Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

Eldersgate sounds nice, doesn’t it? It isn’t. It’s an ex-mining village southwest of Leeds; the mine had closed, and the people were angry. The women stood hard-faced in doorways, with their arms folded. Without exception, they were big, wielded slaps harder than men, and meted out judgements more confidently and mercilessly than any judge on earth. They queued for fish ’n’ chips in their slippers and saved up Green Shield stamps for little luxuries like a new floor mop. Most of the secondary schoolkids bunked off school to loiter in the park, smoking Silk Cut and terrorising people, and the majority of working-age men rolled out of bed and into the pub the minute it opened. There were three shops in the middle of the estate – a butcher’s, a co-op, and a chippie – and on the corner near the main road was the pub – The Greyhound – along with a betting shop and a working men’s club.

My dad was one of the few who worked full-time. He was the postman, and prior to the trip to Bavaria, ‘Postman Pat’ had been the main chant behind me on the walk to and from school: ‘Postman Pat’ along with ‘Gingernut’. Only now it had been replaced with ‘Achtung’, ‘Nazi!’ and ‘Heil Hitler!’ along with goose steps and salutes.

One of the gossiping mothers had found it necessary to spread the news Mum was German. She knew no details other than what my mother had told her in the Co-op one morning, that we had to go to a funeral and Deidre from Number Seven was looking after the cat.

So now I was a Nazi.

It seemed nothing from that ill-fated trip could be forgotten. Even the Alpine winter had followed us home. Eldersgate, never pretty, was now coated in grimy snow. Piles of slush lined the roads, the pithead wheel starkly silhouetted against the bleak and distant moors. The estate’s pebble-dashed semis hunkered beneath a dismal wash of sleet as evenings set in early, televisions flickered through unlined curtains, and drunken rows thudded through the walls. When the power grid cut out, it always came as a shock, a collective groan when televisions died and everyone was plunged once more into icy darkness.

We walked to school through the slush, faces pink and stinging. The classrooms were gloomy and unheated, each desk lit with one candle. We sat in wet gabardines and sopping gloves, citing times tables while squeezing fingers and toes together to keep the blood pumping. My ears hurt with a deep ache… Well, that’s what I remember – the cold, the candles, the dark. And that terrible morning when my life, and that of my family, changed forever.

We hadn’t been home long, maybe a week, but the odd, disconnected feeling persisted as if a sheet of glass separated me from the outside world. And it was impossible to shake the cold – it shivered like an icy breeze inside of me – or the feeling that day was night. And the strangest thing of all was that the girls who’d been my best friends before the trip were now whispering behind my back. A band of evil little Machiavellians, they exchanged significant looks or pulled faces whenever I spoke.

Well, that particular morning, while it was still dark and candles were flickering on the wooden desks, we were instructed to split into groups for a reading project. Expectantly I turned to my trusted set of friends – Sharon, Jill, Lizzie, and a girl called Maxine Street, already gathering up books – when Maxine gave the others that significant look, and the four of them shot off without me. They actually linked arms, moving fast and purposefully towards the reading corner. It had been planned; of that there was no doubt. And the air of daring excitement about them confirmed it.

The instigation, of course, had come from Maxine. Maxine was the cool girl – the one whose straight black hair had been cut into a pageboy style while the rest of us still had pigtails. She was the first to have a cheesecloth blouse to wear at weekends, and white boots that laced up the front. She told us to like T-Rex and dump the Osmonds.

Yes, she was the one. And when that knowledge hit me and I saw what she had done, I hated her to murder pitch.

Without further thought, as the giggling girls ran past – leaving me alone, stunned and humiliated – I unzipped my pencil case, took out the geometry compass and, with wildly shaking hands, hurried after them. Adrenalin obliterated all further thought and I fair flew into the reading room.

As I approached, Lizzie turned. The room was unlit save for a few slats of light through the blinds and buttery flicks of candlelight, but a flash of horror registered on her face…

Just before my hand plunged the compass needle into the back of Maxine Street’s calf muscle. I stabbed her hard, over and over and over, and I meant to do it.

Afterwards, there was a missing jigsaw piece in my memory, only this vague recollection of howling hysterically in class later on that day. The teacher, young and pregnant in a flowery smock, with a topknot on her head, snapped, “For God’s sake, Eva, shut up!”

Her words were like a slap, and the misery stuck in my throat un-sobbed. How did I get home? I don’t know. What happened to Maxine? Again, I don’t know. I think she had to have stitches, and so did Lizzie because she’d put out her hand to protect Maxine. Oh God, yes, I can see her hand now – splayed over the other girl’s leg… and all the blood… gushing into her white ankle sock.

Mum and Dad found out from the headmaster because I sure as hell wasn’t telling. A stone of fear dropped into the cold pond of my stomach at the look on my mother’s face. I was drifting away… a small figure clutching on to a balloon as it caught on the wind and lifted off… She changed towards me, too. Even her voice changed – her entire demeanour. “We’ll have to go to the police. Or a psychiatrist! God only knows, because I bloody don’t.”

What actually happened was I never attended that school again. The ensuing months became a blur, spent lying on my bed in a stupor. I think a man came to ask questions. All that remains of that time is the view from the bedroom window of the distant pit wheel and the moors, and the sound of tinny bursts of laughter emanating from the black-and-white television set downstairs. The only companion I had was Sooty the cat, named after Sooty out of ‘Sooty and Sweep’. He slept on my bed, came in through the bedroom window, and exited the same way. Mum even took to leaving his food out at night because he never came in the house except to my room.

Sometimes I’d take out the strange little straw dolly with its beak head and feather arms, a prize kept hidden since the day it had rolled down the lane to bump against my shoe… To you … The little creature was endlessly fascinating and not at all frightening, just the opposite, in fact, for on the day of the funeral, it had offered both distraction and consolation, and I clung to it – my secret – the one good thing to have come out of that horrible trip. Someone had fashioned it with such care and skill. It was quite a work of art: a small half-bird, half-man had been moulded from clay, the chest bound with hemp, glossy black feathers stretching outwards in the shape of a cross to resemble a scarecrow. Closer inspection revealed engravings on the neck and forehead, little nicks of a knife, tiny symbols.

Had some other child lost it? It seemed like something that would be made for a child, for a girl… or what else could it be?

As the months drifted on, I lay watching clouds scud across the sky. Occasionally the sound of other children’s shouts carried on the wind, or the clunk of a cricket bat on willow. But I never went back to that school or saw any of those girls again. One day, it occurred to me the sun seemed lower in the sky; a soft haze hovered over the purple moors, and the leaves had become tinged with gold.