Hotel Midnight (6 page)

Danny staggered, panting, to the rest room; there he sat on the floor, his back to the fridge. It had only lasted a second, but he had glimpsed something beyond that doorway built by the
incandescent
dead. He’d seen cool green meadows; a stream lined with willows; in the distance had reared a mountain of grey rock. Only this mountain had a human face. He’d seen the dead leave the inferno. They had walked into paradise … because he was certain it must be paradise. And he’d witnessed the burnt
cadavers
instantly become young again. The expressions on their faces stayed nailed inside his head. Happy. Happier than he’d ever seen anyone before. He closed his eyes.

Before his brain shut down, the word HAPPY circled around the inside of his head like a new moon trapped by the gravity of a cold and lonely planet.

The next night Danny stood alone in the loading bay. Softly he sang, ‘Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling …’ He sang as he waited for it to happen again. He knew that it would. Inside, something new orbited the centre of his mind. Revelation. He knew without the tiniest, most insignificant scrap of doubt that he witnessed a miracle take place every night.
Should I tell anyone?

Will I hell!

Share your cake at school, Danny,
his teachers would tell him.
Share your cake with your friends. That’s the polite way to behave.
He’d been left with bleeding crumbs. Danny had learnt the tough way that sharing really meant allowing others to take your
possessions
.
So, share this? No! No way! This is all mine!

Danny had lost his career in engineering; he’d lost his health; he’d lost his self-esteem. Now he’d found the burning path to happiness there was no way on God’s Earth he’d lose that!

So. Eye to the spy-hole. He watched that day’s crop of corpses work in their life-giving atmosphere of flame. He rehearsed mentally what he’d do. As soon as the doorway was complete, and they had begun their exodus to paradise, then he would follow them there.

That exodus began. Danny spun the gas valves shut, killing the flames. The heat would still be enormous, but he’d be in through the oven doors, across the floor, then into the doorway in less than three seconds.

Danny gripped the brass valve wheel. Quickly he spun it shut. Then he swung open the oven doors.

Disaster!

The hot air scalded his face; he gasped; his eyes watered; roast meat smells filled his nose; post-mortem grunts filled his ears. Without the flames the corpses simply collapsed to the floor. Danny stepped over them as they lay vomiting boiling blood.

Fierce blue flames jetted like Bunsen burner jets from mouths and anuses as expanding gasses sputtered outwards.

The doorway of still burning coffins was closed. All that lay beyond was the asbestos block wall. Choking, skin scorching, Danny stumbled back out of the oven into the loading bay, where he limped back to the rest room to dissolve more Solpadol into a mug before gulping it down.

Yes, it’s a setback, he told himself as he glared at his scorched face in the mirror, but he’d find a way through. By heaven, he would. He promised himself that. All it required was effort and commitment, then he would pass through to the other side of that burning doorway to a sublime realm where pain, loneliness and misery could not survive.

Danny was ready the next night. The burning corpses had finished the doorway. Slowly, they filed through it into cool, green pastures.

Without fire, that incandescent animating force fled from the corpses. It killed the doorway, too. Tonight, Danny must leave the gas jets blazing. He would simply open the doors, dash into the oven, then through the miracle doorway. To give him some protection from the inferno he’d made a suit of kitchen foil backed with sacking; on his head, a helmet of wire netting covered in layers of foil. Two tiny holes punched by needles in the material served as eyeholes. For a whole five minutes he’d sluiced himself down from the hosepipe to soak his clothes and layer of sackcloth beneath the suit of aluminum foil. That drenching with water, plus five Solpadol would deaden the effects of the intense heat. It would be enough to get him through the blazing doorway. He sang to himself as his gloved hands pulled back the oven doors. They dripped water. The fingertips steamed as they came into contact with the hot metal handles.

This was going to be hot. He’d suffer some burning. And yet he promised himself any burns inflicted by the fiery interior of the crematorium oven would be supernaturally healed the second he passed through the doorway. Once on the other side he’d rest for a while. After that, he would enjoy a pleasant stroll to the
mountain
with the human face.

The heat from the oven hit Danny with the force of a concrete slab. Winded, he wanted to gasp for air; only he knew he must hold his breath or this heat would reduce his lungs to paste. Through the eyeholes he saw his goal. He waded through the sea of flame, pushing aside corpses that waited patiently in line to file through the doorway. He could see nothing but blazing yellow. Adrenaline together with the Solpadol quashed the pain. Yet he knew he was burning. He could feel the itch of bubbling skin on his back. His hair singed into a molten cap inside his foil helmet.

Danny fought his way through the line of burning corpses. Now faces lunged into view, flames jetting out of mouths. Eyeballs popped with puffs of steam; faces peeled away like they were plastic masks. He felt hands grip his arms.

They’re attacking me!
The thought left him panic-stricken. But then he realized they were helping. The burning dead supported him, and then guided him towards the doorway they had built. They knew his need was greater than theirs.

There it was. He was six feet from the doorway of burning coffins. Beyond its flaring archway were lush meadows, sprinkled with a million golden dandelions. They looked like stars against a sky of surreal green. Willows swayed in a light breeze. Butterflies with wings of a delicate cornflower blue flitted above the grass. And in the distance, the mountain with the human face. It was smiling.

Danny was still inside the oven. The flames were eating into his hands now. The gloves had turned to ash. Fingernails went black and spilled from his fingers; the skin bubbled red and brown like a pizza in an oven, but:

‘I’m there! I’m going through. Oh, thank God! Thank God!’

A six-year-old child, grossly humped with tumors, stood in his way; eagerly he pushed it aside where it burst against the wall like an egg.

Nearly there!

But the suit made him clumsy. Danny’s flailing arm brushed the burning doorway. He hardly touched it but it toppled. It hit the floor in a cascade of sparks that streamed up into his masked face like machine-gun tracer.

Howling now, more from frustration than pain, he swung round at the burning corpse. They stood placidly watching him. ‘Work, you bastards … work!’

They had to build another doorway. They had to do it quickly. Wood coffins were crumbling to ash. Gaping holes appeared in his suit, allowing tongues of flame to lick his flesh. Through his eyeholes he saw his hands trailing skin as they grabbed at coffins and begin to stack them.

Inside his head, his mind detonated into splinters: one screamed with burning agony; one, insanely optimistic, believed he could build another doorway in time, then slip through into cool, cool paradise. Another splinter of his reason was realistic; it knew that time was running out. He’d blown his one and only chance of Heaven; that soon the fist-size chunk of muscle that beat in his chest would begin to labour, then judder.

And finally stop.

Picture a house. One that you know well. Perhaps the one you grew up in? The home where you live now?

A house is a semi-permanent structure on a parcel of land. And land is unequivocally permanent. Immortally permanent – or as near as. Just, suppose for the moment, the house is one hundred years old. You sit in the living-room, gazing out through the window. For example, it’s summer now. You see a garden full of flowers, infant apples cling like dark green bulbs on trees in the orchard, the lawn is ready for cutting again; daisies form a
sprinkling
of white dots across the grass. Now use your imagination to scroll back through time. Take the house back to winter. The lawn is crisped white with frost. Trees are bare. Birds swing on the little wire basket of seed you hung out on the washing line. Take it back to autumn. Leaves are red. A few over-ripe apples hang from branches. Smell the wood smoke. Hear the tractor in a nearby field ploughing.

Imagine, the old man next door. He leans over the fence trying to catch your attention. They call him Walter; he has a bottle of homemade elderberry wine that he wants to give you. Nice bloke Walter. He served on a minesweeper during the war, but never talks about it. Well … only once … a few months ago, when for no reason he recalled the day they were out hunting enemy mines off the coast of Whitby. A German fighter-bomber screamed out of a pleasant summer’s sky to strafe the boat with
machine-gunfire
. Walter’s two best friends were standing either side of him at the stern. Both killed in an instant. Walter was unmarked. His eyes grew silvery when he recalled how his friend’s head rolled away from its body across the deck. Walter had raced after it to stop it falling into the sea. Just for one moment – one wildly
illogical
moment – Walter thought if he could only retrieve the head somehow his best mate could be saved … Walter had blushed as he told the story. ‘Silly young bugger, weren’t I? Harry was dead before he hit the planking. Stopping his head falling in the sea wasn’t going to help him, was it?’

Imagination conveys us back to Walter standing patiently at the fence with his bottle of homemade wine. On New Year’s Day Walter died. The only way to bring him back is through the magic of memory. So linger a little on the image. Walter. The bottle of wine in his hands. An expectant expression on his still
young-looking
face as he anticipates you opening the back door to the garden any moment now.

With imagination you can keep rolling back the years. Maybe to when the garden I gaze on now was full of piles of yellow sand beside stacks of freshly baked bricks, and men in flat caps
working
hard to build what would then be a brand new house on Mill Bank Road. Jump back another ten years. This plot where the house would stand is pasture. Cows munch its grass. A couple of boys climb a tree in search of birds’ eggs. Leap back another hundred years. This parcel of land is the setting for a medieval farmhouse. Women carry leather pails of milk across the yard. They wear long dresses. On their heads are white linen caps. The farmer and his son stroll through the gate. They heft muskets in one hand, geese by the necks in the other. Everything’s changing now. The clothes. The buildings. Fields are smaller. Hedges taller. Roads narrower. Even body shapes are different. The women are as muscular as any man you’ll find on a football field of today. The farmers walk with a hunched gait; they have thick, bull necks; their skin is as red as ripe tomatoes from constant exposure to the elements.

Take a bigger leap back in time. Eight hundred years ago: you see nothing but dense forest from the living-room window. Feral scents seep into the room. Perhaps you hear the squeal of wild boar in the distance.

Back again; this time three thousand years. You’d be
hard-pushed
to find even a sign of human life. If you’re lucky you might glimpse a band of hunters. They’d carry spears tipped with sharp flakes of flint. Television invariably portrays prehistoric people as heavily bearded with a lot of hair; their bodies thickset with just a suggestion of the Neanderthal about them, yet these five or six hunters you see pushing through the undergrowth (just where the barbecue will be many centuries down the line) might be clean-shaven with short hair. This family group, comprising men and women, will probably be lightly built, even willowy. These are a nimble people who run after game, or climb trees for birds’ eggs; they leap streams in search of berries. They haven’t exchanged a nomadic life of hunting for the mule-ish routine of agriculture. Yet….

So, this is about Time. And right about now you’ll be
wondering
it’s high time you find out where all this is leading. Well … yes … it is about Time. Time with a capital T. It’s about Time being surprising, about the past not being the place we imagine after our upbringing on the fodder of standardized history
calibrated
by homogenized text-books, plus a television output of documentaries and costume drama, all derived from material that flows from an extremely limited source. Many a freethinking archeologist will repeat this line: ‘If historians were astronomers they’d only observe one small corner of sky.’

In short, history is surprising. Its content unexpected. It simply isn’t how we imagine.