Hotel Midnight (25 page)

No. I will not let this town put those thoughts into my head. I am sane. I am rational. I will not think about vampires
.

Vampires? Even to think the word made her eyes snap open. Vampires?
Why did I use that word?
She shuddered to the roots of her bones. If she didn’t find another human being to talk to right at this moment she realized she would lose her mind. Above her head, cloud drew cobwebby strands across a ghosting moon. Even the little light it cast into the yard was dying now. She must get inside the hotel. She must find human company.

Feeling her way along the wall, she reached the window that formed a block of shining yellow in that unyielding membrane of brick. Once more, her mind spun out strange ideas:
Yes, the wall is a membrane. At one side are light, life, companionship and safety. While on this side…
.

Then she’d reached the window. For a second the brilliance of the electric light inside dazzled her. Screwing up her eyes, she brought her face close to the glass and peered in. A dresser full of blue plates. An antique-looking stove. A Yorkshire range in
black-painted
iron. Brass kettle. Belfast sink. A wall clock showing half past midnight. But where was … ah, there!

Angling her head to one side, she made out the vast kitchen table that dominated the room. Around it sat five men and women. They were holding a conversation – an intense one. Those that weren’t speaking listened solemnly. Inside was full of light; a beautiful, brilliant, Pentecostal light; it suppressed
shadows
; it didn’t yield before things that creep out of the night. The air inside would be warm; it would smell pleasantly of soap and the lingering after-aroma of freshly cooked food. She saw bottles of wine. Every now and again the men and women would sip from a glass.

It looked wonderful. She wished she sat in their company
drinking
that red wine —a delicious rouge colour; she could imagine how it would taste; its velvety softness. Her tongue ran across her top lip while her eyes roved over the people at the table. An elegant woman dressed in black had long hair that was a gunmetal blue. The way she held herself suggested an aristocratic ancestry. The man sat beside her was in his thirties. His eyes were soulful, caring, yet touched with melancholy. Three other people, in their late teens or early twenties, she guessed, sat across the table from him.

Suddenly she realized she could hear the sound of approaching footsteps. It must be the stranger from the alleyway.
It has to be. He’s followed me here
. She glanced to the corner of the building, expecting the loathsome figure to appear at any moment. Nothing yet. But the slow footfalls sounded louder. Quickly, she tapped on the windowpane with her fingernails. The group inside still talked. Some serious subject that involved them deeply. She tapped again.

Why don’t they hear me?

She glanced to the corner of the building. The sound of
footsteps
grew louder. Oh no … she could see a strange, humped shadow looming across the cobblestones. Her pursuer must be walking along the access to the yard now; the streetlights were behind him, throwing the grotesque shadow forward.

Heart pounding, she rapped on the window. This time it was loud enough for the men and women to snap their heads round to look in her direction. She saw their eyes widen. One of the women screamed.

‘Please, let me in. I’m being followed … please, he’s nearly—’

Then from behind a pair of hands grasped her shoulders. She rolled her eyes down to see fingers that were bloated like raw sausages; the skin was a sickening mix of grey and blue tints, while the fingernails were ragged, purple things. So cold as well … the fingers had the feel of raw meat taken from a refrigerator. That cold seeped through her clothes into her own skin, chilling the blood that ran through her veins, oozing into every secret place of her. She tried to cry out, but shock had locked her throat tight; all she could manage was a hoarse gasping sound. The powerful hands dragged her away from the kitchen window. In seconds she’d been hauled through the gateway onto the river-bank. Here there were no lights. It was merely a strip of muddy ground from which bulged malformed growths of bushes and willow trees that loomed over black river water. Even though she struggled, the grip on her
shoulders
was so powerful she could not turn round to see her attacker’s face.

… Oh, but she remembered it though. That dead white face. With colourless eyes centred by a fierce black pupil that seemed to burn holes through her heart….

Despite her terror she realized that the door to the hotel had opened.

A voice called, ‘Who’s there?’

Once more she tried to cry out, only she was too breathless from the violence of being dragged through the witch tangle of branches to the water’s edge. The River Lepping roared at her now. A full-blooded sound that vibrated her body.

But even though the sound pounded her ears she heard only too well what the man breathed into her ear with that toxic voice.

‘Why didn’t you listen to me? I said you don’t belong here.’

‘Please,’ she choked out the word. ‘Don’t kill me … please don’t kill me.’

‘Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.’ The man held her so her face almost touched the water’s dark surface. She saw two faces reflected there. Both blue-white; cheeks patterned with black veins. Two faces with white staring eyes punctuated by fierce black pupils. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he hissed. ‘You’re already dead.’

With the word
dead, dead, dead
reverberating in her ears he threw her into the river.

First of all she struggled to keep her head above the flood waters of the Lepping, while trying to swim to the bank. Then the words of the vampire sank deep enough into her mind for her to accept the truth. ‘
You’re already dead
.’

Fierce currents rolled her onto her back. She floated
downstream
looking up at the moon through overhanging willows. Silver-edged clouds floated high in the sky. They moved with the flow of the night winds, she moved with the flow of the night river. Just like those clouds she had no control over her
direction
.

I’m already dead
, she thought.
I don’t need to swim
. Understanding seeped coldly through her.
I don’t need to breathe. Because I am dead
… At last she surrendered to the power of the river. It floated her by rocks, rolled her over, spun her in its grave eddies then its remorseless undertow pulled her down under the black waters, down to the bottom of the
riverbed
that was an expanse of slick mud. Being unable to breathe made no difference to her. She did not drown. Could not drown. Pale shapes swam in front of her face. For a moment she thought they were softly swollen fish then she realized they were her own hands floating backward and forward in this cold body of water.

There’s no point fighting this,
she told herself.
I might as well let the river carry me into the sea. I’m truly lost now. Even if I could climb out I can never return home.

Once more her face broke the surface. For mile after mile she floated on her back, passing under bridges, beneath trees that arched over the water, between meadows. Above her the moon shone down; in her imagination it became a hard, round eye gazing dispassionately at the woman in the water, knowing she was doomed and coolly observing what fate would eventually befall her; she was nothing but a piece of driftwood now. Lost to her family, humanity, and God. Once the stream carried her by a house on the river-bank. There was a light burning in the upstairs window – a little block of yellow radiance. Music ghosted from the house, too. A melancholy song that eerily echoed her journey through a night-time countryside that seemed haunted by the ghosts of all those tomorrows she’d never now experience.

Presently the flow carried her away from the house and the music; soon it was lost in the distance.

She closed her eyes. It only seemed for a moment, and then she realized that she lay on solid ground. Opening her eyes, she sat up and looked round. Moonlight revealed that she’d been washed up on a beach. Oddly, it was tempting to lie there, and not to even attempt to walk ever again. Only the water receded as a retreating ocean tide a dozen miles away reduced water levels upstream. As if walking in her sleep, she rose to her feet. There, on higher ground, almost engulfed by hawthorn was a tumbledown cottage. Strangely, she felt herself drawn to it.
Maybe the river brought me here because I was meant to see it
, she thought.
Perhaps I’m here for a purpose
. The moon was bright enough to show her a path that ran through waist-high nettles and hemlock. It appeared to lead directly to the cottage that stood half hidden from view alongside this remote stretch of river. With her bare feet
whispering
through the plants, she glided almost dreamily to the gate that led into a garden grown wild; where roses ten feet high nodded huge heads of pink petals.

Seconds later, she approached one of the windows. The panes were cracked; some were partially covered by a green skin of moss. Slowly … slowly as if she knew someone – or some
thing
– waited for her in the cottage, she leaned forward to look through one of the panes.

Inside was the kitchen of a long since abandoned house. Abandoned by human occupation, that is.

Sitting round a rotting table on decaying wooden chairs were five figures. Five beings that were men and women once. Some wore ragged clothes; a pair was near naked. The women possessed long manes of hair that poured in tangled coils of glossy black down their backs. Their skin was a deadly white with tints of blue. A cold, cold colour that sent a shiver down her spine. They sat at the table without moving. The males possessed
powerfully
muscular arms that were tracked with black veins. The faces of male and female alike were waxy mask-things that revealed no expression. It was their eyes that confirmed what they were.

Like those of the stranger who had thrown her in the river their eyes possessed no iris, so they revealed no colour. What they had were tiny black pupils that lent them such an air of ferocity. All the time she watched the gathering in the derelict cottage they did not move. They did not even blink or shift their gaze from the barren tabletop.

She realized if she moved with enough stealth she could leave this damned and desolate place without attracting their attention. Yet, just for a second, she saw herself sitting at that table with them … waiting with those festering dead-alive carcasses until the end of time. These were the abandoned scraps of their race, rejected by their fellow vampires. They had no purpose. Perhaps even the vampire lusts only burned dimly inside the stone cold muscle they called their hearts. Pitiful, ugly, lonely creatures that had failed even to die.

Taking a step back, she glanced over her shoulder. Her only escape from here would be the river. Not that it could kill her now. But then would it be a comfort to her either? All that waited for her in the water was a drifting existence without
companionship
of any sort. Once more that great dark tide of loneliness swept over her. She tottered, almost losing her balance. Could she face that again? The malignancy of solitude. How it corroded her sanity. Made every moment the most miserable, the most
unbearably
grim unit of time. And that moment of unyielding unhappiness would be replaced by another just as bad.

A mere thirty paces back to the river … then she would escape that gathering of animated death in the decaying cottage. Just thirty paces … she could cover that distance in twenty seconds.

This time she didn’t hesitate when she moved. Turning, she tapped on the window.

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please … let me in. I don’t want to be alone.’

The night-time breeze carried her words away into darkness where they died beneath a cold, cold moon.

From
Hotel Midnight

Electra here, dear friends. On this website all are welcome to share their encounters with the vampiric or the just plain inexplicable. Here is one more story I’ve added to the archive. I’m sure you’ll agree with me, it is one of the most exotic to come our way:

I live in the walls, see. Have done for a thousand years, ever since the sailor from the Holy Land bit me. Master told me I musta’ been ravished by him. That I might have a babe afore Michaelmas. But no. I was bit. And bit was all. Right here, twixt thumb and finger. And I recall a powerful sucking that emptied my arm of blood. The Holy Land sailor smiled all the time, and he had a gold ring in his ear that once belonged to an Egyptian princess, so he told me. And the brightest green eyes I’ve ever seen. And his hair smelt of oranges, too.

No, I didn’t have no child. I stopped eating tho’. I became a biter like the sailor. I bit the cats, and after my master ended his cock-fighting in the big room, I licked all the blood off the floor. My master’s friends laughed at this. They killed a runt goat and poured its blood into a cup and let me drink it. They laughed to see me gulp the hot rouge froth like I was the thirstiest child in Chris’ndom. But they stopped laughing when I asked for more. When they left I ran after them and bit one of their horses even though the rider beat me with his sword. It didn’t hurt. I only wanted to taste the horse’s blood. I wanted to see if it tasted the same as cock’rel and goat. The men weren’t laughing at all then. They shouted at my master that I should be kilt. They sounded angry but their eyes was frightened.

My master was angry, too, that I should bite his guest’s horse. He sent me to wait in the corn mill. There, I sucked dry a cat and four mice. When he came to the mill he stared in ’stonishment at the wee beasts all sucked dry.

‘Why do you treat the animals so, child?’ he asks me.