By Midnight

by Mia James

  ‘See?’ he would say. ‘He’s smiling at you.’ Tonight it didn’t look like the man in the moon was smiling. Tonight it looked like a sneer. April turned over and wished she could go back to those carefree days, back to when her dad had commuted to work every day and he and Mum had seemed, well, in love. April remembered it as a series of hazy snapshots: riding on her dad’s shoulders as he walked through wavy waist-high grass, or squatting next to a stream glinting in the sunshine, scooping tadpoles into a jam jar with a net. April smiled at those memories, however cheesy they now seemed. It was as if she had picked her childhood from a Laura Ashley catalogue. And where was her mum in these sepia photographs? Trailing behind in her wafty Pucci kaftans, her head covered by one of those huge bee-keeper’s hats, complaining about wasps and pollen and skin cancer. Back then, Silvia’s grumbles were only half-serious and her father would laugh along with her, joking that he would give her the kiss of life if a greenfly landed on her. April giggled to herself. They weren’t all bad, her parents, not really. Maddening, yes, frustratingly narrow-minded, but she supposed she did love them. Well, most of the time.

  It kept nagging away at April, the way her father had reacted to her walking alone down Swain’s Lane after dark. There was obviously something about it that had worried him. What could it be? The only thing of interest on the higher part of Swain’s Lane was the gate to the cemetery; lower down it was all houses. Why would he be concerned about the cemetery? Perhaps it was something to do with this disease thing he was working on, or maybe the fox? She hadn’t seen many of them, but they were definitely wild animals and she was almost certain they were riddled with horrible germs. She shivered and looked at her hands. She had scrubbed them meticulously in the shower, but you could never tell what nastiness might be lurking there unseen. Suddenly, she felt itchy and uncomfortable. She jumped up and, pulling on her dressing gown, padded down the stairs to the kitchen. She knew her mother would have a little bottle of that antibacterial hand gel in one of the cupboards, although it was probably too late for her by now; she probably had listeria and scabies and things they hadn’t even discovered yet crawling all over her. The house was in darkness and, as she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes were drawn to the stained-glass arch above the front door. She hadn’t noticed it before. Lit up by the streetlight outside, she could see a picture of a deer being chased by hunters. It was an odd scene for such an urban house. Over the threshold of a country manor, perhaps, but here in the centre of London … Then she remembered what her father had said earlier: it hadn’t always been part of the city, but it still seemed incongruous, wrong somehow. Seeing the glass up there suddenly made her feel exposed and unsafe, as if the front door was flimsy and insubstantial, unable to keep out whatever lurked in the dark. It was silly of course - the door was solid, and it was locked. Still, she shivered as she swung around the banister and trotted into the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers looking for the hand gel, finding it and slathering her hands with the tingly green goop. Feeling a little better, she took a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and popped it open. The last thing I need right now is more caffeine, she thought. I need something to knock me out. Seeing her school bag, she picked it up and rummaged for the book Mr Sheldon had handed out in class.

  Sci-fi homework, great, she thought with an ironic smile, perfect to send me to sleep. ‘Random Quest’, the story he wanted to discuss, seemed to be about a man called Colin who woke up after a laboratory accident to find himself in a parallel universe where the Second World War never happened. More importantly, his dead wife was now alive and married to someone else and he was married to a completely new woman called … Oh God, I was right first time! April thought. This is super-dull. She threw it down and picked up The Dark Victorian Age, the book her dad had left lying on the side. Now this was more like it, she thought as she flicked through. It was full of tales of ladies in amazing dresses who poisoned their husbands and gangs of pickpockets fighting in the streets. As she turned a page, something fluttered to the floor. April smiled as she bent to pick up a passport-sized shot of her from a school-photo session when she must have been about six; her dad had been using it as a bookmark. She looked very cute with her long, thick hair - April had always had thick hair, even as a baby - and a gap where the Tooth Fairy had visited in the night. April felt a little embarrassed that her dad still thought of her as a little girl, but also pleased that he had held on to the photo for so long. She was just putting it back when she noticed a line on the page the photo was marking:A memorable note was received on 16 October 1888. It accompanied part of a kidney alleged to be from a recent victim with the assurance, t’other piece I fried and ate it was very nise.

  ‘Ugh, gross,’ whispered April to herself. Who is this, Hannibal Lecter? Reading on, she discovered it was a chapter about various ‘sexual deviants’ from the Victorian era - most famously Jack the Ripper, the supposed author of the letter about the kidney. April read on for a while, unable to drag herself away from the morbidly fascinating crimes. Apparently Jack the Ripper had been running around London’s East End in 1888, which didn’t seem all that long ago, really. Her dad’s words came back to her and she realised what had been bothering her all this time: he’d said his new book had a connection to this area, and that Silvia definitely wouldn’t let her out if she knew about it. But not even her mother could use Jack the Ripper as an excuse to keep her locked up indoors. So what was going on? She walked down the hall to her dad’s study and gently closed the door behind her. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she hoped there would be something here to explain why her dad was so evasive about the nature of his book, and so jumpy about Highgate. April sat down at his desk: it was a tip. Piles of papers, stacks of books, Post-it notes stuck to every surface, all with scrawled lines like ‘Roman link?’, ‘Call FG, ask to find Ott. txt’, or ‘23-11-88—14.02.93 - signif?’ That made April stop: the last date was her birthday. In fact, Valentine’s Day 1993 was the exact day she was born. What other significance might it have? She opened his laptop as quietly as she could and winced; in the silent study, the whirring of the fan as the machine woke up sounded horribly loud. She glanced at the door, straining her ears for any sounds of movement, but the house was as still as before. She turned back to the screen. Much like his real desk, her dad’s computer desktop was a mess, crowded with files and folders, most of them with titles like ‘Myths’ or ‘Ancient Relics’, next to his work files: ‘Scotsman Features’ or ‘Human Trafficking Project’. She clicked on one: ‘Mythology’ held sub-folders labelled, predictably enough, ‘Greek’, ‘Roman’, ‘Norse’ and ‘Celtic’. It was all as she expected, apart from a folder with a strange jumbled title: ‘J-M569mp’. Clicking on it gave her a prompt window asking her to enter a password. She tried a few guesses, but nothing happened. She shook her head. Probably just porn, she thought, then immediately regretted allowing the idea into her head. ‘Eww …’ she whispered to herself. ‘God, I’m going to need more of that green gel.’

  Then she had a sudden inspiration. She went to ‘Recent items’ and pulled down the list.

  ‘Here we go,’ she said, scrolling down to a file named ‘Highgate’.

  It popped open on screen. It was clearly still in note form: some bits obviously cut and pasted from elsewhere, some single random lines, all very jumbled. But there was one longer piece of writing headed ‘Foreword’.

  There is a deep, dark evil within this city …

  ‘Evil?’ she whispered.

  … An evil so ancient, it is almost beyond the reach of history. Perhaps it has always been here; perhaps this darkness is the real reason men chose to settle on the banks of the great River Thames. This evil, however, is not some supernatural force lurking in the shadows. It is something far more mundane, much more everyday. It is its very ordinariness that makes it so dangerous and its universality that has kept it hidden for so long. It surrounds us still, cloaked in myth and fantasy. It has grown much more dangerous in th
is modern world where technology isolates us, playing into this contagion’s hands, allowing it to spread further and faster. However, it is today’s technology, today’s new ways of thinking and communicating, that may eventually defeat the evil, by exposing it to the light where it will turn to dust.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said April in a low voice. What was he saying about no monsters? She quickly scrolled down, but that was all her dad had written so far. She went back to the ‘recent items’ list and opened another file. ‘Chapters?’

  It was a list, which read:The Plague

  The Great Fire

  Unexplained Outbreaks of Violence

  Riots and Rookeries

  Jack the Ripper

  Dr Crippen

  The Krays

  ‘What is this thing?’ she breathed. What had her father discovered to link all of this together? He’d mentioned the plague, hadn’t he? Now April was feeling distinctly unsettled. She closed the laptop and began to sort through the things on the desk. There was a pile of buff cardboard folders stamped with the words ‘Ham and High Archive, Please Return’. Inside she found yellowing old newspaper clippings attached to boards - some of them very old indeed. The Islington Chronicle, the Hampstead Weekly News, the Camden Bugle. Stories of crowds attacking policemen, unprovoked attacks on clergymen, gangs of youths on the rampage, all in north London, all within miles of her home. One cutting about murder - a woman was found with her throat torn out on Hampstead Heath - was disturbingly close, but it was dated 1903. The more she read, the more uncomfortable April felt. There were many more stories of horrible slayings; torture, decapitation, even mass graves. Individually, these incidents just looked like disturbing but unremarkable events, but if there was something gluing them all together, then that was extremely worrying, especially if it had something to do with the area where she now lived. She carefully put the cuttings back as they had been and tried the desk drawers. The large right-hand one was locked, but the middle drawer slid open. Her father’s diary was inside, each day crammed with appointments, phone numbers and doodles. Under that, she found a battered old notebook. Now this was more like it - her dad’s spidery handwriting filled pages with random thoughts and ideas he had jotted down as he’d been doing his research. I need to look at that in more detail, she decided. Putting it to one side, she picked up a large reference book called A Topographical History of London, which had loads of coloured Post-its sticking out of the top marking various pages. The marked pages were old maps of London, some of the streets, some of the sewers; one was a map charting the course of the River Fleet, which passed through Highgate on its meandering journey down to the Thames. She turned over a few more pages, finding another map with pencil notes in her dad’s handwriting. It was dated 1884 and showed the expansion of the Tube - the Metropolitan District line and the East London line stretching into the East End. Her father had drawn a ring around Whitechapel Station.

  ‘Hang on,’ murmured April. She switched off the light and, picking up the notebook, tiptoed back into the kitchen. Once there, she consulted The Dark Victorian Age book on the counter. Yes, she was right—Jack the Ripper had been running about killing women in 1888. Are the two things linked? But that was absurd, how could people building the Tube be connected to Jack the Ripper? It made no sense. But then, according to the book, there was such a huge network of tunnels, sewers, canals and rivers, even secret passageways and roads under the City, that nobody actually knew how many miles of pipe there were under the ground. Things could move around without anyone suspecting. Had Jack the Ripper escaped detection by nipping down the sewers? Or was there more to it than that? April had seen the Johnny Depp movie using the conspiracy theory that the Ripper was linked to the royal family. Were they infected by this disease too?

  ‘April?’

  She screamed.

  ‘Woah, woah,’ said her father, holding up his hands. ‘It’s okay, it’s just me.’

  April’s heart was beating rapidly, partly from the surprise, but also because she had almost been caught red-handed. In fact, she had been. Her dad’s notebook was still in her hand.

  ‘Dad, I—’

  ‘WILL!’ came a roar from the top of the stairs. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on down there?’

  William took a step back towards the kitchen door.

  ‘God, woman, don’t be so dramatic, it’s just us,’ he shouted. ‘Go back to bed!’

  April stuffed the notebook into her school bag while he was distracted.

  ‘Sheesh,’ he said. ‘It’s a good job they don’t allow guns in this country. She’d have been down here blasting away at imaginary burglars.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ said April, ‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down for my book,’ she added, showing him the John Wyndham omnibus.

  ‘They’re working you hard already, aren’t they?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to have time to do anything else. You should see the reading list they’ve given us for English Lit, it’s huge.’

  Her father grinned affectionately and put his arm around her, leading her back towards the stairs.

  ‘Well, you’d better get back to bed, or you won’t be awake enough to read anything tomorrow.’

  April nodded gratefully and they began to walk up the stairs. They stopped on the landing and she leant in to give her father a kiss. Just as she was turning away, he put his hand on her arm.

  ‘How did you find it?’ he asked.

  April’s heart jumped. He knows, she thought, he knows I’ve been snooping.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, as evenly as she could.

  ‘School, darling. How did you find it all? Didn’t really ask you earlier, it must have been difficult.’

  ‘Oh, school. It was okay. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Well, you’re up at one o’clock in the morning, so I’m thinking maybe you’ve got something on your mind. No one’s giving you a hard time for being the new girl, are they?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s a bit of a worry, I suppose, especially starting right in the middle of term. But actually I’ve already made a couple of friends. One girl I think you’ll really get on with - she’s just like you.’

  William pulled a face. ‘Not too much, I hope.’ He smiled.

  ‘There’s worse things to be, Dad,’ she said, and ran up the stairs.

  Ripper—who? Victim of his environment. Infected? Disease released from underground? Possible, but why such violence? Royal link? Part of cover-up?

  William Dunne’s handwriting was so bad April was amazed he’d managed to make a living as a journalist all these years. Maybe he could read it. She flipped over another page of his battered and closely written notebook and cocked her head, listening for any movement. There had been a brief fight in her parents’ room as soon as her father went back to bed: ‘Up all hours, it’s not natural.’ ‘Give her a break, she’s just started a new school.’ ‘Whose fault is that?’—all the usual things, but they had quickly blown themselves out and now all was quiet. April turned back to the notebook. It was just a scrawl in some places and, as the notes were meant for himself, the meaning of much of it was frustratingly unclear to April.

  Whitechapel branch, plague pits—Def. Roman remains under Spitalfields—connection? What about the coffin/west End rumour; possible urban myth? Another royal connection with Ripper murders?

  One word was written in the middle of a page in big letters and underlined a number of times: ‘DISEASE’.

  ‘A disease?’ whispered April. That was what her dad had said in the kitchen, but how could a disease make you go on a killing spree? How could it make Jack the Ripper hack up all those women? It sounded pretty far-fetched; after all, if there was some virus floating around turning people into homicidal maniacs, wouldn’t it make the news more often? Anyway, even if there were some truth to it, it still didn’t answer the question that had brought her to this point: what was the local connection? If her dad thought that the Undergrou
nd network had spread this disease, that didn’t really make sense in Highgate - the highest point in London wasn’t the ideal spot for digging a tunnel, you even had to walk to the bottom of the hill to catch the Tube.

  Underneath the word ‘Disease’ were a number of arrows pointing to words and phrases: ‘bleeding gums’, ‘pale skin’, ‘hypersexuality’. Her dad had circled them and drawn another arrow to one word.

  ‘Vampires.’

  April laughed out loud, despite herself. ‘You’re kidding me …’ she whispered. ‘Caro will love this.’

  Actually, April felt a sense of relief. She had been getting herself all worked up, convinced her father had uncovered some plot to poison the Tube or something, but no - he was back on the usual stuff: beasties and werewolves. She frowned. So why had he told her he wasn’t? ‘No monsters’, that was what he had said - but why lie about it? And then she turned over the page and felt her skin go cold. Written at the top of the page were two words:

  Highgate Vampire.

  Chapter Seven

  April wasn’t having a good morning. She had woken up with a pounding headache and the worst case of Bed Head Hair in the history of sleep; she looked like she’d spent the night in an eighties metal band. She also had a vaguely unsettled feeling, as if she had been having nightmares she couldn’t remember. Worse, at breakfast it was immediately clear that her parents weren’t talking - if it wasn’t for the black atmosphere they were generating, she might have been impressed that they had managed to slot in a full-scale fight before their cereal. Still, hearing them hissing at each other had given her time to slip into her dad’s study and return his notebook. Strolling into the kitchen, muttering something about an early start, April had grabbed some toast and tried to make a run for it, but her dad caught her at the door.