London Under Midnight

by Simon Clark

  'So, who's doing this, Ben?'

  'Kids.'

  'Why?

  'It's what kids do.'

  Raj rubbed his jaw. 'Then you figure there's nothing behind it?'

  'Raj, it's some graffiti artist who's just trying to work up five minutes of fame for themselves.'

  'What if you dig deeper?'

  'You're asking me to investigate this?'

  Raj nodded.

  Ben laughed. 'Then you can't handle the heat, old son. You've flipped. This is just some joker with a crate full of spray paint and a big ego.'

  'I disagree. So, this is me, your editor, giving you, Ben Ashton, a valuable commission. Five thousand words by the end of next week. Premium word rate. Expenses. Front cover credit.'

  Ben breathed in deeply. This was a good offer. No bones about it, the best assignment all year. His old sofa at home had become a pain in the backside - literally. The fee for writing the article would buy something smart in black. He shot Raj a glance.

  'Vampire Sharkz,' Ben said as he rubbed his jaw. 'You've got word on this, haven't you?'

  'I was hoping you'd uncover that for me when you take the assignment.'

  'This… Vampire Sharkz? What is it? A film? A rock band? A new type of cocaine? And: "They're going to get you." Why are they going to get us?'

  Raj shrugged.

  Ben let out a low whistle as a more disturbing thought struck home. 'Or is it a new street gang? Or a drug franchise marking out their territory?'

  'Find out for me, Ben. You've got eleven days.'

  'Photography?'

  'Jenny's got the graffiti covered with beautiful art shots. Anything else, you've got your camera, haven't you? Okay, what's so funny, Ben?'

  'I met a girl in Soho House on Friday night.'

  'Congratulations.'

  'No, I had to… you know, make my excuses. Well, I told her I was a writer, and she asked what I wrote about. Because I needed to leave in a hurry I told her the first thing that came into my head.'

  Raj invited Ben to continue with a lift of an eyebrow.

  Ben laughed louder. 'I told her that I wrote about vampires.'

  'Vampires? Then the gods must have heard you. Now they've made it your destiny. It's become your sacred quest.' He handed Ben a sheet of green paper. 'Expenses form. Receipts please. Now do it. Go vampire hunting.'

  FOUR

  That moment of waking… which sense comes alive first?

  This time smell. Wet soil.

  Second: Sound. A rustle. Paper? Leaves? A dry whisper.

  Third: Touch. A pressure on the side of her jaw.

  Another sound; this one liquid in motion. A bath?

  Where is this? Am I in bed? Have I forgotten to empty the bath?

  Look for yourself.

  For a moment she willed her eyelids to slide back. She tried again. For some reason she couldn't open her eyes. Come to that, she couldn't move her arms. She sensed she was lying on her stomach with her head to one side.

  Why can I hear water, and smell wet soil, if I'm in bed?

  Then without planning to say it she asked out loud: 'What's your name?'

  The question blazed through her like lightning. This time her eyelids flew back. A light of such brilliance shone into her face she gasped. Even though she couldn't move her head her eyes darted in panic trying to see her surroundings, but all they did tell her was that a retina-searing light filled her world. Only now she couldn't close her eyes again. All she could do was stare into what seemed the heart of the sun.

  'What's your name?' she whispered. Vertigo tugged at her because the only fact she was certain of was this: I don't know my own name…

  Noises, sensations, smells jostled for attention. There were more of them. The pungent tang of oil. A subtler odour of pond water. She heard her own breathing. It suddenly seemed over-loud; its rhythm all wrong. Abrupt intakes of breath followed by a long exhale. What's more she realized that she whispered as she breathed out, yet she couldn't make sense of what she was saying. With an effort she managed to move her tongue. Particles of grit scratched against her teeth. Her mouth tasted bitter, as if she'd taken a mouthful of mouldy bread.

  'What's happened to me?'

  Reaching deep inside of herself, she clutched at the strength to close her eyes. They slid shut blocking out the awful intensity of daylight. For ten seconds she kept them closed. Her lungs sounded like some weird pneumatic apparatus. Spasmodic inhalations followed by a long whispering release. Overlying that, a persistent rustling alongside liquid notes. Strange music…

  The next time she opened her eyes it was easier. The violent blaze of light had gone. It had been replaced with a flood of tungsten brilliance. Okay, still very bright but no longer painfully so.

  'What happened to me… what's my name?'

  The only reply was the dry rustling close by. She found she could blink easily now. As she did so, what she gazed at swiftly resolved itself into sharp focus. There, in front of her, just inches away, was a ruffled expanse of little stones. The area had been formed into ridges, each one no more than an inch high at the most. Beyond those, moving in an eerie dance, were slender green limbs.

  'I know what you are,' she murmured at the green dancers. 'Just need the right word.' She licked her lips. They tasted bitter, too. 'You are…' The effort of remembering ran through her with all the force of a painful cramp. 'Reeds…. you are reeds.' She sighed with relief at recalling the word. The relief was brutally short-lived.

  Reeds? Stones? With another supreme effort she moved her head so she could look down along her body. She was wearing her black dress. The bottom half of her body lay in water. In this light the water resembled liquid platinum. What had been a numb sense of bewilderment backed off before savage jabs of panic hit her.

  'Oh, please, God… what's happened to me?'

  Panic threatened to become a deluge of horror. Her mind swam with vertigo once more. At that moment it seemed preferable to retreat back into unconsciousness in the hope that when she awoke again all this would turn out to be a dream. But anxiety nagged her. Why can't I remember? Something terrible happened? Why don't I know my own name?

  Her breathing grew more erratic. Crimson sparks flew out from the reeds at her. She knew she was starting to disintegrate mentally.

  'You've got to keep it together… you're in danger… you've got to save yourself.' She took a deep breath; when she asked that question again her voice exploded weirdly from her lips. 'What is… your name?' She tried so hard to remember her body convulsed. 'Something else,' she gasped. 'Something easier.' Her lips pressed together as she made the effort to control her growing sense of terror. 'Listen. What's your favourite colour?' This time the answer came straight away. 'Green.' Another question: 'Chocolate or chips?' The answer came as part cry, part laughter. 'Chocolate!' Keep going. 'What are you afraid of?' This time it came as full-blooded cry. 'This… I'm afraid of this. I don't know my own name.' She took a deep breath. 'I'm also afraid of loneliness… and going into a room at night without switching the light on first…' More: 'What's your earliest memory? Don't know… come on, think… think!' She gasped. 'Bakku… the white kitten. Christmas in the house with red gates.' It was if a mechanism was freeing itself in her mind. Wheels turned. Gears made connections. She blinked at the reeds. They were so green they appeared to be luminous. On the gravel near her face were bits of flotsam - a gum wrapper, a triangle of green glass, probably a fragment from a beer bottle. 'Tell me about a happy memory,' she demanded. 'Tell me about a time you were happy.' On the shingle just inches from her eye was a silver coin. It looked like a star against a dark sky it shone so brightly.

  'Come on, tell me a good memory.' She swallowed a lungful of air. Her skin began to tingle. 'I'm little. There's a boy wading in the river. He calls to me, "Don't come too close. It's dangerous. But you can watch me if you sit on the bank. Did you hear me…?" Then he speaks my name. But what is it?' She swallowed. 'Keep going. What happened next? The boy smiles
at me… he's my brother… the sun's shining. We're staying at Grandma's. My brother's annoyed that Dad won't buy him a metal detector so he can find coins, but he's found another way… what's the other way?' She closed her eyes. She pictured the twelve-year-old boy with his mass of frizzy hair. He's standing on a bank of shingle midstream. The sun shines. Not far away a horse drinks from the river. Her cousin flies a blue kite in the field. Then she saw the boy in her mind's eye again. He says a word that must be a name. But what name? 'Then Leo says… that's my brother's name: Leo… and Leo says: "I've been reading about treasure hunting. The book says just use your eyes. It's all about teaching your mind to see the right shape. You see this patch of shingle? The river sorts stones into certain shapes and weights; it's all to do with current flows. See here? It's left stones that are the shape of coins. That means if coins fall into the water when the bank is eroded they'll be deposited in places like this. Treasure hunters call them Glory Holes." So… if I bend down and picture a coin in my mind…

  'Leo crouches to stare at the stones. I see the concentration on his face. Then he yells out, "I've found one… I'm sure it's Roman!" I was so excited for him. He came splashing through the water to me, and he's shouting… "It is Roman. Look… April!" '

  In one convulsive moment she sat up. 'April. My name is April.'

  Recalling her name, and the sudden ability to move again, left her dazed. April looked round. She was sitting on a shingle beach with her legs still in the water. At either side of her were patches of reeds, their tips were higher than her head. In front of her appeared to be a limitless tract of water. Behind her, the ground rose in a slight incline to a stand of willows. She touched her hair. Even though it was dry there was a slight sticky sensation. When she examined her fingers she could see no trace of liquid or matter. But the stickiness remained. Puzzled, she looked up at the sun. But the light blazing in the sky wasn't the sun.

  April squinted against its brightness, even raising her hand to protect her eyes. 'The moon?' She shook her head. What had happened to her? How did she get here? Why is the moon so impossibly bright? She didn't recollect being on a boat… or even wandering here across dry land. After a wobbly false start she managed to climb to her feet. She looked back down at the coin lying in the shingle. It blazed there with a silvery light. That's the key that unlocked your memory, she told herself. It's your lucky charm. Take it. Still shaky on her feet, she managed to pick it up. In the process she noticed one foot was clad in a sandal, while the other was bare.

  Unsteadily, she moved along the shingle beach. If the stones pricked her feet she didn't notice them. After walking through that weirdly bright moonlight for barely more than a minute she found another beach run in from her right to meet her stretch of stones. Seconds later she stood on a spit of shingle that jutted out into gleaming water. The moon was duplicated there so it appeared as if a vast chrome disk floated on the sea. From this vantage point she could look back at both sides of the land on which she found herself.

  She explained to herself, 'This is an island.' To her ears her strange respiration sounded louder. 'April Connor, you know what's happened to you, don't you?' The reeds rustled their own cryptic reply. April, however, furnished an intelligible answer: 'You've been shipwrecked. You're marooned here.'

  Now that she could move her limbs and remember her name she at least remained calm. Even when she noticed that her dress had been torn open at the hip it didn't seem so bad. For some reason seeing the wounds in her bare skin through the torn material didn't form connections in her mind, so there was a sense of unreality. As if the breaks in her flesh that exposed the red, raw lips of a wound didn't relate to the process of washing up here on the island.

  The reeds rustled; a dry sound like whispers from the mouths of ancient Egyptian mummies. She stared at the head on the coin in the moonlight and confessed, 'I'm lucky to be alive, aren't I?' The moment she uttered the words she shuddered as other possibilities rose in her mind. What if she hadn't survived? What if this was heaven? Or hell? Or some eternal state of limbo? With an effort she repressed those disturbing thoughts. What she must do is explore this place, then - and only then - draw her conclusions.

  April walked slowly toward the other end of the island. The reeds waved at one side of her, while a light breeze sent shivers through the branches of the willow trees. An animal scuttled away under her feet. A rat? She couldn't tell. What if it returned with more of its kind? Further along the beach she came across the ribs of a small boat. The timber had been gnawed away by the elements, until it resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur. She couldn't have arrived on that, it must have lain here for years. Besides, she had no recollection of being on board any kind of ship.

  If I'm marooned here, what's going to happen to me? This question provoked a sense of unease. She found herself touching her hair on the side of her head. The strands were sticky. Once more she realized her respiration was arrhythmic. Two or three sharp intakes of breath followed by a long exhale. When she breathed out she whispered words. But what was she whispering? She couldn't understand them. But there was an urgency there; some unconscious element inside of her hissed a warning.

  All of a sudden she was aware of the wound in her side. It didn't hurt. Instead a prickling sensation circled the open wound as if ants ran round and round it, searching for a way into her body. When she checked she saw nothing in the moonlight but the hole torn in her dress and the rips in her skin. Nevertheless, it seemed as if the injury was undergoing some kind of change.

  Again, she found herself asking the question, 'Dear God. What happened to me?'

  The breeze tugged the willows. The whispering became a dark muttering. In a moment of paranoia she found herself believing the trees were talking about her. As if April Connor disgusted them. With a sense of rising panic she walked faster. Ahead of her, the beach turned back on itself behind a clump of bushes. When April at last reached the corner and turned she knew she was no longer alone.

  FIVE

  Bodies. Dead bodies. All lying stretched out at the high-tide mark on that little shingle beach. The hard light of the moon blazed down on the motionless figures. A breeze drew sinister whispers from the willows. They might have been hissing, 'Welcome to the Isle of the Dead, April. These will be your companions forever and ever. Amen…'

  April couldn't take her eyes off them. Here she was, in her black dress with one foot bare, the other clad in a sandal. Her dress was ripped. The wound in her side itched, and she wanted to scream out to the world that she'd gone insane. April walked along the beach, and even though she tried not to, her eyes locked on each dead face in turn. And the trees whispered, 'Welcome to the Isle of the Dead… Welcome to the Isle of the Dead… Welcome to-'

  'No, they're not saying that,' she snarled. It's in your mind.'

  'Welcome to the Isle of the Dead…'

  'Shut up!' The shout exploded from her lips. The moment it did so, the prone figures on the beach came back to life. One moment they lay there with their eyes open, their arms stretched out, where the receding tide had left them in those weird after-death poses, then they were suddenly awake. It was as if the process left them traumatized. Men and women sobbed.

  'Mother, where am I?'

  'Kerry, he hurt me… I didn't do anything. Why did he hurt me?'

  They sat up on the beach. A couple scrambled to their feet as if they'd been knocked down just a second ago and were still in the heat of a fist-fight.

  'I won't let you… I won't let you!'

  'Bastard!'

  'I'll get you for this. You won't get away. I know people they'll rip you in two for what you've done.'

  'Mother? What did he do to me…?'

  'Bastard!'

  'Oh God, look what she did. Look what she did! She bit me… look at my stomach!' The guy in a yellow shirt that was ripped open to the waist stared in horror at the wounds around his navel. 'Hey, look what she did!' The man locked eye contact with April as he framed the wound with his
hands. 'Did you see where she went?' As he advanced on April, his fear turned to rage. 'Hey, I asked you! Did you see where she went?'

  April shook her head.

  'Are you stupid? She was right here a minute ago. A kid with ragged clothes. Jeans that were all torn open. You must have seen her attack me?' The look in his eyes suggested he'd beat a response from her if she didn't reply.

  'I didn't see anyone.'

  'Bloody liar!' That's when he paused. 'But I wasn't here. I was on Waterloo Bridge… so how come I'm here now?' He advanced again. 'Have you got anything to do with it?'

  She shook her head. 'Please. I don't know how I got here, either.'

  'Stupid girl. You must do.' The rage fled to be replaced by an expression of pleading. 'You know something, don't you?'

  'No… I'm sorry. I woke up to find-'

  'Hey, you've been bitten, too. Look at your side.'

  'Don't let him near me again!' A woman with short blonde hair blundered past. She looked around as if she expected terrifying creatures to attack her at any moment. 'Don't let him near me!'

  A youth scrambled from the shallows, a dripping whirlwind of terror. He didn't use words; instead he screamed in mindless panic as he ran up the beach, cannoned off April, then sped away into the bushes. April recovered her balance only to find the man in the yellow shirt had grasped her wrist and then lifted her arm so he could examine the wound in her side.

  'What's happened to us? Look, we've all been bitten.' He roughly squeezed her flesh to open the wound. 'See? Teeth marks! They've gone right through the skin.'

  Now, that hurt. With a gasp April pulled away. Even so, she asked, 'Do you remember your name?'

  'Of course, I do. Do you think I'm crazy? It's…' His face muscles slackened as the shock hit. 'My name is…' He clenched his fist. 'It's… oh, God. Wait. I'll remember in a minute…' He backed away with his eyes down on the beach as if he would find his identity there.

  'You were there, weren't you?' This came from a woman with copper-coloured hair. 'Did you see what he did to me?'