[Brenda & Effie 06] - Brenda and Effie Forever! Read online

  The whole place has been gutted.

  We can’t believe it.

  Where last night there was clutter and mess and evidence of decades of sedentary life, this morning there is nothing. Just sparkling dust in the air and faded patches on the walls where the framed playbills were.

  The living room is desolate. The purple and black wallpaper is faded, wrinkled and tatty in daylight. The carpets have been rolled away to reveal pale floorboards. Not a stick of furniture remains.

  ‘All that heavy Victorian tat,’ Effie whispers. ‘How did they get all that moved so quickly?’

  I shake my head. I’ve no idea. For a moment I think we’ve come to the wrong flat.

  But we haven’t. This is where we came last night, to meet those two extraordinary men. This was where we listened to their strange story, and where they betrayed us, and sold us out to Nicolas the vampire.

  But now… it’s as if they were never here.

  That’s what the concierge tells us, in fact.

  She comes running up the stairs, puffing and blowing. Looking absolutely furious with us. She’s a pinched-face little thing in a flowery housecoat. She assails us in voluble French. We can’t follow, but she’s clearly raving about the door I’ve turned into matchwood.

  ‘We can’t understand you,’ Effie tells her, speaking loudly and slowly.

  The concierge switches to English, and starts demanding to know who we are, and what we’re doing here.

  I cut through her shrill questions. ‘Madame… the two men who lived here, in this apartment. Where have they gone?’

  She stares at me with a funny look in her eyes. ‘What men?’ she snaps.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Effie.

  ‘Please, madam,’ I persevere. ‘It’s no use lying. We were here last night. We met them. They lured us up here to this apartment.’

  She shrugs and squinches up her face, as if we are fools to pay visits on men. This is probably very true. But then she adds, ‘This apartment has been empty for years. No one will live here. It has a very bad feeling to it.’

  Effie and I look at each other. I must admit, this whole thing is giving me the creeps.

  Then the concierge is shouting again – about damage done to a valuable door, and who is to pay for it, etc etc. Effie and I hurry away from her and down the stairs. No sense in hanging around.

  §

  On the train as we trundle through the concrete suburbs we’re sitting with all our luggage crammed around us. I’m rummaging in my shoulder bag and checking the tickets, my passport and papers.

  ‘What are you being so obsessive compulsive about?’ Effie snaps.

  But I’m not being like that. I’m staring at my passport with pleasure and… wonder. I flap it under her nose, open at the page with my unflattering photo. ‘I still can’t believe I actually have a passport,’ I tell her.

  An accordionist has joined our carriage. A Turkish boy, playing an Edith Piaf song as Effie shushes me. ‘Don’t go talking about it. We don’t want everyone knowing it’s a fake.’

  But it doesn’t look fake. This passport looks exactly like the real thing.

  It’s the first piece of official documentation I’ve ever had that shows my name, my address, and my made-up date of birth – sixty years ago, rather than 200.

  I’m real! That’s how I feel. I can march up to the passport control booth and those forbidding-looking men and I can show them who I am.

  ‘Thank you, Effie,’ I tell her. ‘I know you hate magicking things up out of the ether…’

  She nods stiffly, embarrassed.

  ‘But I’d never have been able to come on this jaunt without you. You’ve given me… Well, you given me the whole world.’

  She hates anything effusive like this. And the accordionist is getting louder and closer. She gets out a couple of coins to give him, to send him away.

  She’s so modest, is Effie. But what a powerful witch she must be! To be able to magick up legal documents. And to give me a convincing identity!

  She says, ‘Some holiday this was, anyway. It turned out to be rather hectic and awful in the end, didn’t it?’

  I’m surprised at her, staring at the trails of planes in the sky. We must be close by the airport now. ‘Awful? No, not at all.’ I laugh at her perplexed expression. ‘I’ve loved every minute of it. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world.’

  ‘Really? But what about all the nastiness and… the warnings… about what’s to come?’

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should be worried and dreading getting home. But I can’t be, for some reason. I’m looking forward to landing back in the north of England and catching that train to the coast and our harbour town. I’ll feel all cosmopolitan and sophisticated for several days after we’re back in our settled routines, I’m sure.

  ‘There’s no use fretting about things to come,’ I tell Effie. ‘Anyway, we can tackle anything, can’t we? Us two? There’s nowt that can fettle us!’

  Two

  THE AUNTY MATTER

  Here we are again.

  Much as I loved swanning about on the Left Bank in Paris, and bobbing along on the green briny waters of the Venetian lagoon, I am ever so glad to be back.

  Here in Whitby, where the buildings are pressed close to each other round twisting alleyways tight as fossilized ferns, and go tumbling down to the shore. Where great hulking cliff faces rear up against the bleak North Yorkshire skies. And where the jaggedness of the ruined Abbey stands starkly above, watching over us all in our comfy beds.

  That’s where the Bitch’s Maw is hidden, within the grounds of that ancient, ruined edifice. That’s the town’s sore point, its horrible secret, its weakest spot. Up there, among the fallen stones and the long grasses, the membrane between this world and the underworld is thinnest.

  This is what Effie and I must guard. This gateway into hell, which fascinates the evil beings of this world, and which occasionally disgorges trouble from the world below.

  Several years ago we were entrusted to this perilous task by a shriveled homunculus, an ancient old woman who reckoned she was St Hilda, the very first abbess up here at the top of the town. We had no choice about it. This was our vocation. We had been doomed from the start to meet and team up for this mysterious post. Effie, who has lived here in Whitby all her life, in the very house she still occupies, and me, myself, a wanderer and a lost soul. Someone who thought she’d never find a place to settle on the face of this inhospitable earth. I was told by that wrinkled old Abbess that this was my place. It had been waiting for me forever. I was needed here.

  And very chuffed I was, too. Never having thought that I’d fit in anywhere.

  I set up my guesthouse right next door to Effie’s antiques emporium, as it happened, even before I knew her. It was as if some mystical hand was guiding my actions the whole time. I chose this ramshackle tall building, just a few streets up the hill from the harbour, and I set about rehabilitating and re-configuring its rooms to create a tip-top B&B for the holiday trade. I began with just two rooms and have added a new one each year, as opulent and as extravagant as I can make them.

  And so six years have passed rather speedily and pleasantly.

  Obviously, there have been interruptions to the sedate pace of life at the seaside, and supernatural calamities of all kinds. I would be lying if I said it hadn’t been hectic round here. Terrifying, sometimes, if truth be told. But Effie and I – and our young friends, too – have faced off all kinds of tribulations and won through. That’s the most important thing.

  It was while we were feeling on top of things and, exhausted by our most recent investigations and adventures, the two of us had decided to take our little holiday abroad. We reasoned that Whitby could look after itself for a while. Or rather, our young friends who’ve helped us in various to-do’s, they could step into our shoes for
just a little while. Everything would be fine, we were sure.

  These thoughts are playing on my mind all the way home on the flight to Leeds International and then the train to Middlesbrough, and the final tiny train that chugs slowly through the lush green countryside to the coast. I’m thinking – why, anything could have happened while our backs were turned. Those are just kids we left in charge. Well, Robert is in his early thirties and Penny not far behind him, and Gila is from another dimension, so we’re not sure exactly what age he is. But even so, it was a lot to ask them, to guard the citizens of Whitby and this whole material plane against the ineffable forces of darkness. Maybe we’ve been foolhardy.

  It’s on the chilly platform at Middlesbrough where Effie notices my worried expression and winkles these thoughts out of me. We’re at a café table on the concourse, still feeling somewhat continental, and she’s picking daintily at a Scotch egg. Brushing crumbs off her mac. I’ve just got to the bit about leaving our friends and our town to the ineffable forces of darkness when she rolls her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Brenda. They’ll be fine. You know they will. If anything terrible had happened, they’d have gotten in touch with us, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say, wondering at how she can keep so calm and centred.

  ‘They would have rang us. Texted us. They’d have left messages on my smart phone or on email.’ She’s looking like she’s not enjoying her Scotch egg very much. ‘I mean, I used to think Robert was a bit flighty and silly, but you know, I’ve come not only to like him, over recent years, but also to think of himself as a rather sensible young man. I’d even call him capable.’

  This is high praise indeed, coming from Effie. She never thinks anyone can be trusted with anything, apart from herself. Everyone else staggers about in a world of ineptitude and silliness when compared with her. She can make you feel quite inadequate, if you don’t watch out.

  ‘Maybe we should never have gone away,’ I fret.

  ‘Too late for that now,’ she laughs. ‘Come on. Our train’s due.’

  We start gathering up all our many bags. We’re weighted down by all of this stuff. Before Effie shoulders her chic little handbag from Venice I ask her, ‘You’ve been checking, haven’t you? On your phone?’

  She pauses, mid-shouldering, and blinks. ‘Checking what?’

  ‘Your phone! For messages!’

  I could swear she turns white on the spot. She drops her luggage and starts rummaging about in another of her bags. ‘I haven’t! I haven’t switched it on once! I’ve heard if you keep it on abroad it makes your bill go rocketing sky high!’

  I watch her fumbling through various bits of paraphernalia before she retrieves the expensive phone she bought some time before our holiday. It takes some moments to warm up and come back to life.

  ‘What were you thinking of?’ I find myself shouting at her on the platform. A few teenage Goths, waiting for our train, stare at us and all our palaver. The train’s approaching down the line. ‘Are you really saying you’ve never switched it on once?’

  Effie trembles and almost drops the flaming thing. ‘I’m sorry, Brenda… I was so enjoying the holiday… I just forgot about everything…’

  My heart is pounding along with the rhythm of that rapidly approaching train. ‘But anything could have been happening…!’

  That’s when her smart bloody phone at last flashes into life. She’s got thirty two voicemails and fifty six texts. All of them are from Robert, Penny and Gila. All of them are urgent. In fact, as they go on, they get more and more urgent.

  ‘Oh, help,’ she says, looking at me.

  I could strangle her, I really could.

  Instead we manhandle all our stuff aboard the train when it pulls in and we leave Middlesbrough in a state of panic, reading and listening to all these garbled messages that tell us the story of the past few weeks at home.

  Quite a lot has been going on in our absence, it seems.

  §

  Once home, I unpack in a hurry, slinging everything about the place and getting the washer-drier churning like mad. There’s a musty smell about the B&B, an odour of old, trapped sunlight, so I fling open every window and get the sea air buffeting about the place. A spot of Montavani on the record player. A quick squish round with the furniture polish. A pot of spicy tea on the hob. I’m doing everything I can to coax the place into normality, rare as that is round here.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Brenda,’ said Effie – in a particularly cajoling tone – before we parted company at the railway station. ‘To me, they sound like rather minor cases and problems that the youngsters have had to deal with. Nothing major and nothing deadly. Nothing like what we usually have to see off!’

  I scowled at her, disgusted. ‘Who’s to say? You don’t know what’s been going on, do you?’

  ‘We know that nobody’s died,’ Effie snapped. ‘That’s something, isn’t it? I’m sure, if someone had died, Robert would have mentioned it in one of his hundreds of messages.’

  That’s when I turned on my heel and started dragging my luggage away from her. Why can’t Effie ever take danger seriously? Why can’t she ever display her concern for anyone? And why does she have to be so selfish?

  She came puffing after me, pulling her huge purple bag on wheels. ‘Here, where are you going? Don’t just walk away from me!’

  But to be honest, I’d had enough of her yap-yap-yapping these past few weeks. That voice of hers, I realised all at once, had been needling me for days now.

  So I stomped off alone, ignoring her as she hurried along behind me. Some end to our lovely trip!

  §

  When I’ve emptied my bags and made tea and the place feels a little bit more like home, that’s when I steel myself to phone Robert. It’s just about tea time and he’ll be in his office at the Miramar Hotel.

  ‘Brenda, you’re back!’ he gasps. ‘We’ve been so worried about you!’

  ‘You’ve been worried about us?’

  ‘Well, we never heard a word from you! Not a squeak!’

  ‘I never took my phone. And stupid Effie only realised when we got back home, that hers had been switched off for the full time.’

  ‘Oh, that’s why!’ he says, laughing.

  ‘But are you OK?’ I ask him. ‘You and Penny and Gila… you’re all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. We’re fine. Yes, sorry about that. We started leaving messages with Effie just to reassure you, at first, that we were getting on with things here and coping all right. But then things started going crazy and once or twice we were in pretty deep.’

  There was one terrifying phone call when they were out in the dark somewhere along the coast, and they thought some creature or other was going to kill them all. And another when they were locked up in a cell far underground, pertrified before they managed to free themselves.

  ‘Yes, it’s been rather hectic,’ says Robert. ‘That Hans Macabre? Remember him? He’s been turning up again, with his ice cream van, and trying to sell his disgusting wares to the day-trippers. And there’s been further disappearances at the Christmas Hotel. We think Mrs Claus might be up to her cannibal ways again… but there are also rumours of mermaids heard singing in the hotel’s lavatory cisterns…’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Tiny mermaids. Gila’s seen one, when he went to investigate. They’ve been luring old blokes away from their wives, apparently. And the Limbosine has been cruising about the street at night, picking up unwary victims. There’s been civil war between two of the fish and chip shops, tales of a ghostly wildcat covered in radioactive fish batter, and the Walkers are going crazy again. No one’s ever seen vamp activity like it.’

  There’s a pause. ‘Is that everything?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, I think so. I may have missed something out.’

  ‘But no one’s hurt?’ />
  ‘We’re all fine. We just got on with it, Brenda. You’ve taught us well, you know.’

  My heart glows with pride at this. ‘Thank you. It’s nice to know I can rely on you lot. That means a great deal.’

  ‘But you!’ he bursts out. ‘What about you and Effie? How was your holiday?’

  Suddenly I don’t feel much like going into the ins and outs of it all right now. ‘It had its moments,’ I say.

  ‘Was it not good, then?’

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘Are you fighting with Effie?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Stands to reason. Three weeks alone together. It’s a wonder you haven’t killed each other.’

  ‘As it happens, we didn’t have a cross word until we were back in Middlesbrough. And that was about you and your messages.’

  ‘Oh! Sorry about that!’ He’s laughing again. ‘So, did you meet any fellas on your travels? Did you see many sights? And were there any adventures? Don’t tell me you had a quiet time of it?’

  Now he’s got me laughing, with the over-eager way he’s shooting these questions at me. ‘Look, I’ll tell you all about it. Tonight. I’ll cook dinner. I can’t wait to see you all. What do you think? Are you free? Can you get Gila and Penny together?’

  ‘I’m sure I can,’ he says. ‘And of course we’ll all come. It’ll be lovely. The old gang back together again! We’ve got lots to catch up on!’

  I’m about to put the phone down when the thought strikes me: I’ll have to ask Effie. No way can I leave the old trout out.

  Then I bustle into the kitchen to have a look in my freezer and the cupboards, to see what I could fling together for supper tonight. Suddenly I’m looking forward to it more than ever. I’m back where I belong, amongst the little family I’ve built up for myself. It feels like I’ve been away longer than three weeks. But here I am! At home in Whitby once more!

  §

  ‘I’m sorry, Brenda, but I’ve got a really terrible head, and I just couldn’t face talking to that lot tonight.’