Baba Lenka Read online

  Later that day when I walked out of the nursing home, commended this time ‘for taking it well’, my hair had already returned to its previous state of glossy and full, the sores had disappeared, and my eyes were as bright as a squirrel’s. I would be keeping my date!

  The automaton feeling, however, persisted, with only the dim realisation this could not continue. I couldn’t murder people every other week for the rest of my life! Besides, sooner or later it would be noticed. But how, then, did I stay well?

  The only person who might have the answer would be my mother. I’d let the pressure on my dad slide because of Luke and because of work, but now the urgency was back. What had she read in those books, and was there some other way to control this horrible legacy? Because if there wasn’t, then what hellish path lay ahead? Die but take the demons with me into eternity? Or murder my way through to the bitter end? I wanted a normal life – that of a teenaged girl who enjoyed music and dance, boys and fun – what was wrong with that? Instead, I was going to go down as a mass murderer – one of those vacant-eyed people led away from court after the gruesome truth came out – a tabloid sensation, a mystery, a monster.

  As it transpired, the delay in seeing Mum was because of Earl Hart’s funeral. Dad had been obliged to spend time with Gran, consoling her and making arrangements not only for the funeral but also for her future. She wasn’t coping well. Maud told him the details of Earl’s gruesome death, about the gangrene that had spread through his genitals into major organs, how his private parts had turned ebony before being amputated. He’d died in agony and terror, screaming for mercy. She would never get over it. Never.

  “I wouldn’t have wished that on anyone, not even him,” Dad said as we sat on the bus on the way to visit my mother. “Not even after all he said about my wife – your mother – or what he did to me and then to you. I wouldn’t want that for my worst enemy. It were evil. Pure evil.”

  Indeed.

  We fell silent, and for a moment I felt bad. For my grandma, anyway.

  “At least I’ll have a bit more money to spare now,” he said.

  “How come?”

  A flush spread up his neck. Oh, he’d made a mistake! Wanted to backtrack. But the thought had surfaced, and I caught it. “Oh, I see. You were paying them for my keep?”

  The moment of guilt and shame I’d briefly felt, now dissipated.

  “Well, it were only right. But now I can afford private psychotherapy for your mum. It’s expensive, but she can ’ave it. I’d do anything.”

  All that time and they were paid…

  “Anyhow, it got me thinking,” he said. We were on the top deck, heading towards an old Victorian asylum on the outskirts of Leeds. “You should be allowed to speak to your mother. She’s your family, and no matter what her grandmother did, you have a right to know. I still say it’s going to shock you, though. You’ll not be the same again, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “So she’s not sedated?”

  “No. I thought I were protecting you, Eva. But you’re right – you’re older now, and you’ve worked in that nursing home and settled in really well. The decision I made to leave you with Earl and Maud is something I’ve got to live with. At the time I really did think I were doing me best; I were at the end of me tether, I suppose.”

  I nodded, gazing out of the window as the tree-lined roads gave way to roundabouts and a dual carriageway.

  “I’ve taken this bus journey every single day for years, sometimes just to hold her hand for half an hour. Some days she’s all there, if you know what I mean? Others she’s away with the fairies. But there were never anyone else. I just didn’t want to be asked about her every time we met. I didn’t think you’d be able to move on… Ah, shit…”

  “What?”

  “Seeing as it’s confession time, I admit I found it hard to look at you sometimes, too. It weren’t your fault, I know that, love, but what happened after that funeral – well, you were ill, really ill for a long time, and I couldn’t help thinking it all went back to that. We’d ’ave been all right if it weren’t for—”

  “Me?”

  His turn to look out of the window.

  After a minute I patted his arm. We weren’t demonstrative as a family, never had been. “It’s okay. I understand.”

  He nodded. Clouds of sadness exuded from him. There he sat, so alone, so hopeless. Now was not the time to tell him about Luke, so the opportunity came and went. Besides, he probably wouldn’t approve. We’d been seeing each other almost every night. How quickly he’d become my world. He lifted my heart. Gave me hope.

  Although his remarkable resemblance to Heinrich Blum had been a jolt - perhaps Lenka and I simply shared a physical type - there the similarity really did end. Luke was not a clever manipulator, from a wealthy family, or sent to recruit me into a satanic sect. He was just a guy in his late twenties who Dad would consider far too old for his sixteen-year-old daughter. So I didn’t tell him. Or anyone. It was easy to lie to Helen, to make up late shifts, extra shifts, fabricated meetings with my dad…She just smiled and told me to make sure I was back by ten.

  Aware suddenly of the dopy look on my face as my thoughts drifted back to Luke, I brought myself up sharp. He must be kept a secret. At least for now.

  The journey turned out to be far longer than expected, the bus trundling along the dual carriageway, then onto an A road leading to Harrogate. The psychiatric hospital had been built well away from the city, a mansion that stood alone, its stone walls weathered black. Set in lawned grounds at the end of a drive lined with rhododendrons, the surrounding fields, which blew flat with sleet and northerly winds for six months of the year, were today studded with daisies and dandelions open to the sun.

  “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!”

  ***

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “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 te
ll 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.”

  “Took her own life?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know? Was it in the books?”

  “In Lenka’s diary, yes.”

  “You said you didn’t want us to go to the funeral but we were tricked? What happened?”

  She was beginning to get tired, her eyelids were fluttering, and I reached for her hand and held it firmly, as if I could squeeze strength into her.

  “Yes, I used to get a birthday card every year from distant cousins Jakub and Vanda in Munich. You may remember me mentioning them from time to time? Well, I’d always assumed my mother told them which children’s home I lived in before she died, so there would be someone to watch out for her child. Anyway, those cards came every year. They even sent a wedding card and one when you were born, too. So, when Baba Lenka was on her deathbed, they wrote to say she’d probably be gone before I got there, but a solicitor had informed them that the farmhouse had been left to me if I could be found. And I’m afraid your dad and I took the bait. We weren’t as well-informed as my mother had been, and we were stony broke. We thought if we took a loan for the flights and put the farmhouse on the market, it would make us some money. It looked like a godsend, to be honest.”

  “Why didn’t it? What do you mean by ‘bait’?”

  She took a long, deep breath. “Jakub and Vanda are Watchers, Eva – the ancients. They were never in Munich—”

  “Watchers? The same ones who brought up my grandmother, Marika?”

  “Yes. I pretended I didn’t know who they were at the funeral, but I did. They are the ones who guard and transfer the legacy. As soon as I realised what the old crone was telling me that day at the farmhouse, on the morning of the funeral, I knew we’d been tricked into taking this diabolical blood heritage.”

  “And now they’re looking for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the Watchers one and the same as der Order der schwarzen Sonne?”

  “Not exactly. The Watchers are demonic guardians, sent to keep an eye on their gatekeepers – Lenka, and now you. The Order uses us becau
se we have a direct channel from the Dark Lord to the human realm. Now this is where it’s your turn to take a deep breath. Try to accept what I’m telling you. I know it’s hard. But the people in the Order do not have a conscience or a moral compass. They bow down to the one they call Sakla, or Satan, and nothing is off-limits – in fact, the more abominable the act carried out in his name, the better.

  I’m not sure if you understand the full magnitude of this. The thing is, Eva, you don’t just have one or two demonic entities attached to you, you have a direct route to Satan and access to his entire legion The goal is to extinguish the human spirit, to provoke war and chaos, hatred and division, to keep us all suppressed in ignorance, poverty and fear. Lenka did a sterling job for them during the World Wars. Look how much death and terror there was, and how much money the Order made as a result!”

  “And we brought this into the world – with dark arts?”

  “Essentially, yes—”

  Even as the enormity and horror of what she was saying sank in, I still clung to one last vestige of hope. “But I haven’t been contacted by the Watchers or the Order–”

  “You will be now you’re sixteen. They will know where you are. Eva, have you—?”

  A horrible thought suddenly crossed my mind… No, my mum would not do to me what Clara did to Lenka! Nevertheless, the question flew out. “Is this legacy really mine? Or yours? Because I don’t understand – I mean, you’re so ill!”

  Her eyes were closed now and she struggled to open them again. The hand holding mine felt as feather light and feeble as a dying bird. “Yours, love. And I’m sorry about that, So, so sorry. But once you showed me the poppet, I knew everything had been about getting you to Rabenwald. The farmhouse was, is, worthless. Not only is it falling down, but it was also built on a mass grave. No one would touch it. Lenka was involved with some terrible people, officers who committed mass exterminations. Her house was built over the top of thousands of corpses in order to help cover up the extent of the massacre. You were meant to be there that day, and you were meant to receive the poppet. I realised too late. I told your dad I didn’t understand what those old women were saying and what was going on, but I did. There was nothing I could do by then, though, except instil in you not to take anything or pick anything up, to scare you into doing as I said so we could get away as fast as possible.”