Hotel Midnight (32 page)

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.

I fell with him in my arms into the River Ouse. It was swollen with autumn floodwater. In a moment its powerful currents carried us downstream.

Is there any point in trying to drown a man who cannot die? I don’t know. But before this plague of the mind overwhelms me, and I become a disciple of that contamination, I decided that for as long as possible I would hold on tight to the disease carrier. If there is a God to answer my prayer then maybe He will permit me to keep this monster a prisoner in my arms long enough for these swollen waters to bury us both in the silt on the river’s bed. Then lock us there until mud turns to stone. There, we will become twin fossils that remain in a state of blessed sterility beneath the surface of the Earth for the rest of time.

Dear Lord, I truly hope so….

From
Hotel Midnight

Electra’s here, my dear friends. That completes our triumvirate of the vampiric. Three stories that touch on the vampire-like state that so many of you have encountered in one form or another. This website will continue to cater for you as long as you need it. There are far more stories on my files than I have had chance to publish here yet, so please call back again in the future. And always there are tantalizing promises of closure to testaments by individuals that continue to tug my curiosity. For example, just now, a note appeared pinned to my window frame. It begged me to meet a stranger down on the river-bank behind my home in ten minutes. What would you do? Especially as it is signed John Helvetes. Is this the self-same author of
Jack of Bones,
the testimony that you’ve just read? Or is it an imposter intending to lure me to what could be a fateful rendezvous? So what to do? Stay here in the warmth of the kitchen with my laptop and you, my dears? Or slip on my
best boots and smartest coat then stroll down to the river? After all, don’t they say that you only die once? Or is that, only live once?

I confess, my curiosity is an irresistible force. Wait for me, my friends, here at
Hotel Midnight,
the website without frontiers, without boundaries. Then, the spirits willing, I will be back with more stories soon. And perhaps even a revelation or two….

Darkness Demands

Stranger

In This Skin