Baba Lenka Read online

  Baba Lenka

  An Occult Horror Novel

  By Sarah E. England

  Copyright © 2020 Sarah England

  Cover illustration by Raven Wood

  Cover design by Gina Dickerson: www.rosewolfdesign.co.uk

  Editor: Colleen Wagner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The only exceptions to this are Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm 11, who although mentioned here in a fictitious context, did, of course, exist.

  1st Edition

  www.sarahenglandauthor.co.uk

  Dark Fiction by Sarah E. England

  About the author:

  Sarah England is a UK author. Originally she trained as a nurse before a career in the pharmaceutical industry, specialising in mental health – a theme that creeps into much of her work. She then spent many years writing short stories and serials for magazines before her first novel was published in 2013.

  At the fore of Sarah’s body of work is the bestselling occult horror trilogy Father of Lies, Tanners Dell, and Magda, followed by The Owlmen. Stand-alone supernatural horror novels include The Soprano, Hidden Company, and Monkspike. Baba Lenka is her latest.

  If you would like to be informed about future releases, there is a newsletter sign-up on Sarah’s website. Please feel free to get in touch - it would be great to hear from you!

  www.sarahenglandauthor.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Eva Hart

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two: Baba Lenka

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Part Three: Eva Hart

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Covering Letter

  Acknowledgements

  More books by Sarah England:

  Prologue

  Eldersgate, Yorkshire

  May 1979

  Nicky Dixon took the parcel from the postman, thanked him and tore it open. Inside was a bound manuscript. Bloody hell, it was from Eva! She hadn’t seen her in how long…over a year? Eva Hart had been her best and only friend from the age of eight to sixteen, but one year ago, about a month after Eva’s sixteenth birthday, she’d vanished. Totally. No goodbye. No warning. No nothing.

  Pulling out hundreds of dog-eared, scruffy handwritten pages, she frowned. It looked as though this had been written in the dark – parts of it scrawled in pencil, others smudged and near illegible with a leaky Biro.

  My dearest Nicky, you are the only person I can send this to…

  Within the first few minutes of reading, her heartbeat picked up. Some of this Eva had tried to tell her shortly after they first met. She’d recognised then that her friend was battling with the dark side. But the more she read, the more she understood. Goose bumps rose on her skin, and her eyes widened. Many hours passed until soon it was dark.

  Forcing herself to take a break, she rubbed her aching neck. Dear God, poor Eva – what a terrible burden. This was so much worse, so very much more frightening than anything she could ever have imagined.

  It wasn’t simply Eva who was in trouble, though. It was what Eva had brought with her.

  ***

  Something drops from eyes long blind,

  He completes his partial mind,

  For an instant stands at ease,

  Laughs aloud, his heart at peace…

  W.B. Yeats.

  Part One: Eva Hart

  Chapter One

  Rabenwald, Bavaria

  February 1970

  A raw wind rushed straight from the mountains that day, the kind that whipped skin to ice. Fresh from the snowcaps, it whistled down the slopes and howled through the trees.

  The small procession of mourners trailing Baba Lenka’s coffin paused momentarily on the hill to the cemetery, gasping in the fresh onslaught. Ice blew off pines in swirls of white dust. It stuck to eyelashes, peppered lungs and froze faces. There weren’t many of us – immediate family, the priest, and six elderly mourners at the helm. The rest of the villagers had hung back and refused to come, their expressions dark and unreadable as they stood watching us leave. But the old folk were different, almost as if they were from a bygone age – the women swathed in long, dark robes and headscarves, the men in trousers cut short at the knee and waistcoats fastened over full-sleeved shirts. Swarthy-skinned, their demeanour was quietly watchful. They did not speak much to those in the village, or indeed to us, but in hushed tones amongst themselves.

  Less than an hour before, the two old women in the group had washed and prepared Baba Lenka’s body for burial, after which the water used had been carried out to the farm’s well and tipped away. They stood out there in the frozen yard, heads bowed, muttering in a foreign tongue that carried on the wind. The men then joined them to form a circle, and with heads thrown back they began a strange kind of ceremony, calling and wailing into the wind.

  We’d watched from the farmhouse kitchen window.

  “What are they doing?” I asked my mother.

  Silently she shook her head, narrowing her eyes at the screeching, cawing birds overhead.

  We had arrived the day before. I was seven years old, cold, miserable and hungry. Baba Lenka had been my great-grandmother, but I’d never met her. Nor did I understand why we had to come: spring was about to burgeon back home in England, snowdrops and crocus shivering on roadsides, sunlight chasing clouds across the school playing fields… She was ninety-six, they said. Even my mother had never been to Rabenwald. It was freezing, the air biting, cobbles glistening with ice. And towering over the valley were mountains so huge they stood like giants with their heads in the clouds, the blue light of the snowy slopes ominous, eerie, deadly.

  If only this were all over – that we had never come here. Baba Lenka’s farmhouse didn’t even have running water. We’d arrived late yesterday afternoon to find the kitchen cupboards bare except for mouse droppings, and all the mirrors and windows had been covered with black cloths. It had the feel of a church crypt, and if it had ever been a welcoming home, it would be difficult to picture that. In the grim half-light, with the wind rattling the windows and whining down the chimney, my dad tried to get a fire going, and my mother chipped at packed ice outside to get water for the kettle. There was an all-pervading chill in that house, which once experienced could not be shaken, the kind that gripped the bones and iced the marrow. Mould spotted the wallpaper, damp coated the woodwork, and frost glazed the glass.r />
  As evening plunged into the black of night, my mother’s footsteps creaked up the old staircase to where we would have to sleep, the wind screaming like banshees around the eaves, candlelight flickering over the walls. I trailed behind her, shivering. But on reaching the landing, she caught her breath, and we both stopped to stare. Baba Lenka’s bedroom door was ajar. We saw then what we didn’t want to see – the deathbed soiled and sagging where her body had lain decaying for weeks and weeks on end.

  The room had been stripped of all possessions. Tidemarks left by her bodily fluids had stained the sheets dark yellow, and the sour stench of terminal disease cloyed the air. As we stood on the threshold, the sound of howling wolves echoed from the woods, and the noise of the wind intensified to violent and insistent. It seemed so very much louder up here, as if it was gaining in strength. Hypnotised, I couldn’t look away, the Alpine coldness seeping under my skin…

  Suddenly, catching me totally off guard, I was in the old lady’s mind – lying there in the bed, dying in my own filth with a throat caked dry. Silvery light streaked through the curtains, and a murderous vixen screech rent the night air. The whole room was rumbling and juddering. The house seemed to shake on its very foundations, the floor tipping sideways… A burst of crippling pain ripped through my chest, the heart muscle squeezing and twisting…

  I think I blacked out at that point, stumbling backwards, because the next thing I knew, my mother grabbed my arm and shut the door behind us.

  “Come on, Eva – let’s make the back bedroom nice and warm. We’ll bunk up together in there. Thank God it’s only for a couple of nights.”

  The vision had lasted for a second at most, but the effect lingered. My great-grandma had endured a terrible death.

  Downstairs, her body lay in the parlour, where it had been wrapped in a coarse blanket and awaited preparation. It was our job as family, said my mother, to make sure all Baba Lenka’s personal things were located and put into the casket, ready for burial. As such, she set me the task of checking drawers and cupboards for jewellery, photographs and trinkets. Nothing must be taken. Everything must go with her to the grave.

  There was nothing left in the house, though. Every cupboard and drawer lay empty apart from a few old and very dirty books, which my mother kept.

  Earlier, not long after we’d arrived, while Dad was still getting the fire going, I had heard Mum shouting with someone at the door. It had turned out to be one of the old women who’d come to prepare the body. My mother’s German was halting, but she seemed to thank them, after which she came in to tell my dad what it had been about.

  “I think she was saying no one would tend to Lenka while she was ill. Those in the village say she was a Bluthexe and wouldn’t come, so they contacted the old ones. She said they’ve travelled a long way, and by the time they got here, the storm had blown over. That’s how they knew she was already dead. She doesn’t seem to speak much German. I don’t know what it is they’re speaking, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever ’eard in my life. Anyway, I think that’s the gist of it.”

  “Bluthexe?”

  “Blood witch.”

  “For crying out loud – the woman was dying!”

  “I know. She was saying the storm went on the whole time Baba Lenka was ill, that it raged and raged as she tried to send her demons to someone else on the wind—”

  “What a load of old codswallop.”

  “Aye, well, that’s as maybe, but…” She sighed. “The locals were scared daft, Pete. She was very much alone, I think.”

  “Apart from these old folk?”

  “She said they’d been travelling for days—”

  “Bloody hell, poor old baggage with no one to look after her. Managed to strip the house, though, haven’t they – the locals?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It looks like her things have been piled into the casket; it’s stuffed with—”

  “You’ve looked inside, then?”

  “Only to check all’s as it should be. You don’t take anything out of a coffin, you know? To be honest, it’s a good thing we came or I don’t think she’d ’ave been given a proper burial. They really are scared out of their wits of her round ’ere, you know? From what I can gather, the villagers wanted to tip her down the well. Thank God for Jakub and Vanda, that’s all I can say.”

  “Good thing you kept in touch. Who are these old folk anyway? The ones who don’t speak German very well and travelled for days? Where did they come from?”

  She shook her head. “Further back in my family than Baba Lenka. I don’t know, but I’m grateful to them. Anyway, I think they want to come tomorrow to wash the body, and good, frankly, because it’s in a terrible mess.”

  “You looked?”

  “Her hand had poked through the blanket…” She lowered her voice, but I heard well enough. “God, Pete, her skin’s turned an ’orrible shade of greeny yellow, and the tissue’s so thin it’s split apart over the bones. I only pulled the top part back, and I wish I ’adn’t, because the eyes are still open. I nearly had a bloody heart attack.”

  They fell into numb silence for a while, watching the flames spark into life and rubbing their hands to get warm.

  “She’s got no hair, either. And there’s this strange silver ring on her thumb, kind of like runes all the way round the band, and a little black sun sign etched into it.”

  “Maybe she’d want you to have it?”

  “God, no! You can’t take anything off a dead body!”

  “I just thought maybe she’d have given it to you if she could have done?”

  “No, Pete. No. It’s not something you’d want.”

  “Okay, okay… I were only saying!”

  Around about then, it began to filter through that something about all this was a bit off. My mother had never said much about her upbringing, nor had I known my maternal grandparents. Orphaned, she’d been brought up in various foster homes and remembered nothing much before that. But she could speak German and quite well, too. I’d never heard her use it before, so that was something new. And I also learned there was a huge and possibly terrible secret surrounding Baba Lenka, which no one was going to explain. I mean, I’d hardly heard of her despite the fact she was my great-grandma. We had birthday cards from Jakub and Vanda in Munich, described only as ‘distant cousins we ought to keep in touch with’, but that was the only connection ever mentioned.

  “It’s best you don’t know,” my mother had said on the flight over.

  “But why don’t they want to bury her like normal people? What did you mean?”

  She and my father had exchanged a charged look over my head. The plane had been a jet propeller. And in between each peak of the Alps, it plunged as heavily as a whale before climbing noisily upwards to scale the next. My stomach was all screwed up. I found myself praying when the nose pointed skywards like a rocket.

  That flight was the first part of the nightmare – the first recurring dream I’d have for decades afterwards, although it paled in comparison to the second part; and when the final part of the nightmare arrived, it might have been better if the plane had never made it at all. I often think it’s a blessing we don’t know, or some of us don’t know, what is to come or we would not be able to face it. Yet somehow we do. We do face things and adjust, finding a strength and courage we never knew we had.

  “It’s something to do with the War,” Dad shouted above the drone of the engine.

  Please, God, don’t let those propellers stop turning…

  “You’ve heard about the Iron Curtain, haven’t you, Eva – the divide between east and west Europe? Well, before the Second World War, there was a country called Bohemia just east of the German border. But the Germans who lived there – the Sudetens – were exiled after the Second World War to Bavaria in southern Germany. So, in effect, where Baba Lenka used to live doesn’t exist anymore. It looks the same, but the villages are all Czech.”

  “Why did they have to leave?”

  �
�Because a lot of people died there, Eva. So now there’s a line between the two countries, and Bohemia’s been incorporated into the Czech Republic.”

  “Why did Baba Lenka go to Germany and not stay in the Czech Republic? Was she a Nazi?”

  Beside me my mother stiffened, her glance flicking around the cabin to see if anyone had heard.

  “Where the hell did you get that from? None of our family were Nazis,” she hissed. “They were just innocent people caught up in something they didn’t understand, shunted from pillar to bloody post.”

  “So why can’t she be buried like a normal German person, then? I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, Eva! Because…” My mother, who spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent and had never even been to Germany, sighed heavily. “It’s just as it is, Eva. Baba Lenka wasn’t liked, and there’s an end to it. Some say she’s more Czech than German, others say she was a double agent, a traitor, whatever you call it.”

  “And some say she was an old witch,” said Dad.

  My mother shot him a look, and I sensed the conversation was closed. Besides, I was focusing intently on a prayer to God that the plane wouldn’t crash. A monumental spike of black rock loomed perilously close. There was a small hut at the top of it, jutting out from an overhanging crag, and I wondered very briefly who had built it and why and how. Out of the tiny porthole windows, surreal white-tipped mountains dazzled in distant sunlight as the jet slowly climbed and the engines screamed. Finally, it tipped over the apex. There was a collective, silent exhalation of relief – before, with a stomach-lurching plunge, it dropped through an air lock. People screamed and overhead lockers flew open, drinks were spilled and shaking hands re-lit cigarettes. The journey was interminable, sickly sweet with smoke, and heady with whisky and wine.

  There was no choice – we had to go to this funeral, and there, as my mother was fond of saying, was an end to it. Two days. Three at most. It would soon be over.