The Midnight Hour

by Neil Davies

  Alex Roland glanced towards the sky.

  “No time detective. Listen, believe me. I know what I’m talking about. I was involved in the project.”

  “Project? What project?” Greenbaum tried to ease Walker towards the police station door. Where were all the uniforms when you needed them?

  “The government captured a live vampire almost a decade ago. We’d been trying much longer.” He looked towards the growing crowd of townspeople. He had to warn them.

  Greenbaum stopped despite his urge to escape into the safety of the building. Why was everyone around him going insane?

  “Bullshit.” It was the only answer he could think of.

  Roland ignored him, continuing as if there had been no interruption.

  “We extracted its DNA. This creature the young man saw isn’t exactly a vampire, but it’s a distant relation. A manufactured relation!”

  Paul barely heard the words, his shifting, erratic attention drawn by the cloud that gathered in the sky at the far end of town. It seemed too low, too dark, too alive.

  Roland turned to look up once again, his neck aching in the brace.

  “It’s too late.” His voice almost broke as he spoke. “The swarm has arrived!”

  They covered the sun as they writhed and twisted their way across the town, bringing an eerie, frightening darkness to the people running and screaming below. Too many to count, so dense in their formation that even their translucence seemed solid, the descended on Sheldsville, drawn by the messages of abundant feeding sent out by their scouts.

  One by one the fleeing townspeople fell, struggling, into the dust of main street as the deadly ribbons wrapped around their necks, teeth bursting through flesh, powerful oscillations liquidising skin and muscle as they drank.

  Alex Roland, pulling a creature from the impervious, smooth surface of the neck brace, dragged Paul into the police station, slamming the doors behind him. Just outside, reaching for the suddenly closed door, Detective Greenbaum tugged hopelessly at the ribbon that snaked around his thin neck. There was a moment of intense, burning pain and he fell, twitching in death, to the station steps.

  Inside, Paul looked at the gathered policemen, too frightened to step outside, too frightened to even question the authority of this soldier as he ordered windows barred, doors barricaded.

  Paul said nothing, his head full of images of flying ribbons of blood, of his sister, of vampires. He listened to the screams outside. He listened to the shouted orders and someone’s quiet sobbing inside. It took a moment for him to realise the sobbing was his own. There was nothing he could do.

  By the time the screams finally stopped, Alex Roland had rejoined Paul at the door, listening. The attack had lasted only ten minutes. It had seemed much longer to the stunned, horrified people hiding inside the police station.

  Roland turned, standing. His voice was clear and steady as he spoke. It was almost, Paul thought, as if he had spoken these words before.

  “You have maybe half-an-hour at the most to get out of here before those things start feeding again. Probably less before the clean-up team get here.”

  “Clean-up?” Paul’s voice was still weak.

  Roland ignored him.

  “You’re on your own. I’m getting out now and I suggest you do the same.”

  As he turned to open the door Paul grabbed his arm.

  “Who are you? Why are you helping us?”

  Roland turned to him, his eyes sad, his shoulders heavy with years of guilt beyond anything Paul could ever imagine.

  “I’m not helping you, I’m helping myself. You just got in the way.”

  He pulled open the station doors and stepped out into the town.

  As Paul hesitantly followed he drew in a sharp breath. Bodies lay everywhere, twisted, scattered like so much trash. Blood streaked the dust of main street. Mangled flesh spotted the ground like pebbles.

  There was no sign of the creatures.

  Roland turned back one more time.

  “Get out of here fast. They don’t like witnesses.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?” He smiled grimly. “I’ll be long gone before….”

  His forehead burst open in a fantail of blood and bone as the sniper’s bullet drilled through from the back of his head.

  For a moment his eyes seemed to widen in surprise and, ridiculous as it was, Paul expected him to speak, to just shrug the bloody hole in his head off as some minor itch. But then the legs folded and he fell.

  Paul watched as dust billowed around the fallen body, wondering at how graceless it had been. No slow motion. No artful twisting and tumbling. No last words. Real death was not like those he watched nightly on his DVDs. It was messy and quick and untidy.

  As he stared at the body of the soldier he heard the distant rumble of trucks, saw the cloud of dust at the far end of town. He had not moved by the time the military convoy arrived in main street, rolling over bodies, crushing bones beneath heavy wheels.

  He sobbed quietly as the soldiers dismounted and began their systematic sweep of Sheldsville’s streets and buildings.

  He barely heard the footsteps behind him or the soft whisper of metal being drawn from leather.

  THE SHADOW

  The first time Richard Hamilton realised he had a problem with his eyesight was on a cold Wednesday morning.

  The clock/radio alarm woke him and he reached blindly to the bedside cabinet and hit the ‘snooze’ button. Fifteen minutes later when it burst into life again he wanted to do the same. It was only by conscious effort that he kept his fingers spread over the empty pillow alongside him.

  It had been empty for two weeks now, ever since Lisa had walked out on him.

  He stroked the pillow, remembering how he would stroke her hair first thing in the morning, catching his fingers in knots caused by her restless sleeping. She was a natural blonde but her long hair never seemed to stay one colour for longer than a month. Last time he saw her it had been a deep red, shining in the strip-light of the hallway outside as she walked out without even looking back.

  He felt tears welling beneath his closed eyelids. It hadn’t been that long since the last ones had dried.

  An irritatingly cheerful DJ announced that it was 7:30am and Richard realised that he really had to get up. He couldn’t face losing his job as well as his girlfriend all in the same month!

  He rolled onto his back, reached out and hit the ‘off’ button on the clock/radio, wiped the tears from where they had run down his cheeks, opened his eyes and saw the shadow.

  At least, that’s what he thought it was at first, a shadow off to his left. Nothing particularly worrying or disturbing, just a shadow, but a shadow where there shouldn’t be one. There was nothing there to cast a shadow and the dim grey light that filtered through the closed curtains was hardly strong enough to throw one anyway.

  He turned his head towards it, curious.

  The shadow remained off to his left.

  He turned his head back again.

  The shadow followed.

  Only, not a shadow. Something in his eye perhaps?

  He sighed and pushed the bedclothes back with his feet. Walking across to the small dressing table the shadow walked with him, always to his left, there but vague, shapeless.

  He leaned into the mirror, pulling his left eyelid down, rolling his eyeball. There didn’t seem to be anything there, nothing visible anyway.

  Perhaps it was tiredness.

  Perhaps it was the after-effects of the huge amount of alcohol he had poured down himself last night while watching some instantly forgettable romantic comedy on TV. The film had been crap. Nevertheless, he had cried through most of the first half and all of the second. If a bit of a shadow in his sight was all he had to suffer with after that then he was grateful. Preferable to the pounding head he had been expecting. The shadow and a slight fuzziness in his brain. He’d got off easy!

  The shadow stayed with him all day.

  At th
e office several of his co-workers had accused him of daydreaming when in fact he’d been trying to get a better look at the greyness hovering at the edge of his vision. He knew it was stupid. How could you get a better look at something that wasn’t there? Something that was just a trick of the eye in the first place?

  By mid-afternoon he’d been aware that his boss was watching, which was all too easy in the open-plan building. He forced his concentration back to his ever-increasing in-tray and away from the shadow. It wouldn’t do to lose his job through some strange twist of “the morning after”, however curious.

  At 5:30pm he headed straight for the underground and home. The last hour his head had begun to pound with the effort of ignoring the constant intrusion of the shadow on his vision. He needed aspirin and rest.

  In the morning it would be ok. He’d never had a hangover last longer than one day.

  “Richard?”

  It was Lisa, calling him. Wanting him.

  They stood in a field, facing each other, just too far apart to reach out and touch fingers. A nearby brook bubbled. Birds, high in the trees at the field’s edge, sang into the summer air. There was no traffic, no police sirens, no voices. Nothing but the two of them.

  It was idyllic.

  Even in the midst of the warmth that spread through his chest at seeing her again he knew it was a dream. What else could it be? She’d walked out!

  “Richard. I made a terrible mistake. I should never have left.”

  “Lisa...” the words caught in his throat. How cruel could his own mind be? It would have been so nice to have believed this to be real at least for a while. Why this time did he have to know it was a dream? Why did the fantasy before him have to be scarred by the truth?

  He stepped towards the dream Lisa. It would mean so much to feel her arms around him again, even if it wasn’t real.

  She changed before he reached her, her features fading, her colour draining away until she was nothing more than the shadow of a person. The shadow!

  He stepped back, horrified, as the edges of the shape before him blurred, curling tendrils of mist twisting away in the sunlight, until the thing was shapeless, drifting.

  It took him a moment to realise it was drifting towards him!

  He woke twisted and tangled in his bedclothes, sweat making them stick to his body. He breathed heavily, wiped more sweat from his face with his hand, and peeled the bedclothes away.

  He trembled. He couldn’t calm his racing heartbeat. He was scared.

  What the hell was all that about?

  The room was dark. It was not even morning yet.

  He reached for the bedside lamp and flicked it on.

  He groaned.

  As the small light allowed him to see he noticed that the shadow was still on his left eye.

  It had darkened!

  He tried not to blink as he followed the optician’s light with his eyes.

  “Well Mr Hamilton, there’s nothing there I can see.”

  The optician, a small grey-haired lady dressed in a dark suit that seemed more business than medical, took the light away and he finally blinked.

  “Your eyesight is fine, better than average for your age, and I can’t see any evidence of a foreign body. Nothing that would explain the problem you describe.”

  Yet it’s there right now, thought Richard, blurring everything on that side. And I’m sure it’s getting darker!

  He said nothing out loud, afraid it would sound accusatory, as though he were calling the woman incompetent. Afraid, even more, that it would make him sound crazy!

  She seemed to take his silence as doubt in her diagnosis.

  “I’m very sorry Mr Hamilton, but there really is nothing physically there in the eye. Whatever this thing is it’s not something I’m able to treat. Perhaps a doctor.....”

  Richard was stung into speaking. This was getting too close to his own fears to be comfortable.

  “You think it’s all in my mind? You think I’m hallucinating or something?”

  He was aware his voice was perhaps too loud. He hadn’t meant it to be. He felt he was losing control.

  “Mr Hamilton.” The woman spoke calmly, smiling at him, but backing away slightly all the same.

  She thinks I’m crazy!

  “All I can say for certain is that there is nothing physical interfering with your eyesight. It may be that more investigation needs to be done.”

  He saw the face of the receptionist from the outer office peer around the corner of the examining room and then disappear just as quickly.

  Probably getting ready to phone the police in case the crazy person loses it!

  He pushed himself out of the chair and rushed out of the office, not even stopping to pay.

  He phoned in sick to the office the next morning, the third morning in a row.

  How could he work? He felt he was going blind in his left eye, the shadow creeping further across each day, darker, more impenetrable.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, forearms on the top of his thighs, head down, sobbing.

  If only Lisa were here. She would know what to do. She would take control.

  Christ he missed her!

  He curled up naked on the unmade bed and closed his eyes, crying himself to sleep.

  This time there was no field, no sunlight, no quiet bubbling brook.

  This time there was the darkest of dark alleys and a thick, greasy fog.

  Shadows moved ahead of him, around him, but with a wonderful wave of relief he realised there was no shadow on his eye. To be able to look around without that blackness always there, to feel that he wasn’t, after all, going blind…

  As before he realised he was in a dream, but it felt no less real for that, and despite the darkness, the threat of the dream, he found he did not want it to end. Just to be able to see clearly again, even if it couldn’t last.

  There was one thing missing. One person.

  She was there.

  Lisa! Standing in the alley just ahead of him, vague but unmistakable in the fog.

  She was wearing some kind of long dress and what he could only describe as a ‘bonnet’ on her head. The whole look was decidedly Victorian. The whole dream was Victorian.

  As he drew closer to her, his beautiful Lisa, he lifted his hand to touch her gently on the shoulder, to feel her softness, her warmth, once again.

  There was no hand! Only a black, barely definable shape leaving trails of oily dripping darkness as it moved. It was his. It moved under his control. But only by the furthest leap of the imagination could anyone call it a hand!

  He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out. Instead he vomited thick black bile into the air that burned his throat, blistered his mouth. He looked down at his body. Saw only darkness.

  Lisa began to turn towards him, finally aware of his presence, and suddenly his fear was gone.... replaced by a foul tasting surge of anger and hatred.

  How could she leave him? How could the bitch just walk out like that! No one else would have her. No one else could have her!

  The black shapes he still thought of as his arms rose up, long blades sliding from them, not so much held as grown.

  As Lisa turned he plunged the blades into her eyes.

  He woke.

  He screamed!

  He checked his hands, his body, shaking with fear and panic.

  Fingers. Thumbs. Skin. He was normal, himself again.

  The shadow was back in his eye.

  “Richard, you are clinically depressed.”

  Doctor Charles tapped on his computer keyboard as he spoke, glancing up at Richard who sat, head down, in the consulting room’s other chair.

  “I think the stress of work, of a relationship breaking down, has just proved too much for you over these last few weeks. I’m signing you off work for a month and giving you a course of anti-depressants. Nothing too strong to start with, but we’ll see how things go on those.”

  The dot-matrix printer in the corner whirred
and clattered as it printed out the prescription form.

  “This ‘shadow’ you see in your eye is just a manifestation of that stress, of the chemical imbalance in your mind. As we treat your depression and relieve the stress around you I’m sure you’ll see an improvement in that. In time it will disappear altogether.”

  He handed the prescription over and rose to escort Richard to the door.

  “Come back and see me in a month. In the meantime, think about getting away somewhere, away from your flat. Away from the area even.”

  The doctor smiled at him.

  “Take a vacation.”

  It had taken most of his savings but as Richard stood at the hotel room window and looked out over the small town of Benodet in Brittany, past the old church, along towards the beach, he knew it had been worth it.

  Already he felt better and he had only just unpacked!

  The shadow was still there but somehow it seemed less threatening, less frightening than when he was sitting in his flat back home in London. France was in the middle of a heat wave, people were walking around in shirtsleeves and sunglasses and the cafes and shops along the front bustled with life. He couldn’t have timed it better if he’d planned it months in advance. For a last minute booking it was amazing.

  Perhaps things really would start to improve now.

  On the third day of his vacation, while he bought an ice-cream from the cafe on the corner and watched fellow tourists lining up to board the boat for a river cruise, he suddenly realised that the shadow had faded back to a faint, vague grey.

  It was now no darker than that first morning, perhaps even lighter.

  He grinned a “merci” at the cafe owner, not even worrying how bad his French accent was. He smiled as he crossed the busy road, dodging teenagers on scooters, and sat on the wall facing the beach. The doctor had been right. He was going to be ok.

  Her name was Sally and she was from Devon.

  They had started a conversation for the simple reason that they were both sitting alone in the cafe and they were both obviously English. They took the conversation out of the cafe and round the shops, up to the local market, down to the beach, and eventually for an evening meal at a restaurant overlooking the quayside.