Pumpymuckles Read online

  Ever Greene was just six years-old when she vanished into thin air from the end of Cromer Pier.

  Four months later, she reappeared, safe and sound, on the doorstep of her parents' house, more than eighty miles away. The child had no recollection of where she had been or with whom she had spent the time, but in her hand she clasped a silver and enamel brooch intricately fashioned in the image of a seahorse...

  * * * *

  Ever Greene's childhood was haunted by nightmares and plagued by mysterious events. Now, as a grown woman, she hopes to put all that behind her and lead a purposeful life. She answers an advertisement for the post of governess— a perfectly respectable position for the dignified Edwardian lady.

  This attempt to lead an ordinary life seems destined for chaos, however, when she finds herself working for an extraordinary bachelor. Gabriel Hart wants her, not to teach those sweet-faced children she'd envisioned as her pupils, but to transform him into a proper gentleman. A task of no little undertaking and far from what she'd anticipated.

  And then Ever’s troubled life takes an infinitely more disturbing turn when the monster she called Pumpymuckles, who once chased her through those childhood nightmares, now stalks her waking hours instead.

  But Ever Greene isn't that little girl afraid of the dark anymore.

  Indeed, the darkness should be afraid of her.

  Pumpymuckles

  A Deverells Story

  by

  Jayne Fresina

  Twisted E Publishing, LLC

  www.twistedepublishing.com

  A TWISTED E- PUBLISHING BOOK

  Pumpymuckles

  A Deverells Story

  Copyright © 2016 by Jayne Fresina

  Edited by Marie Medina

  First E-book Publication: December 2016

  Cover design by K Designs

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2016, Twisted Erotica Publishing.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  All characters engaged in sexual situations are over the age of 18.

  Sometimes a nightmare

  is a love story

  in the dark

  Chapter One

  Ever Before

  First the light, like a dying heartbeat, began to waver and dim. From that moment onward, everything that was normal and comforting transformed, from a once cheerfully glowing wick to a blob of fragile soot that curled inside the last tired lick of flame and finally expired, leaving a thin grey sigh.

  Then she felt the space thinning, smelled the burning, saw the air squeezing in on itself. And suddenly she stood in a tunnel, facing into the dark, her bones trembling with the vibration of a steam engine thundering closer. The steady, unrelenting pulse of approaching peril. But from which way did it come?

  This is how it always began, and once it began there was no stopping the dream until she found the power to scream loudly, desperately enough.

  All around her the newly menacing world crunched and crackled with energy. The buzzing filled her ears and overflowed all the way to her chewed fingernails. Her small palms were damp, her heart thumping like a desperate fist trying to beat its way out.

  The worst came when the whistling began. A repetitive tune that echoed along the dripping, soot-blackened brick walls, mocking her. Over and over, the same few notes of a broken chorus.

  And then the whisper. "I'm coming to get you." Sing-song, as if they played a game of hide and seek. But this was no game.

  She looked around, trying to see through the thick, floating ash and the wet steam, her eyes sore, nostrils filling with dust. Her senses strained into the darkness, feeling with every pore, every vein.

  Which way to run?

  "I'm coming to get you!"

  Surely it was more sensible to run back toward the pink daylight— the way she had entered the tunnel. But something told her that he came from behind, that he followed her. And she couldn't remember entering the tunnel, so she had no idea what was outside. What if there was nothing? What if that was not the way back to the real world at all, but deeper into her dream? It could be deceptive.

  Not knowing how she got there, or what drove her into the tunnel, she was helpless, stuck in the middle.

  This may not even be the middle. She could not see the end. It could go on for miles and miles.

  Should she risk running into the dark?

  The whistling was louder now, chirpy, false cheeriness in a tune that never ended. It made her think of the "Pied Piper", who lured children away into the mountain with his magical music, just to punish the townspeople after he rid them of rats and they reneged on the promised fee.

  She knew he was closer. Coming faster. Now she could hear the creature breathing, its lungs and heart working like giant pistons, heavy and yet sleek. He was a vigorous force that folded the world in around him as he came inexorably toward her.

  Her mind was made up. Run toward it. Run toward it and get it over with. Because the horrible thing would catch her eventually and running away merely prolonged the horror.

  So she turned and ran toward the monster. Wind rushed by her face, drying her tears.

  There.

  It loomed before her. The limbs were huge, filling the tunnel, muscles moving like a tortuous, clanking, complicated engine of pulleys and levers. Baring its gleaming teeth, its eyes two big, gleaming, uncaring headlamps, the angry creature roared forward, ready to consume her whole. She saw the flames in its throat, felt the stinging heat. Then she knew it was time to scream.

  So she did.

  Ever Greene screamed so loudly, and at such a pitch, that she broke the glass of milk beside her bed and her mother came running from the room across the hall.

  "Ever!"

  She sat up, still screaming, her skin moist, the nightgown sticking to her back.

  "Ever! Wake up. You're having a nightmare again! Ever!"

  But even with her eyes wide open, she still saw the beast breathing fire before her. He swiped angrily at the glass that had broken all over him and the jagged shards cut his scaly skin, made it bleed. For those few moments the image remained to haunt her, until it burned away like scorched paper and left only hot tears in its wake.

  For tonight he was gone again, but he would be back. He had promised to come for her.

  And his name was Pumpymuckles.

  She'd seen it painted on the brick wall of his tunnel. The letters were faded, dirty, torn and peeling, but she could still read them.

  "Pumpymuckles is going to get me," she murmured, while her mother, who never quite knew how to comfort her daughter under any circumstances, stiffly patted her shoulder blades, and told her there was no such thing as a Pumpymuckles.

  Look at that mess on the floor. Had to be milk, didn't it? Couldn't be water. One of my best glasses broken too. What is she doing, bringing milk to bed? Ooh, there goes my back again. And now I won't get any more sleep tonight. Not with this headache. Such a scream this girl has. Sometimes I wish she was still a mute.

  As her mother fussed over the broken glass and the wet floor, Ever's father hovered nearby, trying to be helpful. His thoughts were calmer.

  No point crying over spilled milk, Astrid.

  Of course, he didn't say it out loud. His wife had no sense of humor, and she wouldn't appreciate the old adage at that moment. But Ever silently shared the joke. Her father's calmly amused way of looking at the world always made her feel as if, no matter what happened or how badly things turned upside down, everyt
hing would be right again soon.

  If only he could come into the tunnel with her; he would know which way to go. But her father couldn't come with her. It was something she had to do alone, and she knew that from the beginning.

  The next morning, while Ever floated a few inches above the stairs in the hall— just because she liked the sensation and nobody was watching— she heard her mother exclaim, "Pumpymuckles, indeed! Only she could come up with such an odd name for a monster. She has your eccentric imagination already, Everett, and that tone of discourteous sarcasm that passes for wit. A six-year-old cynic with the vocabulary and confidence of a thirty-year-old woman is a most unnerving creature."

  Her father replied, "She's an old soul."

  "She's a peculiar child, that's what she is." And she terrifies me.

  Over the pungent aroma of buttered kippers and with the occasional crisp snap of toast triangles to punctuate, they discussed this latest development — on the surface, as if it were a matter of mere inconvenience, no more troubling than a little girl out-growing her shoes too soon.

  But inside they worried. She heard her mother's chattering mind. What are we going to do with her? Such an odd child. He doesn't seem to realize, or else he doesn't want to. He will not talk about the vanishing and how she came back changed. Why doesn't she terrify him too?

  Her father's thoughts were steadier, almost placid. I'm sure the girl will be alright. She has an imagination and that's all it is. Astrid anticipates the worst. It's as if she doesn't recognize our daughter. Not since Cromer pier.

  Cromer pier: the place that could not be mentioned.

  Out loud he made one of those non-committal grunts meant to placate his wife and show that he listened. But he was attentive only to his newspaper now, his thoughts transformed into a slow, methodical rhythm as he absorbed the words he read. The newspaper brought him comfort with its neat columns of print, and there was always something amusing there to balance out the bad. Something ridiculous to make him shake his head at his fellow man and then go on with his own day, content in the knowledge that he knew better than most.

  She couldn't remember when she began to read their thoughts, but for the first six years of her life, Ever had not bothered to speak at all, assuming everybody could hear her thinking just as she could hear them. Once she discovered this was not the case, and realized that it would probably be better if they didn't know what she could hear, Ever had finally decided to transform her thoughts into noises, the way other people did. Much, apparently, to her mother's consternation. Astrid Greene would have preferred a silent daughter— even if she must explain her to the neighbors— rather than one who expressed strange thoughts aloud without caution or censor.

  As she listened outside the room that day, Ever was darkly amused, as always, by the way the sounds her parents formed with their tongues and lips did not match the sounds they held in their minds. They, of course, did possess a natural form of self-censorship. She had yet to learn the art.

  A moment later her mother made an innocuous comment about the weather, while thinking about the cramping pain in her right hand again, worrying about getting old and pondering how her life might have been different had she married someone else. Someone who listened to her, understood her. There was a handsome young vicar once in Swaffham Prior, where she had given piano lessons to an ungracious, runny-nosed child...

  So Pumpymuckles was forgotten. By them. But that was only the third or fourth time their daughter suffered the nightmare. They had no idea what was to come.

  But by the time Ever was thirteen and still occasionally waking them in the night with heart-stopping screams— a surfeit of noise and emotion that was not otherwise heard in their house—her parents no longer found the monster so easily dismissed. And they began to think that the infamous Pumpymuckles was somehow connected to the incident they labeled, in their thoughts, as "The Vanishing".

  * * * *

  Excerpt from Case Studies: The Fugue State of Ever Greene,

  by Dr. Owen Frazer

  The first reported event transpired when the subject was six. This was the first occurrence of what we later came to recognize as a "fugue state", when the subject suffers an unexplained loss of awareness, identity, place and time. These episodes continued intermittently— and lasted for varying lengths of time, ranging from hours to days—over the subsequent ten year period, with the last recorded lapse into an observed trance state occurring on the subject's sixteenth birthday.

  It should be noted that Ever Greene, a bright child of higher than average intelligence, had not used speech at all until the late age of six years. The cause of this failure to communicate with speech at a standard and expected rate of development was never diagnosed. There were no physical abnormalities and, once speech was used, no delay in catching up with other children of the same age. Her speech patterns, sentence structure and vocabulary were, in fact, advanced beyond her age, despite the preceding six years of apparently voluntary silence.

  That the sudden onset of speech should occur after the first incident of "fugue state" and shortly before the night-terrors began, may or may not be connected, but should not be overlooked when considering all the facts known to us.

  And the facts begin here: Ever Greene vanished from the end of Cromer pier when she was six years-old. Despite an exhaustive search, no trace of the child was found.

  Four months later, she returned to her parents' house in Cambridge, more than eighty miles from where she disappeared.

  Ever Greene was alive, well fed and in good health, with no recollection of where she had been or with whom in the days between.

  In her hand she clasped a small, silver and enamel seahorse brooch.

  Chapter Two

  Ever After

  Winter 1905

  Rain rattled hard against the sides of the wind-rocked Hansom cab, as wheels and hooves bore her at reckless, bumpy speed along the cobbled street. She shivered, hunching her shoulders and digging her hands further inside the fur muff that rested across her lap. Not the best of days for travel, but it had to be today. Expected at the curious deadline of "thirteen minutes past seven o'clock, neither a moment sooner nor later", Ever was anxious to be prompt and not start off on the wrong foot.

  She knew herself well enough to surmise that if she did not take this leap now, grasp this strange opportunity with both hands, she would never have the courage to go at all. So here she was starting a new life, on this forbidding, icy cold morning, with wind and rain whipping the street in bitter gusts that would keep most sane people indoors. Reminded of her favorite childhood poem, she whispered to herself,

  "They went to sea in a sieve, they did;

  In a sieve they went to sea;

  In spite of all their friends could say,

  On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,

  In a sieve they went to sea."

  As a young girl she envied those adventurous "Jumblies" of Edward Lear's imagination— intrepid sailors with hands of blue and heads of green— and today she thought of them again in their extraordinarily unseaworthy vessel.

  "Such nonsense," her mother would say. Astrid Greene didn't approve of flights of fancy. Or adventures.

  But now Ever embarked on an extraordinary flight of her own. Ahead of her was something different, finally a grand voyage, when she'd long since given up on the idea of having any.

  Anxiety fluttered in her chest like a bat trapped in the attic. She was keenly attentive to every part of herself, listening for any abrupt change, any warning discord. For as she'd promised her parents, the moment she felt afraid, she would turn back and go home. She took a hand from her muff and, for reassurance, felt the crackle of paper under her coat. A note pinned there to the lining held her name, her age and her parent's address. In case it should be needed.

  But hopefully she had grown out of those strange episodes where she temporarily left her body and went wandering without it. Eight years had now passed since her last incident and t
he doctors had assessed her finally strong enough to go out into the world. It was time, they said, for Ever Greene to lead a "normal" life. Having read their thoughts, she knew they saw it as an experiment of sorts. To them she was simply "the subject", an intriguing case study. What would happen if they let her out into the world again? And she didn't mind being an experiment if it meant she was finally free.

  "Don't stay here just for us," her father had urged, squeezing her hand gently. "You must do what is best for you, my dear."

  She had worried about leaving them, for they were elderly now; her mother's eyesight was poor and she suffered dizzy spells, while her father often forgot what he had done the day before, or what he had said. He walked with a cane, relying upon it more heavily with each passing season. They were white-haired and fading, but they still had each other and they seemed content cocooned together. Their only daughter was simply in the way.

  "You must go," her mother had said firmly. "You can't stay here any longer. It's time you went. Your father and I will manage."

  Astrid Greene, a prim and tidy lady, was never very good with things she didn't understand, things that didn't conform, or behave the way they were supposed to. But she had married Everett, who lived with his own peculiar foibles, so perhaps Astrid wasn't all shipshape drawers, elbows off the table, and crisply ironed bed sheets. After all these years of watching over her terribly messy, unpredictable daughter, she was surely deserving of respite.