Hotel Midnight (20 page)

She looks me in the eye. ‘The problem is, Jack, you won’t be able to stop yourself.’

This time I do smirk my disbelief.

She doesn’t smile. ‘Don’t you remember, Jack? Just a few moments ago. I asked where you’d rather be now … and the answer you gave me was the cemetery?’

I sit there in the room with its purple walls and Gothic drapes. Her eyes hold me. The sound of traffic comes through the windows. A witch’s brew of echoes, engine growls, tyres on roads, the bleat of horns that fade away to die in bleak city streets. All these sounds are deformed by the cold, dead air. They melt into me, through my nerves, through blood and bone. Here in the mad woman’s room, my mind begins to roam again, finding the dark, morbid corners of my brain … it’s not cars on the road outside, no … it’s ten million London dead. They’re flowing by the window in a vast ghost river. They are searching for something. They burn with a hunger. And I find myself asking the question:
What do they want? Who are they looking for?

And the voice inside my head answers:
Me
.

‘Taxi!’

A black cab pulls a U-ee in the road to draw up at the kerb; its tyres crunch filthy London snow. As the saying goes, I’m still not myself after whatever happened twenty-four hours ago. Strangely, I feel weaker now I’m out in the afternoon air; and, Christ Almighty, that cold is piercing.

Katrice Bryden helps me into the back seat. I hear her tell the driver my home address. Through the toughened glass that
separates
the driver from his passengers I see he’s a huge man with a shaved head. Tufts of black hair bristle from the pits of his ears, one of which sports a gold ring. In a past life he must have been a pirate. I tell myself this, my head swimming as if I’ve downed one brandy too many.

I expect Katrice to shoot me a quick good-bye, then return to her house. Instead she pushes me further along the back seat before climbing in beside me.

‘I’ll see you home,’ she says. ‘You can’t travel alone … not yet anyway.’

With a slam of the door the taxi lurches away into the traffic, which like a river in flood catches us and carries us away amid all the roaring trucks and cars. London is a black city today – black streets, black buildings, black-clad citizens, black trees, and more, much more of that black snow lying on pavements and traffic islands. I’m not sure where I am exactly. To me it looks like the drab mix of buildings that scab the land between Kings Cross and Clerkenwell.

‘Jack,’ she says, ‘you should leave London.’

‘For how long?’

I look at her gathered there in a long black coat. Her face, a white heart-shape set with two burning eyes that fix on mine. ‘How long?’ she echoes. ‘How long do you think your life will last?’

‘I should leave London for good?’

‘Yes.’

No way, hose-ay
. That’s what I’m thinking but I mutter something about considering it … it might be for the best, all things considering and such stuff….

I gaze out at people shuffling along the pavements. A plane struggles overhead as if the cloud is pushing it down. Maybe I’m looking at London with a new set of eyes after my … accident? Yeah, accident; from henceforth that’s what it shall be known. Nothing more than a freaky accident. Pressure of work. Bad diet. Surfeit of booze.

I touch the scabs on my face left by the rat bites and peer out on the great Goblin Metropolis. Today I see it for what it really is: A screaming wilderness. The howling vortex that sucks people in. It makes men and women do what they would never normally dream of doing. I see on upper floors the red lights that are the workplaces of whores. I see a dwarf walking with sticks and he’s bearing the black eyes of a damn good kicking some drunk gave him for being a ‘miserable short-arse’. I see the homeless in
doorways
that are cavernous mouths … mouths that are slowly devouring the poor bastards whole. Buildings howl their contempt for you. Roads are killing fields. They want your blood. On the tarmac I see the painted outline of some poor sod that never made it to the other side.

I’m tired. My eyes don’t focus as they should. Blurred patterns fly by the taxi windows. I watch as one seems to pour itself through the ear of a piss-head who leans against a wall with a can of Special Brew in his hand. When I first see his face, it’s the usual crumpled alkie face; he has matted hair, a stubbled jaw.
Urine-enriched
trousers hang from him. He looks so fragile a snowflake could knock him down.

But as that smeary ribbon of light shoots into his lice-alive-oh hair his head jerks up. He stretches, growing larger. His eyes are transformed. No longer watery slits, they snap open into vast blazing orbs that seem to shoot flames at me. He watches me pass. As we turn a corner I see a powerful grin transform his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Katrice asks.

‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘I’m still groggy from yesterday.’

She looks at me strangely, then shoots wary glances through the windows. ‘Jack, you’ve seen something, haven’t you?’

‘Dancing elephants, clowns, acrobats.’

‘Jack, tell me what’s out there.’

‘Nothing. I’m just over-tired, that’s all.’

In the front of the cab the driver mutters. ‘Flipping bikes. They shouldn’t be allowed on the road. I mean, it’s not as if they pay road tax or nothing, do they?’

Katrice is too busy looking out of the back window. Through a side window I see a shrivelled old woman straighten her crooked back. Grinning, her eyes lock onto us; she points at us as we pass. Katrice hasn’t seen the woman and I’m staying quiet. The driver shakes his head as a bus pulls out in front of him. ‘Call themselves flipping professional drivers?’

She’s dropped a tab of acid into my coffee
… those are the words going through my brain as I stare into the back of the taxi driver’s plump neck.
This morning she spiked my drink
… At least that’s what I tell myself as I struggle to stop that depth charge of revelation from exploding inside my head. Because I see a ribbon of purple mist sweep in through the side of the taxi to disappear into the driver’s head. And just for a moment I think I see faces in the mist. Terrible faces. Staring eyes. Screaming mouths. Lost souls.

That’s when the driver stiffens. The top of his bald head lifts to press against the cab roof. His shoulders tense. He turns. I see the grin on his face; his eyes are blazing, leering things … they’re alive with hidden knowledge.

Seconds later he’s swung the taxi into a side street. With his foot to the floor he accelerates, weaving through the traffic, engine howling and horn braying like the world’s gone insane.

There are fewer people on the pavements here. But all turn to watch us tear by. They’re pointing. I see delighted grins. It’s possessed them, too.

‘Stop!’ Katrice yells at the man. ‘Stop. What the hell do you think you’re doing!’

She fumbles to open the door. But the driver’s activated the electronic locking. We’re not getting out here. Not now, that’s for sure. Katrice is yelling some stuff about the Spirit of this ol’ Goblin City undergoing a metamorphosis; that it’s changing; that it’s more powerful; that it’s turned against her because she knows too much; that’s it’s going to kill both of us; that it’s doing freaky shit that it ain’t done before … and her voice sounds so far away … a distant thing, that quacks in the great celestial vacuum … nevermore, nevermore….

I watch all this through a druggy, indigo haze. The taxi barrels away along London’s streets. Without any surprise I see, at last, that we’re approaching Kensal Green Cemetery. I look up into the sky and notice it’s starting to snow.

Those conjoined ghosts … that Spirit of London makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. I know that now.

Dazed, I look through the cab’s window as the iron gates sweep by and we’re rumbling along a path into the heart of the
cemetery
. Black headstones jut up through the snow. The taxi fishtails, exploding a stone Jesus before whipping back to shatter cherubs.

‘Let us out!’ Katrice screams. ‘Let us fucking out!’

The driver swivels his big bald head to leer back at us through the toughened glass. Now Katrice beats at the partition with her fists, gold rings clattering. The driver grins showing yellow teeth.

That’s the instant he loses control of the taxi. It rockets across the graveyard to hit a tomb bigger than the cab itself. When I open my eyes I see that the front end of the cab has punched through the stone wall of the tomb. Coffins have spilt out onto the bonnet. One’s slid through the windscreen. Wet bones poke through rotted wood. The engine’s caught fire now. The driver’s legs are blazing, too.

He’s laughing just like he’s heard the funniest joke in the world.

‘Come on, come on … snap out of it, Jack.’ The world slips into sharp focus as Katrice pulls me from the cab. I’m wondering how she’s opened the locked door, only then I see the door’s lying wrapped round the shattered body of a stone angel twenty paces behind us.

It’s snowing. Great solid lumps of it. It stings as it hits my
rat-bitten
face. I look at Katrice. Blood trickles from her hairline where her head struck the toughened glass. The driver’s going up like a firework now. His nylon football shirt hurls out showers of sparks, flames spurt from his mouth. He’s laughing all the time, the mad sod. A bubbling, gleeful laughter.

‘Come on,’ Katrice yells in my ear. ‘This is where it’s at its strongest. You’ve got to get away from here! It’s going to try and destroy both of us.’

She’s dragging me across snow-covered turf, weaving in and out of lines of gravestones. As I feel the tug of her slender hands I feel the pull – the brutal pull – of something else. The cold vanishes from my body. Instead waves of heat crackle through me.

That
something
gives me a glimpse through the lens of a video camera that Katrice must have concealed nearby. Framed by bushes, it’s at such a low angle we lope toward it as monstrous, inhuman figures on impossibly long legs. Katrice’s hair flies out, her black clothes flutter – feathers of a raven. She’s leading a man whose face is mottled with scabs. I see me but I don’t recognize me. That grinning face is an alien mask glued to my head.

‘Snap out of it! Jack? Jack! Don’t let it in!’ Her pull is stronger. The heat fades from my veins. And there I am, a wounded man limping through the snow with a beautiful woman. Even though I am
me
again, I’m seeing those blurring ribbons of purple snaking in and out of the ground; they form into knots; into cancerous lumps; into black-purple structures that arc over me a mile high. I see faces in them now. Millions of faces – children, teenagers, beautiful women, old men. Millions of faces with screaming mouths and leering eyes. All are turning to face me, to focus on me, fixing me with their blazing stare.

Katrice doesn’t see them. Instead she hangs onto my hand with all the grim determination of the drowning and drags me toward all-too distant gates. Snowflakes come bullet-like, stinging our eyes, salting our hair.

HOT! That heat once more, coming back in a sparkling rush through my arms and legs to set my belly on fire. I feel taller. Inside me, excitement ERUPTS. I am a furnace made man-shaped. I BLAZE in the cemetery; a blistering incandescence; a fallen star.

Again that sideslip. I see myself and the woman through the lens of another hidden camera. Katrice must have concealed a dozen hereabouts. This time I see us from a worm’s eye view. I am a towering colossus. I am electric.

She sees the look in my eye. My leering mouth.

‘No, Jack. Don’t let it take you over.’ In desperation she throws her arms around me. ‘Don’t let it in, Jack. Don’t let it in!’

With a sudden laugh I pick her up, hold her above my head and EXULT. My roar of delight echoes across the Goblin City.

‘Jack.’ Although she’s terrified, she forces her voice to become soft as silk. ‘Jack. Don’t you want to hold me? Don’t you want to make love to me? Think about making love. Imagine my breasts in your hands. Picture yourself touching me. See yourself making love. Don’t think about anything else but that.’

Don’t think about anything else?
So, that’s it. She’s using the old magic now. The magic of sex. She’s giving herself to me … to distract me from what’s running into my brain from those old graves. I look round, seeing purple veins worm from the soil to fly through the air into my head. The Spirit of London that makes people do what they don’t want to do.

And all the time as I hold her there above my head, ready to break her open across a tombstone, she’s murmuring to me in that husky voice. Telling me to picture her naked, how she would look lying before me by candlelight, what it would feel like when her fingers caress my back, or the touch of her tongue on my flesh. In that sensual voice of hers she’s waging war on the invasive spirit.

Yet there are other voices, too. Telling me to imagine the sheer naked joy of seeing her blood spurt from her body.
Kill the woman, Jack … smash her skull … snap her spine….

And there’s Katrice whispering, ‘Want me, Jack Constantine. Want me naked. Want me touching you. Want me doing anything you ask….’

Images stream through my head. Laughing faces of the damned. Katrice naked. Her breasts milk-white, her nipples dark. And I see blood, and hear her scream; and her gasping, sucking mouth. I hear her last breath. Yet I hear, too her gasping cry as, wrapping her long bare legs around me, her body convulses.

Kill her
, say the voices …
kill her, kill her, kill her
.

‘No! Leave me alone!’

Shouting the words I find myself
me
again. The ghosts leave my head. For the last time I look at myself, as if through the lens of one of those hidden cameras: Yes, that’s me there in the cemetery. The man in the overcoat – a frightened, trembling man – but a man in control of himself once more. Holding the woman in his arms. He’s whispering over and over again, ‘Forgive me, please forgive me …’ And that’s probably the tightest he’s ever held a human being before.