Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

While he was full monologue, my body began to twitch and then jerk alarmingly. Flour was all over my hands, and a blinding pain shot down the side of my neck… Strong hands grabbed my hair and began to drag me along the floor. The roots were being yanked out of my head. I tried to reach up, but my skull cracked against the foot of the stairs, then, oh God, the pain… bump, bump, bump… every metal ridge of those stairs slammed into each vertebra. My leg twisted, and screams rent the air. Blood was pouring down my nose… the back of my head pounding…

“What’s she doing?” Colin stood up and began to back towards the door. “It looks like a fit!”

“Oh, bloody ’ell. Call the doctors, tell them it’s an emergency – hurry up!” My mother ran over and slapped my face repeatedly. “Eva! Eva! Can you hear me?”

I think she must have held me down until the doctor came, the same one who’d prescribed mild sedatives. He wacked up the dose and injected a syringe full of something for good measure. “Well, she’s calm enough now, but I think we might need to consider epilepsy. That could be it.”

“Epilepsy? Oh, bleedin’ Nora. What’s that when it’s at home?”

After that incident, the days grew shorter. The beech trees in the woods shone silvery in the moonlight, and fog crept in at dawn, muffling the smoky air with damp, grey mizzle. Sooty took to watching me until the light faded and the moon rose, his yellow eyes steady, purr hypnotic. Sometimes he sat on my chest, creeping in as close as he could, as if drawing fear itself from my breath.

And then one day, my mother must have felt secure, or desperate, enough to leave the house. Why not? I slept soundly all day and all night. It was just after lunch. She said she had an interview for a waitressing job in a local steakhouse. It would mean Dad wouldn’t have to do double shifts and could mend the hole in the wall. She wanted to surprise him with the good news.

“Just carry on sleeping, princess. I won’t be long.”

Her words floated on the air.

She was gone for two hours.

And when she came back, her screams ricocheted around the whole street. During that short period of time, someone had slashed through the plastic sheeting at the side of the house and burgled us. We didn’t have much, but they’d taken the television set and Dad’s whisky. Most of the glassware had gone and my mother’s pearls and engagement ring. The only room that hadn’t been touched was mine.

She bounded upstairs. “Eva! Wake up! Eva – oh, thank God.”

“What?”

“Well, didn’t you hear anything?”

“What? No, nothing apart from you screaming just now.”

“Eva, we’ve been burgled. The bloody television’s gone. My jewellery… Are you telling me you didn’t hear a thing?”

“No, I swear. I’m sorry, Mum.”

She sat on the edge of my bed then and cried, just put her head in her hands and howled. “I can’t take any more of this, I just can’t.”

I reached out through a misty haze to touch her. “I’m sorry, Mum.”

“I’m at the end of my tether, Eva.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So you keep bloody saying!”

The harshness of her tone was a painful jar. My face screwed up, and tears burst out.

“Oh, don’t start, Eva. Just don’t.”

I cried harder.

Her anger was a rabid dog unleashed. Pacing the room, she stomped back and forth, the skin taut across those glass cheekbones, every sinew tight in her face. She wanted to hit someone very badly indeed. The flame red of her hair glinted like fire in the low winter sun, and then she swung around to face me.

“I’ve tried not to dwell on this Eva, I really have. But I can’t help thinking this is all down to you. Ever since the funeral, you changed. The day before, you were perfectly all right – a nice, normal child – but something happened, didn’t it? I can almost see the moment. It’s on the edge of my mind…”

I stared at her.

To you …

“We took such a bloody risk even going, but I were told she’d left us the ’ouse, and even that were a bloody lie…” Her eyes, so like mine – dark grey, slanted upwards – sparked with a sudden flash of understanding. “You didn’t take owt, did you? Remember when I told you how important it was not to take anything away? Either from the house or the coffin?”

I shook my head.

“But you took something, didn’t you? You must ’ave.”

“No.”

“It’s there on the edge of my mind, something. What am I missing?”

“I didn’t take anything, Mum. The only thing—”

“What? What only thing?”

“Well, there was something on the lane…” I so badly didn’t want her to take the poppet away. It was a good thing, not a bad thing, and had nothing to do with Baba Lenka or her coffin. I started to cry again. “It was just a toy on the lane. I found it. I didn’t take it from the house or the coffin, and it wasn’t Baba Lenka’s. It was just a doll.”

All her colour washed away. She lunged over and gripped my shoulders “What doll?”

I turned my face to one side.

She shook me. “What doll, Eva?”

Tearfully I reached inside the pillowcase for the little thing that had brought me comfort night after night, and took out the crow poppet.

“Flamin’ ’ell!” She whipped it off me. “So that’s it! I knew there were summat! Right, well, this little fucker’s gonna get burned to high hell.”

“No, please! It’s just a doll.”

“It is not just a doll, Eva, it’s a witch’s poppet, and don’t you dare tell your dad about this. It’s what’s called an alraun. And because of this, you’ve brought a curse home with you. I expressly told you not to an’ all. I said, did I not, ‘do not take anything away’? And now look – see how ill you are, and look what’s ’appened to us all! Think about it if you don’t believe me. And think hard an’ all. You either invite this stuff in or you accept it… either way, it comes through you!”

I was bawling my eyes out by then, afraid of my mother’s anger yet more afraid still of the consequences of burning the alraun. It was part of me.

“Right, I’m getting rid of this, and it’s got to be done before your dad gets home. Pray to God it’s not too late. Now where are those bloody books… it’ll be in there… what to do to reverse what you’ve done and banish this thing to high hell.”

Books? The ones she took from Baba Lenka’s house? She’d told me not to take anything, yet she had!

The tears dried on my cheeks. Why would she have books that would banish things to hell? What did she mean? And how come she knew so much about a witch’s poppet? Everyone had been telling me it was all in my imagination – the illness, the wardrobe door, the visions. Yet now Mum was going to do some kind of spell. Fear gripped my stomach. This was all real, wasn’t it? Not my imagination, not mental illness, not brought on by trauma or tablets – but real, and that was why my mother was so frightened. Deep inside, I think I knew that all along.

My voice caught in my throat. “Please give it back to me. You can’t hurt it or bad things will happen—”

Alas, she was already pulling down the loft ladder, fully intent on locating Baba Lenka’s books.

I couldn’t even watch from the window. Instead, I lay on the bed as flames crackled and rose from the garden below. Dirty smoke and cinders billowed in on the breeze, along with my mother’s alien chants. It coiled down my throat and infused my lungs, the very essence of the alraun transferring the spirit of another on the current of a burning wind.

Swallowing and coughing, a cage of incineration now surrounded me, the sizzle and spit of melting flesh and muscles became mine, and scorching pain roared down my throat, the ferocious ignition of hair and clothing an enveloping inferno… Gulping down the smoke, my mind blanked into a tunnel of darkness as consciousness slipped away amid loud cries of ‘Burn Witch!’ and ‘Go to hell!’ Thrashing around, clutching my head, kicking and lunging for air, I was burning to death.