by Paul Magrs
To my own surprise, I go to him, without thinking twice. He folds me up in a strong embrace. And it feels so good to be squashed like this against his chest. Only Frank is strong enough to make me feel as small and pliant as this. And he’s right, too. I really wasn’t expecting to see him ever again. I thought he was off in that magic land forever, and we could forget about each other at last.
But here he is, and here I am. Cuddling him back with all my friends watching, in the lavatory of one of my most hated foes.
‘You’d better tell Frank what’s going on,’ he says. ‘And then Frank will do whatever Frank can in order to help you.’
§
My small party of friends leave Danby’s nasty shop quite gladly. Outside the streets are chilly after a cloudless day. We hurry back to my place and the lot of us are surprisingly quiet, for all the catching up we have to do with one another. It as if we are saving ourselves until we are somewhere safe. And as if we are holding our breath, hardly believing that we are reunited again in this town of ours. It is a moment of silent triumph, and talking about it would diminish it somehow, and make it seem ordinary.
For there is nothing ordinary about tonight. My young friends have journeyed back from that strange other world where Effie’s father lives. They have seen and experienced so much there that mine and Effie’s jaunt on the continent simply pales in comparison. I steal a glance or two at Robert, Penny and Gila and they smile and nod almost embarrassedly. They are thrilled with themselves, for succeeding in this wild adventure. They can barely contain their excitement.
Also, they are thrilled that I am up and about, seemingly myself again.
Here is Frank, lumbering alongside me, gazing appreciatively at everyday things such as parked cars, chimney pots, a stray cat staring at us from a garden wall. He, too, is remarkably quiet on this trek back to my B&B.
When at last we reach there, it’s wonderfully warm inside. Slightly stuffy almost, the air laced with that tinge of burning dust from the radiators. We hurry inside and up the stairs and we congregate in my attic sitting room. The place is as crowded as it has ever been. As I hurry to put on the kettle to brew a gigantic pot of spicy tea, I look at them all proudly. They’re starting to talk and swap stories now. Panda is out of my bag and on the breakfast bar, introducing himself to Frank. The others are gathered around Effie, breathlessly going over their tales, the bare bones of which we already know from Robert’s mystically delivered letter.
For now, as I make the tea, and pour out some sherry to take the chill off us all, I look at my friends and let that pride wash over me. Once I was the woman who could never make friends. Or, if I did, I could never keep them, because they would find out my secrets and be disgusted; they would hound me out of their homes, their lives. Or I would simply wander away, forgetting about my ties to life and the people I’d come to know. Drawn by some weird, atavistic impulse, I would simply blunder into a new town, a new way of living.
But here it has been so different. Here in Whitby I have learned to be a proper person. Oh yes, I may be beset by fiends and demons from hell or other dimensions, or out of my own past. That’s by the by. My main triumph here has been that I have learned to be a part of the lives of other people. I have learned to trust them with the secrets I have carried every moment of my life. I have disburdened myself to these people. These ones standing here, passing round the sherry and gossiping and sharing information. So I’m proud of them, but I’m also proud of myself. I’m happy as I’ve ever been, having them all around me like this, in the middle of the cold night, with the day of my worst tribulations ever about to dawn on us all. Even with all this horrible stuff coming my way, I’m happy as owt. It’s just as good as finding out I have a soul, after all.
Frank turns to me, raising his sherry glass in a silent toast. The schooner is dwarfed in his vast green paw. He winks. ‘Hey, doll. Effie here’s been bringing Frank up to date.’
Effie blushes, as she always tended to do when Frank was around. I think she has a bit of a soft spot for the great galoot.
‘Oh yes?’ I ask.
‘She’s saying the ghosts of the Bronte sisters are planning on cutting you into pieces tomorrow night and taking away all your blood to cure every vampire in the world.’
I nod at this. Everyone else is looking at us now. What’s Effie doing, being so frank with Frank?
‘And,’ he goes on, sipping his sherry with a delicacy I’ve never seen in him before, ‘She reckons that the whole point of sending this load of kids to rescue Frank was to put Frank in your place tomorrow night? So the Brontes get Frank’s blood instead?’
Penny gasps out loud and the others all look horrified.
Panda boggles at Effie. ‘What are you doing, Effryggia? Telling the monster that? That’s our plan, that is!’
Frank is frowning heavily. ‘You only brought Frank here in order to sacrifice him?’
I gulp.
‘It was our idea, Frank,’ Robert puts in bravely. He steps forward, between Frank and myself, knowing that one blow from the monster’s fist could kill him outright.
‘Why did you tell him, Effie?’ asks Gila.
Effie looks abashed only for a second. Then she does that thing when her face closes up and she goes on the offensive, knowing that she’s wrong the whole time. ‘Well, I thought the great big dafty would have realised that’s why we were bringing him back! Surely he never thought that he was wanted for his looks or his personality?’ She turns to Frank with laughter in her voice. ‘Surely you never thought for a second that Brenda was wanting you back in her life?’ At this point she really does crack out laughing and the rest of us are aghast. What is she playing at? Does she really want to destroy this ramshackle plan?
Frank’s face turns darker and darker. He’s a shade of forest green when he turns to glower at me. I look away in shame, even though it was never my idea. I would never have sent for him like this. I definitely wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sacrificing him in order to save me.
‘This is what you want Frank for?’ he thunders, his eyes boring into mine. His voice is so deep I can feel my skin vibrate like a drum. ‘This was it? To invite him to his own death? For the sake of a woman who never really loved him?’
He turns for the door, everyone watching. ‘Frank..!’ I begin.
He waves it away and chucks his sherry glass into the fake fire surround. ‘Thanks a lot, Brenda. Thanks.’
Then Frank storms off down the stairs, and into the night.
There’s a pause before Penny – looking like a celtic goddess in her borrowed finery – rounds on Effie. ‘You’ve ruined it! We risked our lives for this. All for the sake of saving Brenda. And you’ve ruined it all!’
Effie has turned ashen-faced. She doesn’t reply to Penny at all. She looks at me and says, almost inaudibly, ‘I think it’s the Brontes… their conditioning… it’s kicking in..!’ Then she gathers herself together and hurries to the door. ‘I’ve got to get away! I must go home!’
She’s gone before I get a chance to say anything else. She knows that she has made a terrible mistake. I mean, it’s true that I would never be keen on having Frank back, on a full-time basis kind of thing. But it was rather nice to see him again, even if briefly.
‘Maybe we should all get some rest…’ I suggest, feeling very gloomy all of a sudden.
Robert looks very dashing in his doublet and hose kind of outfit. He shakes his head grimly at me. ‘We can’t sleep, I’m afraid, Brenda. There are promises to keep.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Gila. ‘We must.’
‘What are your promises?’ I ask.
‘We brought Frank home,’ says Penny. ‘But there was a price, remember. Now we have to kidnap a certain person. And deliver her to her one-time lover, her enemy; the man who has demanded that she return to him. And we’ve got to do it tonight.’
§
So, really, it’s just as well that Effie has done a runner in her shamed and confused state. Because I don’t think she’d be very pleased at all that we’re now discussing how we’re going to get rid of Mrs Claus. And we’re going to do it right now, in the darkest hour before dawn.
For several years I have dreamed about what life here would be like without Mrs Claus and her Christmassy machinations. Of course, then we had the shock revelation that she was, in fact, Effie’s long lost mother, and that put a different complexion on it all. She and Effie discovered that they were beginning to develop something close to an actual, almost ordinary, mother and daughter relationship. So any plans to put paid to Mrs Claus had to be permanently shelved, no matter how much of a nefarious nuisance she continued to be.
In the drear dawn light before the very last day of summer I am in hushed conference with my young friends and it seems that we are at last about to bite the bullet and rid our town of this yuletide menace.
‘She’ll be getting up soon,’ Robert tells us. ‘She takes a long time preparing herself for the day, decking herself out in all her finery. The kitchens burst into action about an hour before that. The first breakfast of the day is hers, and she has it brought to her boudoir on a golden hostess trolley at five thirty.’ Robert knows all of these precise details because of the time he spend enslaved as an elf at the Christmas hotel. At one time it was he who was honoured with the task of taking her huge, over-filled tray in to her each morning. ‘Lambs’ brains porridge and chicken tongues on toast. Plus, a gin and tonic. Seriously, I almost threw up every morning I worked there.’
‘Do you still have your elf costume?’ I ask, shooting him a look and realizing he might have filled out too much to get back into it. When I first met Robert, he was such a skinny thing.
‘I can get hold of one,’ he says. ‘When we smuggle ourselves inside…’
Rather quickly, a plan is starting to formulate itself as we wrap up again to brave the chill dawn. We have only an hour or so before the sun rounds the headland and illuminates the whole town. We must make the most we can of every scrap of darkness. So we hurry out and skulk through the early morning streets in the direction of the Christmas hotel.
I have a plan of my own. It came to me in a flash while we were pulling on our coats. I’m not sure about saying anything to the others yet, because I’m not sure that I can pull it off.
‘You look pensive, Brenda,’ says Penny.
‘Hm, yes. I’m thinking about when I was disembodied recently, and I was astral projecting myself all over town, all over the place…’
Gila and Robert look at me strangely. ‘Were you?’
Panda twizzles round in my bag to tell them, ‘Oh yes! I could see her, remember. She was swinging around the rooftops and floating about all over the place. All in the nude! A splendid sight!’
I try not to find Panda’s enthusiasm too disturbing.
We are hastening down the quiet alleyways past rental cottages and neat gardens. Gulls are watching from chimney pots and there’s a whiff of woodsmoke from some early risers. We’re almost at the West Cliff, where we will be tackling our problems head on. This is really happening, I tell myself. We are about to rid ourselves of one of our most toxic enemies.
‘Go on then, Brenda,’ says Robert, looking very weary as he jogs alongside me. ‘What was it you saw when you were flying about the place? Was it something that’ll be useful this morning?’
‘Indeed it was,’ I say. ‘If we can contact them. If we can get them to help. But we’ll have to see…’ I can’t help being cryptic. I’m short of breath and making up plans as we scurry along. They’ll just have to trust me and my blinding idea.
Suddenly, there it is, looming ahead of us. There’s a winding road cut into the dark rock of the cliff. And at the very top, there is the Christmas Hotel, painted for this season the pink of strawberry ice cream. The chimneys are smoking, so we know that the place is coming alive already. We must get in there quickly if we are to catch Mrs Claus when she is at her most vulnerable.
‘I want to catch her in bed,’ Robert murmurs. ‘When she’s still in her nightie, without her wig, false teeth and her make-up. She can’t move around anywhere without her mobile scooter. If we get ourselves into her inner sanctum, she’ll be at our mercy.’
As we stumble up the steep path towards the hotel, I ponder over what he’s saying. He made Mrs Claus sans wig, etc sound just like me. It’s as if we’re each other’s natural opposites, Mrs Claus and I. Our bits of disguise and fakery are armour for both of us. It’s never really struck me that I’ve got anything in common with that rotten old moo. Robert’s talk of attacking her at her most vulnerable makes me shiver now.
There’s no time, however, to get philosophical qualms about what we are about to do.
We slip by the front of the hotel, where there doesn’t seem to be much action just now. The guests are usually ancient, and so there’s no one zipping about just yet. They will all have exhausted themselves at the ‘Endless Medley: Singalong Disco’ that was held in the ballroom last night, according to the posters.
Robert leads us with practiced expertise to the back of the buildings that make up the biggest hotel in town. Here we have to be a bit more careful, because the kitchens will be busy, and deliveries will be arriving. We slip past the bins and the back doors and find a certain fire escape.
I cast a quick glance at the rooftops, squinting into the morning sun, trying to see any evidence of those spirits swirling around. But I can see nothing, of course, now that I’m back in my corporeal form.
Gila asks, ‘What are you looking for, Brenda?’
Shrewd boy. I tell him, ‘You know, you were right, Gila. About the mermaids and what they were up to here. I’ve seen them. I’ve talked to them. They were indeed luring old men to their deaths, and loving every minute of it. I’ve seen the old men, too. In fact, I encountered a swarm of souls of those who’ve died bizarre deaths at the Christmas Hotel.’
‘Then you have experienced wondrous visions,’ says Gila. ‘This world… it seems to me more strange with every passing day.’
‘I think that’s because you hang out with us, Gila,’ Penny tells him, and urges us both to follow Robert up the tallest fire escape. We try to keep our feet from clanging too loudly on the metal rungs.
Penny’s got a point, I think. That poor lizard boy could be living a much more sedate and commonplace life in our world. I’ve no choice about that sort of thing. Wherever I settle, everything becomes utterly mad. Like now: with two human children, one reptile man – all three dressed in faerie, elvish dress, and one talking Panda. And all of us are about to dispatch a woman who loves Christmas so much she has made it into a deadly mania.
At the top of the fire escape there is a little door. We cluster about Robert even though there’s not quite room enough. I get a twinge of vertigo. Something I never suffered a jot when I was a disembodied spirit.
‘Through here,’ Robert whispers, ‘are the elves’ quarters. This is where I lived when I was under Mrs Claus’s malign influence and rule. ‘This is our easiest way into the place. The door’s never locked. So those elves who still have some vestiges of their personalities left, can come and go as they wish, in the night. Escaping their festive bondage for just a few hours. That’s what I used to do. Though it looks like no one’s broken out of here for a while. The padlock’s rusted open.’
The door opens with a squeal and we enter a dim and dusky, low-ceilinged place with about thirty single beds in it.
‘This is where you all lived and slept?’ Penny asks. ‘All the elves together?’
Robert rolls his eyes. ‘Oh yes. Oh, the shenanigans!’
Panda twitches his nose. ‘It’s a bit stinky in here.’
We can hear showers running and steam issuing into the far end of the long room. Robert explains that we must hurry. Many of
the elves will already have started their day, and others are still readying themselves. We have a few seconds grace while he hunts around for an elvish costume that will fit him. We turn our backs discreetly as he hurriedly disrobes and becomes an enslaved elf once more.
‘Oh, Robert…’ says Penny. ‘You look so…!’
‘Ridiculous,’ he says, looking down at the green felt uniform. He pops on plastic pointed ears and the jaunty hat. ‘I hate it all. And to think, when I first came here, to join my Aunty Jessie after she told me that the pay was good and the work was okay, I was so pleased to don the costume. It was exciting and new. But little did I know what secrets the Christmas Hotel harboured…’
‘Enough of the soliloquies,’ Panda snaps. ‘Now you’ve got your chance to take your revenge on the old monster!’
‘Panda’s right,’ I urge him.
Gila is looking at his boyfriend in the ridiculous outfit. ‘Y-you were a slave, too, Robert. Just as I was once, in the land of Qab.’
Robert grimaces at this comment and I wonder how the two of them are getting on now. Do I detect more friction than ever between the boys? Robert looks flustered in his too-tight-fitting felt uniform. ‘Let’s go.’
Before the other elvish boys come in dripping from their showers he bundles us through a low doorway, leading to a curving staircase, taking us into the main hotel and its public areas. I have to duck down low and squinch myself in as I follow the others. I’m reminded briefly of my own days in service to the aristocracy, about a hundred years ago, and sleeping in tiny attic rooms and using servants’ staircases.
We pad down the hallways behind Robert, treading as quietly as we can on the worn carpets, and pass by the doors through which we can even hear snores from guests who partied too hard last night. All the while I’m thinking: we are going to be caught. I’m a familiar face in Whitby now, at least I am to the folk in this dodgy hotel. They will know that I’m in here up to no good…
