Hotel Midnight

by Simon Clark

  ‘You found out about the deaths quickly enough.’

  ‘I’ve just watched them take place.’ She nods to a metal box that’s not much larger than a paperback novel. I see the glint of a camera lens in one end.

  ‘An automatic video camera?’

  ‘MI5 use them for surveillance work.’

  ‘You’re taking it to the police?’

  ‘They’ll see it soon enough. It will be on dozens of websites within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘So you hide these cameras in graveyards? Film bizarre incidents? And you filmed me in Kensal Green cemetery?’ I look at her sitting there. A beautifully slim figure in black with tightly laced boots and black mane of hair. I take a deep breath. ‘The big question I’m asking myself now is: Why?’

  Instead of answering my question straight away, for a while she talks about a grandmother who was clairvoyant. Who could walk into a house and see not just one ghost, but two or more ghosts that had fused together. ‘Like a big, untidy washing bundle of arms and faces she used to describe it as.’

  Now she stretches her fingers across her black satin lap. Her hands are white spider shapes that are strangely beautiful. My eyes travel up her arms, and I look at her bare forearm where the lace sleeve has slipped back. There are no needle marks that I can see.

  I hear her voice that’s as huskily soft as the one I heard on the Cuspidor CD, and I find myself picturing her naked in the cemetery. Right now I feel the heat in my veins again. I imagine her lying naked on a tomb, her bare back against chiselled words that recall the long dead now residing six feet down. In my mind’s eye, I see her with knees raised high as I make love to her. I can see her breast turning to gooseflesh in the cold air; nipples dark … hard….

  Then she suddenly fires a question right at me. ‘Jack, where do you want to be right now?’

  ‘The cemetery,’ I say before I can stop myself. Then bite my lip, puzzled why I answered like that, just as if someone had pressed buttons in the back of my skull.

  She looks at me in a way that’s both fascinated and horrified. It’s the expression of someone who’s wandered by accident into a room to find an open coffin there. They don’t want to – do they hell want to – but they can’t resist a little peek at the face beneath the shroud.

  ‘OK.’ I look at her hard now; I’m alarmed at blurting out the weird cemetery reply. ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘Remember what I told you about the old Roman towns being haunted by ghosts?’

  I nod.

  ‘I believe,’ she says, ‘that London is haunted by the spirit of the City itself. Listen, this place is two thousand years old. Countless millions of people have lived and died here.’

  ‘That’s a lot of ghosts.’ I intend the words to be flippant. Only they don’t come out that way.

  ‘It is a lot of ghosts.’ Her eyes hold an uncanny fire. ‘I saw them once.’

  ‘Conjoined ghosts?’

  ‘And that’s what these are. These are thousands upon thousands of ghosts that are hundreds of years old. They are fusing together, becoming a conjoined entity that in turn is evolving into a collective personality.’

  ‘The spirit of London.’

  ‘That’s how I think of it, yes.’

  I wish I could tape this conversation. Insane pop stars make front-page news. Even as I think this I have the unsettling sensation that she isn’t as mad as I think.

  Katrice carries on speaking. ‘I first began to see them in my early teens. They streamed by me when I was out walking. At first they appeared as long shimmering worms, then I realized that they consisted of human faces … or what had once been human faces. Later I began to see them as strands of a nervous system that forms a great web through London. I saw them pass through people and wondered why those people couldn’t see them. But sometimes they reacted. They’d pause and shiver – you know that just walked over your grave feeling? For a long time I thought I was special; that I was the only one who could see them. I’d walk through London watching them … just seeing them rush along the roads.’

  Oh Benjay, I tell myself, you are going to pay me a titanic bonus for this one.

  ‘And I began to spend more and more time in cemeteries,’ she continues, her eyes dreamy now, her voice dropping low. ‘I saw that in those places the ghost streams were at their most vivid and most plentiful; in fact, there were mountainous knots of them as if they were forming into nerve centres. It’s there that their power is strongest. I’ve watched them pour into a man’s head and take control of him. It was a cemetery groundskeeper. He ran laughing through the gravestones and out into a road. A bus went right over him. And get this: he was laughing as the tyres crushed him – he was having the time of his life.

  ‘Then I felt them come into me. It was as if a light had been lit inside my head. My muscles hummed. I’ve never felt so energized … so empowered. That’s when I went into music. I found I could write songs … or rather this great Spirit created the music and put the words into my head.’

  A little bit New Age, but what the hell….

  ‘But if this spirit kills people, why didn’t it kill you?’

  She gives a little shrug. ‘It found something in me that it didn’t find in anyone else. It found a way to express itself through me … I don’t know exactly.’ She shrugs. ‘As for the others … maybe they’re just its playthings.’ Her eyes lock on me. Twin pools of darkness. Black holes that draw me in. I think of her naked body; I see her lying there on a grave; her eyes burning with dark erotic power. I want her again. My heart begins to pound. And I have to force myself to stop telling her what I’m fantasizing right now.

  She continues, ‘I’d formed a relationship with the Spirit. One that was powerful. Intense. Even intimate. It gave me energy and inspiration. Then the band became more successful. I started doing coke. Yards and yards of it. The faces in the ghost streams turned furious. I saw their anger. I felt it, too. They didn’t like what I was doing … maybe doing coke was like dripping water onto an electrical circuit. It was screwing up our …’ – she gives a blood red-smile – ‘relationship.’ She sighs. ‘Then I went to Paris with the band. I saw those ghost faces in the audience, only they were bursting like over-filled balloons. Then in a moment it was over. I felt the Spirit leave me. I couldn’t sing a note. I couldn’t even remember the lyrics. You see something else had sung through me.’ She tilts her head; a gesture that acknowledges loss. ‘What could I do? There I was in front of five thousand fans.’

  ‘After a spot of self-mutilation you walked away from the concert hall and never looked back?’

  ‘In a nutshell, yes. I quit music. And ever since I’ve been photographing graveyards in the hope I can find the Spirit again.’

  I nod seriously. Inside I feel white-hot glee. There’s more than a magazine article in this material. I see a TV documentary. Maybe even the golden path to Hollywood.

  ‘But it’s still in the graveyards,’ I say, ‘This Spirit?’

  ‘It’s everywhere. But it’s at its most powerful in cemeteries. Now it’s taunting me. I secretly film the graves and it brings people to perform for me in front of the camera. As if to say We know what you’re doing. Now watch our power. And weep.’

  ‘And the couple who were fucking and the man who hooked himself up on the tree were all possessed by the Spirit?’ I ask. ‘It possessed me, too?’

  ‘You felt that heat in your body. That irrational excitement. Then you tried to climb into the tomb where I’d hidden the camera. What’s more, the Spirit forced you to do this while I was there in the cemetery.’

  I feel uneasy about this. Yes, I did a crazy thing at the tomb. But maybe she’s just seized on that to make it fit with her big ol’ London Spirit beliefs.

  She’s still talking, ‘I’d just put the camera in the tomb when I saw you walk into the cemetery. I hid and watched you.’ Matter-of-factly she adds, ‘It wasn’t long before I saw they’d entered you and taken possession. You can tell by the way t
he person’s body suddenly twitches, it becomes larger, as if a new source of energy’s been switched through it. After it was over you were like a dead man walking. It was all I could do to get you back here. The taxi driver thought you were on drugs.’

  ‘But it’s left me now,’ I say as if I believe her. Oh, Jack Constantine you consummate liar you. ‘I’m safe.’

  ‘For the time being.’ She takes a deep breath – the emotional, dolorous kind. ‘I don’t see the ghosts anymore … but I can imagine them now … they’ll be trying to reach you. They’ve had you once. They’ve forged a bond. Sooner or later they’ll return.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To kill you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I feign shock.

  ‘They will kill you on camera. That way they will taunt me again. They want to make me suffer for destroying what was a unique relationship.’

  Pretentious? Me? Myself? Moi?

  ‘I see,’ I tell her. ‘But they will only kill me if I’m near one of your concealed cameras, right?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Then I’m only in danger if I return to a cemetery where their power is strongest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I won’t go back.’

  She looks me in the eye. ‘The problem is, Jack, you won’t be able to stop yourself.’

  This time I do smirk my disbelief.

  She doesn’t smile. ‘Don’t you remember, Jack? Just a few moments ago. I asked where you’d rather be now … and the answer you gave me was the cemetery?’

  I sit there in the room with its purple walls and Gothic drapes. Her eyes hold me. The sound of traffic comes through the windows. A witch’s brew of echoes, engine growls, tyres on roads, the bleat of horns that fade away to die in bleak city streets. All these sounds are deformed by the cold, dead air. They melt into me, through my nerves, through blood and bone. Here in the mad woman’s room, my mind begins to roam again, finding the dark, morbid corners of my brain … it’s not cars on the road outside, no … it’s ten million London dead. They’re flowing by the window in a vast ghost river. They are searching for something. They burn with a hunger. And I find myself asking the question: What do they want? Who are they looking for?

  And the voice inside my head answers: Me.

  ‘Taxi!’

  A black cab pulls a U-ee in the road to draw up at the kerb; its tyres crunch filthy London snow. As the saying goes, I’m still not myself after whatever happened twenty-four hours ago. Strangely, I feel weaker now I’m out in the afternoon air; and, Christ Almighty, that cold is piercing.

  Katrice Bryden helps me into the back seat. I hear her tell the driver my home address. Through the toughened glass that separates the driver from his passengers I see he’s a huge man with a shaved head. Tufts of black hair bristle from the pits of his ears, one of which sports a gold ring. In a past life he must have been a pirate. I tell myself this, my head swimming as if I’ve downed one brandy too many.

  I expect Katrice to shoot me a quick good-bye, then return to her house. Instead she pushes me further along the back seat before climbing in beside me.

  ‘I’ll see you home,’ she says. ‘You can’t travel alone … not yet anyway.’

  With a slam of the door the taxi lurches away into the traffic, which like a river in flood catches us and carries us away amid all the roaring trucks and cars. London is a black city today – black streets, black buildings, black-clad citizens, black trees, and more, much more of that black snow lying on pavements and traffic islands. I’m not sure where I am exactly. To me it looks like the drab mix of buildings that scab the land between Kings Cross and Clerkenwell.

  ‘Jack,’ she says, ‘you should leave London.’

  ‘For how long?’

  I look at her gathered there in a long black coat. Her face, a white heart-shape set with two burning eyes that fix on mine. ‘How long?’ she echoes. ‘How long do you think your life will last?’

  ‘I should leave London for good?’

  ‘Yes.’

  No way, hose-ay. That’s what I’m thinking but I mutter something about considering it … it might be for the best, all things considering and such stuff….

  I gaze out at people shuffling along the pavements. A plane struggles overhead as if the cloud is pushing it down. Maybe I’m looking at London with a new set of eyes after my … accident? Yeah, accident; from henceforth that’s what it shall be known. Nothing more than a freaky accident. Pressure of work. Bad diet. Surfeit of booze.

  I touch the scabs on my face left by the rat bites and peer out on the great Goblin Metropolis. Today I see it for what it really is: A screaming wilderness. The howling vortex that sucks people in. It makes men and women do what they would never normally dream of doing. I see on upper floors the red lights that are the workplaces of whores. I see a dwarf walking with sticks and he’s bearing the black eyes of a damn good kicking some drunk gave him for being a ‘miserable short-arse’. I see the homeless in doorways that are cavernous mouths … mouths that are slowly devouring the poor bastards whole. Buildings howl their contempt for you. Roads are killing fields. They want your blood. On the tarmac I see the painted outline of some poor sod that never made it to the other side.

  I’m tired. My eyes don’t focus as they should. Blurred patterns fly by the taxi windows. I watch as one seems to pour itself through the ear of a piss-head who leans against a wall with a can of Special Brew in his hand. When I first see his face, it’s the usual crumpled alkie face; he has matted hair, a stubbled jaw. Urine-enriched trousers hang from him. He looks so fragile a snowflake could knock him down.

  But as that smeary ribbon of light shoots into his lice-alive-oh hair his head jerks up. He stretches, growing larger. His eyes are transformed. No longer watery slits, they snap open into vast blazing orbs that seem to shoot flames at me. He watches me pass. As we turn a corner I see a powerful grin transform his face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Katrice asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘I’m still groggy from yesterday.’

  She looks at me strangely, then shoots wary glances through the windows. ‘Jack, you’ve seen something, haven’t you?’

  ‘Dancing elephants, clowns, acrobats.’

  ‘Jack, tell me what’s out there.’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just over-tired, that’s all.’

  In the front of the cab the driver mutters. ‘Flipping bikes. They shouldn’t be allowed on the road. I mean, it’s not as if they pay road tax or nothing, do they?’

  Katrice is too busy looking out of the back window. Through a side window I see a shrivelled old woman straighten her crooked back. Grinning, her eyes lock onto us; she points at us as we pass. Katrice hasn’t seen the woman and I’m staying quiet. The driver shakes his head as a bus pulls out in front of him. ‘Call themselves flipping professional drivers?’

  She’s dropped a tab of acid into my coffee … those are the words going through my brain as I stare into the back of the taxi driver’s plump neck. This morning she spiked my drink … At least that’s what I tell myself as I struggle to stop that depth charge of revelation from exploding inside my head. Because I see a ribbon of purple mist sweep in through the side of the taxi to disappear into the driver’s head. And just for a moment I think I see faces in the mist. Terrible faces. Staring eyes. Screaming mouths. Lost souls.

  That’s when the driver stiffens. The top of his bald head lifts to press against the cab roof. His shoulders tense. He turns. I see the grin on his face; his eyes are blazing, leering things … they’re alive with hidden knowledge.

  Seconds later he’s swung the taxi into a side street. With his foot to the floor he accelerates, weaving through the traffic, engine howling and horn braying like the world’s gone insane.

  There are fewer people on the pavements here. But all turn to watch us tear by. They’re pointing. I see delighted grins. It’s possessed them, too.

  ‘Stop!’ Katrice yells at the man. ‘Stop. What the hell do you think
you’re doing!’

  She fumbles to open the door. But the driver’s activated the electronic locking. We’re not getting out here. Not now, that’s for sure. Katrice is yelling some stuff about the Spirit of this ol’ Goblin City undergoing a metamorphosis; that it’s changing; that it’s more powerful; that it’s turned against her because she knows too much; that’s it’s going to kill both of us; that it’s doing freaky shit that it ain’t done before … and her voice sounds so far away … a distant thing, that quacks in the great celestial vacuum … nevermore, nevermore….

  I watch all this through a druggy, indigo haze. The taxi barrels away along London’s streets. Without any surprise I see, at last, that we’re approaching Kensal Green Cemetery. I look up into the sky and notice it’s starting to snow.

  Those conjoined ghosts … that Spirit of London makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. I know that now.

  Dazed, I look through the cab’s window as the iron gates sweep by and we’re rumbling along a path into the heart of the cemetery. Black headstones jut up through the snow. The taxi fishtails, exploding a stone Jesus before whipping back to shatter cherubs.

  ‘Let us out!’ Katrice screams. ‘Let us fucking out!’

  The driver swivels his big bald head to leer back at us through the toughened glass. Now Katrice beats at the partition with her fists, gold rings clattering. The driver grins showing yellow teeth.

  That’s the instant he loses control of the taxi. It rockets across the graveyard to hit a tomb bigger than the cab itself. When I open my eyes I see that the front end of the cab has punched through the stone wall of the tomb. Coffins have spilt out onto the bonnet. One’s slid through the windscreen. Wet bones poke through rotted wood. The engine’s caught fire now. The driver’s legs are blazing, too.

  He’s laughing just like he’s heard the funniest joke in the world.

  ‘Come on, come on … snap out of it, Jack.’ The world slips into sharp focus as Katrice pulls me from the cab. I’m wondering how she’s opened the locked door, only then I see the door’s lying wrapped round the shattered body of a stone angel twenty paces behind us.