The Midnight Hour (10 page)

“Reach inside my jacket.”

She hesitated, unsure she could force herself to feel through the blood for his body.

“Please, Jennifer. My jacket.”

She took a deep breath, rolled towards him, wincing as her elbow landed in a pool of… what? She couldn’t be sure. She did not want to think on it. With a final stretch she found his side, surprisingly dry, and slid her fingers inside his jacket. They met cold metal.

“Take the gun Jennifer. When he comes in close it’ll be your only chance.”

“I can’t Harry. I’ve never… I couldn’t take a life, I told you.”

“This man will kill you if you don’t try.” He coughed and spat. She felt droplets of blood hit her face. “Jennifer, you have to try.”

Desperately she searched the darkness, hoping for something that would take the decision away from her, but she could see nothing save the dark outline of the car, the headlights no longer shining.

The headlights.

How had he…?

“Harry? How did you turn the headlights off?”

He laughed. It soon collapsed into a spasm of coughing, but for a moment she actually heard him laugh.

“I didn’t.” She could barely hear his voice. “The ghosts did!”

She saw the outline of the man walking slowly by the side of the car.

It had seemed an eternity, in reality only minutes, while she waited for him to arrive. Harry had been silent since he told her about the headlights. She was not even sure he was alive any more.

She had waited, sitting in mud that grew thicker with the slow crawling advance of Harry’s blood. She cried quietly, still shivering, but more with the cold than fear. She felt she had somehow fallen through the fear into a strange calmness. What would happen would happen. She was as prepared as she could be.

The man stepped closer, flicked on a flashlight, played the beam first over Harry’s unmoving body and then Jennifer. She squinted in the sudden light but otherwise did not move.

She saw the barrel of the gun rise into the edge of the flashlight’s beam, aiming directly for her. Perversely, the strongest thought that flickered through her mind was that she had not heard the man’s voice. How could he kill her without even speaking to her? The thought angered her.

She waited for the crack, the expected pain, but she would not close her eyes. She stared into the light, hating the man who held it.

She flinched as the barrel moved, but it was not the recoil of a shot. As the flashlight, too, jerked upwards she saw the fist wrapped around the gun, a pale, grey fist with flesh that seemed to squirm and writhe, as if the blood vessels were alive, twisting and burrowing.

The car headlights burst into life, shattering the dark of the night, momentarily blinding Jennifer as she recoiled in surprise.

She heard the struggle before her eyes adjusted enough to see it. The man with the gun pulled and fought for control of his weapon, a weapon held solidly by another man, strangely hard to focus on, as if he drifted in and out of reality. But she saw enough to know he was naked and his whole skin behaved as the skin of the hand had. Rippling, writhing, as though thousands of worms burrowed through the bones and muscles.

Worms
. She felt suddenly nauseous.
Oh my God!

“Now Jennifer.” Harry, barely alive, croaked the command to her. “You have to do it now!”

The pistol felt heavy beyond its size as she pulled it from behind her back. It took all her strength to lift it in front of her, to point it at the two men struggling, to start pulling the trigger.

It kicked, hurt her hand, her arm, as each shot screamed away from her. At first nothing happened, her shots flying wildly into the dark, but then the man with the gun jerked as though hit in the side. Again and again. He let go of his gun and staggered backwards, glaring angrily at Jennifer. He lurched forwards, trying to reach her.

She kept pulling the trigger, a lucky shot ripping the man’s ear from his head, another drilling through his left eye, bursting blood and brain in a fantail that sparkled almost prettily in the headlights.

She was still pulling the trigger, empty clicks echoing around her, as the man fell to the roadway, dead.

She dropped the gun, buried her face in her hands and cried, looking up only as she heard the ghosts approaching.

They came out of the night, a susurration of wind and whispering flowing in their wake. Men and women. Naked, grey, skin as alive and writhing as the one who had struggled with the killer.

One hundred and seven of them
, she guessed.
One hundred and eight if Ricky the Rodent’s among them
.

They approached her from all sides, footsteps silent, mouths closed, only the unending background of barely discernible whispering and an icy, flowing breeze that wrapped around her.

They stopped ten feet away, close enough that she should have felt threatened, frightened, yet she felt strangely calm. These figures, so grey they almost melted into the night, their eyes full of sadness and loss, even the unnatural movement of their skin, seemed to be
right
to Jennifer. It was right that they were here. She was the interloper.

Beside her, Harry groaned, still clinging onto life.

When Jennifer spoke, she was surprised at how strong, how calm she sounded.

“Why did you save Harry? Why did you stop the other man from killing us both?”

“We did not want Harry to die at the other’s hand.”

The words were spoken, not by one voice, but by a choir of mismatched, disjointed voices, speaking directly into her head. She saw no mouths move on the ghostly apparitions before her.

“But Harry killed all of you.” Her journalistic mind struggled to understand, unconsciously searching for a story even in the midst of her shock at the events of the night.

“We did not want the other to kill him.” Those voices again, hard to listen to, strangely easy to comprehend. “We have so much
more
planned for Harry.”

The ground trembled, began to pitch and roll beneath her.

An earthquake
, she thought, scrambling backwards, painfully to her feet, stumbling towards the car.
But we don’t get earthquakes. Not like this.

        Harry moaned again and she saw his eyes flutter open in the light from the headlights. Then  the ground rolled again, visibly this time, ripples pushing upwards in the solid roadway, waves of tarmac crashing towards them. Cracks snapped open around her, around Harry, strange pulsing light spearing up through the openings. Unnatural, blinding light.

Something roared, more than the wind, more than the splintering ground. It was the roar of an animal, a creature, large and deadly and angry.

Jennifer screamed, covered her ears, fell back against the bonnet of the car as explosion after explosion tore apart the world around her. And the one thought kept circling in her mind…

I killed a man, and now I’m going to die… is this justice?

Silence fell, almost as deafening in its way as the roar before it.

Slowly Jennifer opened her eyes, blinking back tears, trying to ignore the pounding in her head, the stabbing pain behind her eyes.

The ghosts had gone. The roadway, in the still shining headlights of the car, was empty and flat, the mud and tarmac unbroken. Her would-be killer lay unmoving to one side, blood pooling alongside him.

And Harry?

Jennifer cried, unashamed and unrestrained, sobbing out her fear and her sorrow.

Harry was gone. Alive or dead, he was gone, swallowed up by the ground, the very road built on the bodies of his victims.

VIRGIN FLESH

“It’s so hard to find mature virgin flesh these days,” grumbled Edward Sneakeatin, elder ghoul of Oak Church Cemetery. He tore another strip of flesh from the hastily prepared corpse on the worm-rotten dining table. “Too much permissiveness.”

“The young living of today have no morals,” nodded a visiting vampire, sipping distastefully at a glass of newly donated blood. “And promiscuous blood tastes so bitter. I mean, I’m all for sex but…” he shrugged his shoulders, “…we must get out priorities right. Sup first, ravish later, that’s my motto.”

“You vamps are fast becoming our main problem you know,” said Edward, chewing on an untidily amputated finger. “Not only are you spoiling the flesh’s flavour by seducing your victims but you also take all their blood, leaving a deflated corpse with skin like a prune!”

“I always hated prunes when I was alive,” commented a lesser ghoul, before sinking jagged teeth into a footless leg.

“Indeed,” said Edward, firing a vicious glance at the young ghoul.

“You know as well as I do that it’s not as easy as it used to be,” said the vampire, scratching dried blood from his elongated teeth. “I know that the rule when you and I started in this business was that a fully experienced vampire would leave every other victim with his or her virginity intact, and enough blood to keep the flesh full. But times are hard. Almost everyone now goes around brandishing crucifixes in our faces, or hanging garlic all around their bedrooms. Films and TV have made Undeath very difficult for all of us, and the crap from the blood banks just can’t compare with virgin blood straight from the jugular.” He held up his glass and scowled at it.

Edward Sneakeatin sighed, his long thin white face growing even longer as he drummed his scarred, blood-stained fingers on the corpse’s breast.

“This girl was only fifteen according to her gravestone, and still not a virgin!”

The young ghoul who had interrupted earlier began to sing softly. “Where have all the virgins gone?”

Edward shook his head sadly and murmured, “Far, far away.”

Janet Stevens stopped Alan Clarke’s hand from sliding any further along the inside of her thigh and shook her head.

“Just because I’m eighteen now doesn’t mean I have to say yes.”

She pushed the invading hand away and pulled her dull grey skirt down over her bare knees.

Alan slumped back in the car’s driving seat and sighed.

“Look Janet, we’ve been going out for almost two months and the most I’ve managed to get is a brief grope through that shapeless woollen thing you call a sweater.”

“There’s no need to be so crude,” chided Janet, suddenly self-conscious of her second-hand, cheap clothes. “Anyway, two months isn’t all that long.”

“Long enough,” murmured Alan.

“I want to be sure I’ve found the right man before I… well, you know.”

“Where you’re concerned, I’m not so sure!”

Twisting round suddenly, he grabbed her arm.

“Come on Janet. You’ve got to give in sometime.”

“No!” she snapped, trying to pull away.

“Now’s as good a time as any,” he growled, trying to reach the lever that would recline her seat.

Screaming, she struggled free and fell out of the car door onto the damp roadside grass. Scrambling to her feet she ran towards the tall shadows of nearby trees, not daring to look back towards the car. She began to cry as she ran.

Alan watched her running in the bright moonlight. He’d been so close. So bloody close.

“Jesus,” he hissed as he pulled the passenger door closed, gunned the engine to life and pulled away from the verge. “Jesus Christ!”

She could walk home tonight.

“I think I’d do just about anything for a taste of virgin flesh,” said Edward Sneakeatin.

A murmur of agreement hummed through the congregation of still hungry ghouls.

“Fair enough,” Edward conceded. “This, shall we say, deflowered flesh is eatable, but it’s really not satisfying. I still feel hungry even after a three course corpse!” His stomach chose that moment to grumble its agreement.

“I know what you mean,” nodded the vampire. “You have one, and then ten minutes later you want another.”

“I particularly like the third course,” said the young ghoul with a flair for interruptions. “Even when I was alive I was always known as a ‘leg man’. Anyone’s for a tasty leg.” His voice drifted into wistful reflection.

“What’s your name ghoul?” asked Edward, more irritated than angry.

The young ghoul looked up and smiled.

“It’s been such a long time since anyone wanted to know my name. If my memory is still intact it’s Stuart. My ghoul name’s Suckm.”

“Well Stuart Suckm, I’m going to be keeping an eye on you, so make sure you behave!”

Stuart shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Indeed,” said Edward, turning back to the almost finished meal on the table. In frustration he ripped a toe off a shapely foot and stared at it.

“Satan’s balls!” he shouted. “What I wouldn’t give for a young virgin to chew on instead of this crap!”

He pushed the toe into his mouth as the assembled ghouls nodded in understanding, an occasional isolated “here, here” drifting from the mass. It reminded him for a moment of his living days in the House of Commons.

Janet Stevens was lost. Lost and cold.

She cursed herself for not bringing a coat with her. But then, she had expected to be travelling home in Alan’s car. She fought back the recently stopped tears that threatened again and sat down on a gnarled tree stump, the open wound of the tree-feller’s axe long since healed.

A slight breeze rustled through the branches of the surrounding trees and a handful of dry leaves drifted to the forest floor. Moonlight speared down from an almost cloudless sky and she gasped at how pale her hands looked, pale and cold. She pulled the sleeves of her sweater down into mittens, held tight in her fists, and thrust her arms between her thighs in an attempt to keep warm.

The breeze was beginning to grow into a wind now and she shivered as it blew around her legs. She had to find shelter of some kind, but she had no idea which way to go.

A large bat flitted alarmingly around her head for a moment, until she screamed, burying her face in her skirt.

She remained in this seemingly uncomfortable, folded posture for almost a full minute before daring to raise her head. The bat had gone, but a cracking of twigs to her left startled her into standing.