Hotel Midnight

by Simon Clark

  The man must have turned toward me when he hissed the words, ‘from this monster’. The stench of spices with an undertow of moist fungus odours made me flinch despite the paralysis.

  ‘And don’t worry,’ he breathed at me. ‘The muscle spasm won’t last long. And in exchange for a few brief hours of discomfort you will be guaranteed a long, healthy life. Did I say long? An exceptionally long life indeed. Those delightful little chaps you now carry in your veins will keep every kind of cancer and virus at bay.’ The stench of spices mixed with the stink of rot was so strong I knew he stood close to me. I even felt his damp breath on the side of my head. It had all the flesh crawling quality of an ancient cellar being opened after years of disuse as he whispered. ‘No need to thank me now … maybe when you’re up to, it, hmm?’

  Still I couldn’t move. My muscles had locked tight. The infection must have launched an aggressive attack on every cell of my body. All I saw of the pair now were their shadows cast on the wall in front of me. The tall thin one of the man together with the shorter one of Lauren. If I rolled my eyes to the right I could see Colette lying dead on the bed. The Lauren shadow vanished. I heard the pat of her feet descending stairs. She was going to the telephone in the hallway so she could call the police.

  My left arm gave a wrenching spasm. My fingers twitched. A pain like a hot metal skewer being driven down the marrow of my forearm blasted through me. My arm swung down loosely. Although it seemed incredibly heavy I realized I had its use back. I flexed my fingers. Then moved the wrist as I rotated the shoulder blade. Almost simultaneously I found I was able to twist my head. Now I saw the back of the thin man in his long black coat as he stooped over the dead woman on the bed. She fascinated him.

  ‘Immune,’ he sighed. ‘Such an exquisite rarity. Do we pity her? Or do we admire her biology? On the one hand she’d have aged quickly and died. On the other, her immune system defeated what I coined Omega Bacillus – the germ that ended death.’ He gave a coughing chuckle. ‘How sublime.’

  Those pains came again through my other limbs. After each one I found I could move my arms and legs. A savage jag of pain tore at my back. As the pain started to fade away I realized that locking cramp had evaporated from my body. When the man stroked Colette’s face with a finger as mottled as the skin of a newt I could stand it no more. OK, so I wasn’t thinking straight. Already a fever burned behind my eyes. But I lunged at the stranger. Grabbed his arms, then hauled him from Colette.

  ‘Don’t you touch her!’ I screamed the words. ‘You bastard! You dirty, filthy bastard!’

  I want to hurt him! The words screamed through my mind. I want to hurt him. I want to see him bleed! I want him to beg for mercy!

  But how?

  Even though I held him he managed to twist round so he could bring his face close to mine.

  So this is it. This is the murderer. I stared into a face that resembled one of those moons that bleakly orbit worlds far from the sun. It was riven with diagonal gullies. They ran from the left temple down to the right-hand side of his jaw in channels so deep they exposed bare bone in grey stripes. The fleshless nose had sunk so as to resemble twin moist pits; the ruined remains of his nostrils. I couldn’t tell whether he was black or white. There was a Dalmatian pattern of both there. The over-large eyes were perfectly round with a sticky brightness. They were ringed with concentric circles of black, red and grey. While the mouth was little more than a shrivelled hole through which I glimpsed yellow fragments of teeth. Now the reek of peppercorns, frankincense and cinnamon underpinned by the stench of rotting meat exploded into my face with a power that made me lurch back. I cried out because I saw that the spices had been stuffed into ulcerated fissures in his face. Some of the gashes had been crudely stitched shut with crisscrosses of surgical gut to form a row of xxxx. A split in the skin that had once allowed a scalp sprouting strands of dull black hair to lift up from the skull had been stapled shut – just. It oozed a red fluid from between scabbed edges.

  The man belched words into my face: ‘Now aren’t I a pretty boy? Hah! Aren’t I a pretty boy to favour many a fine lady with my kisses?’

  That fevered heat soared inside my head. Rational thought all but escaped me as the infection toasted my brains. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream at the face in front of me.

  ‘Some call me Johnny Nightmare,’ belched the man, washing my face with disgusting odours. ‘Or the Knucker Boy, or Bob o’ the Plague Pit. I’ve been known by all those names but mostly I’m Jack of Bones … the same good old Jack of Bones who makes his supper from ladies’ fancies and manhood once-a-rampant.’

  He almost sang the words. The black-lipped mouth formed a slit. Good God, this thing is grinning at me. As it did so, it tilted its head to one side to watch me. I saw huge abscesses in its mottled neck had been stuffed with spices. Some fresh. Most, however, were old. Moistened by weeping sores the ground spices formed a paste that oozed to leave glistening smears on the black coat.

  The room lurched around me in sickening swings. Fever spread through me in a scalding tide. Now I wanted to break free of the creature’s grip. Every pathogen known to man seemed to swim in the toxic pus that leaked from the glistening eyes.

  Then I saw Colette on the bed. Her dead eyes stared at me. They demanded I act. She was always the strong one. Colette faced up to challenges. She might fear people but she would never let that fear stop her. Once she’d seen a woman being mugged. Even though there were three of the thugs she waded in alone to fight them best she could. A day later she was still in hospital with a fractured cheekbone. But she’d held down one of the guys despite the kicks from the others until the police arrived. Colette’s lifeless eyes met mine. I clamped my teeth together. I still had that grip on the man’s arms. He gripped me, too – so much the better!

  With a howl loud enough to make even those toxic eyes widen in shock I swung the man round until his back was at the window. Then I pushed so hard I heard the crack of tendons in my shoulders. He was strong but his centre of gravity was poor. With a snarl of fury he toppled backward.

  I watched as the window framed his head. Above the matted hair were stars shining around the crescent moon. Then there was a whiteout effect as the glass pane shattered the moment his skull struck it.

  Even though I released my grip on him, he kept his fingers hooked round my upper arms. His weight took me with him. He fell backwards through the window first. I followed.

  It was a drop of perhaps fifteen feet. My fever-powered instincts drove me to keep his body between the ground and me. When the concussion came it was enormous. An avalanche, a tidal wave, a bomb blast all at once. The air slammed from my body. But I realized one thing. The man hit the road before me. I landed on top of him. It may be imagination, but I was convinced I heard the snap of his breaking bones as he cushioned my fall. So much for Jack of Bones! Most of his were now shattered. Despite everything I smiled with pleasure at the thought of his skeleton reduced to devastated ruin.

  I rolled to one side panting. The effects of the fever distorted my vision so much that the row of houses seemed to soften then lean forward, so their eye-like windows could gaze down at me. The moon was an Arab dhow made of pure silver sailing through the night sky; the Milky Way its sea.

  The man grunted. Then sat up.

  ‘You think you’ve got the better of Jack of Bones, my young friend? Pah! This anatomy will mend.’ The eyes narrowed as the mouth formed that smile, which was more like a slit in rotting leather. Even with this dim streetlight I noticed the fall from the window had opened a fresh ravine in that ruin of a face. Instead of being blackish, the new wound glistened as red as raw steak. ‘A little more work with needle and thread. Pack another quarter ounce of frankincense into the wound, then I’ll continue my merry dance. Ha! What fun little fellow. What fun!’

  ‘Who are you?’ My voice had all the grogginess of a broken-down drunk.

  ‘I bring good news. The best news! I’m here to cure one and all, the r
ich and the poor, of all that ails them.’

  ‘You infect people … you disease them … you …’ My head swam I could barely keep my head up from the ground as the man’s parasites embedded themselves into my brain.

  ‘But I ask you this? Do you feel pain?’ He sat there in the road staring at me with those slickly oozing eyes. ‘No, you don’t. You’ve cracked ribs no doubt. I can see you broke your nose in the fall. So … touch the cracked bone for yourself, if you don’t believe me. There … I’m telling the truth, aren’t I? Feel the kink? See the blood on your hands?’

  I grunted as he stood up.

  ‘Hah! And one of my wrist bones has fractured. But we don’t feel pain, do we? That’s the benefit of playing host to this heaven-sent germ. My darling Omega Bacillus. It’s switched off our pain receptors. And you, my friend, will feel it endow many more benefits over the next few days. Now …’ He twisted his own arm to relocate the elbow joint that had been dislocated in the fall. The snapping sound echoed along the deserted street. ‘Now, time to take my leave of you as I see you have visitors.’

  I peered along the road. Through the mist block-like shapes approached. Spinning lights turned the mist from white to electric blue.

  Limping slightly, the tall figure hurried in the direction of the city wall at Calder Bar. Meanwhile, the sirens penetrated the inner fog that had gathered around my brain as the fever tightened its grip. Then the image of Colette’s dead face came back to me. Resolute Colette who fought back so fiercely when life attacked her. She must have fought the stranger when he found a way into the house.

  ‘Wait … I’m not letting you get away with this.’ I meant to shout the words but they came in grunts. With the whoop of approaching police cars he wouldn’t have heard anyway. But I would make him hear. Oh, yes I would make this Jack of Bones hear me until my voice made him sick to the very heart.

  And yet … and yet, damn him, he was right. When I stood up I felt no pain even though blood poured from a rip in my thigh. My index finger was crooked where the bone had snapped. But no pain. If anything there was a buzzing sensation that felt like a very mild electrical stimulation; nothing I would describe as being even remotely uncomfortable.

  All of a sudden, cars seemed to roar from a huge distance to materialize in front of Colette’s door. My perceptions were still skewed. Houses quivered like jelly. Again the impossible physics of size. The policemen were far more gigantic than the cars that carried them. My head felt as if it would burst as I struggled with the concepts of contents possessing a greater volume than their container. A staggered turn revealed the house with its smashed window. The building pulsated as if it had become a living heart there at the side of the street. Looming from the doorway, appearing more like a polyp growing from living flesh than a separate entity, was Lauren. She waved her hands. Pointed at me. Yelled.

  ‘There he is! That’s who attacked my friend!’

  With a sudden burst of energy I ran for the ancient city wall. Behind me, a pair of policemen followed on foot. Another followed in the car that screamed like a banshee.

  Maybe I couldn’t have been so badly hurt in the fall because I made it to the steps in a matter of seconds. I bounded up them two at a time until I reached the top. There, arms pumping, feet striding, the man who called himself Jack of Bones, loped along the walkway some twenty feet above the city’s ground level. For Colette I’d do this. I’d follow. Whatever it took I’d kill him with my bare hands.

  Only the harder I ran the faster it drove the stranger’s germ through that complex network of veins and arteries. Skin burned as fever racked up the temperature. Stars burst above my head like balls of paint striking black infinity. Uncannily, the moon sailed round and around the Pole Star. The stone walkway by turns resembled the back of a pale snake or the smooth camber of a human tongue.

  Jack of Bones had infected Lauren along with many others. I saw them now in the alleyways. Silent walkers who prowled the night seeking new hosts for the parasite – their contagion. They turned to stare up at me. And they knew that although I wasn’t yet one of them. I was becoming one of their kind. Above the city, the massive square towers of York Minster rose. A human dream rendered in stone. I glimpsed the river. It ran as a body of liquid silver. To my left across the road were the railway lines that drove north to a home I knew I would never see again.

  With what contagion had the man infected Lauren? What was it, exactly, that simmered in my blood? I thought of Colette so patiently explaining about the parasite that infected cats … that transferred to humans … that changed behaviour … For a moment a surge of vertigo caught me. I had to lean back against the parapet. Perspiration swamped my face. It ran freshets of ice down inside my shirt. Back along the walkway the police were closing in. In the other direction the black-coated man ran effortlessly, his coat tails fluttering like the feathers of a raven.

  ‘For Colette,’ I grunted. Then gripping the inner core of strength that is the last hope of the damned I continued the chase. Behind me were calls for me to stop, to make it easy for myself. I ignored them. This is my one last task.

  Yet even as I ran the bug worked its influence in my brain. When I glanced down at a red-haired girl staring up at me I saw through her eyes. I watched a desperate figure run past. He had a smashed nose. A broken finger….

  I see through her eyes, I told myself. I know she works as a maths teacher. She was kissed by the man on the wall. He pressed his lips to hers here five weeks ago. He drew some of that life essence of hers into him before he infected her. He drank some of her vitality to keep his failing body alive and—

  Oh, you’re getting there John, my bonny wee lad. You’re chasing me hard now – me, your friend Jack of Bones. But don’t you feel that lovely, lovely germ breathing new life into your body? Just like it did to me all those years ago. When I went by the name Posthumous Godling. In 1343 I cut the stones that you run upon now. On Christmas Eve I unloaded a barge of sweet, white ashlar for the Treasurer’s house. There, a black rat bit me on the thumb. All along it had been concealed in those stone slabs that had been carried all the way from Constantinople. Oh, how my skin burned that night, John, my bonny wee lad….

  I didn’t slow down as the man’s voice reached into me. So that was it … a myriad of viral minds interlinked like millions of computers on the internet. Simultaneously, I saw through the eyes of the infected as they:

  Walked these streets. Made love. Drove taxis. Wheeled the dead in hospitals. I saw through their eyes. They saw through mine. I saw me from behind. A man running on a medieval wall. And I laughed out loud because I knew one of the police officers was as diseased as me. I saw the strategy for the micro-creature’s domination of man with perfect clarity. In fast-food outlets infected cooks discretely licked a finger to leave a dab of saliva on a shred of lettuce or the underside of the burger. In a print works one of the employees sneezed as the pages of the book passed by on the conveyor belt toward the binding machine. I thought about the hitherto untouched men and women eating kebabs and hamburgers. I recalled readers’ habits of licking their finger in order to turn a page.

  And I saw the whole massive strategy spreading a microbe that would do all the thinking for us. In return it would give us long, healthy lives. Running in front of me was the stranger, this Jack of Bones. For a moment the contagion allowed me into his memory. A stone mason who shaped these wall blocks for three pennies a day. There he is, infected by the Byzantine rat that carries an altogether different plague. But not for him the reward of eternal rest in a pit full of bodies covered in burning lime. He moves through the city for centuries. He witnesses the executions of criminals in the public square. Then he’d follow the dripping heads being carried through the streets to where they’d be impaled on spikes above the city gate. I see him draw the life force from his victims. They collapse down dead, yet that infection has the power to reanimate them within moments. He feeds. Takes just enough of the life-force to nourish his ancient body. Then
moves on … only then comes the time when the priests capture him. They embed his body deep inside this wall for centuries. Eventually, however, he tunnels free. Denied of his intake of substance his body has withered. His skin breaks open in sores. So that’s why he feeds so greedily now. He has to repair the rotting body. Until then, he disguises the stench with all manner of spices.

  So why am I chasing him? What will I gain from attacking him? I can’t kill him, can I?

  Now the stream of images from the infected rushes through me. I see through a girl’s eyes. A river has carried her downstream. She climbs out to walk through an overgrown garden to a building. There, strange, withered men and women sit round a table in the ruined house. They do nothing. Sit. Stare. Wait.

  I see a building made of brick. It dwarfs the other ones in the town. I see a shop with a sign: Leppington Stores. I know I’m seeing through one of the damned’s eyes as it moves toward the building that seems to dominate this market town. It’s raining. Through falling sheets of water I see the sign above the building’s doorway. STATION HOTEL. By proxy, I look through a stranger’s eyes. The stranger carries me round to the back of the hotel. Through a window I peer into an old-fashioned kitchen. Sitting there at a table, a woman types at a laptop. The secret watcher makes out the words on the computer screen: Hotel Midnight.

  Am I supposed to go there? Is this all part of their plan; those things that teem in the blood of how many people? Hundreds? Thousands?

  Yet, part of me still retained its original identity. That fragment burned for vengeance. Colette should still be alive. With this searing need for retribution I realized I had the power to move even faster. As the wall ran toward the edge of the river I surged forward. With a last burst of speed I grabbed this monster who called himself Jack of Bones, then spun both of us over the guardrail.