Hotel Midnight

by Simon Clark

  ‘Ben. Answer me this.’ Now … huge and somehow monstrous … her voice pounded through the store. ‘How long have you been sleeping with Caitlin?’

  His head jerked round with shock. ‘Jackie?’ His voice came through the concealed security mic. ‘Never. Are you crazy? You know I—’

  On screen five Caitlin had frozen, too, white vapour spurting from her lips.

  Ben recovered from the shock. In that no-nonsense way of his he retorted, ‘Look, Jackie. This is ridiculous. We’ll talk about it later. In the meantime, have you seen this?’ He waved his hand back along the aisle. ‘The air-conditioning really is screwed. The place is filling up with fog.’ A white mist had formed at waist height. So thick it actually hid his legs from the knees down. Jackie rolled the camera control ball under her palm, speeding through one camera after another – aisle level, ceiling cam, wall cam. He was right. Thick mist flowed in a milky stream, engulfing aisle after aisle.

  ‘Eldritch or what?’ she heard Ben say, trying to make a joke of it. The mist rose to his chest. Caitlin wasn’t immune either. Tendrils of fog, eerily luminous through the low-light lens, reached between her legs to smoothly lace about her thighs.

  Jackie felt the pull of the past again, taking her mind back.

  Shivering in a northern town. Thirteen years old. Frightened. Alone. In that old warehouse with holes in the roof that let in snow. ‘I warned you I’d find you, Jackie.’ Melody Tranter’s face looms toward her. ‘I’m going to rip your stupid face off, Jackie Burton. No one tells on me. No one.’

  Then Melody Tranter flying back through the air with a screeeeech! To hit the wall – and her blood and brains and bile splashed out to leave a pattern of gorgeous butterfly wings.

  Dave Vorliss on water-skis paints a foaming vee down the centre of the lake. Then the cell phone rings as Jackie watches her husband from the car. A voice breathes into the earpiece: ‘Jackie Vorliss. This is Rose Spencer … you should know that your husband has been screwing me for months. He says you won’t give head. That’s his absolute favourite. I do it for him every single day … yum … yum … yum.’

  The horse’s head rises from the lake behind Dave. A pulpy tumour of darkness. He looks back as it strikes, slamming him into the water. It carries him down, holds him there, until he drowns.

  The housebreaker runs down the railroad track something looms out of the night. At first he thinks it’s a locomotive. Only this is eerily silent. He screams when he sees blazing eyes.

  Jackie’s attention snapped back to the screens. It had come.

  Yes, she thought: I remember you. You are my avenging angel; you are my dark destroyer. She understood now as all those repressed memories flooded her mind. That dark shape was as much part of her as her immune system. Activated by her hurt, it flew to her defence. Take Ben. Yes. Take him now….

  She watched Ben walking along the aisle that would lead to the pod. He was perhaps a hundred paces away. While, moving with the swiftness of a torpedo beneath the white blanket of mist, came the dark shape. Its lines hardened as it rose to the surface. A second later it emerged, a dark horse’s head veined with purple, a mane fluttered, eyes blazed from the shadow face.

  ‘Ben. Stand still … Ben, I need you to stand there.’

  He paused. Behind him the horse’s head rose higher from the mist, and as it rose above him once more, it became that vengeful cobra shape, mouth opening, eyes blazing.

  His pause only lasted a moment. Sensing that phantom shape rush at him through the mist he glanced back – then he was running. A wild headlong run with his arms wheeling as if he swam through some spectral ocean.

  He cannoned against the aisles. Cans spilled to the floor, sauce cartons exploded beneath his swinging arms as he tried to run faster.

  ‘I want you to stand still, Ben,’ Jackie whispered, and the whisper ran in goblin sighs through frigid air. ‘Stand still, Ben. Don’t prolong it. Let it come to you.’

  He screamed, ran harder. Vapour spurted from his lips. The steps to the pod rose out of the mist forty paces away.

  On screen, Caitlin’s eyes grew larger as she stared into the darkness. In that gloom she must have been all but blind, but she looked in the direction of the noise beyond the wall that separated her from the main part of the store. Her head tilted when she heard Ben’s terrified yell.

  Then from a concealed warehouse mic, Jackie heard her daughter begin to murmur in a voice that sounded like a prayer: ‘No, not him. Not Ben. Over him. Stride over him into the pod. Go over him into the pod. No, not him. TAKE HER! TAKE MY MOTHER!’

  Jackie roared in anger. The horse’s head, fulminating with purple blooms beneath the dark skin, rose higher. Now it was just five paces behind Ben; it would strike now, surely it would strike. This – her avenger, her dark destroyer – kept rising. It flew up out of the mist. Jackie rolled the camera control beneath her palm. Six screens were instantly full of the monstrous head. Staring eyes blazed at her through the cameras. For a split second the ceiling cam flashed on something part horse’s head, part serpent that soared through the air above the supermarket aisles. Then she was looking into that monstrous, demonic face. It filled the screen; grew larger, lost the eyes from the edge of the monitor, leaving the mouth that yawned as a pit of darkness: wider, wider….

  From the warehouse mic Jackie heard Caitlin for the last time. ‘Mother! I know it, too. I understand it. I’m sorry….’

  Jackie cried out as six TV screens burst into jets of shattered glass. She tried to throw herself back from the heads as they swarmed from the monitors. Six duplicate heads that were both cobra and horse, yet somehow neither, spurted out. Bible black. Slick. Purple veins running from blazing eyes to the root of their necks. Six heads lunged.

  Each pair of jaws bit deep into her body to take a sixth of her. Then six pairs of jaws bearing six bloody hunks of meat withdrew to whatever abyss that was their domain.

  Five years slipped by. Fate resolutely balanced the books. And, as in every household, Caitlin and Ben had their share of good luck and bad luck. Business thrived, despite the freak accident with the CCTV monitor console that had exploded with such force it had reduced Jackie Vorliss to something less substantial than ground beef. Caitlin successfully sued the manufacturer in a multi-million dollar negligence suit. The newly married couple moved to a ranch in the hills where along came Eddie, a blue-eyed baby boy with a giggle that could make anyone laugh. He loved the horses they kept there. He’d watch them for hours. Fate dished bad stuff, too. Eddie fell out of his buggy one day, bloodying his nose. Of course, Ben was mortified, telling Caitlin he’d taken their son to see the horses and only left him alone for a minute when he was distracted by a call on his mobile. Caitlin tried to reassure Ben, but, of course, he insisted on strapping the baby into the back of the Mercedes and taking him to hospital. No real damage said the doctor and gave Eddie a lollipop.

  That autumn Ben took Eddie (a consummate little walker now) for a stroll down through the red-dressed trees to the lake. With the wind suddenly blowing cold, Caitlin followed, carrying Eddie’s hat with the droopy doggy ears to keep his own ears warm.

  She saw the pair through the trees.

  Ben sounded angry. He was raging at little Eddie who wept into the palms of his hands. ‘Listen to me, stupid. Don’t do that!’ He lifted his fist above the boy’s head. Caitlin clenched her own fists and, as the horse’s head rose from the shore, she hissed, ‘Come now … take Ben now.’

  And that was the moment Ben screamed.

  THE WHITBY EXPERIENCE

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Don’t be. The pizza will be ready in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Red or white?’

  ‘Go crazy: buy both. We’re on holiday, aren’t we?’

  ‘Don’t forget to lock the door.’

  ‘Afraid Dracula will get me?’

  ‘Lock it, Ingrid.’

  ‘OK … now, do you remember the way to the supermarket?’

  ‘Rou
ghly.’

  ‘Don’t get lost; those little streets are a maze out—’

  ‘Ingrid, trust me. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘OK. Get a move on. I’m going to put the pizza in now.’

  ‘Oh, there’s just one more thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘When I come back and you open the door for me?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Be naked.’

  ‘Fat chance, mister.’

  ‘Aw …’ He grinned, looking every inch a mischievous little boy. ‘This is a second honeymoon, isn’t it? The kids are with grandma; the dogs are with Uncle Bob; work’s a million miles away, and I’m feeling as raunchy as a—’

  She found herself grinning back at him as he stood there at the turn in the stairs. ‘Be back in fifteen minutes.’ She adopted a sexily husky voice. ‘And you’ll see what this old girl can do.’

  His eyes flashed. ‘Just watch me move.’ With that he went down the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Oh, Ben,’ she called down after him. ‘Try and remember the scented candles.’

  His voice came softly back up to her, promising that he would. A moment later she heard the door of the apartment block shut far below. For a moment she leaned over the banister, looking down through the twists and turns of the stairwell, half expecting him to come running back up the stairs to say he’d forgotten his wallet or simply to kiss her, and suggest they forget pizza in favour of slipping under the bedclothes. But a silence quickly settled on the stair, she couldn’t even hear muffled TV sounds or voices from the other apartments below.

  She was on the point of returning to the apartment, when she noticed what appeared to be a brown ball resting on the banister maybe two or three floors below. A misshapen ball set with two pieces of glass that….

  Eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said startled. ‘I was just looking for my husband.’

  God, she sounded a total idiot, she realized, apologizing to the old man who looked up at her. But the truth of the matter was that his sudden appearance like that, gazing up with those glass-splinter eyes had startled her. Feeling more idiotic, she gave him another smile, then backed through the apartment door before closing and locking it.

  The poor guy had probably heard the two of them calling up and downstairs and simply come out to see what all the noise was about. No doubt permanent residents here must have had a bellyful of here-today-gone-tomorrow holidaymakers who tramped up the steps calling to one another, playing music too loud, leaving sand all over the stair carpets and generally behaving like inconsiderate slobs.

  Still with a twinge of guilt Ingrid went through into the lounge to look out of the window. She thought she might catch sight of Ben as he headed off in that long stride of his toward the seafront before cutting off to the supermarket, where it lay in a tangle of narrow streets and ancient cottages. But no. The mist that had been seeping in off the ocean all day had thickened so much she couldn’t even see their car parked on the road four storeys below. It now appeared as if their apartment floated on a lake of streaming white.

  Through the glass she heard the soulful call of the foghorn. Being a city dweller the sound was alien to her; gravely mournful, too. She couldn’t escape the notion that she heard some primeval creature that lay dying on the shore as it called to its long lost mate.

  The booming cry came again; a dark rhythm embedded with such a ghostly resonance it bordered on the funereal. She shivered. Now, alone in the apartment for the first time since her arrival, it suddenly became a grave and lonely place, where empty bedrooms were haunted by shadows that might—

  ‘OK, enough,’ she told herself firmly, as her imagination began to slide insidious little movements into the corner of her eye. ‘Dracula’s hardly likely to come popping out of the wardrobe, is he?’

  Even so, she quickly turned on every light in every room, before returning to the living-room where she switched on the TV. All channels were blank. Great … now the set was on the fritz. But they’d been watching it not ten minutes ago when they’d run the fruits of their harem scarem camcorder work from the last few days. The video camera was still plugged into the TV; so instead of having to sit on the sofa listening to the mournful call of the foghorn she hit the ‘play’ button. First came a jogging shot of the village of Staithes just a few miles north of Whitby. Little more than a rock shelf on the sea’s edge, it was home to a few dozen cottages and a couple of inns that were achingly picturesque. An October sun shone brilliantly on red tiled roofs; flocks of seagulls wheeled, crying raucously; fishing boats bobbed in the estuary. Ingrid smiled at the TV screen as Ben’s face appeared, ‘Have you heard the local legend, Ingrid?’ he was saying in his best Boris Karloff impression yet. ‘Ingrid, dear. On the last Friday of October those terrible … those dreadful hell birds come down and carry off the first blonde lady they see….’

  Then came shots of Whitby: the ancient abbey on the cliff that had been ruined even further by a few stray shots from a U-boat in World War I. After that, the church of St Mary’s surrounded by a graveyard full of headstones weathered into fantastically weird shapes. More views: the famous 199 steps that cascade down to the old town where streets are so narrow it’s a struggle for a single car to pass between the rows of tiny sixteenth-century cottages; the Banwick Arms with its whalebone rafters; the marvellously named Town Of A Magic Dream coffee house where Jim Morrison painted the ‘Crazy Horse’ ceiling mural of counter-culture legend; then across the River Esk to Whitby’s more modern half, complete with Woolworth’s, the Gothic storefront of The Dracula Experience (displaying the cape that Christopher Lee once wore) and a gaggle of amusement arcades full of flashing, honking slot machines. Ben had insisted on videoing her standing outside the house on Royal Crescent where they were staying over Halloween weekend.

  They’d chosen the apartment by sheer chance at the tourist office. Soon they discovered that a hundred years or so before, the house had played host to a famous guest. Ingrid watched the TV as her own face filled the screen. Off camera, Ben was asking her to get closer to the plaque. Now she watched her own blonde-framed face smile back into the camera. ‘It’s too high.’

  ‘Stand on tiptoe.’

  ‘Can you get it in now?’

  ‘Just … wait, the top of your head’s covering the bottom half.’

  ‘This better?’ She’d lowered her head a little.

  Now, comically standing on her head like a blue crown, was the wall plaque:

  WHITBY CIVIC SOCIETY

  BRAM STOKER (1847-1912)

  AUTHOR OF DRACULA STAYED HERE

  1890-1896

  ‘My God, does it get any better than this?’ Ben’s voice soared from the TV as he’d filmed the inside of the apartment. ‘Bram Stoker dreamt up Dracula here. We’re even sleeping in the great man’s bedroom. Jesus. Just look at the view.’

  Smiling, Ingrid dueted her own voice from the TV: ‘But it’s changed a bit since then.’

  ‘Just a bit,’ Ben said zooming the camera through the open doorway to reveal the hi-fi, TV and modern artwork on the walls. ‘Nice décor. Post-modern minimalist, would you say?’

  ‘Absa-bloody-lutely.’

  A wavering shot of the square windows accompanied by Ben’s Karloff voice. ‘Bram Stoker climbs the fifty-eight steps to his apartment where he gazes out to the ghost-rich sea and thinks: I know I’ll write a story about a foreign gentleman who goes round biting people on the neck. He shuns daylight, detests garlic—’

  ‘Pizza … damn, he’ll be back any minute.’

  ‘– the only way to kill him is to hammer a chunk of wood through his evil old heart. Little did he know—’

  Ingrid stabbed the ‘off’ button then went through into the kitchen where she slid the pizza into a now smoky oven. Great, a second honeymoon and your husband will come back to find you reeking of cooker-smoke.

  She went to the bedroom where she sprayed herself with scent, checked her long, curling blonde hair, then gave
it a jet of hair-spray to make sure it stayed in place. ‘There, thirty-six years old and still a beauty.’ She smiled into the mirror meaning the compliment in a faintly jocular way. But she did feel good and, if she were honest, she looked good, too; her blonde hair shone, her eyes sparkled, her face glowed from a super-abundance of Whitby fresh air, good food and – don’t cha’ know it? – a whole heap of good loving. This ‘second honeymoon’ as they jokingly called it, made her look years younger. She’d just added a touch of lipstick that was a knowing, lascivious red when she heard the knock on the door. Smiling, she remembered her promise. In a second she slipped off her clothes, then padded barefoot to the door.

  Lie naked on the kitchen table and murmur, ‘Supper is served.’

  She smiled even more broadly at the mental image. Maybe later, girl… She slipped back the bolt then turned the handle ready to pull open the door to see Ben’s surprised face.

  But, what if it’s the old man with those tiny glittery eyes?

  ‘Good point,’ she murmured to herself. Slipping the chain back on, she opened the door an inch, making sure her body was well hidden behind it.

  A good job, too.

  She looked out onto an empty landing; craning her neck, she saw an equally empty staircase, too, with the brown wooden stair-rail switch-backing its way into darkness below. For a moment she thought she saw a shadow moving through the gloom. ‘Ben … Ben? Is that you?’ Confused, she tried to see at either side of the door without opening it any further. Cold air slid up from the darkness to make her shiver so much her skin puckered into goose flesh.

  No. There’s no one there. But who had knocked on the door?

  A knock came again. She started so much her forehead bumped against the doorframe.

  ‘Ben?’ The darkened stairwell gobbled up her whisper. Hell, it didn’t take a genius of observation to tell there was no one down there. Who’d creep about in the darkness anyway, when there were light switches on every landing?