by Paul Magrs
Also, I think about the Bronte sisters and why it is they need me dead. I slide under the water and submerge myself fully. The water doesn’t scare me like it used do. I love the subaqueous squealing and booming in my ears, and the hefty thump of my heartbeat echoing around me.
I used to think the Brontes would be nice girls. It was just something I assumed would be the case. But now I know better and it’s such a let-down. I wonder why they didn’t kill me when they had me in their secret base? I was there in their front room made out of crystal – surely they could have zapped me then or done me a mischief of some kind?
Then it comes to me. No, it’s another ritual. A ceremony. They need to kill me at a certain time, in a particular way. That’s why my beheading at the wormy hands of Mr Danby was no good, and didn’t count. It wasn’t death at the right time and in the correct place. So perhaps that’s why Effie has gone to all this bother to bring me back. She’s brought me back in order to have me killed again. Properly, this time.
I burst out of the warm soapy water all aggrieved, all furious.
But no, I’m just being paranoid. As Panda says, Effie worked hard to resurrect me because she is my friend and she loves me. Simple as that.
Those Bronte bitches have made me paranoid.
Oh, what an awful word! I don’t usually go round describing people as bitches. But I think I’ve had enough provocation in this case.
When I’m out of the bath and drying myself, puffing talcum powder everywhere, I hear doors clashing down the stairs and on the landing.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ Effie calls and I find myself grinning.
It’s just like other evenings we have shared in my attic flat. She’ll have brought a bottle and a nice cake or some pick-and-mix. We’ll sit in my room and put the world to rights and discuss our latest investigations. For the first time in ages, it seems like things are getting back to normal. We’ve been through death, disaster and the unlocking of lost memories. But us two old girls still come through!
§
I fluff up my wig and hoist on my comfiest dressing gown and slip into a pair of satin slippers. It’s as if my whole skin comes alive again with all these sensations. It seems like my brain is eager and greedy to be fed all this sensual information.
So when I sashay into my sitting room I’m feeling what you might call over-stimulated.
Effie’s pouring out sherry for us, and she sees at once that I’m in a transport of cosy delight.
‘Eeh, you do look well, Brenda. If I didn’t know better I’d guess you’d had a month in a health spa. Not been beheaded and almost dead at all.’
I sink into the comfort of the cushions on my green paisley settee. ‘Effie, you can’t know what it’s like. I’ll never complain about this old body feeling tired and achy ever again. It’s bliss to be back to being me again.’
She hands me my sherry and there’s an amused twinkle in her eye. It’s good to see it back there after her being such a sourpuss of late.
Panda reaches up for his sherry too, and comes to sit on a low stool.
‘Are you going to be here all the time now?’ Effie snaps at him.
‘Yes, I am!’ he barks back. ‘Brenda’s my friend too, you know.’
Effie tuts and goes on to ignore her erstwhile childhood friend. ‘Brenda, now that you’re back to full strength, I’m going to bring you up to speed.’
I nod. ‘Yes, please do! Ooh, that Limbosine man hasn’t been waylaying you again? And taking you back on rides into your past?’
She smiles a bit impatiently. ‘Er, no, he hasn’t…’
‘Well then,’ I go on. ‘What about the mermaids at the Christmas Hotel? Has anyone been lured over the cliffs again?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping tabs on that…’
Something else pops into my head. ‘And what about Mr Danby? I know they banged him up in the police cells on the night everyone thought he’d done me in – but did they charge him? Is he free?’
‘I DON’T KNOW!’ thunders Effie, looking cross.
‘But these are all important things!’ I protest.
‘STOP interrupting me!’ Effie shouts, and then looks ashamed at yelling at someone who was – let’s face it – until recently, comatose.
‘Brenda’s only trying to help,’ says Panda gruffly. ‘She’s reminding you of vital information which you yourself have forgotten about!’
She turns and gives him such a look that he falls immediately silent.
Effie coughs. ‘I need to discuss with you much more urgent matters, Brenda.’
I can’t help it. I interrupt her again. ‘Yes! Indeed! Such as, where are our young friends? What’s this out-of-town mission they’ve gone on?’
Effie is turning dark pink. She’s gritting her teeth and that’s always a bad sign.
‘I will explain everything,’ she says. ‘In my own time.’
‘She’s being a bit slow,’ Panda mutters, sotto voce.
She ignores him.
‘Go on, Effie,’ I urge her. ‘You tell me the things I need to know.’
She nods and takes a sip of sherry and then gathers her thoughts. Is that a tremble I see in her fingers as they grip the emptied schooner? Why is she so scared? Suddenly I’m not so sure what it is she wants to tell me.
‘It’s about your blood, Brenda. That’s what this is about. All of this. It’s all down to the uniqueness of your blood.’
I stare at her. My breath catches in my throat. I’m about to ask her a question, but then it fizzles immediately out of my head. My blood?
She smiles gently at my confusion. My stupid face gives my feelings away. It always makes Effie smile, the way I reveal myself so easily. ‘Don’t you remember, Brenda? Our time in the Land of Qab?’
‘I’ve tried to push it out of my memory,’ I say. ‘It was such a terrifying ordeal.’
‘Remember how I became a vampire queen?’ Effie sighs. ‘Do you remember how my beloved Alucard had bitten a chunk out of my neck, eh? In an attempt – quite unsolicited, I must admit – to make me just like him? The old devil sank his choppers into my tender throat, and before I knew it I was hanging about doorways and dark alleys, roughing up young blokes and drinking their blood.’
Yes, I do remember, I want to tell her. And what’s more, I think she’s sounding a bit too keen on it all in retrospect. But I don’t berate her for her breathlessness. Instead I say, ‘And you became younger and younger. You became a raving beauty again. A third of your current age.’
She nods, accepting the compliment graciously. ‘And I ran off to the weird dimension of Qab, via the time-space portal in the upstairs lav at the Spooky Finger bookshop. Once there, I became queen of the lizard men.’
Panda is looking from me to Effie and back again as we recall this bizarre escapade. He furrows his furry brow. ‘Are you two serious about this? Or are you having me on?’
I smile at him and heft up the sherry bottle for another spot of the sweet stuff all round. ‘It’s all quite true, Panda. Every word of it. Effie did become vampire queen of what we thought was another dimension, another reality. And we thought she would never go back to normal. We thought we’d lost her forever…’
Effie’s eyes light up. ‘Yes, but I was cured, wasn’t I? I was made rid of the vampire contagion forever, wasn’t I?’
Panda lets out a sigh of relief. ‘Goodness, Effie, dear, but I’m very glad to hear it.’
‘And Brenda was the one to save me,’ Effie says, staring at me with a rapturous expression. ‘She was willing to give up everything in order to save me, and bring me back home.’
‘Well, what else could I have done?’ I shrug. ‘I couldn’t leave you languishing there, supping lizard blood and living in that nasty palace.’
‘How did she save you?’ Panda asks.
‘Her blood,’ Effie tell
s him. ‘She gave me half of her blood. Her blood’s unique, you see. It’s the only substance in the world that can reverse the effects of vampirism. That’s why she’s so precious. That’s why Walkers all over the world are wary of her. She’s a kind of legend to them. And that’s because she is their salvation. She is the cure.’
Then both Effie and Panda are staring at me.
I knock back my drink as I start to absorb this news. ‘Bloody hell!’
§
This knocks me for six.
Talk turns to other matters that evening, as Effie slices up the rather delicious Madeira cake she’s brought round. She’s telling me all about Mr Danby and how they can’t make any charges stick. When the medics examined my body, apparently, they reported that I seemed to have been dead well before that guillotine sliced off my head. Well, what do medics know?
Panda’s crumbling his soft cake into chunks small enough for him and throwing in the odd question. I hear how Danby is back in situ at the Spooky Finger, as if nothing has happened. Word has spread around town that his gruesome magic show was just a great big fake.
And the police haven’t said a word about my mortal remains being nicked from their mortuary. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I imagine is what they thought.
As all this chitchat rumbles on and we demolish the midnight feast, my head is banging with what Effie said about my blood.
I have tried to block out of my mind what transpired in the terrible land of Qab, ever since we were transported back from there. It was a dizzyingly horrible adventure that I thought none of us would ever survive. But we did, and we came home safely, and back to relatively normal. But even so, I remembered how it was my blood that rescued Effie from her vampiric state. Of course I gladly donated all that I could in order to save her. But even as it was pumped out of me and I recovered from that loss, I knew there would be repercussions.
My blood is exceedingly valuable, I remember thinking. If word gets out about this, then my life is forfeit, surely. I’ll become the golden goose of the undead world. But that begs the question, do vamps and Walkers really want to be cured? Most of the ones I’ve known have been quite pleased with themselves, and rather glad of their saucy lifestyle.
I suppose those that are proud to be vampiric would loathe the idea of a substance that would reverse their condition. They would dread such a thing coming onto the market.
Effie catches my eye and she realizes that I’m off on a troubling train of thought. She waves a gnarled hand in front of my face. ‘Are you okay, ducky?’
I smile grimly. ‘Is this why the Bronte sisters are after me, then? They want to take my blood?’
She nods. ‘I’m afraid that’s it. That’s what all of this is about. They want to use your blood for its curative properties. The Brontes think that they can rid the world of vampires.’
‘Isn’t that genocide?’ Panda pipes up.
‘I suppose it is,’ Effie muses. ‘But the Brontes don’t see it that way. For over a century they trained young girls to fight the demons of the night. When I turned up on their doorstep, all that time ago, they learned from those pages of the Books of Mayhem that there really was something that could easily, painlessly make the vamps back into honest citizens.’ She looks at me sadly. ‘The blood of the daughter of Herr Doktor Frankenstein. They’ve been waiting for you, Brenda. It’s all been foretold.’
This is why those vampires in Paris were so weird with us. Nicolas and his fiends from the catacombs. This is why they were so forceful in telling us that we shouldn’t return home. It was because they knew this was going to happen. They knew who I was and what ran through my veins…
‘But… but…!’ splutters Panda. ‘Why should the sisters want to kill her? Surely they’d be better off keeping her alive, and only siphoning off a certain amount of blood at a time. And then there’d be an endless supply, wouldn’t they?’
Effie shrugs. ‘Don’t ask me. Ann, Emily and Charlotte aren’t at all rational. They’ve been in that underground lair for too long. It’s addled their minds. All they know is that the Books of Mayhem dictate that… that…’
‘What?’ I ask, wanting to drag it out of her. I need to be prepared. I need to know the worst.
‘You have to be torn apart from end to end, standing at the Bitch’s Maw at midnight at summer’s end. They need to take all your blood at once.’
Panda’s jaw drops and he looks at me, to see how I’m taking this startling bit of information.
‘Right,’ I say, trying to look quite composed. ‘Well, as it happens, I don’t believe in silly old prophecies. No matter what kind of book they come from. Those nasty Brontes can believe what they like – I’m not having anyone ripping me end from end, I can tell you that much for nothing!’
‘Good for you, Brenda!’ Panda cheers.
‘What we need is a plan,’ I say.
‘There already is a plan,’ Effie says darkly. ‘That’s what the kids are up to.’
§
It takes some eking out of Effie, but I soon find out the rest of what was happening while I was out of it for about a month.
Those poor children! What are they doing, risking all for my sake?
‘It was Robert’s idea,’ Effie says. ‘As he said, it’s his responsibility. And the others, they all went of their own volition. They said to tell you that, Brenda, when you woke up.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Where is it they’ve gone to?’
Effie pauses and licks her lips. ‘Er, they’ve gone to fetch your ex-husband, Frank. They kind of thought that he could be of some help in this situation…’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘But how can they go and get Frank..? He was… taken away! To another land…’
‘To the land of Faerie,’ Effie says sadly. ‘Yes, and Robert believed he had the means to go there…’
‘But they can’t go there! It’s too dangerous…!’
‘I did tell them not to. You must believe me, I warned them not to. I told them what my mother has said about that wicked land.’
‘But they still went?’
‘Robert wouldn’t be stopped. If he thought it could help you. And Penny and Gila felt the same.’ She rummages about in her handbag for a moment. Then she takes out a crumpled envelope. ‘This arrived this morning. It’s from Robert. It was sent to me by magical means. I found it in my toaster when I was about to pop my pikelets in.’
She passes the letter to me. Without another word, I open it and begin to read.
§
‘Dear Effie and Panda and (if you’ve woken up yet!) Brenda –
‘I’m hoping that this will get to you. I don’t know how everything works here, but apparently it’s quite possible to zap this from wherever the hell we are, back home to you. I just want to drop you a line to let you know how we’re getting on in the search for Frank.
‘Actually, not too badly. Penny and Gila can hardly credit it that I’ve actually managed to get them here, into this strange place.
‘It really is another land. It’s like… well, it’s like every long summer holiday you ever had away from school. Those really long summers when you lost track of the weeks and how long it would be before you had to return to the real world. The summers when the sun baked the fields brown and turned the grass to yellow straw and each day seemed to last forever. We have wandered into the land of Faerie during high summer and everything is glorious. The locals live this kind of rural, idyllic existence and I must admit that they have welcomed us pretty warmly. We’re so strange and alien to them: we’re so much taller and bigger. Our ears aren’t pointy and we come from a much more ordinary, less enchanted place. I suppose they accept us because of whose company we arrived in. It was their king, after all, who brought us into this realm…
‘Yes, he helped us after all, Effie. He took pity on our plight �
�� on Brenda’s difficulties – and agreed to help us. I suppose it’s also because he and I have become rather close, too. And I had to come clean about that with Gila, too. I had to tell him about my occasional night flights across the skies above Whitby on that flying settee. But to my surprise Gila wasn’t angry or jealous. He’s such an easy-going creature. He doesn’t fret over the things that drive humans crazy. I’m glad of that, because of these clandestine meetings I’ve had with the Erl King. But without those, we wouldn’t have been allowed to come here now.
‘‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I’ll lead you to Frank, if that’s what you really want.’
‘Well, we don’t really want him, do we? He was an ungovernable brute. But if we can persuade the Bronte sisters to accept Frank’s blood rather than Brenda’s, then that would be ideal, wouldn’t it? They were created by the same mad genius. They came from the same unholy source. Surely his blood would be just as valuable as hers?
‘The Faerie king told us where the crossover point was. There is a portal on a roadside, just north of Hexham. We were to go there and he would meet us and take us across to his land.
‘On the train I had to explain to Gila why it was that Brenda’s ex-husband came to be in the land of Faerie in the first place. It was all to do with him being defeated in our great battle with Karla Sorenson and her minions, and how he was torn to pieces before my eyes high up in the attics of the Christmas Hotel. Then the Faerie King took him away again – to piece him together and to take care of him, and to keep him out of Brenda’s hair. None of us have heard from Frank since – but now we need him. And so here we are. For Brenda’s sake.’
I stop reading aloud at this point, and look at Effie and Panda aghast. ‘I wouldn’t have let them go to all this bother. If I’d been awake I’d have stopped them.’
Effie shrugs. ‘You know what it’s like when Robert gets an idea into his head.’
‘But… the very idea of sacrificing Frank instead of me… it’s so horrible and cruel. I mean, our relationship was a stormy one, and we rarely saw eye to eye. But I’d never expect him to take my place and get sliced up from end to end instead of me…!’
