Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

Those night terrors would start the minute my bedroom door was shut and the landing light turned off at seven in the evening. By then, Dad was counting every penny, and no light was ever left on if it didn’t need to be. Downstairs, the sound of murmuring voices on the television would drift up the stairs, and Mum and Dad would come up around ten. Which meant three hours up there on my own. Sooty would always leave at dusk. As soon as the light faded, he stood up, stretched, then leapt onto the windowsill to be let out. Looking back, I realised he wasn’t ever with me at night and only returned at dawn.

The first time it happened was about two weeks after we’d moved in. I was probably on about half the dose of the blue tablets by then and had trouble getting off to sleep. Dad had shut the bedroom door and clomped back downstairs. Initially it was more of a feeling that something was off, that my stomach was prickling and my pulse points ached. I lay there, eyes wide open. It was far darker than usual. It’s hard to explain except the blackness was total and seemed to breathe, hiss, be alive. The sense of foreboding racked up rapidly, exactly as it had on the hill to the cemetery in Bavaria, and all at once, the need to get out became overwhelming. Every nerve was firing. I imagine it’s the same kind of panic as being trapped underground or buried alive. All I knew was I had to get out.

This is our fresh start; this is where you get well… fresh start… fresh start…

I sat up, hot, breathing hard.

Mustn’t scream, mustn’t cry out… mustn’t ruin it… This is me being silly, causing problems for them …

But the atmosphere was electric. Someone else was here in the room – they were breathing, loudly, the rasping gasps of one old and sickly. Who was here? Who? A feeling of menace crawled up my back; pressure pounded on the top of my head. Someone was going to arise out of nothing, out of the air, and materialise in front of me. What was coming?

My eyes burned into the void. A face would appear, or eyes… something horrible… And then what? I couldn’t scream, could not even breathe… my throat had constricted. I was going to see eyes in the darkness, and I thought my heart would stop.

There was a lull, a moment.

Before what sounded like the dull, rolling roar of a strong wind whipping up. Not from outside, not thunder, but from inside the room – to be precise, from inside the wardrobe! This had to be a dream. But here I was, sitting up, ramrod straight with my eyes wide open. And the wind was not imagined, either – it was icy, blowing the hair back from my forehead, whistling as it had that day in Bavaria, racing down from the mountains and through the trees. The cries of crows carried on the air along with the wailing cries of the ancients. Every detail of the funeral procession then began to replay, as if we were still standing there on the hill to the cemetery, as sharp and clear as the day it had happened. The wintry blast nipped my face, and the smell of smoke and pine filled the air.

My breath had lodged like an iron nut in my chest, and I could neither breathe in nor out. My lungs had set to stone. In desperation I tried to move my arm, to knock something onto the floor so someone would come; I was in bed at home, not here on this hill in the freezing cold. I was not on this mountainside but trapped in a waking nightmare. Yet even as I told myself that, the daylight of the scene switched to night, and the sun became a brilliant full moon, starlight glittering on the snow.

The shock of what happened next caused my breath to come back with such force it left me gasping as frantically as a person half drowned and given the kiss of life. Something was walking out of the wardrobe. And taking form.

I shut my eyes, opened them again. She was still there. Only much, much closer.

Wake up, Eva! Wake up… wake up!

Baba Lenka, with her twisted, broken neck, was almost level with the end of the bed, ankle bones cracking and crunching with every step, that one staring eye fixed directly on me just as it had the day she’d fallen out of the casket.

I screamed so loudly that Dad thundered up the stairs two at a time.

“What the hell’s happened? Has someone broken in?”

He had the light on, was scanning the room, his face ashen.

“Baba Lenka’s in the wardrobe!”

“You what?”

“She’s in the wardrobe,” I wailed, sobs hitching in my throat. “The door opened, and she came out.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, shouting down to Mum that it was just a nightmare.

“Sweetie, she’s not in the wardrobe, okay? It’s just a bad dream.”

“But I wasn’t asleep.

“You were, chicken. You’d nodded off and had a bad dream. It’s understandable considering what happened, but it was just an old lady’s funeral, and it was eight months ago now. She’s dead and gone. And when people die, they go to heaven. They go to be with God. It’s over. They definitely don’t come back and open little girls’ wardrobes. It’s not possible.” He walked over to the wardrobe and yanked open each of the doors. “Look – just your clothes in there, see?” He parted the new little school pinafores and dresses to show the solid wood at the back. “That’s it. It’s just a lump of wood, and there is nothing in it other than your things.”

I bought it. I believed him. I wanted to so badly.

He smoothed back my hair. “Maybe those drowsy tablets delayed the reaction. But it’s all over, all right? We should never have taken you, but we’d no one to leave you with – we couldn’t tell your grandparents we were going, you see? Not with how me dad is about Germany. Listen, it were a bad experience for you, but you’re home now and you’re quite safe. So go back to sleep, there’s a good girl, and let us grown-ups have a bit of peace – I’ve to get up at four in t’ morning.”

“Okay. Sorry, Daddy.”

“That’s all right. You just call me if you’re frightened, chicken. But remember this – only human beings can hurt you. If a big fella comes to take you away, then you scream your lungs out, all right? But nothing else can hurt you – no old ladies coming out of wardrobes, and there are no ghosts.”

I smiled.

He got up, walked to the door and turned out the light.

But as the door clicked shut and I turned over to go to sleep, doing what he’d told me to do, Baba Lenka was staring right back. Up close. With her head on the pillow next to mine.

“She’ll ’ave to see a psychiatrist, Pete.”

My parents stood over me, faces bobbing like white balloons, voices disembodied.

By then, the night terrors had been going on for weeks. After the first few episodes of bloodcurdling screams, my parents had stopped running upstairs and decided instead on a tactic of ignoring me. Maybe that would work? Maybe it was attention-seeking and would stop?

Only it didn’t. As soon as the bedroom door shut, the blackness thickened and crackled. It pulsated, hissed, watched and breathed. She knew I was alone. Knew I’d be lying there fixating on that wardrobe, never wavering, waiting for the key to turn in the lock and the door to nudge ajar… until the creak sounded as it eased away from the hinges, followed by a rush of icy air fresh from the snow-topped mountains.

Baba Lenka was as starkly vivid to the eye as anyone else, the rotting stench gag-inducing as she hobbled out, bones and joints cracking and splintering with every step. I could not face what was coming, my small heart banging so hard it hurt. I screwed up my eyes, repeating over and over that she was not, could not, be real. But when I opened them again, she was inches away from my face. And my throat was raw from screaming. But like I said, after the first few nights, my mum and dad didn’t come running anymore, didn’t switch on the light or say it was a dream. They left me screaming – screaming with my hands over my ears until I began banging my head on the walls to get her out of it.