Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

“Hot day,” said Dad as we jumped off the bus.

“Yeah.”

My mother’s room would be stuffy. As we walked up the drive in the full blaze of the heat, I slipped inside her skin, inhabiting her mind. She didn’t want to feel the fan of a cool breeze on her face despite the sheen of perspiration glistening on her face and chest – nothing Alpine, nothing wintry. She sensed our footsteps echoing on the stone steps to the front door, clicking now along the tiled corridor towards her room at the end, facing the back of the house in the shade. The sheets are cream, and she’s sitting up, wearing a pale pink nightdress. She’s been sickly, the crown of her head still pounding with the weight of sedatives, and her wrists are sore from restraints. But her feeble heart is jittery now, anticipation shooting through her arteries, tingling in her fingertips, sparking hotly in her cheeks. Someone is coming. Someone she must speak to.

Dad knocked on the door, and in we went.

My eyes locked with hers.

“Eva, thank God!”

“I’ll leave you to chat, then,” said Dad, plonking down the chocolates he’d brought. He kissed Mum’s cheek. “Glad you’re feeling a bit better, love. I hate seeing you like that, you know, like—”

She never took her eyes off mine. “It’s all right, Pete, you go for a walk. The lake’s pretty at the moment.”

“If you’re sure?”

“Yes, positive. Go – Eva and I need to talk.”

After he’d shut the door, she said, “Bloody ’ell, you’ve grown!”

“Course I ’ave.”

She laughed. “Come ’ere, love. I’ve missed you something chronic.”

I rushed over to the bed and hugged her, snuffling into the warmth of her hair and neck, inhaling the scent of her skin – a hint of rose talc mixed with the sourness of a heavily medicated body. “I’ve missed you, too.” It was hard not to cry, and my throat was constricting with the effort of not doing so. I could feel the pent-up sobs in her, too.

After a few minutes I pulled away a little to look at her, to take in the reality of her presence, swallowing repeatedly until my voice was steady enough to speak. “Have you been here in this room all these years? No one would tell me anything.”

“Eva, listen, we haven’t got much time. Your dad agreed to an hour at the most, and that was only because I said I’d scream the place down if he didn’t. He doesn’t want that, he’s worn out, and I’m weak and getting weaker with every episode, you know, with every relapse. To tell you the truth, love, I’m usually sedated. If I’m not sedated I get ill very quickly. So this visit is an exception.”

I nodded.

“Okay, well I’ll get straight to the point because we’ve got so much to say and not nearly enough time. Nor do I know when I’ll be well enough to see you again. Anyway, as soon as you turned sixteen I knew that no matter what – we had to talk.”

“Yes, me too.”

“I’m frightened for you. Eva.” She stroked my arm, up and down, her eyes glistening with tears.

I nodded. “Because of the legacy?”

“You know about it, then?”

“Mum, I need help. I’ve been having vivid dreams about Baba Lenka for eight years now – visions—”

She nodded. “Yes, your dad told me. Okay, right, well there are things you need to know and fast. Your dad ’asn’t got a cat in ’ell’s chance of ever understanding this – he still thinks you can lead a normal life, but I can see just from looking at you that’s not the case.”

“It started when we got home from Rabenwald. Every night I’ve lived her life like I was her, in explicit detail, right up to when she was initiated into der Orden der schwarzen Sonne—”

My mother’s eyes flashed. “Oh, my giddy aunt.”

“The dreams stopped dead on my sixteenth, when she became a member of the Order. Since then, there’ve only been brief flashes of scenes, kind of like a bad signal on TV – of journeys through forests, always at night, sometimes in carriages, other times in the back of luxury cars, various men, castles and underground tunnels with rooms underneath–”

“Rituals?”

“Yes, blood rites and people wearing animal masks, all chanting and humming. Usually it starts with a bell being rung, a call to the underworld, I think?”

She nodded, bit her lip.

“I lie there paralysed and forced to watch. It’s like she’s trying to show me what was going on, but since her initiation it’s all taking place from a distance. It’s so hard to explain, but it’s as if the real Lenka fell backwards down a tunnel – like she was taken over and became a robot… I know, it sounds mad but—”

“She was possessed.”

“How do you mean?”

She shook her head. “So you understand what Baba Lenka was? You know our family was embroiled in the black arts?”

“Yes, and Mum, I get ill, really badly sick and—”

She narrowed her eyes. “Yet here you are, all glossy and healthy?”

She was focusing on my eye, the one Nicky had commented on, and I looked away.

“I heard your grandad came to a sticky end? Painful way to go, that, wasn’t it, love?”

I nodded, staring at the floor.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, is there, Mum? I mean you’re not mad at all. You’re possessed, aren’t you? Is that what happened?”

She glanced at the clock. “Ten minutes have gone already. You have to listen now because this could be our last chance.”

“Why, what do you mean by ‘last chance’? And what is possession? Who possessed Lenka and who possesses you? Is that why you’re sedated all the time and look so poorly? I mean, look at you, Mum! You can’t weigh more than six stone and you’re covered in bruises.”

Gently, I pushed up the sleeve of her bed jacket, and gasped at the extent of the dark purple marks on her arms.

“I’m not always myself, that’s what I’m trying to say. I can only think straight when I’m not sedated, but when I’m not sedated the attacks happen. Like I said at the start, I get weaker with each relapse, so this is dangerous for me, Eva. It’s when they get in.”

I felt the cold breeze then, and I know she did, too.

“Who gets in? The demons?”

She nodded. “Just listen now. First of all, when we went to Rabenwald for Baba Lenka’s funeral I wasn’t happy about it, not one bit. I did not want us to go, and we couldn’t afford to go either, but we were tricked.”

“Tricked? By—?”

She shook her head impatiently at the interruption. “When I was about six years old, my mother, Marika, committed suicide, and I was brought up in a children’s home, as you know. I had few memories of her apart from tales of the forest where she grew up in Bohemia. Now, do you remember those old folk at the funeral?”

“Yes.”

“Right, well, they’re called the Watchers, and they raised her like themselves, pretty much as a gypsy. She never stayed with her mother – with Lenka – but the older she got, the more was revealed to her. There was no mother and daughter bond, I can promise you that – Baba Lenka terrified my mother. She called her a satanic witch. Anyway, as soon as she got the chance she fled, and escaped to England just before the war, which was where she met my father – your maternal grandfather. Unfortunately he was killed in action shortly after I was born. But this is what you need to know, Eva – the Order tracked my mother down.”

My heart lurched.

“She knew about them, you see, and of course she also carried the family legacy. They traced her and tried to make her return to Rabenwald, which was where Baba Lenka was living by that time. After the Second World War ended, Lenka crossed over the border to Bavaria along with thousands of other Sudetens and took up residence in that farmhouse – the one we went to and I wish to God we hadn’t, especially after what I found out later. So anyway, my mother had to pack up and run again. She took a train up to the north of England, where she left me in a children’s home before taking her own life soon after. Maybe she hoped I’d disappear into obscurity and be spared. Maybe she thought it would end there; I don’t know.”