The Midnight Hour (7 page)

Baphomet!

It didn’t matter how long you kept them here, or what you called them, humans were trouble. He would much rather deal with demons any day.

He sat back and drummed his fingers on the carved demon head. He had run out of ideas, other than to give in. He didn’t know whether he could bring himself to perform that particular humiliation.

Deep in the bowels of Hell the boilers were cold, the fires of Hell flickering out all over the reality. And far above, on the surface of the planet Earth, the next great ice age advanced on humanity.

PHOTOGRAPHS

“I don’t remember you.”

Karen peered at the photograph pinned to the corkboard. She reached behind her, fingers pushing through the papers, pens and rolls of undeveloped film that cluttered her desk until she found what she was looking for. She lifted the magnifying glass to her eye.

“Now why don’t I remember you?”

The photograph, one she had taken several weeks ago, showed a simple beach scene. Sand, water, people in swimming costumes. And standing off to one side, where she surely wouldn’t have missed him, a tall, slim man in what looked like a double-breasted, black business suit. Most unusual was the wide-brimmed hat tugged low over his eyes. Not quite a cowboy hat. In fact, unlike any hat she had ever seen before. It was black, tall, conical, with that wide, stiff brim.

She remembered the day, bright and hot. She had been wearing a sleeveless top and shorts, her shoulder length black hair tied back away from her face, and had still been too hot. Had she noticed a man in a business suit and that hat on the beach she would have focussed on him, made him the centrepiece of the photograph. The sheer strangeness of the picture would have made it fascinating. As it was, she had been disappointed when it was developed. It was a nice reminder of a sunny day, but it had no artistic merit. She had pinned it to the corkboard in her office for her private memories.

If she now reframed it, making this strange man more of a feature, she might yet make something worthwhile of the shot. She peered closer through the glass. Pity the face, what could be seen of it beneath the brim of the hat, was out-of-focus.

Strange that, how the suit and hat seemed so sharp and defined and yet the face was blurred?

I still don’t understand how I could have missed him.

“One of these days I’m going to get to use that precious camera of yours!”

Karen smiled, knew her friend Jackie was at least half-joking, but nevertheless placed a protective hand over the camera on the cafe table between them.

“Sorry, for my use only.”

“I can’t help thinking that it’s your relationship with that camera that gets in the way of you and men.”

“At least my camera doesn’t lie to me and betray me.”

Jackie shook her head, smiling, and took a sip of her Espresso.

“You’re 26 years old, almost two years younger than
me
. You can’t let one bad experience put you off forever. Not all men are Steven you know.”

“Prove it!”

Jackie laughed and, after a moment’s hesitation, Karen joined her. It was good to laugh. It seemed a long time since she’d had reason.

Raised voices from across the street caught her attention, heard even above the constant droning of traffic and passers-by. She liked sitting at the pavement cafes in the city, liked the closeness of the noise, the people, the smells of city life. It appealed to the artist in her. She liked to cultivate that side of her nature, encourage it, especially since Steven. He had tried to stifle her creativity, crush it. What his Wall Street mind couldn’t understand, it tried to kill.

Maybe finding him in bed with my best friend, my ex-best friend, was really the best thing that could have happened!

“Sounds like somebody got a bad hotdog.” Jackie had stood up and was peering out across the traffic towards the argument.

Karen grabbed her camera.

“Back in a minute.”

She pushed through the crowds of shoppers and weaved through the gridlocked traffic, raising her camera to her eye as she went,
clicking
and
clicking
and
clicking
. The angry faces. The jabbing fingers. Open mouths spraying spittle and accusation. A part-eaten hotdog thrown back at the vendor. A pair of tongs waved menacingly in the air. This was fantastic. This was drama. This was art!

The pictures were disappointing.

She watched them develop, feeling an emptiness in her stomach. It was almost a sixth sense with her, knowing when a picture was going to be bad.

“Wish I could tell before I took the things and wasted film.”

She clipped the latest alongside the others, hanging in her darkroom. She could feel the arguing men in the pictures looking at her, accusing her.
We set up the opportunity
, they seemed to say,
and you blew it
.

“They were taken quickly. There were lots of other people in the way.”

Excuses. A real professional would have got at least one good shot.

She hung her head, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She knew that was the truth. As a professional she should have made it happen.

She almost called Steven.

As she sat on the edge of her bed, wearing nothing but panties and a T-shirt, she felt an almost overwhelming need for someone to hold. Someone to lie in bed with. Someone who could wrap her in their arms and hold her close.

Steven had only ever held her as a precursor to sex. Every moment of tenderness or care or concern they had ever shared had been followed by sex, or at least by an attempt to persuade her to have sex.

It was sex that prevented her calling him. She didn’t want sex with Steven, or with anyone. When she thought of sex, she thought of Steven and her ex-best friend. It was an image she didn’t think would ever leave her.

She called no one.

She crawled under the duvet alone, curled up, hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed until she fell asleep.

The morning was cold.

Through the thin curtains of her bedroom window she could see it was bright outside, and by midday, when the sun finally came round the building and shone through the window, it would start to warm up. But for now her apartment was cold.

She peered sleepily at the clock on the bedside cabinet. 9:03am. Not that time was important. There was nothing she needed to do today. Nowhere to go. No meetings. No pitches. No shoots. No work!

Being your own boss was great, until the work dried up.

She thought bitterly about the photos from yesterday. Unless she got something better than that there wouldn’t
be
any more work.

Getting out of bed on days like this was hard, but she managed it. She forced her legs out from under the warm duvet into the cold air. She shivered as she stood. She dressed quickly in those things closest to hand. Tracksuit bottoms. A heavy sweatshirt with ‘I Want You’ stitched across the front, a present from Steven. She pulled on white socks found on the bedroom floor, trying to ignore that they had been thrown there to go into the washing basket, and struggled into pale blue trainers, not bothering to untie them first.

Feeling slightly warmer but no happier, she pulled open the curtains, squinting out at the morning traffic, already near gridlock, and then walked quickly out of the bedroom and towards the small kitchen area.

The coffee she made was black and strong and filled the large Simpsons mug. By the time she was halfway through it she was beginning to feel awake and alive. As she rinsed the empty mug under the tap, she convinced herself that this was only a temporary lull in her career.

“A few bad photos don’t make me a bad photographer.”

She was in a better mood as she opened her darkroom, ready to trash the photos from yesterday, forget about them.

As she reached up for the first one she hesitated. She looked closer. She took it down, picked up the magnifying glass from the tabletop and examined the image, looking not at the two arguing men, but at the crowd behind them. At one figure in that crowd. A figure wearing a black, double-breasted business suit and a wide-brimmed hat, tugged down over his eyes.

“What are you doing there?” she wondered aloud. “Strangely familiar.”

She hurried out of the darkroom, taking the photograph with her. At her work desk she stared at the corkboard, at the beach photograph she had pinned there the other day. Where she felt she had seen this man before.

He wasn’t there.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

She examined the beach scene under the magnifying glass. The families, the sunbathers, the swimmers. But no man in a business suit. No wide-brimmed hat tugged down over the eyes.

Could she have imagined it? Surely not. She had seen him. She
knew
she had seen him.

She looked closer, harder at where she felt he had been standing on the beach and shuddered.

There, on the sand, were two large, heavy footprints.

“I’m telling you he was there and now he’s
not
!”

Karen, mouth half-full of hotdog, spat the last word out, along with a spray of food.

Jackie glanced at her friend as they walked away from the fast food stand, back towards the office building where Jackie worked. She was worried. She knew Karen had been struggling a little lately with work not coming in as fast as she wanted it to. She knew the whole issue with that bastard Steven had knocked her into a downward spiral. But she had never imagined she would become delusional.

“You do realise that what you’re saying just isn’t possible?”

“It happened.”

“People do not just get up and walk out of one picture and into another.”

Karen shrugged, not wanting to discuss any further whether it was possible or not. She knew what she had seen.

“Listen.” Jackie stopped and placed a hand on her friend’s arm. “There’s a few of us going out tonight. Why don’t you come along? It’ll be fun. It’s ages since you’ve been out on the town.”

Karen shook her head and gently pulled her arm free.

“I’m not ready for a night parading myself around the clubs looking for men. Not yet.”

“You make us sound like sluts!”

They paused, looking at each other, before both broke out into laughter.

For a moment neither could speak, until the laughter subsided a little. Karen wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

“Thanks for the offer though. Seriously, I couldn’t afford it, and I really don’t want to put myself in the firing line with men again.”

“Karen, you look good. I mean, even when you dress down you look good! You put yourself in the firing line every time you walk out the door.”

Karen smiled. “Thanks. And thanks for pointing out I’ve ‘dressed down’ today, as you put it! Go back to work and stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”

Jackie checked her watch and started to hurry away.

“I’ll call you later, ok?”

Karen waved and waited until her friend had disappeared into her office block, then she turned to start a long, slow walk home.

She stopped. Her stomach clenched. Her heart seemed to pound in her ears.

The man in the suit and wide-brimmed hat stood at the corner, watching her through eyes hidden by the hat’s shadow.

That afternoon, as she sat on the edge of her bed, shivering, trembling, she tried to convince herself she had imagined it.

One moment he was there, the next he had ducked behind the building. She had only hesitated a moment before running forward, almost skidding around the corner, but he was nowhere in sight.

Imagination? Hallucination? Madness?

She pressed the palms of her hands against her face and cried, heavy, shoulder shaking sobs.

What’s happening to me? He was real. But he couldn’t be!

She forced herself to stand up, willed her legs to move, to walk out of the bedroom and to her desk. She had been avoiding this since she got back to her apartment, but she knew she had to look.

The two photographs were pinned side by side on the corkboard, both slightly askew, the corner of one overlapping the other.

For a moment, her eyes would not rise that far. They stayed fixed firmly on the desktop as if looking for something there. But there was nothing there she wanted to find. It was fear that was stopping her looking higher. Fear of confirming what she knew to be true.

I have to do it. I have to know.

She looked up, first at the beach scene. Only those vague footprints remained to show the man had ever been there.

Next, the street argument.

She looked at the watching crowd. There was no business suit, no wide-brimmed hat.

He had disappeared!

She felt dizzy, nauseous. Her fingers trembled as she raised them up to touch the two photographs, as if needing the physical contact to know they were real. But she wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t expected him to be there anymore.

How could he still be in the world of the photograph when he was there, in
her
world?

The first note appeared the next day.

She found it pinned to the outside of her apartment door, written in faint, spidery handwriting on a page torn from the kind of notebook available in every newsagent in the city.

FOUND YOU
.

There was no signature.

Shaking, glancing nervously along the corridor, she tore the note from the door, the tape holding it ripping a layer of paint away. She screwed the paper into a ball and threw it in the bin just inside her apartment.

She tried to tell herself Steven was playing some kind of sick joke. Or he’d split up with her ex-best friend and was hoping to come back. But deep inside, pushing at the edge of her deepest fears, she knew who the note was from.

She told no one.

The second note was pushed under her apartment door a day later as she bathed.

She saw it as she stepped into the living room, naked expect for the towel wrapped turban-like around her wet hair. It lay on the carpet, white with faint blue lines. Folded in two.