Hotel Midnight (15 page)

‘I don’t believe it … I don’t damn well believe it.’ For a moment she stood looking at the steel shutters covering the doors of the supermarket. ‘For crying out loud, where has he got to?’ She looked round half-expecting to see Ben lying bleeding on the street. Shaking her head, she followed the road that ran steeply down to the harbour-side. No, he must be lost, that’s all. If she walked along the harbour near the amusement arcades she might find him there. After all, there he’d find people who could give him directions back to Royal Crescent.

With blasts of white jetting from her mouth she reached the harbour to find the tide out and an expanse of mud stretching greasily out into the mist. And so much for people being here. Pubs and cafés were shut. Amusement arcades shuttered and silent.

In fact, the whole of Whitby was silent. Apart from the foghorn that still bellowed its mournful cry. God, that sound … it felt as if it was dragging through her body like a saw blade. Didn’t they ever switch the damn thing off?

She put her head down to walk on again, the mist stroking her neck with cold fingers … bone fingers that had been dead for a hundred years … a thousand years … the foghorn lowed across morbid, black mud … there, a long lost rope coiled unpleasantly eel-like … boat tracks formed many an open wound in the
riverbed
… abandoned lobster pots became the muddy ribs of dead children claimed by the gluttonous silt … beyond those, monstrous shadows loomed in a mist that didn’t reveal so much as a trace of another living human being.

She watched her passing reflection in the windows of The Dracula Experience; a hunched phantom-like figure with mist damp hair pasted down flat against her skull. And all the time the blister on her hand burned as if her flesh was being gnawed by fire ants. That foghorn boomed so loudly it set her teeth on edge and cursed her with the thumping mother and grandmother of all headaches. Good grief, all she wanted now was to get back to the apartment, get under a hot shower – then get some vodka down her throat.

She’d been walking perhaps five minutes when the road ended at a ramp. Confused, she stared at it for a moment. This led down to the sands … how had she missed the road that would take her back?

Ahead of her, the beach stretched out to be lost in that all enshrouding bleak mist. Waves of salt-air rolled with a tomb-like iciness over her, probing cold fingers through her clothes to touch her skin. She gave a great shiver that shuddered down to the marrow of her bones. That cold alone was enough to drive her back to the apartment, Ben or no Ben, but at that moment she saw a figure on the beach. Obscured by mist, she couldn’t even tell if it was male or female, but there was something about the
silhouette
; the angle of the head….

‘Ben?’

Slowly, she walked down the ramp, sensing stone slabs give way to soft yielding sand beneath her feet. ‘Ben?’

The figure didn’t react to her voice at first. But as she walked out across the sand it turned and moved down the beach toward the still unseen ocean. She followed.

It’s him … I’m sure it’s him, she told herself. What on earth was he doing on the beach at night? Perhaps he had been attacked, or had fallen and struck his head; now he wandered in a confused state, looking for her.

‘Ben!’ This time a full-blooded shout came from her lips. The figure stopped. Looked back (she was sure he’d looked back, even though she couldn’t clearly see his features in this God-awful mist). Then the figure began to walk purposefully once more.

Ingrid found herself half-running after him (
it has to be Ben; it is him; no doubt
). Soon Whitby town and its cliffs vanished behind her into the fog. Now she moved through that all but dark murk, which had the clarity of ditch water. ‘Ben. What’s the matter?’ This time her call didn’t slow him, he still strode purposefully toward the water’s edge.

But what water?

She could see no waves. The tide had gone way out; she could have been crossing some cold, damp desert. Every so often she’d walk across a white speckling of dead seashells, looking for all the world like tiny skulls. But there was nothing to indicate the
direction
she walked. She couldn’t even make out the harbour wall that must run out to sea to her right.

Ahead, the figure began to vanish into the mist as it moved faster and faster away from her. ‘
Ben
…
Ben! Wait!
’ A breathless panic bore down her; a pitiless weight, crushing her chest. ‘
Wait for me!
’

She followed the fading figure for a full five minutes,
desperately
trying to keep it in view. Still she hadn’t reached the water’s edge; what’s more, she couldn’t even hear the surf between the cries of the foghorn now way,
way
, behind.

Surely the tide can’t have gone this far out? She must have lost her sense of direction and be walking
along
the beach, not
toward
the sea. But even as she walked, the nature of the shore changed; dark boulders emerged from the mist. They littered the beach at weirdly regular intervals. She walked by one. Perhaps eight feet long, it was oblong in shape, and closely resembled its neighbours that now surrounded her.

This was absurd; impossible; but she found herself thinking of them as being coffins hewn from stone. But what would coffins be doing lying out here on the seabed?

Passing by another, she looked more closely at it. Although erupting with a malignant growth of kelp the coffin shape was unmistakable. But coffins, hundreds of coffins on the seabed? Could this be the remains of a long sunken graveyard? After all, she remembered reading that water levels had inexorably risen around the coast over the last few centuries, submerging whole villages. And she recalled the stone coffins at Whitby Abbey where the monks were interred. Maybe an unusually low tide had laid bare this submerged cemetery? One that had long since been stripped of its soil by ocean currents. But the coffins were of tremendous size. She pulled aside strands of weed from one of the stone caskets to reveal where the lid joined to the main body of the coffin. A scabbing crust of shellfish had formed over parts of the stone. Where the lid joined, the shells had broken as if….

She closed off the images her imagination sent oozing into her brain. Find Ben, she told herself. That’s the important thing now. She walked on. The foghorn lowed with a dark and morbid
intensity
across the beach.

Exhausted, she toiled up the same steps the long dead Bram Stoker and his long dead wife and children had climbed to their holiday apartment all those years ago. It seemed as if the mist had followed her here, it swirled up the stairwell like water flooding the building.

Too tired to raise her arms to switch on the lights, she climbed the well of darkness to the white painted door. But where was the key? She’d swear it had been in her jacket pocket. ‘Well, it’s gone now,’ she told herself wearily. ‘Must have dropped it.’

Maybe Ben had found his way back here before her after his insane game of hide-and-seek on the beach. Yes, that’s it, she thought her spirits rising a little. He’s back. There was a strip of light showing beneath the door.

Feeling a renewed burst of energy she rapped sharply on the door. Then she rapped again.

Her heart gave a leap as she heard the bolt slide back and saw the handle turn.
He’s home, thank God
. She stood back as the door opened a few inches and a pair of eyes beneath a yellow fringe looked out. Strangely the eyes looked straight through her, then to the back of her and down the stairs. Then the female voice called out softly. ‘Ben … Ben? Is that you?’

She woke with a massive thumping headache. God, what a dream … and why was she so cold?

That was the moment she opened her eyes to see them
lowering
the stone lid back over her, sealing her into darkness – they were singing out in their high children’s voices: ‘Trick or treat, trick or treat, trick or treat …’ Those misshapen, long drowned boys and girls with pink, sea-anemone eyes, starfish mouths, barnacle-encrusted jaws, and brown, leathery, seaweed hair that spilt from their rotting skulls. Those no longer
little
children, suffocated by seawater, and saturated with a
post-mortem
mischief, who’d tricked her out here. And who’d laid her in the coffin with bare-bone hands … ‘Trick or treat, trick or treat …’ Even now she thought:
Good God, the idiots; why can’t they get it right
?

Dazed from the blow on her head, she laughed deliriously: they’d got it all wrong; you only play the trick if the victim
doesn’t
offer the treat … All wrong … all wrong, wrong, wrong….

She still laughed (with a crimson note of hysteria) when she remembered seeing Ben lying in the stone coffin nearby with his face gouged like some pumpkin mask, the thick, white church candles driven deep into his empty eye sockets; the wicks burning with a greasy yellow flame in the damp sea-air. ‘They can’t even get that right!’ She sobbed with laughter. ‘The candles go
inside
the pumpkin head! Not
through
the eyes! It’s all wrong.
All wrong!
’ Her laughter rose into great, wailing shrieks.

As a matter of fact, she only stopped laughing when the first wave hit the end of the stone coffin, and she realized that, at long last, the tide had turned.

We’re looking down on the couple just before it happens. The camera is mounted in a tree. Stark branches frame the shot. It’s night. We see gravestones – old gravestones, and angels long since eroded to demons; a rash of sulphur leprosy across distorted faces.

The couple lying on the grass are naked. They’re fucking with such determination that their eyes are puckered tight and the microphone catches their gasps. From the look of bliss on their faces they’ve probably even forgotten that they’re fucking in a graveyard, on a mattress that’s nothing but soil, bones and rotting faces. He’s a stocky man with muscular thighs and a tattooed snake that coils down his spine. She has short-cropped dark hair, small pointed breasts. We notice she’s shaved her pubic hair and we exchange glances, our eyebrows rising, then look back.

‘Is this what you wanted me to see?’ I ask.

‘Patience, Jack.’

‘Porn movies at eleven in the morning? It’s a mite too early for me, Benjay.’

‘Shh … it’s nearly here.’

‘Gary – Gary – Gary – Gary!’ The woman pants the man’s name from the speaker. Then she climbs on top of him to impale herself on him with a deep throaty ‘
Oh
….’

The man’s eyes look over her bare shoulder toward the camera, not directly into the lens but close. They narrow. He’s seen
something
that puzzles him. Then his eyes widen in shock.

The woman notices his expression. ‘Shit!’ she snaps. ‘Someone’s watching us, aren’t they?’

She looks back. There, in the low light, her face flares strangely, almost as if it shoots out light rays. Then her own eyes go huge. She’s seen something that terrifies her. Her mouth yawns wide into a scream.

That’s the moment the screen goes dark.

I smile at Benjay who sits there, his boyish Asian face now the picture of mature gravity. ‘And fade to black, crash in music. The bog-standard cliffhanger – or is the hook at the start of an episode still known as the cow-catcher?’

‘Patience, Jack,’ he replies. But he’s not smiling. He’s seen this before (many times I guess) and he knows what’s next. On screen is a one-word question.
Continue
?
With the hand that holds the cigar he hits enter on the keyboard.

‘It’ll take a minute to download.’

He’s good to his word. Sixty seconds later the picture returns to the screen. The man and woman are still there on the grass; they’re still naked. Gravestones that are dwarfish from this camera angle surround them.

‘What do you make of that, Jack?’ Benjay asks, pointing at the screen with his cigar as if not wanting to bring his finger too close to the figures writhing on the grass.

‘They’ve been attacked,’ I tell him, my blood running cold, not liking this one bit. Especially the sobbing sound coming from the speaker.

‘Attacked? Yes and no.’ Benjay swallows as if something he ate no longer agrees with him. ‘Keep watching.’

Leaning forward now, my hand resting on the monitor, I focus on the two figures. Slowly, they’re worming across the turf on their bellies. Their bare feet are green from grass stains; they moan like they’re hurting from head to toe. I look for signs of violence on their bodies. There are none. I try to make out the groaned words. There’s nothing coherent.

‘What are they saying?’ I ask.

‘Shh. Keep watching. See what happens next.’

Like human slugs, they slither toward a tomb slab that lies flat against the ground. Another metre or so and they’ll leave the edge of the shot. Already the man’s arms are out of the frame. That sobbing comes softly and utterly heart-broken through the speaker … crash to black.

Continue
?

Again the film clip has finished and again the prompt. Benjay taps
enter
. The disk makes its churning sound inside the computer as the next clip downloads.

I stand there, ready to wait for another sixty seconds or so but the screen flares into life with a suddenness that’s as shocking as it is vivid. Now the two are in close up from the same overhead shot. They are laughing and screwing with a frenzy that’s nothing less than fucking maniacal. The focus isn’t quite right; images are fuzzed, the figures flare; the exposure is shot. But it is the same man and woman. This time they fuck on the gravestone with enough force to shake the bones in the ground below. Now the voices are guttural, I catch words that are foreign. A name? A plea for mercy? An orgasmic celebration?

Christ knows. But you’ve heard the phrase hammer and tongs? Well this was it in spades.

‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ I say.