Hotel Midnight (19 page)

‘How do you know my name … uh, I guess you’ve looked in my pockets.’

‘I found your notepad. You’re going to write a magazine article about me, aren’t you.’

‘Right on, sister.’

‘I’m not in the music business any more.’

‘So, I guessed. Film, isn’t it now? Flesh flicks and cemetery studies.’

‘They aren’t hard to find. Over a hundred websites carry the videos.’

‘Porn and suicide films.’

‘I didn’t create those scenes. I simply recorded what happened.’

‘Am I starring in one now?’ I ask, as I finally manage to sit up. ‘What will that be? Black comedy? Writer with head in coffin?’

‘Your mouth is bleeding again.’

I pull a tissue from a box on the bedside table, hold it to my lips then take a peek. I can’t stand the sight of blood. And there’s a fair smear of it there. ‘Shit.’

‘You should stop talking for a while. Give the wound time to scab over.’

I try to stand. Not a blinding success. My legs have all the
rigidity
of second-hand latex.

‘Stay there for a while. You need to recover.’ She leans forward into the meagre light coming from street-lamps outside. ‘You’re safe now. It can’t find you here.’

It can’t find you here
. That’s a statement that needs
elaboration
. Unpeeling the tissue from my lips I ask, ‘What can’t find me here?’

‘If you keep talking you’ll have blood all over my bed.’ She puts a long fingernail that’s painted a glossy black to her lips. ‘We’ll talk in the morning.’

Right now I need to ask a hundred questions. Yet my body feels sluggish. I am exhausted. As she stares at me with those luminous eyes I feel consciousness slip away.

‘So what happened to me?’

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘A ghost did this?’ I stare at her across the coffee table as she sits on the sofa.

‘Not
a
ghost …
ghosts
.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘Many ghosts … ghosts beyond counting.’

‘What are these ghosts?’ I see the magazine article shaping nicely in my head.

‘Conjoined ghosts.’

I shake my head puzzled. ‘Conjoined ghosts? I don’t
understand
.’

She regards me through those darkly kohled eyes. Time beats for a while. She’s wondering about me perhaps … Then: ‘When I was eleven,’ she tells me, ‘I read a book by a
seventh-century
monk called the Venerable Bede. The book was
An Ecclesiastical History Of The English People
.’ Her gaze slides over my face. Examining my expression, I figure. For scepticism? Amusement?

‘Not the usual reading matter for a schoolgirl,’ she comments. ‘I guess that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I read Greek legends when I was thirteen. Couldn’t get enough of ’em.’

‘Perhaps we’re cut from the same cloth then.’ She does not smile. ‘One scene from the book stayed with me. It described the time just after the Romans left Britain. Their cities were still here, but abandoned and overgrown. You’d think rather than live in huts made out of sticks the local Brits would move into
ready-made
villas, but they were frightened to enter the old Roman towns. They were convinced that the places were haunted by vicious ghosts that would attack them the moment they set foot in the place.’

‘You said conjoined ghosts. What do you mean?’

‘The journalist in you is coming to the fore now, isn’t it, Jack Constantine?’

‘I’m interested.’

‘Bullshit. You believe I’m off my head – you’re thinking what a great story this is going to make for your rag.’

‘No, I—’

‘The reason I’m telling you this,’ – she holds up a black painted fingernail – ‘is because I’m giving you a fighting chance to save your own life.’

This interests me for all the wrong reasons. I sit up straight. ‘Are you saying that my life’s in danger?’

‘It is now. Yes.’

‘From these ghosts?’ I don’t know whether to smirk my
disbelief
or laugh out loud. ‘Just what do you expect them to do to me?’ I manage to say this with a straight face, promising myself to devote the article fee to three months’ solid work on the Tod Browning biography. If nothing else, I’ll have earned it through my sheer acting ability in the face of fucking lunacy.

‘I anticipate,’ she says, her cheeks pink as anger sends a rush of blood to that alabaster-white skin. ‘I anticipate the same will happen to you as happened to the people in the video footage you saw.’

‘A man hanged himself from a meat hook. OK, so he died but the couple of face-biters inflicted some superficial wounds. That’s all.’

‘They were found this morning in Highgate cemetery. The man had allowed the woman to strangle him. In fact, he smiled as she garotted him with a belt. Then she removed her clothes and lay on a gravestone. Exposure killed her.’

‘You found out about the deaths quickly enough.’

‘I’ve just watched them take place.’ She nods to a metal box that’s not much larger than a paperback novel. I see the glint of a camera lens in one end.

‘An automatic video camera?’

‘MI5 use them for surveillance work.’

‘You’re taking it to the police?’

‘They’ll see it soon enough. It will be on dozens of websites within twenty-four hours.’

‘So you hide these cameras in graveyards? Film bizarre
incidents
? And you filmed me in Kensal Green cemetery?’ I look at her sitting there. A beautifully slim figure in black with tightly laced boots and black mane of hair. I take a deep breath. ‘The big question I’m asking myself now is: Why?’

Instead of answering my question straight away, for a while she talks about a grandmother who was clairvoyant. Who could walk into a house and see not just one ghost, but two or more ghosts that had fused together. ‘Like a big, untidy washing bundle of arms and faces she used to describe it as.’

Now she stretches her fingers across her black satin lap. Her hands are white spider shapes that are strangely beautiful. My eyes travel up her arms, and I look at her bare forearm where the lace sleeve has slipped back. There are no needle marks that I can see.

I hear her voice that’s as huskily soft as the one I heard on the Cuspidor CD, and I find myself picturing her naked in the
cemetery
. Right now I feel the heat in my veins again. I imagine her lying naked on a tomb, her bare back against chiselled words that recall the long dead now residing six feet down. In my mind’s eye, I see her with knees raised high as I make love to her. I can see her breast turning to gooseflesh in the cold air; nipples dark … hard….

Then she suddenly fires a question right at me. ‘Jack, where do you want to be right now?’

‘The cemetery,’ I say before I can stop myself. Then bite my lip, puzzled why I answered like that, just as if someone had pressed buttons in the back of my skull.

She looks at me in a way that’s both fascinated and horrified. It’s the expression of someone who’s wandered by accident into a room to find an open coffin there. They don’t want to –
do they hell want to
– but they can’t resist a little peek at the face beneath the shroud.

‘OK.’ I look at her hard now; I’m alarmed at blurting out the weird cemetery reply. ‘What happened to me?’

‘Remember what I told you about the old Roman towns being haunted by ghosts?’

I nod.

‘I believe,’ she says, ‘that London is haunted by the spirit of the City itself. Listen, this place is two thousand years old. Countless millions of people have lived and died here.’

‘That’s a lot of ghosts.’ I intend the words to be flippant. Only they don’t come out that way.

‘It is a lot of ghosts.’ Her eyes hold an uncanny fire. ‘I saw them once.’

‘Conjoined ghosts?’

‘And that’s what these are. These are thousands upon thousands of ghosts that are hundreds of years old. They are fusing together, becoming a conjoined entity that in turn is evolving into a
collective
personality.’

‘The spirit of London.’

‘That’s how I think of it, yes.’

I wish I could tape this conversation. Insane pop stars make front-page news. Even as I think this I have the unsettling
sensation
that she isn’t as mad as I think.

Katrice carries on speaking. ‘I first began to see them in my early teens. They streamed by me when I was out walking. At first they appeared as long shimmering worms, then I realized that they consisted of human faces … or what had once been human faces. Later I began to see them as strands of a nervous system that forms a great web through London. I saw them pass through people and wondered why those people couldn’t see them. But sometimes they reacted. They’d pause and shiver – you know that just walked over your grave feeling? For a long time I thought I was special; that I was the only one who could see them. I’d walk through London watching them … just seeing them rush along the roads.’

Oh Benjay, I tell myself, you are going to pay me a titanic bonus for this one.

‘And I began to spend more and more time in cemeteries,’ she continues, her eyes dreamy now, her voice dropping low. ‘I saw that in those places the ghost streams were at their most vivid and most plentiful; in fact, there were mountainous knots of them as if they were forming into nerve centres. It’s there that their power is strongest. I’ve watched them pour into a man’s head and take control of him. It was a cemetery groundskeeper. He ran
laughing
through the gravestones and out into a road. A bus went right over him. And get this: he was laughing as the tyres crushed him –
he was having the time of his life.

‘Then I felt them come into me. It was as if a light had been lit inside my head. My muscles hummed. I’ve never felt so energized …
so empowered
. That’s when I went into music. I found I could write songs … or rather this great Spirit created the music and put the words into my head.’

A little bit New Age, but what the hell
….

‘But if this spirit kills people, why didn’t it kill you?’

She gives a little shrug. ‘It found something in me that it didn’t find in anyone else. It found a way to express itself through me … I don’t know exactly.’ She shrugs. ‘As for the others … maybe they’re just its playthings.’ Her eyes lock on me. Twin pools of darkness. Black holes that draw me in. I think of her naked body; I see her lying there on a grave; her eyes burning with dark erotic power. I want her again. My heart begins to pound. And I have to force myself to stop telling her what I’m fantasizing right now.

She continues, ‘I’d formed a relationship with the Spirit. One that was powerful. Intense. Even intimate. It gave me energy and inspiration. Then the band became more successful. I started doing coke. Yards and yards of it. The faces in the ghost streams turned furious. I saw their anger. I felt it, too. They didn’t like what I was doing … maybe doing coke was like dripping water onto an electrical circuit. It was screwing up our …’ – she gives a blood red-smile – ‘relationship.’ She sighs. ‘Then I went to Paris with the band. I saw those ghost faces in the audience, only they were bursting like over-filled balloons. Then in a moment it was over. I felt the Spirit leave me. I couldn’t sing a note. I couldn’t even remember the lyrics. You see something else had sung through me.’ She tilts her head; a gesture that acknowledges loss. ‘What could I do? There I was in front of five thousand fans.’

‘After a spot of self-mutilation you walked away from the concert hall and never looked back?’

‘In a nutshell, yes. I quit music. And ever since I’ve been photographing graveyards in the hope I can find the Spirit again.’

I nod seriously. Inside I feel white-hot glee. There’s more than a magazine article in this material. I see a TV documentary. Maybe even the golden path to Hollywood.

‘But it’s still in the graveyards,’ I say, ‘This Spirit?’

‘It’s everywhere. But it’s at its most powerful in cemeteries. Now it’s taunting me. I secretly film the graves and it brings people to perform for me in front of the camera. As if to say
We know what you’re doing. Now watch our power. And weep
.’

‘And the couple who were fucking and the man who hooked himself up on the tree were all possessed by the Spirit?’ I ask. ‘It possessed me, too?’

‘You felt that heat in your body. That irrational excitement. Then you tried to climb into the tomb where I’d hidden the camera. What’s more, the Spirit forced you to do this while I was there in the cemetery.’

I feel uneasy about this. Yes, I did a crazy thing at the tomb. But maybe she’s just seized on that to make it fit with her big ol’ London Spirit beliefs.

She’s still talking, ‘I’d just put the camera in the tomb when I saw you walk into the cemetery. I hid and watched you.’
Matter-of
-factly she adds, ‘It wasn’t long before I saw they’d entered you and taken possession. You can tell by the way the person’s body suddenly twitches, it becomes larger, as if a new source of energy’s been switched through it. After it was over you were like a dead man walking. It was all I could do to get you back here. The taxi driver thought you were on drugs.’

‘But it’s left me now,’ I say as if I believe her.
Oh, Jack Constantine you consummate liar you
. ‘I’m safe.’

‘For the time being.’ She takes a deep breath – the emotional, dolorous kind. ‘I don’t see the ghosts anymore … but I can
imagine
them now … they’ll be trying to reach you. They’ve had you once. They’ve forged a bond. Sooner or later they’ll return.’

‘Why?’

‘To kill you.’

‘Oh?’ I feign shock.

‘They will kill you on camera. That way they will taunt me again. They want to make me suffer for destroying what was a unique relationship.’

Pretentious? Me? Myself? Moi?

‘I see,’ I tell her. ‘But they will only kill me if I’m near one of your concealed cameras, right?’

‘That’s true.’

‘Then I’m only in danger if I return to a cemetery where their power is strongest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I won’t go back.’