The Midnight Side

by Natasha Mostert

  Lyrics from ‘Brilliant Disguise’ by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1987 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission.

  THE MIDNIGHT SIDE. Copyright © Natasha Mostert. First published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton in 2000. First published in the United States by Harper Collins in 2001. Portable Magic Edition, 2013.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Photographer / © Denis Cohadon / Trevillion Images

  Author photograph by Mark Andreani. © Natasha Mostert

  ISBN 978-1-909965-02-7

  www.natashamostert.com

  www.portablemagic.com

  PRAISE FOR THE MIDNIGHT SIDE

  ‘In THE MIDNIGHT SIDE Mostert eschews the usual murder-mystery clichés in favour of murky, gloomily-lit suspense, painting a Dickensian picture of foggy London that is as compelling as the unfolding drama. Bedtime reading for the brave.’

  The Times (London)

  ‘Classy, psychic thriller, full of frights and forebodings … an original, unsettling book, which kicks the usual preconceptions into shape and preserves its chill to the final line.’

  The Literary Review

  ‘An unusual debut thriller … The plotline is an original one and Mostert seasons it with absorbing psychological detail … the novel holds our attention throughout, and its climactic surprise … is a humdinger.’

  Kirkus

  ‘African mysticism, paranormal experiences and terrifying dreams set the tone for this eloquently written novel … Mostert’s solid prose and chilling premise should make this a crossover success, satisfying fans of ghost stories as well as readers of main-stream suspense thrillers.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘A taut and disturbing story.’

  The Newcastle Evening Chronicle

  ‘A wonderful debut. Part ghost story, part mystery, part literary thriller, THE MIDNIGHT SIDE delights on several levels: gorgeous writing, vivid characters, nail-biting suspense, and a truly scary story of love gone wrong.’

  Romantic Times

  ‘A clever and engrossing chiller of a novel.’

  Manchester Evening News

  ‘This is a thoroughly chilling debut from a talented South African writer. The setting is contemporary London in winter, endowed with an air of supernatural menace, but without any of that dreary Victoriana beloved of lesser writers.’

  Bradford Telegraph and Argus

  ‘THE MIDNIGHT SIDE grabs your attention in the first chapter and makes you page feverishly through a paranormal mystery that keeps you intrigued until the last page.’

  South African Times

  ‘A clever debut ghost story that starts with a phone call from a dead woman and keeps you guessing until the end. This South African author is one to watch.’

  Daily Express (London)

  To Frederick

  and to Joan Mostert, with love

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE MIDNIGHT SIDE was my debut novel and I wrote it in 1999. It was published the year after by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and by William Morrow in the US.

  It is now difficult to remember, but in those days very few people used mobile phones or email. We still wrote paper letters and relied on landline telephones for our long distance communication needs. When I wrote The Midnight Side it therefore never even occurred to me to give my heroine a mobile phone.

  After twelve years the rights to The Midnight Side reverted to me and I was free to re-release the story in whatever shape I wished. As I re-edited the manuscript, trimming flabby prose and correcting a few small errors that have bugged me ever since the book was first published, I had to make the decision on whether I wanted my heroine to whip out an iPhone whenever she receives those mysterious phone calls from the dead. After giving the problem a great deal of thought, I decided to stick to the original version. A chirping mobile with a catchy ring tune simply isn’t as spooky as the sound of an old-fashioned phone pealing hollowly, monotonously and seemingly without end.

  I first became fascinated by the phenomenon of phone calls from the dead when I was only thirteen years old. I was reading a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room when I came upon an article about Thomas Edison who had worked on—but never completed—a telephone he hoped would connect the living with the dead. The article also discussed reports of people receiving phone calls from relatives no longer alive. Whereas I am not altogether certain that a ghostly apparition will have the power to terrify me, I am pretty sure that a phone call from someone I know to be deceased would just about scare me witless. Years later, when I started thinking about an idea for a ghost story, I thought it might be a good way to start a book: a phone call in the early morning hours from a beautiful woman who had died mysteriously …

  The Midnight Side also reflects my interest in mysticism, which has its roots in early childhood when I was growing up in South Africa. My aia (nanny) was a Zulu woman who introduced me to African mysticism and legends and the world of the isangoma (witch doctors). I thought she was the coolest person on the planet and tried to emulate her in every way. I remember exasperating my mother by insisting on stacking bricks below each corner of the bed to keep out of reach of the tokoloshe—an evil gnome with an enormous head but very short legs. When I created the character of Siena in The Midnight Side, I drew on many of my childhood memories for inspiration.

  I am often asked if I believe in magic. I believe there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane and things that move at the periphery of our vision. If that’s magic, then I believe in it.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title page

  Copyright

  Praise for THE MIDNIGHT SIDE

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  FIRST ENVELOPE

  Chapter 1 – Chapter 2 – Chapter 3 – Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 – Chapter 6 – Chapter 7 – Chapter 8

  SECOND ENVELOPE

  Chapter 9 – Chapter 10 – Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 – Chapter 13

  THIRD ENVELOPE

  Chapter 14 – Chapter 15 – Chapter 16 – Chapter 17

  Chapter 18 – Chapter 19 – Chapter 20 – Chapter 21

  Chapter 22 – Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Natasha Mostert

  Preview of Natasha Mostert’s DARK PRAYER

  Contact Natasha

  PROLOGUE

  And here the precious dust is layd;

  Whose purely temper’d Clay was made

  So fine, that it the guest betray’d.

  Elegy on Maria Wentworth

  Thomas Carew (1594–1640)

  THEY HAD SHAVED her scalp. All that beautiful red hair was gone. Alette’s face seemed mottled and bruised in the cool, green dusk of the hospital room.

  Four o’clock in the morning. The time when death’s angel is walking, as his mother would say.

  ‘Mmmgh.’

  The sound was tiny—a soft rattle of phlegm in her throat. He leaned over until his face almost touched hers. He gently placed his finger in the soft hollow beneath her eye.

  She would be dead soon. ‘Worm’s meat,’ as the good Dr Donne wrote so elegantly. But no, she would be cremated… she had stipulated it so in her will. No maggots and slow decay for his red-haired
love. Fire and cleansing and brittle ashes. ‘Precious dust,’ said Thomas Carew. Another seventeenth-century poet with an ear for a clever conceit.

  He sniffed gently at the scent of her skin. His lips barely touched the lovely high ridge of her cheekbone.

  He pulled back. Alette was jerking her head and rolling it slightly from side to side on the pillow. Her eyeballs moved underneath the curved, veined lids.

  He wondered if she sensed that she was in danger. Maybe fear was able to breach even the soft, implacable hold of the coma that was shuttering her brain. She had been conscious of danger yesterday just before she drove back to London; of that he was certain. He had watched as she lingered for a moment beside the open car door, slapping her gloves against the palm of her hand: back and forth, back and forth. She had hesitated, he knew, because she sensed a rage in the air.

  He always marvelled at her psychic abilities. Although she sometimes prostituted herself doing readings for stupid, bored, rich women just like any other common fortune-teller—pandering to their wishes, telling them what they wanted to hear—she was the real thing. She had the gift. He was awed by it and enchanted. Catching a glimpse of this gift was like catching sight of a furtive flame through the closed fingers of a cupped hand.

  Back and forth went her gloves. Back and forth. He watched her. He held his breath and his mind silently screamed at her to get into the car.

  Get into the car.

  To reach this point had taken months. He had engaged in extensive research on how to sabotage the car. Detective novels aside, it’s a tricky business: tampering with brakes. It’s not easy to get it just right. To inflict just enough damage so that the brakes would keep functioning normally and only give way once she steered the car through those hairpin bends down the cliff. Of course, he had also ensured that her seat belt wasn’t working.

  Get into the car.

  With a slight shrug of her shoulders she turned her body sideways, pulling both her legs into the car with one feminine, graceful motion; her skirt riding up slightly against her thigh.

  What was it Alette had said during their last conversation? ‘My life is obsession. At times I’m obsessed with keeping my own freedom. At other times I’m obsessed with robbing someone else of theirs.’

  She had spoken slowly, sounding almost puzzled. The light streaming in through the window had blanked out the expression in her eyes. Her face had the flawless, un-human look of a face caught in the cold shock of a flashlight.

  Obsession.

  Obsession is an open wound; a trickle of rotting pus. Only a clean cut can stop the green poison from spreading. Amputation. Severance. Brutal, uncompromising and quick. Soft hands make stinking wounds, as his mother was fond of saying, and she was right. A break has to be clean and absolute. Final.

  With no possibility of a comeback.

  FIRST ENVELOPE

  ONE

  I long to talke with some old lover’s ghost…

  Love’s Deitie

  John Donne (1572–1631)

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG, Isa was dreaming.

  She was dreaming of a funeral: the funeral of her love. The funeral to which she was not invited, to which she dared not go.

  Wind in the trees, white flowers on black mud. The widow’s dress billowing at the hem.

  At the widow’s side stood Mark. Isa recognized him instantly, although they had never met. In a few years’ time Mark would lose the graceless, gawky gestures and the outsize nose of adolescence and become the image of his father. At this moment his hand was protectively draped around the shoulder of his mother, who was weeping with wild abandon, without any thought of propriety. Her face was screwed up into an ugly grimace of woe and her mouth was open. To her left were the two younger girls—twins—Cecily and Anne. Their long blonde hair was pulled back behind their ears with crimson velvet ribbons.

  Isa wanted to join them. She wanted to take the widow’s slack hand into her own, and kiss the smooth cheeks of the little girls. She wanted to say, ‘Please talk to me. I have no one to talk to about him. I have no one with whom to share my grief.’

  Isa started to speak but the wind blew the words from her mouth. She started to walk towards them but her legs dragged, heavy as lead.

  Then she felt a tug at her sleeve. She looked down and saw the hand resting on her elbow. As always, this hand was small, much smaller than her own square, capable-looking hands. And as always, Isa was unable to see the owner of the hand although she could sense her presence, and on the edges of her peripheral vision hovered a shape…

  The phone rang: the sound a long, long chain dragging her back to consciousness.

  She fumbled for the phone, her fingers slipping and then clumsily gripping the receiver. Behind her eyes was a sense of flickering nausea. The ringing of the phone sounded odd: flat, atonal; strangely off-key.

  ‘Isabelle, is that you?’

  The connection was poor. But the voice could only belong to Alette: there was no mistaking that whispery voice. And only Alette ever used her full name: Isabelle. Or rather I-i-sabelle. Alette always pronounced her name with the first syllable slightly drawn out: ‘I-i-sabelle’—like a child calling out the name of another child during a game of hide-and-seek.

  Isa struggled to concentrate. Her mind was still stupid with sleep and the phone call seemed almost an extension of her dream. In her dream she had sensed Alette beside her, had felt the pressure of her hand, and now, only a waking moment later, here she was talking to her. The switch from dream to reality was so abrupt, her brain was struggling to cope with the transition.

  Isa knew her cousin was calling from London. The satellite hook-up between the U.K. and South Africa was particularly poor today. Some words came through as clearly as though Alette was standing next to her, while other words were drowning in a sea of scratchy noises. The words faded away but it sounded as though Alette was constantly repeating, ‘Isabelle, is that you?’

  Isa pushed herself upright. ‘Alette, yes—it’s me. Listen, we have a terrible line. Let me call you back.’

  ‘No.’ The word came over the line with the force of a bullet. ‘Don’t hang up.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Silence. But the noise on the line was lessening.

  Isa pulled a pillow into place behind her back. The sky outside her window was grey, streaked with pink. The curtain was open—she must have forgotten to close it when she went to bed last night. Actually, she could hardly remember the previous night. She reached for her wristwatch on the bedside table. Five A.M.

  There was a wicked ache lurking behind her eyes, which no doubt had something to do with the wineglass that stood next to the telephone. But it wasn’t the after-effects of the wine that made her feel suddenly apprehensive. Something was wrong. London was two hours behind Durban—for Alette, it was three o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Alette—what’s wrong?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ The ghost of a laugh. ‘Sorry I woke you.’

  Isa shifted more comfortably against her pillow. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You were having a nightmare.’

  Isa didn’t ask how Alette knew. Alette always knew.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Alette’s voice was clear. The noise on the line was now hardly noticeable.

  ‘No. I’m okay.’ For a moment she considered asking Alette about the hand in her dream. But no, then she’d have to discuss with Alette the rest of it—her distress at not being able to attend Eric’s funeral; her insane desire to approach his family—and she most certainly did not want to discuss Eric with Alette. The last time they had talked about him the discussion had deteriorated into a row. Alette has never approved of Eric. ‘He doesn’t even make pretence of ever leaving his wife. Thirteen years you’ve given him. How can you do this to yourself?’

  That conversation had taken place three months ago; only ten days before Eric’s death.

  Isa repeated the words to herself silently: Eric’s death. Eri
c was dead. Death. Such a tired, dusty word. It hovered on the lips like a poisoned sigh.

  ‘Isabelle … I may have to ask a favour of you—?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve always been able to count on you.’

  ‘Yes?’ Isa wondered where this was going. She pressed the phone close to her ear. The noise was picking up again.

  ‘Can I count on you—will you promise me that if I need you, I can count on you?’

  Isa frowned. ‘You should know the answer to that.’

  ‘Watch out …’ Alette was talking, but her words were fading in and out. Something about fear, Isa thought, about being afraid. Something about danger.

  Isa spoke loudly and deliberately into the receiver. ‘Alette, I’m losing you. I’m hanging up. I’ll call you right back.’

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She replaced the receiver briefly and then started to dial Alette’s number in London.

  She listened for the first loud click that always follows the country code, then the second click after she had dialled the code for London. While dialling, she cradled the phone in her neck and picked up the wine bottle from the bedside table. It was almost empty. She never used to drink by herself.

  The line was busy. She hung up and waited a few seconds in case Alette was attempting to get through. A few minutes later she tried once more but again the line was busy. After listening to the monotonous beep for a few moments she replaced the receiver.

  She would try calling again tomorrow. She yawned. Yes. Tomorrow. Turning onto her side, she pulled the pillow into her arms and closed her eyes.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes again, the pink sky had turned to blue. The two weaver birds outside her window were engaged in a noisy marital spat. Even this early in the morning the air was already soft with heat and humidity.

  Isa reached for the robe at the foot of the bed. The fabric was thick; too heavy for this time of the year. But the robe was his robe and she needed to feel it against her skin before facing the day. She rubbed the flannel between her fingers. It had his smell on it still.