Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

Give us work… give us work… Eva!

What to do? What to do?

My rational mind then blanked completely and an automaton took over, exactly like before. Vaguely aware of my actions, I had a hot shower, shoved the dirty linen into the washing machine, then dressed and hurried over to the nursing home early.

Instinctively knowing who to pick out, I took the back stairs two at a time, heading straight for the top floor. One of the ladies had developed a nasty chest infection following a fall a couple of weeks ago. No one expected her to last more than another day. So what difference would it make? She’d had her life, and I wanted mine – that was it.

Bedridden, her lungs were rattling with fluid, the oxygen mask hissing when I walked in and softly shut the door behind me. She lay prone, having toppled sideways off a mound of pillows, deep in an opiate-induced dream.

Yet the second my shadow crossed the far wall, her eyes snapped open and her hands gripped hold of the sheets. The whites of her eyes grew large, fingers scrabbling for the buzzer.

Calmly I moved it from her reach and turned off the oxygen supply. Then, pulling off her mask, tugged loose one of the pillows from behind her. Once more, it was like watching someone else commit the act, only this time there was a significant pause, an extra moment taken in which to witness the build-up of terror in the victim’s face. It was curiosity, nothing more, noting how her horrified stare flicked to the all-enveloping shadow reflected on the wall in front. The shape had spread into one of giant wings that towered over the bed, and the rush of an Alpine breeze whistled over the sheets. The room that had been bright with the dawn sun a moment ago, now darkened to night, and the fluorescent light buzzed and flickered overhead.

“Get away from me, demon,” she whispered.

My head cocked to one side as, poised with the pillow, a transfer of information began to take place. Knowledge channeled into me, relaying in full every indiscretion she had ever committed – from the baby angrily shaken but declared a cot death, the letter concealed from a close friend because she wanted the man for herself, to money stolen from petty cash. And just before her wrinkled mouth could work itself into a scream, I snuffed her out.

Later that day when I walked out of the nursing home, commended this time ‘for taking it well’, my hair had already returned to its previous state of glossy and full, the sores had disappeared, and my eyes were as bright as a squirrel’s. I would be keeping my date!

The automaton feeling, however, persisted, with only the dim realisation this could not continue. I couldn’t murder people every other week for the rest of my life! Besides, sooner or later it would be noticed. But how, then, did I stay well?

The only person who might have the answer would be my mother. I’d let the pressure on my dad slide because of Luke and because of work, but now the urgency was back. What had she read in those books, and was there some other way to control this horrible legacy? Because if there wasn’t, then what hellish path lay ahead? Die but take the demons with me into eternity? Or murder my way through to the bitter end? I wanted a normal life – that of a teenaged girl who enjoyed music and dance, boys and fun – what was wrong with that? Instead, I was going to go down as a mass murderer – one of those vacant-eyed people led away from court after the gruesome truth came out – a tabloid sensation, a mystery, a monster.

As it transpired, the delay in seeing Mum was because of Earl Hart’s funeral. Dad had been obliged to spend time with Gran, consoling her and making arrangements not only for the funeral but also for her future. She wasn’t coping well. Maud told him the details of Earl’s gruesome death, about the gangrene that had spread through his genitals into major organs, how his private parts had turned ebony before being amputated. He’d died in agony and terror, screaming for mercy. She would never get over it. Never.

“I wouldn’t have wished that on anyone, not even him,” Dad said as we sat on the bus on the way to visit my mother. “Not even after all he said about my wife – your mother – or what he did to me and then to you. I wouldn’t want that for my worst enemy. It were evil. Pure evil.”

Indeed.

We fell silent, and for a moment I felt bad. For my grandma, anyway.

“At least I’ll have a bit more money to spare now,” he said.

“How come?”

A flush spread up his neck. Oh, he’d made a mistake! Wanted to backtrack. But the thought had surfaced, and I caught it. “Oh, I see. You were paying them for my keep?”

The moment of guilt and shame I’d briefly felt, now dissipated.

“Well, it were only right. But now I can afford private psychotherapy for your mum. It’s expensive, but she can ’ave it. I’d do anything.”

All that time and they were paid…

“Anyhow, it got me thinking,” he said. We were on the top deck, heading towards an old Victorian asylum on the outskirts of Leeds. “You should be allowed to speak to your mother. She’s your family, and no matter what her grandmother did, you have a right to know. I still say it’s going to shock you, though. You’ll not be the same again, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“So she’s not sedated?”

“No. I thought I were protecting you, Eva. But you’re right – you’re older now, and you’ve worked in that nursing home and settled in really well. The decision I made to leave you with Earl and Maud is something I’ve got to live with. At the time I really did think I were doing me best; I were at the end of me tether, I suppose.”

I nodded, gazing out of the window as the tree-lined roads gave way to roundabouts and a dual carriageway.

“I’ve taken this bus journey every single day for years, sometimes just to hold her hand for half an hour. Some days she’s all there, if you know what I mean? Others she’s away with the fairies. But there were never anyone else. I just didn’t want to be asked about her every time we met. I didn’t think you’d be able to move on… Ah, shit…”

“What?”

“Seeing as it’s confession time, I admit I found it hard to look at you sometimes, too. It weren’t your fault, I know that, love, but what happened after that funeral – well, you were ill, really ill for a long time, and I couldn’t help thinking it all went back to that. We’d ’ave been all right if it weren’t for—”

“Me?”

His turn to look out of the window.

After a minute I patted his arm. We weren’t demonstrative as a family, never had been. “It’s okay. I understand.”

He nodded. Clouds of sadness exuded from him. There he sat, so alone, so hopeless. Now was not the time to tell him about Luke, so the opportunity came and went. Besides, he probably wouldn’t approve. We’d been seeing each other almost every night. How quickly he’d become my world. He lifted my heart. Gave me hope.

Although his remarkable resemblance to Heinrich Blum had been a jolt – perhaps Lenka and I simply shared a physical type – there the similarity really did end. Luke was not a clever manipulator, from a wealthy family, or sent to recruit me into a satanic sect. He was just a guy in his late twenties who Dad would consider far too old for his sixteen-year-old daughter. So I didn’t tell him. Or anyone. It was easy to lie to Helen, to make up late shifts, extra shifts, fabricated meetings with my dad… She just smiled and told me to make sure I was back by ten.

Aware suddenly of the dopy look on my face as my thoughts drifted back to Luke, I brought myself up sharp. He must be kept a secret. At least for now.

The journey turned out to be far longer than expected, the bus trundling along the dual carriageway, then onto an A road leading to Harrogate. The psychiatric hospital had been built well away from the city, a mansion that stood alone, its stone walls weathered black. Set in lawned grounds at the end of a drive lined with rhododendrons, the surrounding fields, which blew flat with sleet and northerly winds for six months of the year, were today studded with daisies and dandelions open to the sun.