effie. She laughs bitterly. ‘Your body parts,’ she says, ‘are revolting. Do you get it? Do you get it, Brenda?’ She laughs louder, ripping up the last of the incriminating letters.

  I don’t think it’s all that funny. She wouldn’t be laughing so much if it was her whose spares were coming to life and acting up.

  But Effie doesn’t have spares. No one else in the world has spares the way I have. Of course they don’t.

  Effie says, ‘I think we can say this investigation is closed now, Brenda. What do you think?’ I get a wry look from Effie then. ‘But I reckon we ought to keep quiet about the outcome, eh? We don’t want all of this . . . getting out, do we?’

  I can only agree with her.

  Chapter Six

  The Wickerwork Man

  Saturday morning, I run into Robert at the butcher’s, where he seems to be buying unholy quantities of meat. He is also full of questions about Effie, and Henry, and everything that’s been going on. He’s ahead of me in the queue, and I raise an eyebrow as he reels off his order for five dozen pork chops and a gross of sausages.

  ‘It’s barbecues every night,’ Robert explains.

  ‘Ah,’ I say. Which reminds me. ‘We’ll see you this evening, I reckon. If you’re not run off your feet. We’re coming to the barbecue tonight. Effie is very keen.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He smiles. ‘I’m glad she’s wanting to get out and about a bit more.’ Then a shadow seems to flit across his face. ‘I will warn you, though. These evenings in Sheila’s beer garden . . . they can get a bit rowdy.’ Now he seems almost furtive, as if realising he is speaking out of turn.

  ‘I think Effie is about ready for a little excitement,’ I tell him. ‘After hospital, and being cooped up and all. Only yesterday she was saying to me, she can’t wait to be back in the swing of things. To see a bit of life again.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says Robert vaguely. ‘She might see more than she bargains for, up at the Hotel Miramar.’

  Now we are holding up the queue, as the butcher bags up the chops and sausages and whatnot. He’s looking for a box big enough for Robert to carry it all in. The people behind us mutter impatiently and I touch Robert’s arm, and lean in closer. I see that I’m touching the black armband he’s wearing in memory of his Aunty Jessie, so I move my hand a little. ‘What is it? What’s up? Sheila’s not started holding parties for swingers again, has she?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’ He frowns. ‘But there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. There’s an atmosphere. A presence, almost. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being ridiculous.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘But we’re best off trusting our instincts, I think.’

  ‘Even Mrs Claus felt it.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She came to Sheila’s barbecue one night. Brought some of the elves. She sat in the bamboo garden on her motorised scooter and what do you think she told me on her way out?’

  He’s looking at me earnestly. I shake my head, urging him on.

  ‘She said she had felt something decadent . . . something wicked in the very air of the place. Mrs Claus had wanted to be away from there, and back home at her Christmas Hotel . . . because the Miramar’s beer garden, she said, was steeped in . . . evil.’ He boggles his eyes at me. ‘Even Mrs Claus – wicked as she is – felt something untoward.’

  She’s got no right to talk, I think. ‘Oh, she probably just doesn’t like the competition.’ I laugh.

  ‘It’s more than that,’ Robert says.

  I nod seriously. ‘Well. We’ll see. We’ll be there tonight, Effie and me.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, and sounds genuinely reassured. Then he goes staggering out of the shop, bearing his vast freight of meat.

  The two of us are all dolled up in our finery. Effie, in particular, has gone to a lot of effort. She’s in an antique velvet frock she has brought out of deep storage. It’s a striking outfit, but now she’s fretting about the barbecue being smoky and stinking up our glad rags. She’s still in her glamorous turban from the Posh Ladies’ shop and its colour tones in nicely with the rest of her ensemble.

  As we toil up the hill to the Miramar, she’s full of beans. ‘I want to make the most of being out of a coma. I’ve wasted too much time in my life. I’ve been a recluse. Hiding away in that house of mine, under all that dusty tat. Doing the bidding of ghosts from the past. I’ve been like some dotty old spinster.’

  She’s setting a brisk pace up the hill, and I have to hasten to catch up.

  She goes on: ‘No wonder I was so easily buttered up by that elegant charlatan, Alucard, last year. I’d seen nothing of life! I was easy prey! Well, not any more. I’m going to be more cynical and worldly-wise. And I’m going to get more in the thick of things!’

  A shiver has gone through me at the very mention of Alucard’s name. I haven’t tried to tell Effie any more about my recovered memories of 1946. I don’t think she would be all that receptive to them. I don’t want to keep banging on about the way Alucard attacked me. It seems too much like rubbing it in.

  When we get to the Miramar we see that it’s all been decked out in bunting and fairy lights, as if there’s some big festival on. Already there is music pumping out from some elaborate speaker system. The Rolling Stones, I believe. That stirs a particular memory for me, as we scoot around the hedges of the side garden. Something about Princess Margaret in the sixties and the Stones, but it’s not very clear, and not at all pertinent to the matter in hand. We pass by a few of the Miramar revellers and they are grinning at us in welcome, holding their paper plates and plastic tumblers of beer.

  We find our way into the beer garden, just as dusk descends across the town. Most of the wickerwork tables are already taken, but we find that a small one in the corner has been reserved especially for us. Robert’s work, I imagine. Tall wax tapers are blazing away, creating a homely glow. I leave our handbags safely with Effie and fetch some drinks for us at the al fresco bar, and examine the griddle, where the chef is starting to cook huge quantities of meat. To be honest, my stomach rolls over at the sight of all those sausage links and dripping, fatty hanks of flesh. I might just stick to the salads, which look rather nice.

  ‘What’s this? Lager?’ Effie frowns when I bring our drinks.

  ‘It’s all they’re offering,’ I tell her, and then I freeze. ‘Ah. Hello.’

  Henry Cleavis is standing right in front of our table. Dapper in a velvet jacket and a silk cravat. His polished head gleams in the gentle torchlight as he bids us good evening. He stammers when he greets Effie, and he eyes her blue silk turban guiltily.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says stiffly.

  ‘Effie, what can I say?’ Henry begins gallantly. ‘I can only hope you find it in your heart to forgive me.’

  Effie tosses her head. ‘It’s not as easy as that, is it, Professor Cleavis?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I feel quite sorry for Henry. He’s transfixed beneath that basilisk stare of Effie’s.

  ‘I know very well that your bullet grazed my temple out of sheer mischance and bad luck,’ she tells him. ‘Of course I realise that. I’m not a fool. And, if that were all, I could forgive you.’

  ‘Well, then,’ he says hopefully.

  ‘But you were aiming at Jessie. You were intent on destroying her. Which, indeed, you did. You assassinated the womanzee in cold blood, and I was injured as you carried out that wicked act.’

  ‘It needed to be done,’ Cleavis says levelly. ‘She was a danger to everyone. My job is to rid the world of monsters. That has always been my job, Ms Jacobs. Ever since the days of the Smudgelings.’

  Effie’s tone becomes rather lofty and grand. ‘And what you do not understand, dear Professor Cleavis, is that this town has always been plagued by monsters. It wouldn’t be the same town were that not true. We pride ourselves on our misfits and monsters and we de
al with them in our own way. We do not shoot them in the head. Nor do we rely on passing vigilantes or strangers for help.’

  ‘I see,’ says Cleavis, swallowing hard. ‘And so you would have let the womanzee roam about freely?’

  Stupidly, I pipe up then: ‘Yes, Effie. You were the one, warning Robert. Saying that Jessie shouldn’t be hiding out in those caves . . . that she was a danger to everyone . . .’

  Effie shoots me a glance. ‘We deal with these things ourselves. We know what to do. We don’t need help from . . . outsiders.’ She glares at Cleavis.

  ‘I’m an outsider, too, then,’ I say. ‘I’ve not been here long.’

  ‘Oh, you belong all right,’ Effie says.

  ‘Look, let me fetch some food for you,’ Henry says. ‘And more drinks. I’d like to discuss this further with you. I want to know more about this place. I want to understand Whitby and what goes on here . . .’

  Effie tosses her head snootily once more, but she has relented, I can tell. She passes Henry our emptied plastic beakers and we tell him what we want to eat. I have fully decided now to stick to the salads and the vegetables. Henry dashes off happily to gather our orders.

  ‘He’s not so bad,’ Effie tells me, out of the corner of her mouth. ‘He’s okay.’

  I sit back in my wicker chair and beam at this. Maybe she won’t mind so much if Henry and I start seeing each other . . . properly. Perhaps there won’t be any friction between them. My head swims slightly at the thought of being happy like that. Henry as a full-time boyfriend kind of thing. Boyfriend! And him over a hundred years old! I watch him shuffle along at the vast griddle, balancing three plates and chatting away with the other hotel guests. I glance around at the arcadian splendour of Sheila’s beer garden, as the shadows start to lengthen and the whole place takes on a golden, glamorous atmosphere. There are glowing paper lanterns in the trees, rustling and bobbing in the night breezes. Chinese things, presumably in memory of the dastardly Mu-Mu.

  Robert comes to greet us and he hugs us both warmly. He tells us to enjoy ourselves tonight and, if I’m honest, I don’t know what he means about the atmosphere of the place. There’s nothing diabolic about it. It’s just us oldsters having fun. True, when you look around, the others might seem a bit greedy: the way they tuck into their chops and kebabs. Otherwise respectable-looking people are sitting there with sticky meat juices all down their chins, and even down the front of their party clothes. They tear at the barbecued meat hungrily, even rapaciously. I turn to remark on this to Effie, and find her wolfing her own hank of steak with unseemly relish. Henry grins at me through a mouthful of sausage.