Hotel Midnight (23 page)

‘There’s pages that’ve been ripped from a book.’

‘Write it down in a letter for me, Nick. I’ll read it sometime never.’

‘No, listen … it tells you about the hand.’

‘Yeah, as if crap in a book can tell you anything worth
knowing
.’

Clayton doesn’t read … can’t read. Gets all touchy if someone tells him stuff about a book. It’s as if he thinks all books have shit written down about him, about what he’s really like. You follow? Paranoid is the word, I guess. It gets him punchy. So he kicked open the caravan door; stalked off, cursing any bird that flew near him. He’d been gone about an hour when he came back with beer and food. He must have snatched them because we hadn’t had so much as a penny to scratch our you-know-what for a week. Grunting, he plonked a beer in front of me along with a vacuum pack of pastrami. As I ate. I noticed he was watching the hand. Then he looked at the book pages in the shoebox. This went on for a while. Me eating, him pulling on the can of beer, watching the mummified extremity.

Then at last he said, ‘OK, Einstein, what does it say about the hand?’

‘It’s famous.’

‘The hand? You’re pulling my dick.’

‘No, look for yourself.’

‘You look for yourself.’ Touchy again because I showed him the page with all those bamboozling (to him) black marks.

I explained, ‘There’s a photo of the hand in a museum case. Someone must have snatched it then hid it under the bath.’

‘What is it, then? Egyptian?’

‘No, it’s local.’

‘If it’s from here it’s worth squat, then.’

I read the page. ‘“In Whitby museum is the grisly relic The Hand Of Glory. The hand came from a gibbeted murderer. After the blood was squeezed from the severed limb it was embalmed in salt and pepper before being dried in the sun.”’

He opened another can. ‘Sounds like a streak of piss to me. I mean – why bother?’

‘I’m getting to that,’ I told him. ‘The Hand Of Glory was used by thieves. When they went housebreaking they’d put this outside the door of the house with a burning candle wedged between its fingers, then it’d send everyone in the house into a kind of trance. After that, old Johnny Lightfinger strolled into the house and took what he wanted.’

‘With no one any the wiser?’

‘Something like that.’

He stared at the hand, his big ugly face scowling as he thought so hard the skin from the top of his head to his eyes formed into hard ridges. I thought he’d make his usual scornful remark about the hand, but then he said something surprising. ‘OK, Nick. Let’s try it.’

Come to think of it, Clayton is superstitious. Looking back now I realize he never even gets out of bed on a Friday the 13th. Of course, he never ever admitted he was superstitious, only he’d make some excuse about not rising. Not that that in itself was unusual: we didn’t have day jobs in the City, did we? Society didn’t expect us to fight for the democratic way, did it? Brain surgery would continue without our intervention, right? So we’d settle down for a day’s smoking, drinking with maybe a bit of the other if we had female company.

Yeah, so we were losers. Alcohol was the answer to our
problems
(even hangovers). And there were those purple pills that allowed us to soar with angels.

But then Clayton found the Hand Of Glory. With that, he believed, he could change everything. He could turn our poxy lives into
gold
.

‘Why don’t we do the Morrelli place?’

He gave me that sneering look of his like I’d just suggested we write a letter to Santa Claus. ‘Think bigger, Nick.’

‘Morelli’s the richest man in Whitby. He’s out of town. That mansion’s sitting up there all alone.’

‘Duh … Turd brain.’ He waved The Hand Of Glory under my nose. The brown skin looked like a rotten apple in the moonlight. ‘What’s the point in trying this if the house is empty? Isn’t it supposed to put people in a trance?’

‘Clayton.’ My laugh came out on the nervous side. ‘You don’t believe that thing really works, do you?’

‘There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?’

The time was coming up to around ten as we walked into Whitby. If you’ve never clapped eyes on the place let me tell you: Whitby is a hunchbacked town. A dark, evil-tempered hunchback at that. With its back to the sea, houses disfigure the hillside like clusters of scabs. Streets are so narrow that all the buildings hang over them with weird frowning faces. They have poxy little windows that look like evil eyes. And those beady little eyes are always watching you; always hating you, and willing the big bird of bad luck to come crapping all over your head.

In that old monster town there were people about even on a winter’s night like this. Most were moving from pub to pub; a few were leaving restaurants as the shutters came down. In houses across the water lights shone where most of the townsfolk eyeballed their tellies. Clayton couldn’t resist a bit of clowning, running the dead fingers through my hair, or putting the hand on girls’ shoulders, so they’d look down at it and scream at the sight of mummified flesh. They all thought it was a joke hand. Most laughed. They knew Clayton; they knew what he was like. So did I. An ugly incident in search of an opportunity.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what big idea have you got for the hand?’

‘Just you wait and see. This is gonna blow your mind.’

‘What’s the point in heading up the cliff? There’s nothing up here.’

‘There is.’ He nodded at a dark column standing above the old church on the cliff-top. ‘The TV mast.’

‘What the hell do we want with that?’

‘You’ll see in a minute … here.’

He gave me the hand to hold as he pulled a candle and a glass jar from his pocket. I followed him in the moonlight, with the sound of the sea booming against the bottom of the cliff. I tried not to think about that pound or so of dried skin and bone I held in my hand. And when I felt the fingers twitch inside mine I muttered to myself: ‘It’s only your imagination, it’s only your imagination….’

Fifteen minutes later he’d done. Clayton had climbed the thirty-foot TV mast, lit the candle in the jar (no mean feat with the breeze blowing like that), wedged that and the Hand Of Glory into the front of the transmitter dish, then made me recite the verse with him. I should have felt an idiot chanting that rhyme, but instead of feeling ridiculous I felt cold. A great lumbering cold that went to the root of my bones.

‘
Oh, Hand Of Glory, shed thy light, direct us to our spoil tonight
.’

Clayton came swinging down the TV mast like an ape, boots clanging the steel ladder, moonlight glinting on his shaved head. ‘See,’ he called, with a crazy leer on his face. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it?’

‘Right.’ My voice sounded so sceptical it oozed. ‘What’s the point in leaving the hand up the friggin’ TV mast?’

‘Just you wait and see. Now … we’ve earned ourselves a little treat. Hold out your mitts.’

Standing in the breeze, the sea whooshing around the rocks below, he tipped half-a-dozen purple pills into my palm. ‘As the bishop said to the actress: swallow. We’re going to party tonight.’

Clayton was in one of his wild’n dangerous moods. The purple pills were Frankies, some kids called them Frankensteiners. They were made by an alcoholic lab technician who combined uppers, downers, E and some of his own secret ingredients into a
mind-bending
cocktail for the nark-head connoisseur. Take them, and you were launched on a magic roller-coaster ride to hell knows where. As I’ve said, sometimes you flew with angels. At other times in our aluminum mobile home, that leaked, that festered, that smelt of wet socks, we conversed with GOD.

I swallowed them.

By the time we walked down the hill into town those Frankies were kicking in. Imagine being rolled easily along on big fat marshmallow tires instead of legs; imagine a tropical breeze has replaced the cold easterly. It warms you right through to your gnarly old soul. You don’t feel that headache any more. Those swollen veins in your throat you’ve got from your dirty rotten drinking stop hurting. You shrug off that burning itch in your dick. And instead of dark wells of shadow in back yards there mushroom these gorgeous mists of indigo and crimson. Lurking houses no longer frown but grin; window eyes now wide open; they blaze with
joy
. That’s how Frankies feel.

We were laughing, waving our arms, excited.

‘
Man
,’ I sang out, ‘why did you put the hand up the TV mast?’

‘
Man!
’ he sang back, ‘haven’t you worked it out for yourself yet? Look!’ He pointed along Church Lane as that laugh came bubbling up through his throat again. ‘Look, Nick. It works. The Hand Of Glory damn well works!’

Jesus … shivers prickled up my spine, my eyes grew wide, as I followed the direction of his pointing finger. I told myself this was a new trick courtesy of the Frankies. But it wasn’t. This was really happening. Whitby had fallen asleep. Not only people in their beds, either. Everyone had fallen asleep in their tracks. Men and women lay on the street, or in bars. A man lay upside down on a flight of steps that ran to the beach. A woman dozed amongst
fast-food
clams spilt from a trashcan. A cold hamburger stuck to her forehead like a huge third eye.

‘C’mon, c’mon,’ Clayton shouted. ‘You must have worked it out by now?’ The sound echoed over a town that was silent as
death
.

Maybe it was the cold dawn of realization, but it rolled back the feel-good warmth of the Frankies. ‘You put The Hand Of Glory in the TV mast.’

The leer went
wild
on his face. ‘You’re getting it. And why did I put the hand there?’ He walked across the chest of a cop lying on the pavement. ‘Because down here’s a dead zone for TV transmissions; that’s why they stuck the booster mast up on the cliff. TV signals are scooped up by the aerial then squirted out again, down here … down to all these houses. Only now’ – he grinned – ‘… only now the TV signals go
through
the Hand Of Glory first … they
amplify
its power … and what you see is what you get. Sleepy town.’

He was almost skipping now with a lusty delight. Sometimes he stepped over a man lying there sleeping in the gutter; sometimes he kicked.

‘Whoa, Nick! Did you see how his nose just went
POW!
’ He hooted. ‘Christ crap on that … look at all the blood!’

By the harbour it was the same. Dozens of people lay
unconscious
in the road. Dead, I told myself until I bent down to feel a woman’s chest. There was the heartbeat, good and strong. When I held my open palm under her nose I could feel her breath. They weren’t dead, only sleeping. The Frankies still worked their magic on me, too. I could see her breath come out as a mist that was pure
gold
.

‘Good idea,’ Clayton shouted.

Finding a pair of women in high-heels and short skirts, he started pulling off their clothes.

‘Just opening up a couple of goodie bags.’ He laughed. ‘Look at the twin peaks on this. Yooo! Pierced nipples!’

Neither of the women woke or even murmured in their sleep as he went to work on them. The old time phrase for the action came to mind:
sporting the wood
.

Clayton was sporting the wood so hard with one of the
sleeping
beauties her back slapped the pavement loud enough to echo along those comatose streets for miles around. Dazed by the sight of all this, I stepped over bodies lying flat out, walked round a car that had run into a store front, the driver lay bleeding (and still sleeping) in his seat. I watched Mick Waterman lying back on a bench with a cigarette smouldering away on his chest. It had burnt a hole as big as a saucer in his best silk shirt. As I turned away his jacket lapel caught fire; a rose-coloured flame took root there.

Not a whimper from him. Not one.

I turned round. Now I noticed a cat lying unconscious on the ground just a yard away from the sleeping mouse that it had been chasing when the Hand Of Glory blasted out its power from the TV mast.

Seagulls littered the quayside. I picked one up. They were warm, plump things, heavier than I imagined. I could feel the heartbeat through its feathers. I put it down gently. Then I remembered Mick Waterman with the fire taking hold of his jacket. I went back and rolled him over into a puddle at the side of the road. The flames went out with a long cartoon
hisss
… like Tom, the cat, sinking his burning butt into a birdbath.

‘Give me a hand, Nick. Hey, give me a hand!’

Laughing so hard you’d think his bald head would burst into a million pieces, Clayton sweated as he heaved old Judge Jeffrey over the harbour railing. ‘Help us out, Nick!’

I kept on walking. It was getting crappy now. An alarm screamed where a house had caught fire (maybe some poor bastard had fallen asleep into their nice log fire). Fish appeared on the water to float there in a shining carpet. Do fish sleep? I asked myself as I walked into a bar. Do they drown if they stop
swimming
?’

I stepped over a bartender who’d somehow fallen into a sitting position like an obese pixy. There I helped myself to cash from the register.

Clayton walked in over a bouncy rug of fallen bodies (not a murmur, not a sigh from them). He put on a lah-di-dah joke voice. ‘Ah, there you are barkeep, my fine fellow. Your best
champagne
and your largest cigar.’

‘Coming right up, sir.’

So that’s how it went. We drank champagne; we used those sleeping guys and gals as beanbags. Torsos are comfortable, heads are not. We chatted conversationally.

‘The cold water never even woke him up.’ Clayton blew smoke rings at the ceiling. ‘Judge Jeffrey sank like a stone.’

Then the idiot did something stupid. He set fire to a woman’s hair. That really does stink vile. We went to the next bar to continue drinking. We also took money from cash registers, purses, wallets. Clayton removed clothes and posed the clientele like models in a hilarious wha-d’ya-callit … tableau? Yeah, that’s the word. Tableau. A kind of warped nativity scene with things sticking in here and there. ‘Won’t there be some red faces when this lot wakes up,’ he told me) as he finished off with a few artfully inserted bottlenecks.