Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

“This will end when you let me—”

“No, no, no, go away! Go away!”

I took to holding on to the crow poppet, which once again offered comfort, a silken balm to the raw terror. I held it like a nun holds a cross. When Baba Lenka appeared, I would reach into the pillowcase for the doll and hold on fast, whimpering, sobbing, begging, “Leave me alone, go away, leave me alone, please! Oh, please!”

And every time, the room grew cold. The shivering that began in the dorsal spine would ripple up my back and across my arms like a breeze across a pond, making my teeth chatter and skin goose. The smell, too, was something I’d only ever encountered once before in my young life, that of rank, diseased flesh mixed with human excreta and black mould, the stench that had pervaded the farmhouse in Rabenwald.

So, I knew when she was coming.

And that she wanted something.

When you let me… when you let me…

She wasn’t going to stop, was she? The more I begged her to leave me alone – the more I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, the more I screamed – the more that fact became clear. It was going to go on and on and on… until what? Until I let her what…?

The courage to not screw up my eyes and scream anymore, to open them and keep breathing while looking her in the face, came nearly two weeks after my parents had left me to scream myself hoarse. Maybe not courage. Maybe it was exhaustion?

Baba Lenka was lying on the bed. Right next to me. Her head on the same pillow.

Look at me… look at me…

The breath stuck hard in my chest, my stomach clenched in a tight knot, and my heart slammed like a hammer into my ribs.

Don’t scream, don’t scream, see what she wants… breathe… breathe…

Slowly, very slowly, she turned towards me. A bone cracked as she did so. Fetid breath wafted into my face. And then one long, gnarled finger traced down the side of my cheek. I shut my eyes fast.

Oh God, oh God, oh God …

Opened them.

Holy hell! She was suspended over me, floating a matter of inches above my face.

The white muslin shroud, stained and dirty, dropped in folds around her, and the tissue flesh of her cadaverous face hung from shiny white cartilage. It was impossible to resist, to not look, to not see what was in those hollowed eyes boring into mine. Mesmerised, I stared right into them.

At which point there was such an almighty bang in my chest, it nearly stopped my heart. My reflection in her eyes was upside down.

Hands reached down and shook me. Someone was patting my face, more than patting – slapping. “Call the doctor, Alex! Tell him she’s got a pulse but not much of one. Christ, what’s wrong with ’er? What the bleedin’ hell’s happened?”

Brushstrokes of weak light fanned across the far wall, and a wood pigeon cooed from a nearby tree. Where was this?

“Eva, wake up, love! It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Can you ’ear me?” His voice was breaking, this man whose face swirled in mist. “We’re going to get the doctor to you, love. Your mum’s on the phone now. Christ, I think you’ve frightened yourself to bloody death. We should have got you more help, but we didn’t know what to do. We thought the memory of that place would fade, that you’d eventually forget…”

The doctor came in the next flutter of my eyelashes. Listened to my chest with a stethoscope. Did the pulse and temperature routine. “Nightmares, you say?”

This was a new doctor, not the one who’d taken me off the blue drowsy tablets.

“She had tablets earlier this year from the doctors in Eldersgate,” my mother told him. “For anxiety.” She then told him a pack of lies about what had happened at infant school last February and how a family funeral had upset me. I heard the word amitriptyline and saw him frown and shake his head.

“All right, well, the good news is I don’t think there’s much to worry about. She’s having withdrawal symptoms – hallucinations, by the sound of it – so I’ll prescribe a mild sedative to help her come off the amitriptyline and suggest she stays home from school a while longer. Meantime, she’ll need some tests to check out her cardiac function, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, as it were. Let’s give her a full MOT.”

The days blurred. And later, from the back seat of the car, petrol stations and streetlamps whizzed by in the indigo of November dusk. Our footsteps echoed along fluorescent hospital corridors, and the smell of fear and disinfectant tainted the air. My heart was okay, they told Mum and Dad while I stared up at the ceiling at cartoons of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The whole thing was due to a panic attack caused by hallucinations, just as the family doctor had said. All was perfectly normal, and there was no need to worry. Meanwhile, it would be wise to ease the withdrawal from amitriptyline by continuing with the mild sedative prescribed. Just for a while.

It made sense. Everyone was nodding and agreeing.

Mum stayed home, clacking knitting needles at the end of my bed while I drifted in and out of a sedated sleep. I’d get over this. It would pass, all come out in the wash…

And while she was there, Baba Lenka didn’t come.

The minute she left, however, as soon as dusk fell and the soft hoot of the owls blew like panpipes in the woods, that wardrobe key turned, the door groaned on its hinges, and the spirit of Baba Lenka blew over on the cold, cold wind.

Sedated now, I could no longer call out. Instead, fear washed over me in dull expectation. Paralysed, my eyes looked into pupils reflecting my upside-down face, and like pins to a magnet, the draw to look into them was unstoppable.

You must take the gift, Eva… Accept this or it will kill you!

A heated exchange drifted up from the lounge.

My eyes flicked open. The conversation was yet again about me. You could tell by all the heavy sighing.

Had a day passed since we’d got back from the hospital? Or two, maybe three? Curious, I pushed back the covers and crept to the top of the stairs to listen. The afternoon had set to a foggy drizzle, and every few seconds, car headlights lit the oak-panelled stairway in a ghostly sheen. The bloodstains on these floorboards were no longer a puzzle. The scene had played out a few times now: an elderly lady had been dragged up the stairs by her hair, having been hit hard on the side of her neck with a rolling pin. Blood drooled from the side of her mouth and out of her nose, every step jolting the bones of her spine. I saw, too, the tall man who had done it, the thin strands of greying hair that barely covered his pasty scalp. Grim-lipped, he had the gleam of self-righteousness, of entitlement, in pale eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Mother’, he called her – never ‘Mum’, always ‘Mother’.

“Well, we can’t go on like this, can we? It’s been the best part of a year, and nothing’s worked. She’s just not right, is she? And we’re broke, Pete – I have to get some work. That plastic sheet covering the wall isn’t safe, and come winter it’ll be bloody freezing. I can’t sit home all day every day doing bloody nothing.”

“I agree. It’d be better if you could work, then I’d ’ave time to try and brick it up meself. As it is, I’m on double shifts.”

“Chicken and the bloody egg, though, isn’t it? I can’t get out for interviews and leave her, can I?”

“Well, do you think she’s well enough to go to school, then?”

“You know she isn’t. Anyway, the doctors all say she’s perfectly normal. No, I think what we need here is a priest.”

“You what? You mean a bloody vicar? Are you joking? It’s mental illness—”