The Midnight Hour
Page 2
“I’ve got something for you Clare. Open the door and its all yours!”
More laughter. Several whoops. The music seemed to grow louder.
She covered her face with her hands. She would not let them goad her into responding. She knew from experience that if she stayed quiet they eventually got bored and moved on to other things, things more interesting than the mad woman in the hotel room.
Behind her hands the tears began.
00:30am
The floorboards by the far wall were loose. She noted their creaking as she paced the room. They had been loose for as long as she could remember. It wasn’t important, it was just something she noticed.
They had stopped calling her name a couple of minutes ago. Her name, crude suggestions, eventually angry abuse when she refused to even acknowledge they were there outside her door. Towards the end someone had started hammering at the wood, shouting obscenities. For a while she had been afraid the lock would give way, or the hinges, and that they would come pouring into the room. She had backed away to the shuttered window, frightened, crying, trembling.
But it had stopped. The door had held. She had sank to her knees in an attitude of prayer, but she had given up praying long ago. There could be no one worth praying to, not when you saw what had happened to the world.
Carol, her six year old daughter, had been the first. Not just the first in their family but the first in the whole town. It was a notoriety Clare would have gladly done without.
The slim pale girl had died quietly, apparently painlessly, in the invisible, insidious way the plague had of taking its victims. Clare had been holding her. Matthew, her husband, had stood beside her. There was nothing anyone could do.
Matthew had himself died just a week later, but he wasn’t the second. By then hundreds had died, perhaps thousands. The town had been decimated quickly, quietly, ruthlessly.
Within a month, when there was only herself and maybe twenty others still alive, she had walked out. No packing, no planning. Just out of her front door, down the main street and away. Away. That had been all that was important.
By then bodies just stayed where they fell, in the middle of the street, on their porch, in a shop doorway. There was no one left to clear the corpses away. At least, no one who cared.
The loose floorboards creaked underfoot again.
Some hidden part of her mind shouted at her, called to her. The floorboards were important.
Why?
She slowly got down on her hands and knees, placing her palms against the worn carpet. She could feel the floor vibrating with the bass of the music outside.
“There’s something here I should remember.”
She whispered the words, not even realising she had said them aloud.
A drop of sweat dripped from her forehead onto the back of her hand. Her breathing grew heavy. She could feel more sweat running from her back, down her sides, under her breasts.
She felt ill.
“Perhaps the exercise wasn’t a good idea after all!”
But she knew it wasn’t the exercise. It was a memory. A memory fighting it’s way to the surface through barriers that had been strong and impenetrable for almost 2 years. Since the last time these floorboards were lifted. Since just after the one time she had let people into this room.
She scratched at the edge of the carpet, managed to get a hold and pulled it back. She heard little popping, tearing noises as the worn material snapped free of the edging strips it had settled back onto all that time ago. Dust rose into the air, into her lungs, making her cough, but she kept pulling until the bare floorboards lay before her and the carpet was folded back under her knees.
Three strips of board side by side had been broken and placed back at some point. Now they lifted easily as one by one she pulled them up and placed them carefully to one side.
Her heart was thumping almost as loud as the music as she reached a trembling hand down into the darkness below the floor, muscles tensed for quickly pulling away if anything should move.
Her fingers found the soft cloth of a bag and, clutching it tightly, she lifted it into the light. A grey cloth bag, heavy with whatever was inside it. She shuffled backwards, allowing the carpet to fall back over the bare floorboards, over the hole she had made.
The bag made a metallic noise as she placed it on the bed, metal on metal.
Taking one deep shaky breath she pulled open the bag.
00:50am
Clare stood before the bed, one hand covering her mouth, the other twisting nervously at the bottom of her t-shirt. In a line before her lay the contents of the bag. Three knives. A wide-bladed hunting knife. A serrated edged army knife. A machete. Even after all this time they shone, clean, polished. Without touching she knew they were razor-sharp.
As she looked at them the memories, painful, horrible memories, came screaming back into her head.
Death from the plague was not quiet, peaceful like she remembered. But she had not been able to watch her daughter die in the agonies of that terrible illness. Instead she had decided her daughter would die quickly, in her sleep, with her mother by her side. Her daughter had been the first.
When her husband had shown the first symptoms of the plague it had been a relatively easy decision to show him the same mercy she had shown her daughter. And then the neighbours had been infected, then the families down the road that she knew by sight but not by name.
It had got easier the more people she released from their agonies. She had realised she had a calling, a gift even. In this time of panic and fear she could bring peace and calm. She knew then that she had to go out into the world and help all she could.
But things had gone wrong here, in this city, this hotel room. Wrong when she had let those others into her room, into her body. Even though she had released them from their anguish afterwards it had not been the same. She had sinned. She had slipped from her path.
She had hidden the knives and her mind had conveniently forgotten the rest.
Until now.
00:58am
The army knife was tucked into the waistband of her trousers. The hunting knife was in her left hand. The machete lay on the bed.
She turned the key in the door.
She was ready. She had rediscovered her purpose in life, her reason for living. Her calling.
She didn’t need to hide in this room anymore.
She pulled open the door, reached back and grabbed the machete in her right hand, smiling as the thud thud thud of the music grew suddenly louder, filling her body with a sensuous pleasure she had not experienced for so long.
Clare danced out into the plague-infested world slicing and stabbing to the beat.
ARGUMENT
He could not remember who started it, or even what it was all about.
Sarah had always been volatile, with a quick and vicious temper that was as slow to fade as it was fast to arrive. Maybe he had been partly to blame, but she had turned it into a major issue and started the actual argument hadn’t she? Did it matter any longer?
Yes! It mattered.
He drove the car fast along the unlit country roads, accelerating the anger out of his system. The headlights swam in the lashing rain, splashing over the trees that lined the road. They failed to penetrate more than a few short feet into the interior of the woods that surrounded the small Welsh village they had lived in for the past three years.
His wheels skidded on the gravel scattered at the roadside, and he had to fight to keep the car away from the wooden fence and the sign that announced ‘Country Park’ in the flash of his bounding headlights.
He let out the breath that he had not even realised he’d been holding and relaxed his foot on the accelerator pedal. Take that as a warning, he told himself. Ease off. There’s no point in getting yourself killed.
Almost ten years ago, when he first met her at University, he would never have argued so strongly. He had watched his father take what he called ‘the path of least resis
tance’ with his mother so many times he just presumed that was the way to behave when you loved someone. Never argue. Just agree. It seemed to work for his parents, who stayed together until his father died. He just wanted the same.
Sarah Anderson was the kind of girl that he, Michael Samson, never stood a chance with. He remembered watching her, the first time he saw her, striding across the campus with such confidence, such poise. Her black hair bounced on her shoulders as she smiled and talked with another girl. He could not remember what the other girl looked like. He had been too captivated by Sarah.
He remembered she wore a loose fitting t-shirt with a bright yellow smiley face on it. The face seemed to laugh and leer at him as her breasts jiggled freely beneath the light material. She wore a short skirt, barely longer than the t-shirt, and her legs were long and shapely. He couldn’t say what she wore on her feet. His eyes never got that far.
He was a geek. He knew it. His glasses were too big, his teeth weren’t straight enough, his body was scrawny. Worst of all, he was no good at sports. He read books. He worked hard. He got A’s for his assignments. But he was no ‘jock’. Girls like Sarah Anderson always ended up with ‘jocks’.
But he didn’t know Sarah Anderson properly back then. He didn’t know she was that rarity, a beautiful girl who was not impressed by the fact, not overwhelmed by the attention, and not interested in sports or the people who played them. She was a bookworm too. She just didn’t look like any bookworm he had ever seen.
Since that day when he fell in love with her at first sight, he had seldom argued, seldom disagreed, never threatened her with anything. Until tonight.
He had hit her.
He had never done that, not in seven years of marriage.
She had provoked him before tonight, certainly, and there had been times when the thought had crossed his mind. But he had never given in to it. Striking Sarah was the last thing in the world he would have wanted to do, before tonight. Tonight the anger had rushed up at him so fast and so hard that his hand had lashed out before his mind could control it.
He remembered the pain in his palm as he slapped her, a stinging pain that was mirrored in her shocked eyes. He, too, had been shocked, more so when he saw the trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth where he had split her lip.
She said nothing, just stared at him, her eyes glistening with tears that welled and overflowed down her cheeks.
She had grabbed the car keys from the hall table and was almost out of the door before he caught her. He was still angry, ashamed by his violence yet driven by it also. Driven to dominate the woman he had always been careful to agree with. Driven to abuse the woman he had always cared for.
He grabbed the keys from her hand and pushed her away, feeling nothing as she stumbled and fell heavily. The car was his and only he was going to drive it from now on! She would have to pay for her own in future!
He had stormed out of the door instead, taking the initiative from his stunned and shocked wife. If anyone was going to disappear dramatically into the night it was him.
It had been work. That’s what the argument had been about, at the start anyway. He had worked late again. He had forgotten to phone to tell her. She had accused him of caring more about work than her. She had even suggested he might not be working late at all. That he might be seeing someone else.
It had been that last twist in the argument that had finally snapped something inside him. He had been working late. He did need to finish the work, and they needed the extra money the overtime would bring in. But worst of all, there was just that grain of truth in what she shouted at him.
Not that he was having an affair, but he had thought about it. Fantasised about it with at least two girls in the office. That was enough to add guilt to the anger. The mix had been explosive!
He worried that Sarah, alone in the house, might turn suicidal. For a moment even he had considered it. He felt so alone, angry yet miserable, driving through the night on deserted roads. Perhaps he deserved to die? That was when his foot had pressed harder on the accelerator, almost causing him to skid off the road. Now he was more in control. Now he worried more about Sarah.
He did love her, more than anything else. Tonight was just an aberration, a moment of stupidity. They would get over it. He should not have stormed out. He should head back immediately.
The car that pulled out in front of him made his foot slam on the brake. He swore at the taillights as they sped away and then he pressed harder on the accelerator again. No one was going to do that to him!
It wasn’t hard to catch the other car. The driver either did not know the roads as well as he did or was much more nervous about night driving. He was going to flash his lights and beep his horn when the coincidence hit him.
The car in front was exactly the same model and colour as the Ford Escort he drove. Everything, even down to the rust patch above the left rear light, seemed identical. He felt an icy block slide down into his stomach but quickly ignored it. Just a coincidence, that’s all. What else could it be?
He was startled out of his surprise as the car in front weaved, seemed to lose control, and with a grotesque squeal and stomach churning crash cart-wheeled into a roadside ditch.
He braked the car to a juddering stop as metal and plastic was spat into the air behind a cloud of gravel. His car rattled with the dry shower as he stared, horrified, at the scene before him.
As the dust settled he stepped from the car, unable to take his eyes away from the twisted remains that lay crushed against the trees of the wood. No one could have survived that. Whoever had been driving must surely be dead. He had to call the police, anyone.
He was turning to leave when a rectangle of metal caught his eye, lying in the road near the remains of the crashed car. A number plate.
He read it.
He read it again.
His eyes stared. His mouth fell open.
It was the number of his car!
But it couldn’t be! It was true that the car in front had seemed identical to his, but not the number plate. It was not possible!
And then he saw the body.
She must have been thrown clear in the crash, but it had not saved her.
The mangled remains of a woman lay twisted on the road, arms and legs snapped and bent, head at an angle that suggested it was barely part of the body anymore, and the clothes....
The clothes. He thought he recognised the clothes.
He stepped nearer, not daring to think it, not daring to look but having to. He stood above the body and looked into the dead staring eyes of his wife, Sarah.
He screamed but no sound broke the stillness of the night. He turned to run back to his car but there was nothing there. How could there be? His car lay mangled in the roadside ditch.
He fell to his knees and raised his head to the sky, his mouth open in a long, silent shout of anguish.
And then the road was empty, save for the bloody remains of a wife who, in anger and shock, had driven recklessly away from her raving husband.
In the living room of the house Michael and Sarah Samson had called home, Michael Samson lay dying on the carpet, trails of blood leading from his wrists to the razor blade almost lost in the deep pile. There was no sound from him, no outward sign that his life was rapidly ebbing away, but his eyes were wide and terrified, filled with horror at what he had done, at what he had forced his wife to do.
Now he knew. It really did not matter who had started the argument. It really did not matter at all.
RIBBONS OF BLOOD
They floated in on the breeze, light as gossamer, translucent in the sun that hung low and hazy over the fields. No one noticed them. The farmers were too busy with their work and of those few others awake at this time of the morning, none were looking to the sky. Rippling, almost invisible, they snaked over the clock tower, the church spire, the homes and work places of Sheldsville, and no one knew they had arrived.
Until people began to die.
Smiling, he killed the engine and picked up the well-read paperback from the passenger seat. It wasn’t much of a job, but as long as he made his pickups and dropoffs his time was his own. And he liked to get out early in the morning, before Janet, his spinster sister, dragged herself from her morgue of a bedroom and began nagging him. He knew they needed more money, but he didn’t see why he should be the one to change his job. She claimed to be an artist, a painter, but she hadn’t sold anything in years. At 34 she was eight years older than him, but he felt the more mature of the two. After the death of their parents he had been the one to organise the funeral, the house, everything. She had done nothing but wallow in melodramatic grief. It had set the pattern for the last five years.
Pushing his bitterness to the background, determined it would not spoil the start to his day, he opened the book at the scrap of paper that acted as a bookmark. Dracula’s Guest, the chapter that didn’t make it into Dracula. The book had other stories by Bram Stoker, but it was to Dracula’s Guest that he kept returning. He loved the atmosphere, the village, the chase. He loved the gothic, the vampire, in fiction. His collection ranged from the classics of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker to more recent interpretations, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley. He loved them all.
He glanced down at his black t-shirt, black trousers, black shoes. He caught sight of his close cropped black hair in the rearview mirror and raised thick eyebrows in amusement. If only he had the cape and teeth to match.
He laughed, settling in the warmth of the morning sun coming through the windshield, and began to read. Time for a few pages. Time to immerse himself.