Hotel Midnight

  Why? I mean why would Bryden do that? Good question. And it was my job to find out; then distil the answer into a concise 5,000 words for the readers of Click This. Sounds easy when I put it like that. I watch the carriage doors slide shut, then comes the pull of gravity as the train speeds away into dark, fathomless places beneath London.

  I’d spent the day visiting former Cuspidor members, its management and anyone who might have had anything to do with Katrice Bryden. Either they kept their mouths shut or they genuinely knew nothing about her whereabouts. No one had seen her in months. No one had her home address. No one (conveniently enough) knew her telephone number or e-mail. PRS payments and royalties were paid directly into a bank account. Presumably, like some blackmailer, she simply visited different cash machines to draw whatever money she needed. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Bryden was invisible.

  I plod beneath grey skies and over pavements that look as if they’d been smeared with mucus, which leaves me musing idly about gigantic slugs. I’m getting nowhere really, really fast. I need a fresh strategy.

  The one place (or places rather) that I knew she frequented were graveyards. London must have dozens, if not scores, from small churchyards to vast public cemeteries created in Victorian times to house corpses generated by a city of millions strong.

  I head for Kensal Green cemetery. I leave the station to find it’s already dusk. Car lights paint more silver trails on those mucus-covered roads. Gritty snow hits me in the face. Here, there are not so many people about. Those few that brave the cold walk with their shoulders hunched; it looks as if headless zombies patrol the streets.

  A high brick wall surrounds Kensal Green forcing me to walk a full half-mile before I find the entrance gates. They are mighty iron structures that could keep an invading army out – or in.

  Make this quick, I tell myself. After all, this had to be a wild goose-chase. You’re hardly likely to walk into a cemetery to find Katrice Bryden, glorious in black lace, hiding a spy camera in a tree. But there may be some clue, or at very least walking through the necropolis might spark some intuitive deduction.

  As I pass through the gates into Dead-land I glance back with sheer naked envy at a man strolling into the Irish pub across the street. The lights blaze; it’s a warm and welcoming place. Not like this. A cemetery on a grim-as-death January afternoon with the light all but gone, where 50,000 bodies rot in the ground as they wait for the return of Jesus Christ.

  I walk along frosted tarmac paths. And I marvel at this sea – no, an ocean, a vast, bleak ocean of gravestones. There are angels galore; mock temples, and tombs the size of cars, some surrounded by wrought-iron fences; some bearing statues of spectral beauties. There are sphinxes, dogs, lions (all lying down to await their master’s return from the hereafter); and all the stonework is at least fifty years old. It’s stained with lichen and decay. Statues of girls are rotted by the cancer of pollution. I look into one of the car-sized tombs through a hole that’s big enough to stick my head through (if I was sodding-well crazy enough). There, I can just make out the boards and nailheads of a coffin. I give the tomb wall an experimental kick. From inside comes a frantic scurrying of claws on the coffin lid. OK, so it might not be one Benjamin Tobias Grimwood trying to claw his way to freedom, but his bones must be home to a coven of rats.

  What’s more, it’s the kind of place that plays tricks on you when you’re alone. I swear I keep seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. But every time I turn to the movement, anticipating a mugger, I see nothing but stone angels. Another swirl of snow rages through the graveyard. Stinging grains of ice force me to screw my eyes shut until all I can see is a strip of blurred headstones. I turn my back on the storm and walk deeper into the cemetery.

  The wind blows again. But it’s one of those weird ones you feel from time to time. The cold breath of air doesn’t seem to go round me but through me. It passes into my skin, strokes the inside of my ribs, then sends icy jets through the hidden chambers of my heart.

  ‘Jesus,’ I tell a stone Christ with Fuck Me Naked aerosolled in pink across His chest. ‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

  Christ stares me down with moss-covered eyes, as if daring me to pass comment on the words painted on His body.

  Again the cold air pierces me. That’s when I decide I’ve had enough of the place. My teeth rattle in my head. The snow drives into my eyes. I can’t see any more. For a moment I stumble blindly back the way I came. I blink hard trying to shift that freezing slush from my eyes. And, Jesus, I’ve walked further into the cemetery than I realized. The iron gates stand there bleakly against the sky: they seem a fantastic distance from me.

  I walk faster. As I walk I think about the Irish pub with the friendly lights and the friendlier bottles of Old Paddy inside. One of those has my name on it. I’ll start with a double … take it from there … God-damnitt … who moved those gates? They were in front of me a moment ago. I must have taken a good slow blink and somehow turned onto another path.

  They’re back in front of me. I’m on course. I can feel that whiskey money in my pocket.

  The wind blows again. Trees rattle. Dead bone things clattering in the cold air.

  Does Katrice Bryden climb into you? These thoughts spit hot and slippery into my brain. Does she climb you, tree? Does she sit astride a branch and rock there? Does she feel the hard diameter of wood? Does she watch lovers fucking in the grass? Does she rock faster feeling the ribbed bark press hard against her thighs?

  Yes, she does.

  I know she does.

  I have a photo of Katrice in my pocket. In the near dark I fumble it out to look at it. There she is: a mysterious Egyptian goddess – a goddess of little deaths, I shouldn’t wonder. Full red lips, teeth that are white, almost pointed. Eyes that are pools of liquid night. Raven hair flecked with a blue that is near black. She’s looking directly at me. I feel a heat growing inside of me. God, yes, I want to find her. But for an altogether different reason now.

  Who holds you at the midnight hour?

  Suddenly I find this funny and begin to chuckle to myself. A throaty, lusty chuckle. My heart beats faster. The pulse in my neck presses against my collar like a fist punching out through the skin. Excitement fucks with my eyes. I see purple blotches come streaming from the ground. They bloom around me. Dark flowers opening up from tiny buds to vast dandelion clocks that fly away in the breeze.

  She’s here somewhere. I know it!

  Then I laugh out loud because I realize what an idiot I’ve been. I don’t have to find her. I can bring her looking for me.

  All I need to do is give her something she wants.

  I move faster. The gates are there in front of me. My heart beats with wild, crazy rhythms. Breath spurts from my lips.

  Show her something interesting.

  Fire sweeps through my veins.

  Give her something she needs desperately. Tease her obsession.

  I reach the tomb of Benjamin Tobias Grimwood once more. Snow clings to dead ivy to form veins of white on the stonework. I see the hole and rotted coffin beyond. Inside – the mouldy flesh of the late Mr Grimwood must squirm as rats crawl through his bones … there’s a plump, pregnant bitch rat that squeals inside Mr Grimwood’s skull, her moist snout poking through the orbit of a decayed eye.

  My blood surges to the boil, filling my body with incredible heat.

  A noise comes echoing from the gravestones, and somehow I know it’s me. Laughing. At the same time I feel an overwhelming sense of strength. I am indestructible. I am immortal. What’s more I know how to become the bait that will draw Katrice Bryden from her secret hiding place.

  With a WHOOP! I fling myself down at the tomb. The hole that’s weathered in its side rushes at my face. Grinning like I’m the cleverest sod in London, I lunge forward, thrusting my head into the tomb. Like a battering ram my head crunches through the coffin wall and I’m face to face with the maggot-ravaged visage of of Benjamin. Rats explode in a fury of claws and
teeth. I’ve invaded their lair. They hate that, the bastards. They’re not going to give up their nice comfortable corpse nest for nothing. They’re going to fight to the death. But I’m fighting back.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ I scream at them. ‘I’ll rip you apart!’

  They lunge for my eyes.

  Laughing, I lunge back biting them.

  I feel a rat go for my tongue. I feel the furry head, with its brittle skull squeeze between my lips. I feel its smoothly bulging eyes press against the roof of my mouth. I feel its snout slide down over the back of my tongue, tickling – oh, so wickedly tickling my tonsils.

  Got you, you bastard.

  I bite hard. Bones crackle. My teeth slice through skin, unlocking sweet rat blood that runs across my tongue.

  The sheer electrical energy bursting inside my head seems to light the coffin. I see the man’s ribcage. The buttons of his funeral suit lying along his spine like liquorice drops. I see the skull tip down to look at me as the pregnant rat-bitch slides with predatory menace from the jawbones, shreds of man-tongue cling to her fur.

  ‘Come on,’ I’m laughing and howling and spitting blood and rodent flesh all at the same time. ‘Come on, I can take you, too!’

  Before the rat can reach me, darkness gushes into the coffin. That flood of shadow catches hold of my senses and snatches them away. For a second I find myself looking down at my own body. That’s me… the man in the overcoat lying face down on the ground; his head inside the tomb….

  Now a glimmer of surprise comes to me. Why should I do such a thing? That’s absurd … that’s not like me at all….

  Snow falls faster … it covers the body in a white sheet … the cemetery is absorbing me into itself … I am merging with what haunts those man-sized cysts beneath the grass….

  I open my eyes to see this. A ceiling that’s painted in purple swirls. Shining there are silver stars. A crescent moon. A lightshade of black lace; inside a red bulb burns.

  Someone is touching my tongue, probing it, squeezing it … suddenly the tip stings. I grunt. Try to sit up.

  ‘Lie still. I’m swabbing your mouth with alcohol … it should kill any bugs in there. Lie still, Jack. I’m trying to help you.’

  So I do lie still. Now as I come fully awake I realize I’m lying on a bed in a room of wicked purple. Chairs, curtains, and duvet are varying shades of purple, too. The face that looms close to mine as she swabs my mouth is painted a stark, ghost white. Her eyes are heavily made up with black eye shadow, and outlined with kohl. My goddess of little deaths. Falling down across her face is a wash of raven-black hair that catches the light from the red bulb, sending glints of crimson fire along the strands.

  I recognize the woman straight away. For now, my mind is too muzzy to recollect what happened exactly or what circumstances brought me here. But I realize that I didn’t find my quarry after all. Katrice Bryden found me.

  When I wake again my mind is that bit clearer. I realize it’s night. There’s the sound of traffic passing on the road outside. For a moment I lie there lightly touching the wounds on my face that still burn as if I’ve been touched by a lit cigarette. Then I remember the rats. Or at least I remember a dream of rats … or what seemed like a dream….

  I catch my breath as I sense someone else in the room. I turn my head to see a figure sitting in an armchair beside the bed. The eyes are fixed on me; they gleam with an uncanny light that sends shivers running through me.

  The figure whispers: ‘Relax, Jack. There’s nothing to be afraid of now.’

  ‘Katrice Bryden?’ I form the words clumsily. My tongue’s swollen to twice its normal size.

  She nods. ‘You were in a mess when you arrived here. I’ve treated the bites on your face. There’s not a lot I could do with the one on your tongue but it should heal quickly enough.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My words come out in a distorted croak.

  ‘Have you had a tetanus shot recently?’

  ‘Eighteen months ago … I sat on something sharp in Hebden Bridge.’ I attempt a heroic grin. My lips sting like crazy.

  ‘Then the shot will be good for a while yet.’ She looks at me, her eyes burning from the darkness. ‘Jack, why were you trying to crawl into the grave?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Again a stab at a hero’s smile. Again a stab of pain in my lips.

  ‘Were you drunk? Or high?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, I think I went crazy … just a little bit. I don’t know why … or maybe I went a lot crazy….’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘I’ve just told you … crazy.’

  ‘No, what was your mood? Depressed?’

  ‘No. Elated. Excited. On fire.’

  ‘You felt indestructible?’

  I nod. ‘King of the world.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Sore. Exhausted.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Abused … as if someone’s done something disgusting to me … only I … well, I can’t remember.’ I feel like shit. ‘I can’t remember. Like I say, I was crazy at the time.’

  ‘You were looking for me, Jack?’

  ‘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 g
et 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.’