by Paul Magrs
This very room is the scene of so many strange goings-on. Like when Effie was transformed into a vampire and my gentleman friend at the time and I had to lock her in the bathroom. And this is where Effie and I watched that horror film that should never have existed, ‘Get Thee Inside Me, Satan’ and we were ineluctably drawn into the behind-the-scenes extras on the DVD and wound up in a quarry in Wales.
Panda trots in, rubbing his ears on a towel, having had a little wash and brush up. He notices my faraway expression. ‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘Oh, just reminiscing. About some of the things that these four walls have seen in recent years.’
He nods. ‘Yes, you really must tell me more about the things that you and Effie have got up to.’
I smile at him, and it’s hard to know where to even start. Besides, there’s not enough time to tell him the whole story before tomorrow rolls around. The others know what kind of to-do’s we’ve been through together. If the worst comes to the worst tomorrow night, and I never come back home again, there will be others who know my story. I find that reassuring, really.
Then I think: Robert wants to tell my story to the whole world. Perhaps it will be best, then, if I am out of the way and nowhere to be found…
I get up. ‘Early night!’ I tell Panda.
‘I’m having a nightcap and watching some telly,’ he informs me. ‘Marvellous thing, the telly! The Bronte sisters never had one, of course…’
‘Keep the sound down,’ I say, blowing him a kiss. He likes very loud and violent action movies, it turns out. (‘And I thought I had such refined tastes!’ he laughed when he discovered this predilection for car chases and shoot-outs.)
I retire to my oriental boudoir and make myself comfortable in that nest of satin and silk. Very faintly I can hear the soundtrack of a film Panda has tuned into. I can hear him making shooting noises and joining in.
But before I know it, I’m asleep.
§
‘Brenda..?’
It’s Robert’s voice. I can hear him clear as anything.
I’m standing in the dark. I’m in a kind of corridor, but I can’t see what the walls are made out of. It’s not chilly, but something is giving me gooseflesh.
‘Brenda, I’m here,’ he says. ‘We’re all here.’
‘I-I can’t see you. I can’t really see anything.’
‘We’re close by you. We’re on our way. Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes! But we couldn’t work out how you’d sent it…’
‘Magic, Brenda. So you know what we’ve been up to?’
‘Yes! And you’re coming back, are you? You’re going to be here in time for tomorrow night?’
‘We are! But we need your help…’
Straight away, I offer it: ‘Of course! What should I do?’ Then I think, but it’s hopeless. This is just a dream. A useless dream. I’m wishing all this to be true.
‘No!’ Robert cries. ‘It’s true! We’re really coming back. Through the astral plane, thanks to the pinking shears the Erl King gave us.’
‘But how can I hear you?’
‘Perhaps it’s because of the time you spent here, Brenda, when you were separated from your body? It could be that you still have a link with this realm…’
That sounds about right. This place I’m standing in does seem too real to be just a dream. And Robert’s voice must be the real thing… surely…
I start walking towards the source of that voice. Groping blindly through the dark, I totter forward. A few steps and I’m free of the confines of that corridor. Now it feels as if a whole vista of darkness is spread before me.
‘Brenda?’ says Robert’s voice. ‘There are things you must do, at the portal in Whitby. We can’t find it alone. We need you to find it and open it up from the other side.’
‘How do I do that?’
My attention gets caught then by a glimmering in the darkness. Very far away, I can see points of light streaking through the black. They look like the blurry forms on a radar screen. Four figures, floating together through the inkiness. At once I know they are my friends, making their way back to me.
‘Here!’ shouts Robert and, with all his strength he lifts up the green pinking shears and flings them into the void.
I can see those flashing blades turning end over end. They inscribe a silvery arc through the darkness; spinning towards me.
I was never any good at catching. My physical co-ordination is awful. I think it’s to do with the strength of my eyes being quite unequal. Two different previous owners, you see. Nevertheless I put both my hands in the air and hope fiercely that those blades won’t slice them to bits.
And WHOOSH! The pinking shears come hurtling out of the night. Easy as anything, I pluck them out of the air.
‘I’ve got them!’ I yell at the lights in the distance.
‘Good!’ says Robert. ‘Now, this is where you have to be…’
When he tells me where to go I groan. I should have known! But I’ve got no choice because my friends need me. And I, of course, need them.
Then all of a sudden I’m awake in my bed. I’m sitting up, holding the pinking shears.
My bedroom door is open and there’s Panda, looking disturbed. ‘What on earth is all the shouting about?’
I jump out of bed in my nightie and start scrambling around for warm clothes. ‘No time to explain! Come on! We’ve got work to do.’
§
It was true what Effie said earlier: town seems darker and feels a bit less friendly now at night. Panda and I have barely stepped out of my side passage before we realise that we’re being watched by unfriendly eyes. It’s hard to say where they are, or who they belong to. We catch glimpses of eyes flashing in the dark and monitoring our every move.
‘Who are they?’ Panda asks.
I feel sure they are Walkers. All the vamps in Whitby are watching my house and trailing me wherever I go. They know that my fate is inextricably bound up with theirs, and they don’t know what to do. They’d be scared to spill my blood, presumably, even if it was to put me out of the way. What they certainly don’t want is me falling into the hands of the Brontes tomorrow. And so they watch me from corners, rooftops, and the mouths of alleyways. It’s the early hours of the morning and it’s obvious that I’m up to something. Softly, I tell myself to keep calm.
Then I make a snap decision and go and bang on Effie’s door. I should have phoned the poor old trout, really, and gave her fair warning to get out of her bed. But this is an inspiration on the spur of the moment. I want her with me on this mission tonight. We two old birds work best together.
‘What do you want?’ she asks crossly and blearily, with her head stuck out of an upstairs window. At first she looks a bit scared, and now she knows it’s me she realizes that there is work to be done this night.
Within minutes she is downstairs in a warm coat and a balaclava, wincing at the cold, salty breeze. ‘Shall I make a flask of tea?’
‘We’re not going that far,’ I tell her. ‘Though what we could do with, if you’ve got one, is a crowbar.’
She doesn’t ask any questions. Effie nips back into her shop and returns with a lethal weapon that she pops into my shopping bag. ‘You can carry it,’ she tells me.
Then we’re off, threading through the tangled back streets, as if we’re trying to shake off pursuers. Which is exactly what we are doing, actually. As we hurry down cobbled alleys and trot through pitch black ginnels, there are flapping footsteps behind us now and then. Or the swish of a cape, or the rustling of a nylon tracksuit.
Effie and I are old hands though, and we don’t panic. Inside my bag, Panda can’t hear or see much, so there’s no fuss from him, either.
Then we are on Silver Street, where all the shop windows are dimmed and the upstairs rooms are dark. Not a single light is on. All the g
ood citizens are in their beds, and most of the wicked ones are as well.
The bookshop window glows with an eerie purple light. The sign that reads ‘The Spooky Finger’ sways and creaks in the gentle wind.
‘What are we doing here?’ Effie hisses, as we observe this place from across the road.
‘I had a dream,’ I tell her.
‘You’ve got us up in the middle of the night because of a dream?’
‘It was a very vivid one. It was real. And I know that tonight we’ve got a job to do in there. At ‘The Spooky Finger’.’
I’ll give Effie her dues: she doesn’t quibble with me or make any more complaints. She trusts me in my conviction and helps me decide what the best way is to break into Mr Danby’s establishment.
We decide that it has to be round the back. So the next thing is, we’re creeping down an alleyway and unlocking the gate to his back yard, trying to keep it as quiet as possible. His yard smells mouldy with rotting vegetables and worse. Effie lets out a high-pitched squeak when she sees a rat. It’s crawling on a sack of garbage that it’s nibbled open. When we look inside the bag – all the bags – are filled with books.
‘I knew he really didn’t care about books,’ Effie says. ‘This whole shop is just a front for his nasty activities. Who’d throw out perfectly good books like this?’
All I know is that Danby is a very strange man. I could never fathom out his motives.
Then Effie asks for her crowbar back and proves a dab hand at the art of employing such a tool. Panda and I watch, holding our breath, as she wedges it into the frame of the back door and makes this horrible splintering sound. There’s a crash and a bash and suddenly the door’s hanging off its hinges.
‘We’re in!’ she cries, and we dash inside.
Effie finds the light switch and we are in a small, filthy kitchen. Every surface is covered in fag ash and dirty plates and scummy mugs. There’s a mucky magazine on the breakfast table and a lingering scent of fried eggs.
‘What do we do next?’ Effie asks, looking excited.
I pause and, sure enough, I can hear noises from upstairs. Scuffling feet. Thumping about. Mr Danby knows that he has intruders.
‘I need to get to the lavvy on the first floor landing.’
Effie and Panda stare at me. ‘Are you desperate?’ she asks.
‘No! That’s where I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.’
She shrugs, as if all that’s my business, and then the three of us steal into the darkened shop beyond the beaded curtain. The great hulking square shapes of bookcases loom over us and we stub our toes on badly-placed heaps of hardbacks.
‘Hello?’ comes Mr Danby’s voice, quavering down the stairs. ‘Is there anyone down there?’
I grin in the dark. It’s good that he’s the one who’s scared for once.
‘You’re enjoying this,’ Effie tells me.
‘It’s about time he was the one to suffer a little,’ I tell her.
Effie frowns. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Brenda I know.’
But there’s no time to go into it. The lights over the lower staircase suddenly burst on, and Danby comes into view, in striped cotton pyjamas and brandishing a golf club. ‘Who’s there?’ he shouts, in a strangulated tone.
‘Give me that crowbar back,’ I say to Effie, quite calmly.
‘No, Brenda! You can’t… dash his brains out!’
‘I’m simply going to disarm him,’ I tut, and take the heavy bar off her.
Then I jump into the light.
Danby squeals like a stuck pig.
‘I’ve come for you, Danby!’ I tell him in my most blood-curdling tone.
‘No, wait, please!’ he shouts. ‘Please don’t hurt me! Please! I will give you anything, you can have anything…’
I wield my crowbar playfully and take a step closer to him. ‘What if what I most want is to give you a thrashing?’
‘Go away!’ he warns, shaking his golf club.
I realise I’m still clutching my bag with Panda in, so I turn to give it to Effie to look after. In that instant, Danby lashes out and strikes me on the side of my head with his golf club. It makes a sickening noise and sets both my ears ringing. I stagger a bit, clutching onto my wig, and it is a few moments before I can yell at him. ‘You cowardly flaming SOD!’ I shout, and go after him with the crowbar.
Danby shrieks as I hoik the bent golf club out of his shaking mitts. He cowers against the wall, stumbling on the stairs. ‘Go on then, kill me! That’s what you’ve wanted to do for ages, isn’t it? You vile demon from hell!’
For a split second I am on the point of doing just what Effie feared. I almost smash him across his bald shiny head and liberate his addled brains. But fortunately I prevent myself from doing anything so drastic. That isn’t me. Monster I may be, but not, I hope, a murdering one.
‘I’m not going to kill you, Danby.’
He sags visibly with relief.
‘We just need to borrow your first floor lavatory, that’s all.’
He stares at me flabbergasted. ‘All of this, and you just want to use my toilet?’
I can’t believe he’s never felt any of the strange emanations from that little room. I had assumed that the very reason he moved into this place was because he has detected the thinnish patch in the fabric of space-time located in the customer toilet. It could be he’s bluffing, or perhaps he never felt a thing.
‘I’m using it as a store room,’ he says, as Effie and I head for his stairs. ‘It’s filled with vintage romances.’
‘Then I suggest you get them cleared,’ I tell him.
Effie and I watch him labour alone, dragging cardboard boxes out of the WC and piling them on the landing. He huffs and puffs and still looks fearful.
Effie swipes one of the books from the box nearest her. ‘‘Love in the Milky Way’ by Tish Madoc,’ she frowns. ‘I think I’ve read that one.’
At last the dowdy, tiny toilet is empty and ready for us.
‘I still can’t understand what you want with my lavatory,’ Danby grumbles.
‘Shut up,’ Effie snaps. She’s the one holding the crowbar now. ‘Now I’ve had quite enough of your voice.’
Now I’m fetching out the special pinking shears. Panda’s been holding onto them in my shopping bag: he hands them to me with great ceremony.
I stand before the faded watercolour painting of a Lakeland view and wonder what I should do next. This is where I ought to be slicing through the fabric of the universe with great decisiveness and aplomb, but I find myself dithering.
‘What are you doing with those funny scissors?’ Danby shouts. ‘I hope you’re not going to damage anything.’
Effie clouts him one then, I think, because he cries out in dismay. But I’m not looking at them. I’m staring at the grayish depths of the lake in the clumsy painting. What to do…
There’s no point hovering and worrying. It’s best to make a proper stab at things. So I take a deep breath, and plunge the tips of the blades into the painted lake. Surprisingly, they don’t touch the glass. It doesn’t crack. It dissolves at the touch of the pinking shears. I open the blades and go snip-snip-snip and they cut neatly, satisfyingly. The crimped edges of the universe fall open at my touch and the fake water in the picture starts to swirl and whirlpool around my hand.
‘I think I’ve done it!’ I gasp.
Effie shares my excitement with a high-pitched squeal. Danby is horrified. ‘What are you doing? That’s a dimensional portal opening up, right in the middle of my home!’
‘It’s a special feature,’ Effie tells him. ‘It’ll be good when you sell up and move on. It has the ‘wow’ factor for your new buyers.’
Now the portal is becoming larger, with all this scintillating light and colour pouring out of it. It’s as big as I am all of a sudden, and exerting a
queer gravity, which is drawing me towards it. I withdraw the pinking shears and return them to Panda, who is hanging out of my bag and watching with great fascination.
The job is done. This is what Robert told me I had to do, and now there’s nothing for it but to wait.
‘What the devil are you playing at?’ howls Danby. ‘Anything could step through it! You could unleash all sorts out of that!’
Effie touches my arm. ‘It’s not the way back to Qab, is it? We’re not going back there?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I’m just showing the way home for our friends. They will see this gap in the void, and come to us. I hope.’
There’s a scuffling in the hallway and I turn in time to see Danby scrambling upstairs. ‘Mother! Mother!’ he cries. ‘They’re messing about with the interstitial dimensions.’
‘Oh, let him tell his mother,’ Effie shrugs. ‘What can she do? All she does is lie about in a suitcase.’
Just then the whole room and landing beyond is filled with a radiant light. We throw up our arms to protect our eyes.
There are figures materializing in the brilliance. Four figures, three of normal height, and the fourth is huge and bulky.
It takes some moments for the dazzle to clear. And when it does we simply stare at each other for a moment.
‘We made it!’ Robert yells. ‘We’re through!’
Penny grabs me in a hug. ‘You did it, Brenda! You’re amazing!’
Robert, Penny and Gila are all dressed in gorgeous outfits of embroidered silk. The three of them are all over Effie and I, jumping up and down excitably.
But I am all the while only too conscious of the hulking figure behind them. He is the very opposite of them: he is calm and dressed in stinking rags.
When Effie sees him she gasps loudly and we all fall quiet.
‘Hullo, Brenda,’ says Frank. ‘I bet you thought you’d never see your Frank again, eh?’ He holds out his arms. ‘Hug for your old man?’
