By Midnight

by Mia James

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘Those girls in the first picture, they weren’t sitting on the chair. They were sitting on this gorgeous guy’s lap. He had a red shirt on, and it was sickening how they were throwing themselves at him.’

  ‘And …?’ prompted Fiona.

  ‘And he’s not in the photo! It can’t be, it can’t …’ said April, almost to herself. The other pictures had downloaded now and she clicked on them quickly, looking for the one that was making her stomach turn over. Not that one: a shot of the crowded corridor; not the next one either: a shot of the entrance hall. And then, there it was.

  ‘Oh no, no, no …’ moaned April.

  ‘What’s up? Are you looking at the one you sent me of Milo?’

  ‘But this is stupid!’ snapped April. ‘Have you been messing about with them? You Photoshopped them or something?’

  ‘No, April, I didn’t.’ Fiona sounded annoyed. ‘I thought you had.’

  April looked back at the screen. Her heart was beating too fast, too hard, it felt like it was wedged in her throat. The picture in front of her was of the ballroom. April had sneaked off to the side with her camera because she had wanted to send Fiona a picture of Milo. She had snapped it off, and sent it with the message: ‘This is Milo dancing - sexy huh?’ But Milo didn’t look sexy in this picture. He didn’t look like anything, because he wasn’t there. Just like the guy in the armchair wasn’t there. April tried to swallow, but she couldn’t. Maybe she had made a mistake with that first shot - maybe the girls were sitting on the arms of the chair. But they weren’t, they weren’t, her mind insisted. But she hadn’t made any mistake with the picture of Milo. He had been in the centre of the photo, dancing, a huge cute grin on his face because he was twirling a girl around in the air. And now, here, that girl was in the photograph alone. Whirling through space, no partner, no Milo. Just a weird black smudge where he should have been.

  ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you,’ said Fiona. ‘At first, I thought it was a joke, but I couldn’t figure out why you’d bother airbrushing someone out of a photo right in the middle of a party. And then I started to worry. I don’t know what’s going on down there, but I do know it’s pretty strange. And now you’re telling me about this Marcus guy spreading rumours - it does sound a bit wrong.’

  Wrong. That’s exactly what she had been thinking. All wrong.

  ‘So what do I do now, Fee?’ said April desperately.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie. Get a new phone?’

  She couldn’t explain it to Fiona, she hadn’t been at the party. To other people it just looked as if she had a faulty camera, or like some weird light effect, but April had been there. She had seen those boys. She had touched them. Oh God, I kissed a boy who isn’t there, she thought.

  ‘April? Are you still there?’

  ‘Sorry, Fee, I’ve got to go,’ said April suddenly.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going back to school. First I’ve got to make a grovelling apology, and then …’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I think I’m going to visit the library.’

  Chapter Twelve

  April barely made it back to school in time for her next lesson. She was flustered and red in the face, but she managed to slip through the door for her English Literature class with seconds to spare. Luckily there was still a desk free next to Caro, near the back. She glanced at her friend, but she was avoiding her gaze. April opened her book and scribbled a note, then passed it across to Caro.

  Sorry for overreacting. Sorry I shouted. Forgive me?

  Caro took April’s pen and scribbled under it, Buy me cake and it’s forgotten.

  April grinned and nodded. Americano, tonight at seven?

  Caro gave a thumbs-up, then wrote: Got a plan re: evil rumours. Now pay attention, some of us are trying to listen.

  April stifled a giggle. They were reading Hamlet, which, despite all the killing and ghosts and the weird Shakespearian language, seemed quite reassuring and normal after everything April had been coping with recently.

  ‘Many critics have argued,’ said Mr Andrews, their English teacher, ‘that Hamlet is the embodiment of a man’s journey from adolescence to maturity - birth to death, if you like.’

  April wrote it all down, although she personally thought the ‘many critics’ were talking cobblers. As far as she could tell, the story was simple: Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his dad, who appears to him as a ghost and demands he take revenge on Bad Uncle Claudius. Then Hamlet drives his girlfriend to suicide, there’s a big sword fight and everyone dies. Frankly, thought April, Hamlet’s having a pretty easy time of it.

  April wished she had a ghost telling her what to do, telling her what those photographs meant. Was Caro right? Were there really vampires on those photos? Is that what her father’s notebook was getting at? She shook her head. Just listen to yourself, April, she scolded herself. Just because you took a couple of rubbish pictures on your mobile phone doesn’t mean the undead are walking the earth. There are dozens of better explanations, if not thousands. A couple of wonky photos, especially when she’d drunk about eight cocktails, were hardly proof of the supernatural.

  ‘It’s one of Shakespeare’s most enduring plays because the majority of the audience identify with Hamlet’s struggle,’ said Mr Andrews. ‘He doesn’t know whether or not to believe the ghost, he’s surrounded by people with ulterior motives, and then, when it comes to doing something about it, he finds all sorts of excuses not to act. That’s what’s at the heart of the play: which is better, thought or action? Head or heart? And those are questions we have to deal with every day.’

  Tell me about it, thought April.

  She was out of her seat almost the second the bell rang. She muttered a goodbye to Caro and sprinted to the front of the room. She wasn’t going to stick around while everyone stared at her and discussed the rumours about her supposed orgy with Marcus Brent and his idiot friends. Besides, she had better things to do. She turned right along the corridor, keeping her head down, pretending to fiddle with her bag so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone. Finally she turned into a long corridor with a wooden door at the end, a sign next to it reading ‘Chandler Library’. She pushed it open and found herself in a surprisingly large space with a high ceiling and a balcony around the walls. It was very modern-looking with steel-fronted shelves and banks of computers.

  ‘Big, isn’t it?’ said a voice to her left. April turned; a grey-haired old lady was sitting behind the desk, stamping a big pile of books in front of her. She guessed she must be about eighty - she had deeply lined waxy skin and horn-rimmed glasses in a style that April thought had slipped out of fashion in about 1956.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I saw you looking at the room, dear.’ The old lady smiled. ‘A lot of people are surprised at the size of the library when they first walk in. They added it on to the original building when it was converted into a school. I suppose they thought all those mighty young brains would need more books.’

  April looked around. There were two Chinese girls sitting at a long table in the middle of the room and she could see a couple of pupils browsing the shelves, but it wasn’t exactly the popular destination she’d assumed it would be.

  ‘Oh, it’s all done over the Internet these days, lovey,’ said the lady, looking towards the computer terminals with distaste. ‘Or the wealthy families buy their children all the books they need. People don’t read the way they used to any more. So the Chandler has become a repository for a lot of rare and specialised books. Which is nice, but I do prefer it when people read them.’

  April nodded politely and began to move away.

  ‘Library card?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be needing a library card?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  The woman pushed a wh
ite form towards her. ‘Fill that out and I’ll snap into action.’

  April stared at her in surprise; she really didn’t look as if she could move faster than a snail’s pace. The woman kept a straight face, but there was a distinctly wicked gleam in her eye. ‘I’m Mrs Townley, by the way. If you need any help, just yell. I’ll probably hear you.’

  April murmured her thanks and headed towards the history section. Is everyone around here crazy? she wondered as her eyes scanned the shelves. Military history, social history, international, political; each section was amazingly well stocked, but none of it quite fit the bill. She found one promising book - The Inquisition in Britain - but beyond a few engravings of heretics being tortured and burned at the stake, it didn’t have much else of relevance. April had researched vampires on the Internet after Caro had first mentioned them a few days before, but it was frustrating and repetitive with endless sites trotting out the same old ‘garlic, mirrors, sunlight’ stuff that everyone had seen in the movies and on TV. She was most interested in the mirror thing, as it seemed to be the same principle as cameras - something to do with the silver they used on the back of old looking glasses - but most of the information on the Net was contradictory, mainly because most people were getting their information from different movies and books. She found the worst offenders in the online discussion groups were incredibly serious teenagers who felt they ‘were’ vampires, despite the fact that they weren’t immortal bloodthirsty killers. They all confidently claimed they knew the ‘real truth’ about vampires, but most of it seemed connected to various rather sad sexual fantasies. Ironically, April realised that she was looking for something like one of her dad’s books - for a work by someone who had sifted through all the silliness and the rumours and could give her the hard facts, if there were any. But she couldn’t really ask him, could she? She imagined the conversation: ‘Dad, you know those vampires you’re looking for? Well, I’ve found them. They go to my school. And you know how you told me not to kiss any boys at the party? Well, I didn’t, technically, because it turns out he’s actually a vampire.’ I would be so grounded, if he didn’t cart me off to the loony bin first.

  ‘Ah-ha, this is more like it,’ she whispered as she finally found the mythology section. Working backwards, there were books on zombies, witches, werewolves, even a book detailing the folklore of the will-o’-the-wisp. And then - her heart leapt - there were four or five books on vampires. She pulled them down and carried the pile to a table out of sight of the Chinese girls. There were enough rumours going around about her already without adding fuel to the fire.

  April eagerly flipped through the books, but she was to be just as frustrated as she had been with the Internet. Vampires in the movies, vampires in romantic literature, vampires in folklore, it was all the same tired stuff: vampires don’t like silver, crucifixes or holy water and you could kill them by staking them through the heart, exposing them to sunlight or beheading them. Some could turn themselves into bats or wolves. The end. There was nothing relating to her father’s theories and nothing she would regard as serious - a scholarly dissection of folk myths, for example. And nothing on Highgate or the Highgate Vampire. She had felt sure a library of this size would have had something on local legends, but there was nothing. Dejected, April was putting the books back on the shelf when she noticed a volume that had been left on top of the book case. Curious, she picked it up and her heart leapt again.

  London’s Cemeteries: A Guide, by Ian Montgomerie.

  Excited, she sat down and began reading:In the early 19th century, London was booming. Almost overnight, the population doubled, with unchecked immigration and impoverished workers pouring in from the countryside, but the streets were not paved with gold, as many thought. Disease, overcrowding, poor sanitation and starvation all contributed to a massive rise in the death rate, so much so that in 1832 the government, fearing an epidemic, passed a bill designed to encourage entrepreneurs to set up private burial plots outside the city. Their plan worked and within the next decade, seven new cemeteries were built at Kensal Green, West Norwood, Abney Park, Nunhead, Brompton, Tower Hamlets and Highgate. They became known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’.

  April skim-read the chapter on Highgate and, although it was interesting - the Victorian attitudes to death, the use of pagan and Egyptian imagery, the famous burials - there was nothing she wanted. She flicked through the rest, but there was no mention of vampires or any sort of supernatural occurrences at all.

  She took the book back to its shelf and headed towards the front desk where Mrs Townley was now sitting with her eyes closed, her knitting on her lap, listening to an iPod. April sighed theatrically, leaving her filled-in library card form on the desk and heading towards the door.

  ‘Didn’t find what you were looking for, eh?’

  April almost jumped in the air. ‘God, you scared me!’ she gasped, clutching a hand to her chest.

  The old woman chuckled. ‘Been doing that trick for donkey’s years. Gets ’em every time.’

  April gazed at her, amazed. The old woman really was crazy. ‘No,’ she said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘I didn’t find what I was looking for.’

  ‘Well, stick with it, lovey. Whatever you’re after, it’s out there, it’s just a matter of looking in the right place. And I can always find time to help anyone who’s really looking for answers.’

  April nodded weakly as she headed for the door. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, before you go, I thought you might like these,’ said the old lady, picking up a huge pile of books from the shelf behind her and thumping them down on the desk. ‘Miss Holden’s reading list—’

  ‘Wow, thanks!’ said April. ‘How did you—?’

  ‘No magic to it, dearie. Miss Holden’s very efficient. She sent me an email.’

  April pulled out the sheet Miss Holden had given her and pointed to the title the teacher had added at the bottom.

  Mrs Townley peered at it through her glasses, then looked at April. ‘For that you’ll be needing Griffin’s.’

  ‘Griffin’s? Is that a reference book?’

  ‘No, the bookshop on the High Street. Mr Gill is the owner, tell him I sent you and that you’re one of my “special students” - he’ll know what you mean.’ Mrs Townley leant forward and beckoned April closer. ‘I don’t send many students to Mr Gill,’ she whispered. ‘He’s a dear man, but he’s very old and I don’t like to wear him out. So let’s keep it our little secret, yes?’

  ‘But why do we ha—’ began April, but Mrs Townley had already turned away.

  ‘You!’ she yelled at one of the Chinese girls. ‘Break the spine on one of my books and I’ll break yours!’

  As April walked away, she heard Mrs Townley turn on her iPod again. Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast.

  Crazy, April thought to herself as she walked out of the library. Completely crazy.

  Griffin’s looked like it had been abandoned, a curiosity from a bygone age left behind as the rest of the world modernised and moved onwards. It’s a miracle it’s avoided becoming a Starbucks, thought April. From its tiny windowpanes to its narrow entrance with its firmly closed door, it was the absolute opposite of the bright, welcoming, open-plan shops on either side. Griffin’s bowed shopfront may well have been painted an interesting colour once upon a time, but whatever it was, it was now buried under decades of grime from the High Street traffic. It was a wonder you could even read the dull gold lettering on the shop sign: R. J. Griffin, Purveyor of Fine Books.

  There was a hand-written sign on the door - ‘Please ring bell’ - but it took half a dozen goes before a little old man shuffled up to let her in: Mr Gill, April presumed. He had ruddy apple cheeks and was bald but for the tufts of wild white hair sticking out horizontally from just above his ears. His half-moon glasses and moss-green cardigan added to the impression of a studious but forgetful Cambridge don. But he didn’t look particularly friendly.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he ask
ed suspiciously, still holding on to the door. ‘We’re not sponsoring anything.’

  ‘No, no,’ said April, ‘I’m looking for a book.’

  The man raised his eyebrows and looked April up and down. ‘Oh well.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better come in, then.’

  He opened the door just enough to let April squeeze in. She had to duck under a clump of strange dried flowers hanging from the doorframe and step around an old full-length mirror. It was an incredibly cramped shop, every available surface covered with worn, dusty old books. She didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything here, let alone the book she needed.

  ‘Is there something specific you’d like?’ said the old man sceptically. Clearly they never had any customers under seventy in here. April fumbled out her reading list and showed him the book title Miss Holden had scribbled at the bottom.