Come to think of it, Clayton is superstitious. Looking back now I realize he never even gets out of bed on a Friday the 13th. Of course, he never ever admitted he was superstitious, only he’d make some excuse about not rising. Not that that in itself was unusual: we didn’t have day jobs in the City, did we? Society didn’t expect us to fight for the democratic way, did it? Brain surgery would continue without our intervention, right? So we’d settle down for a day’s smoking, drinking with maybe a bit of the other if we had female company.
Yeah, so we were losers. Alcohol was the answer to our problems (even hangovers). And there were those purple pills that allowed us to soar with angels.
But then Clayton found the Hand Of Glory. With that, he believed, he could change everything. He could turn our poxy lives into gold.
‘Why don’t we do the Morrelli place?’
He gave me that sneering look of his like I’d just suggested we write a letter to Santa Claus. ‘Think bigger, Nick.’
‘Morelli’s the richest man in Whitby. He’s out of town. That mansion’s sitting up there all alone.’
‘Duh … Turd brain.’ He waved The Hand Of Glory under my nose. The brown skin looked like a rotten apple in the moonlight. ‘What’s the point in trying this if the house is empty? Isn’t it supposed to put people in a trance?’
‘Clayton.’ My laugh came out on the nervous side. ‘You don’t believe that thing really works, do you?’
‘There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?’
The time was coming up to around ten as we walked into Whitby. If you’ve never clapped eyes on the place let me tell you: Whitby is a hunchbacked town. A dark, evil-tempered hunchback at that. With its back to the sea, houses disfigure the hillside like clusters of scabs. Streets are so narrow that all the buildings hang over them with weird frowning faces. They have poxy little windows that look like evil eyes. And those beady little eyes are always watching you; always hating you, and willing the big bird of bad luck to come crapping all over your head.
In that old monster town there were people about even on a winter’s night like this. Most were moving from pub to pub; a few were leaving restaurants as the shutters came down. In houses across the water lights shone where most of the townsfolk eyeballed their tellies. Clayton couldn’t resist a bit of clowning, running the dead fingers through my hair, or putting the hand on girls’ shoulders, so they’d look down at it and scream at the sight of mummified flesh. They all thought it was a joke hand. Most laughed. They knew Clayton; they knew what he was like. So did I. An ugly incident in search of an opportunity.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what big idea have you got for the hand?’
‘Just you wait and see. This is gonna blow your mind.’
‘What’s the point in heading up the cliff? There’s nothing up here.’
‘There is.’ He nodded at a dark column standing above the old church on the cliff-top. ‘The TV mast.’
‘What the hell do we want with that?’
‘You’ll see in a minute … here.’
He gave me the hand to hold as he pulled a candle and a glass jar from his pocket. I followed him in the moonlight, with the sound of the sea booming against the bottom of the cliff. I tried not to think about that pound or so of dried skin and bone I held in my hand. And when I felt the fingers twitch inside mine I muttered to myself: ‘It’s only your imagination, it’s only your imagination….’
Fifteen minutes later he’d done. Clayton had climbed the thirty-foot TV mast, lit the candle in the jar (no mean feat with the breeze blowing like that), wedged that and the Hand Of Glory into the front of the transmitter dish, then made me recite the verse with him. I should have felt an idiot chanting that rhyme, but instead of feeling ridiculous I felt cold. A great lumbering cold that went to the root of my bones.
‘Oh, Hand Of Glory, shed thy light, direct us to our spoil tonight.’
Clayton came swinging down the TV mast like an ape, boots clanging the steel ladder, moonlight glinting on his shaved head. ‘See,’ he called, with a crazy leer on his face. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it?’
‘Right.’ My voice sounded so sceptical it oozed. ‘What’s the point in leaving the hand up the friggin’ TV mast?’
‘Just you wait and see. Now … we’ve earned ourselves a little treat. Hold out your mitts.’
Standing in the breeze, the sea whooshing around the rocks below, he tipped half-a-dozen purple pills into my palm. ‘As the bishop said to the actress: swallow. We’re going to party tonight.’
Clayton was in one of his wild’n dangerous moods. The purple pills were Frankies, some kids called them Frankensteiners. They were made by an alcoholic lab technician who combined uppers, downers, E and some of his own secret ingredients into a mind-bending cocktail for the nark-head connoisseur. Take them, and you were launched on a magic roller-coaster ride to hell knows where. As I’ve said, sometimes you flew with angels. At other times in our aluminum mobile home, that leaked, that festered, that smelt of wet socks, we conversed with GOD.
I swallowed them.
By the time we walked down the hill into town those Frankies were kicking in. Imagine being rolled easily along on big fat marshmallow tires instead of legs; imagine a tropical breeze has replaced the cold easterly. It warms you right through to your gnarly old soul. You don’t feel that headache any more. Those swollen veins in your throat you’ve got from your dirty rotten drinking stop hurting. You shrug off that burning itch in your dick. And instead of dark wells of shadow in back yards there mushroom these gorgeous mists of indigo and crimson. Lurking houses no longer frown but grin; window eyes now wide open; they blaze with joy. That’s how Frankies feel.
We were laughing, waving our arms, excited.
‘Man,’ I sang out, ‘why did you put the hand up the TV mast?’
‘Man!’ he sang back, ‘haven’t you worked it out for yourself yet? Look!’ He pointed along Church Lane as that laugh came bubbling up through his throat again. ‘Look, Nick. It works. The Hand Of Glory damn well works!’
Jesus … shivers prickled up my spine, my eyes grew wide, as I followed the direction of his pointing finger. I told myself this was a new trick courtesy of the Frankies. But it wasn’t. This was really happening. Whitby had fallen asleep. Not only people in their beds, either. Everyone had fallen asleep in their tracks. Men and women lay on the street, or in bars. A man lay upside down on a flight of steps that ran to the beach. A woman dozed amongst fast-food clams spilt from a trashcan. A cold hamburger stuck to her forehead like a huge third eye.
‘C’mon, c’mon,’ Clayton shouted. ‘You must have worked it out by now?’ The sound echoed over a town that was silent as death.
Maybe it was the cold dawn of realization, but it rolled back the feel-good warmth of the Frankies. ‘You put The Hand Of Glory in the TV mast.’
The leer went wild on his face. ‘You’re getting it. And why did I put the hand there?’ He walked across the chest of a cop lying on the pavement. ‘Because down here’s a dead zone for TV transmissions; that’s why they stuck the booster mast up on the cliff. TV signals are scooped up by the aerial then squirted out again, down here … down to all these houses. Only now’ – he grinned – ‘… only now the TV signals go through the Hand Of Glory first … they amplify its power … and what you see is what you get. Sleepy town.’
He was almost skipping now with a lusty delight. Sometimes he stepped over a man lying there sleeping in the gutter; sometimes he kicked.
‘Whoa, Nick! Did you see how his nose just went POW!’ He hooted. ‘Christ crap on that … look at all the blood!’
By the harbour it was the same. Dozens of people lay unconscious in the road. Dead, I told myself until I bent down to feel a woman’s chest. There was the heartbeat, good and strong. When I held my open palm under her nose I could feel her breath. They weren’t dead, only sleeping. The Frankies still worked their magic on me, too. I could see her breath come out as a mist that was pure gold.
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‘Good idea,’ Clayton shouted.
Finding a pair of women in high-heels and short skirts, he started pulling off their clothes.
‘Just opening up a couple of goodie bags.’ He laughed. ‘Look at the twin peaks on this. Yooo! Pierced nipples!’
Neither of the women woke or even murmured in their sleep as he went to work on them. The old time phrase for the action came to mind: sporting the wood.
Clayton was sporting the wood so hard with one of the sleeping beauties her back slapped the pavement loud enough to echo along those comatose streets for miles around. Dazed by the sight of all this, I stepped over bodies lying flat out, walked round a car that had run into a store front, the driver lay bleeding (and still sleeping) in his seat. I watched Mick Waterman lying back on a bench with a cigarette smouldering away on his chest. It had burnt a hole as big as a saucer in his best silk shirt. As I turned away his jacket lapel caught fire; a rose-coloured flame took root there.
Not a whimper from him. Not one.
I turned round. Now I noticed a cat lying unconscious on the ground just a yard away from the sleeping mouse that it had been chasing when the Hand Of Glory blasted out its power from the TV mast.
Seagulls littered the quayside. I picked one up. They were warm, plump things, heavier than I imagined. I could feel the heartbeat through its feathers. I put it down gently. Then I remembered Mick Waterman with the fire taking hold of his jacket. I went back and rolled him over into a puddle at the side of the road. The flames went out with a long cartoon hisss … like Tom, the cat, sinking his burning butt into a birdbath.
‘Give me a hand, Nick. Hey, give me a hand!’
Laughing so hard you’d think his bald head would burst into a million pieces, Clayton sweated as he heaved old Judge Jeffrey over the harbour railing. ‘Help us out, Nick!’
I kept on walking. It was getting crappy now. An alarm screamed where a house had caught fire (maybe some poor bastard had fallen asleep into their nice log fire). Fish appeared on the water to float there in a shining carpet. Do fish sleep? I asked myself as I walked into a bar. Do they drown if they stop swimming?’
I stepped over a bartender who’d somehow fallen into a sitting position like an obese pixy. There I helped myself to cash from the register.
Clayton walked in over a bouncy rug of fallen bodies (not a murmur, not a sigh from them). He put on a lah-di-dah joke voice. ‘Ah, there you are barkeep, my fine fellow. Your best champagne and your largest cigar.’
‘Coming right up, sir.’
So that’s how it went. We drank champagne; we used those sleeping guys and gals as beanbags. Torsos are comfortable, heads are not. We chatted conversationally.
‘The cold water never even woke him up.’ Clayton blew smoke rings at the ceiling. ‘Judge Jeffrey sank like a stone.’
Then the idiot did something stupid. He set fire to a woman’s hair. That really does stink vile. We went to the next bar to continue drinking. We also took money from cash registers, purses, wallets. Clayton removed clothes and posed the clientele like models in a hilarious wha-d’ya-callit … tableau? Yeah, that’s the word. Tableau. A kind of warped nativity scene with things sticking in here and there. ‘Won’t there be some red faces when this lot wakes up,’ he told me) as he finished off with a few artfully inserted bottlenecks.
A couple of hours later Clayton sighed, ‘All good things come to an end.’ We’d just loaded the last bucketful of money into the trunk of a red BMW that had caught our eye. Maybe it was time. You couldn’t leave those people asleep outside all night, could you?
But when they did wake we’d be long gone. They couldn’t pin anything on us. It didn’t take long for Clayton to return to the TV mast, shin up the ladder, blow out the candle and stick the hand wrist first into his pocket with those Spock fingers pointing out. Then we drove south with the trunk filled to the lid with cash. Lovely liquid untraceable cash. I cranked the CD player until the car shook. Then we drove with the windows down hollering out into the night air. It felt so good. We were the undisputed Lords of MISRULE. The Agents of CHAOS.
Then we found the truck that’d rolled into a ditch. The driver wasn’t dead but I couldn’t wake him. We passed more cars. Some had come to a stop with their engines still running, the dozing drivers slumped in their seats. At dawn we reached the city. That was sleeping too. And we knew it was never going to wake.
Six months have gone. When it’s cold we burn banknotes in the hearth. We’ve as much food and drink as we need – for now anyway. Clayton’s messed with those pills too long though. One side of his face is paralyzed. Not that it matters. He’s been going insane for weeks now. Not long ago he started screaming, and I figure it’s one of those screams that’s never going to stop. Me? I’m sitting here writing down what happened to us. There’s that mummy hand squatting on the table. Its ugly fingers twitch every now and again; the index finger rises slowly to point – j’accuse. I’ve got the loaded revolver here. As soon as I’ve reached the end of this, my last living testament, I’m going to suck the barrel until the bullet comes. You follow?
Naturally enough, we speculated after that night in Whitby. We decided that the mast didn’t only boost TV transmissions down into the valley, but carried signals back the other way, spreading the power of that shrivelled man-paw along transmitter chains, relay stations and satellite transponders across the world. Leaving us the only ones to be immune. And there’s one more thing we figured out: although we knew how to activate the hand we didn’t know a damn thing about switching it off.
Now I see the results for myself. Men and women sleep out in the streets. They still breathe; but their clothes rot, their hair grows into tangles, while vines snake across their bodies, and moss covers their faces in a soft green rash. For all the world they look like the fallen statues of a dead as bones civilization.
Maybe they will wake up in a thousand years? Maybe they’ll never wake. Just like me when I slide the gun muzzle into my mouth, put my thumb on the trigger and begin that final squeeze….
THE ELECTRA SUITE
To be alone, at night, in vampire-haunted Leppington isn’t recommended….
The Touch of Velvet by Professor Ruth Porteous, Director of Contemporary Myth, Flyyte University, Illinois
From Hotel Midnight
Electra’s back in the chair tonight, my friends. Thank you for all your e-mails. I hereby make a global apology … or should that be a universal apology? … that I cannot reply to all of them in person. For example, Jolanda, from Holland asks oft-repeated questions, to whit: ‘Who is Electra? What, exactly, is the Hotel Midnight website?’
I’d direct you to the FAQ icon for more detailed answers, but to muster all my womanly patience I’ll repeat my earlier replies: My name is Electra. Much more than that you don’t need to know. Moreover, you might find additional information a dangerous thing, my friends. This, the Hotel Midnight website, is our confessional, our treasure house of recondite and uncanny stories, and experiences that one feels should be recorded in some way, but can never find the right venue. After all, what kind of expression do you see on your loved one’s face when you begin with the words, ‘My dear, I have something to tell you. Last night I saw a ghost …’ Hmm … doesn’t always go well, does it? Mocking laughter isn’t conducive to continuing a heartfelt confession of a disturbing encounter with the unknown.
So, here we are. Hotel Midnight. Welcome, my friend I am Electra. You, the reader, are an active participant, a willing colluder in this adventure beyond the boundaries of the normal. Believe me, when I assure you, there is always room for you and the experience you wish to share at Hotel Midnight. You never will be turned away. Your story will always be heard with a non judgemental ear. Because I know in this life inexplicable things happen to people. They can turn lives inside out. If you are robbed, you tell the police. If you have tonsillitis, you consult a doctor. But, well you know, there are incidents from your own life that you will never relate to anoth
er human being for fear of becoming a target of their mockery. How many of us have seen a figure on the stairs when we’re alone in the house? Or seen a relative who is no longer alive walking through the garden gate? Or even seen things in our dreams that have disturbed us so much we’re desperate to tell our friends. But we don’t; we keep our mouths shut, because we know the sound of disbelieving laughter would be too painful to bear.
So, my friends … send me your eyewitness accounts, your urban myths, your dream diaries, your confessions about whatever befell you. Ours is not to differentiate between what might be truth or fantasy or illusion. Jung and Freud believed there is more truth enshrined in a dream than contained in a legally sworn testament. Pilate asked, ‘What is truth?’ Dare we suppose that ‘truth’ is everything we see, hear, read and imagine? Only that we so often find ourselves viewing ‘truth’ as if we see it reflected in those distorting mirrors you find at funfairs. The substance reflected is real enough, only sometimes its shape is transfigured, its ‘truth’ distorted.
Here, then, are three more testaments that have found their way to me. Remember, dear friends, Hotel Midnight does not judge.
You, however, might choose otherwise….
I
VAMPYRRHIC OUTCAST
‘You are as the darkness of night touched by the pale light of the moon.’
From Skanda Purana (India, circa. 1000 AD.)
By the light of a midnight moon the town of Leppington lay sleeping. Twenty hours of heavy July rain filled the streets with pools of water that glittered silver. Each one duplicated the image of the moon. A hard disk as white as bone that oh-so faintly revealed dead lunar seas.
The girl walked barefoot down the deserted street, her toes sinking into puddles, annihilating those shimmering copies of a faraway world.