by Simon Clark
He smiled and shook his head. A vampire army? The idea appealed to his at times flippant sense of humour.
That flippant sense of humour was something he’d developed at medical school. After all, when you’re nineteen years old and you suddenly find a corpse there on the dissecting room table and the anatomy lecturer is saying to you, quite straight-faced but no doubt inwardly blabbering with laughter, ‘Now, Mr Leppington, perhaps you would be so good as to remove the spleen for your fellow students’ examination. Come, come now, Mr Leppington. Dead men don’t bite.’
My God, yes, there are times when a sense of humour is as essential as the air you breathe.
The hotel room had grown gloomy. He switched on the table lamp, took a sip of coffee, then returned to the book.
3
As David Leppington read, in the room next door Bernice Mochardi tried on clothes she’d found in a storeroom on the same landing.
They were Electra’s clothes, she had no doubt of that. They were stored neatly on shelves. Bowls of salt had stood on each shelf to prevent damp creeping into the delicate fabrics.
My God, she thought, Electra must have more clothes than a princess. Surely she never gets to wear everything?
It was early Saturday evening. She had nothing to do. Boredom eventually outweighed any notion that it might be improper to try on someone else’s clothes without asking. Besides, Electra would be busy opening the hotel bars downstairs and supervising kitchen staff.
Surely it wouldn’t do any harm to take a few items to her own room, Bernice reasoned, try them on, then return them neatly folded to the storeroom. Why, I imagine Electra no longer knows she has these clothes. There’s probably storeroom after storeroom in this hotel containing clothes that Electra had bought and never even worn.
And I need to take my mind off that stupid video, she thought firmly. I can’t keep brooding over it. Or wondering what happened to the man in the video. It might have been nothing more than an elaborate joke. Don’t some people take photographs of themselves in coffins, pretending to be dead? Every day hospitals remove cucumbers, Coca-Cola bottles, and God knows what else from people s anuses. It’s a strange, strange world; people are driven to do strange things…
…like watching that vile video; like barricading your door at night; like imagining that a man — green with graveyard mould and eyeless — paces outside your door, Bernice.
Shut up, she told the voice in her head. I don’t need this. Why should these mad, these bloody mad thoughts preoccupy me?
Leave this town, said a sudden cool voice in her head. Leave this town if it’s the last thing you do.
The clothes.
Busy yourself with these. Occupy your mind.
Bernice gathered up armfuls of blouses, dresses, scarves, gloves from the shelves, then walked quickly across the hotel corridor back to her room. She closed the door behind her.
4
In Room 101 Fiona panted on the bed. Matt was a great gloomy shape above her. He thrust himself into her body. The bed creaked to the muscular rhythm. She surrendered herself to pleasure.
He looked down at her, eyes glinting in the near dark. Nothing else existed but that friction between her legs — that delicious friction that made her heart pump harder, brought out her breath in hard spurts. She gripped his buttocks in both her hands, pulled him into her. He panted a string of words at her; they were loving, sexy and dirty all at the same time.
God, she was coming.
She looked up at the ceiling, her mouth and her eyes wide. The ceiling rose blurred, contracted to a grey spot, then seemed to explode into a million colours as the orgasm roared through her body.
5
Saturday night. Within the brick walls that formed its unyielding crust, the Station Hotel continued its existence on this Earth.
An animal is composed of internal organs that are, in turn, composed of living cells. The animal’s heart beats, circulating blood through arteries that might be as thick as a hosepipe or thinner than a hair. The digestive functions continue; lungs aspirate, valves open and close, electrical impulses flicker across the brain carrying sensations — warmth, pressure against skin. If that creature is human those electrical impulses transmit ideas — whether to write a poem about the waves on the ocean or the intention to watch a concert on TV.
The hotel mimicked the life process of the body. Food entered through the door, waste was flushed down the drains.
As microbes in a body follow their own agenda, the hotel’s four guests went about their business. In Room 101 the two lovers entwined upon the bed; in Room 407 David Leppington drank coffee and read his book; in 406 Bernice Mochardi slipped on black lace gloves that reached up over her elbow. The kitchen staff peeled, diced, chopped; they stirred pans that billowed steam; Chef was already on this third whisky-and-lemonade. Electra moved svelte as a cat amongst the tables in the dining room, greeting the clientele.
And as an animal is unaware — at first — when a virus invades its body, so no one noticed the thing that crept through the back door into the hotel, bare feet padding softly on the carpet. Someone seeing it on the landing might have believed they could describe it — the long arms, the way its toes curled back beneath its feet so it walked on them, the two burning eyes, the scalp curling with thick blond hair, red pressure points at either side of the nose that suggested glasses had been worn once. But its biology was as alien to man as anything that pulsates on the ocean floor; or even holds fast to rocks upon worlds beyond the stars.
6
Fiona lay warm and safe in her lover’s arms. He was asleep. She relaxed as drowsiness pulsed up within her in warm, pleasant waves. Her body throbbed. This was so right; so absolutely and so perfectly right. She’d found love at long last. Everyone deserved to be loved and to fall asleep warm and safe in the arms of a lover as tender and considerate as this.
She closed her eyes. She was happy, content, warm. Sleep stole across her brain as stealthy as a fox.
7
Bernice stood in front of the mirror. She was dressed in blacks and in purples so dark they bordered on black. She wore black lace gloves that reached above her elbows. The fabric felt oddly seductive; she could feel the pressure of it enclosing her hands, wrists and forearms. There was something sexy about it; just the feel of the pressure. The blouse-was silk. Almost black, it was shot through with fibres of that dark electric purple that imbued it with the same kind of glint you find in a beetle’s carapace. And the blouse was definitely on the big side for her, tailored for Electra’s statuesque frame. The skirt would have come to Electra’s calves. On Bernice it came down to her feet.
Now, I could pass for a Victorian lady she thought, pleased with the effect and swishing the skirt from side-to-side with an elegant sweep of her hand. I am the mistress of the house, the lady of the castle. I can do what I want — go where I want. This is my home.
She experienced a giddy thrill, dressed like that; suddenly she lifted the skirt to admire her black lace-topped stockings. Now she wished someone could see her dressed like this. She wanted to share the effect: primly Victorian yet smoulderingly sexy; the fusion of opposites.
Bernice smiled in the mirror, her brown eyes sparkling, her teeth catching the light. A euphoria buzzed through her veins.
I can do anything, she thought, I can knock on David Leppington’s door and sweep into his room to lie back on the bed kicking my black-stockinged legs in the air and laughing at his surprised expression.
Just then she wanted to shock.
She thought of sweeping elegantly into the bar downstairs just to turn the heads of the slaughtermen on their night out on the town; then she’d sit at the bar, order red wine, as lusciously red as her lips, and wait to see who approached her first.
Too tame, she thought, skin tingling, eyes glittery.
I want more.
So much more.
Her skin burned hotly.
Her heart beat faster.
She wanted t
o live dangerously.
If the blond-haired man from the video appeared at my door, I’d kiss him on the mouth and pull him onto the bed, she thought outrageously.
If only I could find the man from the video.
Electra probably has him chained away somewhere.
She keeps him as a sex slave.
Where?
In the basement, of course!
Those words seemed to come from outside her head. In fact, they came so strongly she thought someone had spoken them in the room.
With a surprised gasp she looked round. No one there. The room was still the same: the star-shaped crack in the window above the bathroom door, the framed painting of a girl knee-deep in the river on the wall, the suitcase containing the video tape lay snug in the wardrobe…
And William Morrow, eyeless and dead as can be, stands outside your bedroom door.
No. Stop those foolish thoughts. There’s no one outside the door, Bernice. Just you wait, I’ll prove it.
Before she could stop herself she fearlessly opened the door.
Standing outside in the corridor, black, hard-edged, was her shadow, thrown from the light behind her.
Otherwise the corridor was empty. Stretching along the corridor was the old scarlet carpet (where bare, dead feet tread); no, they don’t, she told herself firmly. Keep your imagination under control, Bernice.
Nevertheless, blood buzzed through her veins. She felt in a strange, almost alien frame of mind, as if an external force guided her actions.
A cool, sane splinter of herself told her to return to her room, shut the door, get changed, wash her face and telephone one of her friends from the Farm. The voice told her she needed company.
She needed a normal, bog-standard conversation to bring herself down to earth.
But something had got a hold of her. She wanted to do something that was dangerous and exciting.
But what?
The basement.
Go down into the basement.
You might find out a secret. Just what has Electra done to Mike Stroud, the blond boy from the video?
Again, the sensation came that the words had originated from outside her head.
You don’t want to go down into the basement, Bernice, said the voice of reason, it’s dirty, dark, rat-infested…
But she found herself walking quickly along the corridor, her sandalled feet whispering across the carpet. Then she was at the stairs; she walked quickly down them, feeling that strange buzz of excitement; she could have been a spy on a mission of national importance. Her heart beat faster.
Go back, Bernice, go back.
She ignored the voice of reason and hurried down to the lobby, breathless, excited.
The lobby was deserted. The doors to the public bars were locked to prevent the rowdier elements invading the peace of the hotel. Customers would use those doors of the bar that opened directly onto the street. Electra would be in the restaurant. Through the closed doors she could hear the occasional burst of boozy laughter along with the mushy bass beat of the karaoke machine in the bar.
She tried the door of the basement.
Locked.
Fine. Damn’ fine.
She glared at the door impatiently as if it barred her from meeting a lover.
Quickly, she looked in the cupboard behind the reception desk. A huge bunch of keys lay on the shelf.
Oh, come to momma, she thought, feeling a near-delirious burst of pleasure.
It took no more than three attempts to find the right key, then the basement door swung open.
Stone steps led down into a darkness that seemed to pulsate with a velvety blackness.
She looked round the lobby. The light from the chandelier seemed far too bright, the normally muted red of the drapes seemed hideously garish. It was like when you have a drink of wine in a gloomy bar, then go outside where the daylight seems brutally over-bright because your dilated pupils refuse to contract to restrict the gush of light onto the optic nerve.
What’s happening to me? she thought wonderingly. This really felt just so weird, as if she’d been injected with some potent stimulant.
Go back, Bernice. Knock on Dr Leppington’s door. Tell him something peculiar is happening to you. Don’t go down into the basement…don’t go down into…
She went down the basement steps in a rush. Darkness enfolded her. She stared around the place, wide-eyed, seeing only gloomy shapes.
The darkness…I’ve never seen darkness like this before, she thought, awed; it seemed to be veined with a deep, deep red.
She reached out, feeling at that darkness, as if it would be solid as a wall.
Then a warning voice shunted into her head: You’re going to reach out and touch a face. The voice of reason was fighting back through that giddy excitement. It was beginning to make progress, too, but not nearly enough.
Impetuously, she walked into the darkness, one hand in front of her, the other gripping the keys.
Any second you will touch a face. It will be Mr Morrow, the man who killed himself in your room, Bernice. He’ll be standing there, face bloated with pus, his eye sockets empty as fresh graves…he’s waiting for the kiss of living lips; he’s been all alone in that grave for a hundred years — oh, he’s so cold and lonely he’d sacrifice his niche in heaven just to press his maggot-thickened fingers onto your bare breasts, then slip his tongue — slippery as a dead fish — into your mouth…
She gasped.
Her fingertip pressed something cool in the darkness.
Mr Morrow’s dead face…
No.
No, the wall.
Inside her head the voice of reason spoke louder. Bernice, what are you doing in the basement? In the dark? Unable to see so much as your hand in front of your face?
This is madness.
And she realized that’s exactly what it was.
The heat from her earlier excitement quickly dissolved into the darkness. Now fear crept into her veins. A cold fear of unreasoning dread.
She found she was moving deeper into the basement, still in absolute darkness. She couldn’t stop herself. A greater power had control now.
She smelt the damp; the fustiness of air imprisoned by the five floors of the Victorian monstrosity above her, and by the subterranean rock that lay behind the walls of the basement.
This place is bad, she thought. I shouldn’t be here. This is a bad place where bad things happen. This is where a hundred years ago the owner of the hotel raped his servant girls. Then threatened them with the sack if they told. This is where children were pushed crying and terrified against a wall; this is where they heard a zip being opened in the darkness; this is where they were told to open their mouths and warned not to bite when…
Oh, dear God, this is a terrible place.
The cold rolled at her in dark waves.
She looked round, unable to see a thing.
The darkness was liquid. Veins of deeper darkness wormed from the damp brick beneath her feet to take root in her feet. She felt those roots of darkness work up through her legs, her stomach, her chest where they snaked cancerously into her heart.
She blinked, seeing purple bloom in front of her eyes.
I’m going to scream.
She took a deep breath. I’m going to scream. I’m going to keep screaming until someone comes.
You’re going to project that scream through two metres of solid brick? No one’s going to hear you down here, Bernice.
Like no one heard those children. Or the shrieks of those fifteen-year-old maids when their hymens were brutally torn.
The blond man screamed in the video.
No one heard him.
So why on Earth should they hear you, Bernice?
When the terrible thing happens to you in the next five minutes, no
one will hear. You’re going to suffer this alone.
In the dark.
Now her senses turned in on themselves. Deprived of sight, she became exquisitely sensitiv
e to her body. She felt the firm grip of the lace gloves around her hands, fingers and wrist. The silver droplet earrings felt like splashes of icy rainwater against her neck whenever she moved her head.
She heard the soft squelching beat of the pulse in her neck. Acutely, she was aware of the sensation of her blood running through her body; from the arteries that were as thick as her thumb and fed her heart to the capillaries in her finger-tips that were thinner than a hair. Even there, she felt her lifeblood whisper through those tiny blood vessels. And she heard the blood that pulsed through her body, driven by the solid beat of her heart. If ungodly creatures lurked in this basement then now, surely, they could hear that beat; that hypnotic rhythm thudding up through her chest, through her neck to fill her head. It sounded as loud as a drum in a marching band.
Boom-boom-boom…
The keys chinked in her right hand. Her left hand moved in a motion similar to someone polishing a window, a circular motion; her sensitive fingers passing over shelves — bearing soft bundles in the utter darkness. (Victorian underwear of crisp white cotton spotted with blood; a severed hand tied up in a rag; dead babies in sacks: the terrifying images flowed incontinently now.)
She found it hard to breathe. The cold was intense.
Her fingers touched brickwork; she felt the icy feathers of saltpetre that grow from basement walls.
A hard protrusion.
A staring eye.
No.
No. A light switch.
Jerkily, she swiped down at it.
Damn…it didn’t work. The switch was a dud.
No, you were clumsy. You didn’t push the switch fully down.
She tried again, this time grasping the cold piece of plastic between finger and thumb before pulling.
A bulb flashed on above her head; after the darkness it was screamingly bright. Dazzled, she looked round. There were stacks of crates containing empty beer bottles. The basement walls curved inwards above her head to form a series of vaults shaped like barrels lying on their sides. Here and there were shelves piled with pieces of old sacking, workmen’s tools, buckets, old bundles of brewery invoices, redundant kitchen equipment, half a dozen white plastic toilet seats.