Hotel Midnight

  ‘A first-rate archeologist like you?’ Piet stood up to kiss me on the lips. ‘You’ll soon get another job.’

  ‘Oh, by the blood of all the hairy-arsed gods of yore, give me something I can get my teeth into. Anything.’ I took a bottle of wine from the rack, then I plunged the corkscrew into the cork as if stabbing the thing. ‘A pristine iron-age settlement – or one of the great henges. Only not another bloody nineteenth-century bottle factory please.’

  The cork popping from the bottle seemed to release a strange sound. A scream that rose into a searing squeal. I stared at the bottle. How could removing the cork emit a sound like that?

  Piet hurried to the door. ‘Oh, no what’s he done to Woody now?’

  I understood. It wasn’t the bottle emitting the shriek: it had come from the dog. For some reason my wife suspected our son of accidentally hurting the animal. We left the house to find Admar kneeling with his arm round Woody’s neck.

  Admar hugged the dog while shouting, ‘Stop that! Stop that! I’ll get you back!’ The boy yelled the words in the direction of the orchard at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘Admar, what’s the matter, honey?’ Piet asked.

  ‘The man hurt Woody.’

  ‘Which man? Where is he?’ Now I looked round the garden for an intruder.

  Admar’s eyes flashed with rage. ‘He went back over the fence.’ He pointed in the direction of the apple trees.

  I ran down through the trees to the bottom of the garden. The fence there is a low one; it’d be easy for an adult to vault over into the farmer’s field beyond. I expected to find a local youth who’d decided to make a nuisance of himself. Only there was nothing but meadow. It ran down to a stream lined with willow. The intruder would have had to run like the wind to reach the cover of the trees. Then maybe they had because I couldn’t see anyone now.

  Piet appeared beside me. She held her hand to her eyes as she scanned the field. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘Well the bastard hurt the dog. Woody’s bleeding.’

  ‘Bleeding! Do you think he’s been shot?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Admar insists the man spat through his hand at Woody.’

  I frowned, not following.

  ‘Admar, said like this.’ She bunched her hand to a fist then pressed it against her lips where the thumb joined onto the hand.

  ‘Admar didn’t see a weapon?’

  She shook her head. ‘Then he was so shocked at seeing Woody hurt that he wouldn’t have thought to look.’

  We walked back to where the dog was turning his head back to lick his flank.

  ‘There’s a small wound.’ I took a closer look. ‘Looks like a puncture.’

  ‘It might be deep?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s not much blood.’

  ‘Dad, will Woody die?’ Admar’s eyes teared up. He was a slender boy, with a thick head of hair as dark as his mother’s. He was so slightly built that he resembled a slim adult in miniature, not the hefty Viking-boned boys of my family – or me come to that. Admar had an uncanny knack of mimicry that could make his friends breathless with laughter but right now his face was the image of anxiety for his pet.

  I did my best to reassure him. ‘No, he won’t die. What’s more, Woody seems to be taking care of the wound himself.’

  Woody turned to look at me when he heard the sound of his name. He licked his lips. I noticed the pink smear of blood on his tongue. The dog appeared calm enough. OK, he’d been hurt, but you could tell from his demeanour that he’d taken it in his stride. He even broke off tending the wound to retrieve the squeaky doll from the middle of the lawn.

  ‘He’s fine,’ I stressed, ‘but it wouldn’t hurt to take him to the vet to have him checked out.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Admar asked. He didn’t want to let Woody out of his sight for a while.

  ‘’Course you can, champ. Want to get his lead?’

  ‘Wood-heee! Wood-heee!’ He used his distinctive call to attract the dog’s attention. ‘Car! Walkies! Wood-heee!’

  The dog dropped the toy to come bounding toward the boy. His wagging tale gave my knee a meaty whack as he ran by. The animal’s ebullient mood had to be a good sign.

  Piet patted me on the back, grateful I wasn’t going to downplay the dog’s injury. ‘I’ll get his blanket for the back of the car.’ She followed the pair into the house.

  I took a moment to check that there was no one lurking in the garden. These days it’s not the done thing to be tough on intruders, but, by God, I promised myself to twist the thug’s arm until he squealed. Admar had said Woody’s attacker had somehow ‘spat through his hand’ to hurt our pet. I guessed the weapon had to be an air pistol. The thought made me clench my fists. What if the idiot had fired wide? What if the pellet had struck Admar?

  I walked back across the lawn. Near where the squeaky toy lay there were some drops of blood amongst the scattering of daisies in the grass. The grass needed cutting, so formed a wiry green fuzz. I crouched down to examine the spots of glossy red. I knew a dog’s instinct would be to grip whatever’s hurting it with its teeth and pull it out. I was searching for a grey airgun pellet. Instead, I saw something that although I recognized it for what it was I’d never seen its like close up before.

  I pinched the object between my finger and thumb, and then plucked it from the blades of grass that partially concealed it. A bare description of the missile would be: a needle-sharp splinter of bone, partly wrapped in a slender tendril of vine that had been stripped of its leaves, then attached to a bird’s wing feather. The artifact had been assembled with consummate dexterity. Despite my anger, I had to allow that. Its appearance was suggestive of a scribe’s quill. But instead of a nib there was that splinter of bone, sharpened at one end. The bone was perhaps half the length of my little finger, and stained with Woody’s blood, while the whole missile was no longer than my hand from fingertip to wrist. I use the word ‘missile’ with confidence because I knew what I was seeing. Without doubt, it was the distinctive type of dart that would be fired from a blowpipe. Hence, Admar’s description of the attacker spitting through his hand.

  As I stood there holding the dart, looking every inch the homeowner who’d picked up a filthy syringe from his garden, I glared out over the meadow. At that moment, I began to ask myself questions. If a man used such a weapon, where was he from? Why did he attack us? What would he look like?

  As the clock in the hallway downstairs began its midnight chimes I switched off the bedroom light. With it being so warm Piet lay beside me with the duvet up over her legs only as far as her hips. The dog was in his bed in the kitchen. He was at peace with the world and had been happily snoring when I left him. The vet had given Woody a clean bill of health, merely washing the wound with an antiseptic solution. I decided it would only complicate the situation if I mentioned the dart I’d found on the lawn. Admar was fast asleep too. He’d opted to leave the windows wide open so they fluttered in the nighttime breeze. He sprawled face down on top of his Lunar landscape duvet. Aptly, he’d snuggled his head into the pool of light grey that marked the Sea of Tranquility.

  After kissing Piet goodnight I lay flat on my back, my eyes open. My bare feet I left in the open air, complete with their big toes that had never known a nail – my ‘silly toes’, you’ll remember. A glint of reflected moonlight played on the ceiling.

  When the last chime of the clock faded to a dying hum Piet whispered, ‘James? Did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’ I pictured a stranger armed with a blowpipe.

  ‘The clock struck thirteen.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I counted them.’

  ‘It’s never chimed thirteen before.’

  I felt rather than saw her shrug.

  ‘It did just now.’

  ‘It must be heat.’ OK, as rationalizations go it was a weak one. Figuring out why a clock struck thirteen instead of its customary midnight twelve doesn’t head yo
ur list of priorities when you’re ready to sleep.

  Drowsy, Piet murmured, ‘Hope you have a good weekend, James.’

  ‘Hope you have one, too, Piet.’ Ever since we were first married we wished each other that on a Friday night. I don’t know how it started, but it had stuck fast.

  Downstairs the clock began to chime.

  ‘Again …’ Piet whispered. ‘Lucky thirteen.’

  ‘Damn clock. There’s no such time.’

  For a moment we lay awake, both of us waiting for the rebel clock to voice its idiosyncratic heresy once more.

  Only silence now. It chose not to challenge the laws of chronology again just yet.

  I closed my eyes.

  How can it be when you wake up seventy miles from the nearest coastline you hear the sound of the sea? The rush of surf rose into a crescendo before receding to a hiss. The clock radio beside the bed glowed: 2:09 a.m. I listened to the noise outside the bedroom window. For a moment it sounded like conspirators whispering down in the garden. Then slowly, inexorably, the whisper rose into a hiss, which in turn swelled into a soft roar that reminded me of surf cascading toward a beach.

  ‘Piet?’ I spoke her name softly.

  From the way her gentle breathing continued uninterrupted I realized she was still asleep. For whole minutes I lay still. I listened to the rise, followed by fall, of that surf-like sound. For all the world, it seemed that the tide had rolled seventy miles or more over dry land as far as our garden fence. After a while I realized I couldn’t sleep again until I’d satisfied my curiosity. So, after easing my nail-less big toes into a pair of slippers, I padded out onto the landing without switching on the light. I didn’t want to disturb my wife and son. Then I headed downstairs in the direction of the clock that had recently taken to chiming thirteen. For the moment it was satisfied uttering a rhythmic tick-tock. I was pretty much moving around by sense of touch. Yet risking a fall would be witless to say the least, so I groped along to a small wooden table between the dining-room and lounge doors. There I knew I’d find a torch. It only took seconds to locate the drawer in the table. Soon after that I had the torch in my hand. Even so, I postponed switching on until I made it into the kitchen. If Piet woke to the sight of torchlight beams flashing about the staircase it would only give her a fright. She’d already had her fair share of those today.

  However, the moment the kitchen door closed behind me, I thumbed the torch button. The light sprang out to reveal the Dalmatian sitting up on his beanbag, tail swishing. Perhaps he was expecting a bonus walk? The fur had matted on his side where the wound was located. If anything, it might have been caused by the dog licking his flank. Maybe the taste of his own blood intrigued him.

  ‘Woody, no need to get up,’ I whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  The surging hiss came again, forcefully enough to make the dog glance at the window above the sink. A growl sounded in his throat.

  I swung the torch to shine it through the glass. Giant shapes crowded against the pane. A shock jolted down my spine. My God … I thought my heart would lurch out through my ribs.

  Then I took a steadying breath. ‘Woody. Don’t worry. It’s only branches.’

  Trees. Branches. Leaves. Yes, that’s what I could see all right. But that hardly made a cartload of sense. We didn’t have any trees so close to the back of the house. In fact, the only trees we possessed were apple; they were thirty metres away at the bottom of the garden.

  My heart beat hard; this made me so uneasy. Even so, I managed a philosophical tutting sound as much for my benefit as the dog’s. ‘Looks like someone’s been playing a joke on us, Woody, old boy.’

  Immediately I thought of the stranger who’d somehow flung a dart into Woody’s side. Now, branches outside the window? A mental image flared of a lunatic hacking limbs from a tree then propping them against the kitchen window.

  ‘Think it’s time you called the police,’ I told myself. A blowpipe attack, then branches? Did the madman plan to set the woodpile on fire? Was he even now pouring petrol?

  I knew I couldn’t sit and do nothing until the police arrived. First, I’d have to check that there wasn’t some psycho out there with a fuel can.

  ‘I need back-up, Woody.’ I muttered the words without thinking, yet the dog understood the need for solidarity. Canine instinct kicked in. Smoothly, he slipped off his bed to stick close beside me as I unlocked the kitchen door.

  When I opened it I wasn’t ready for what I saw.

  Or what I didn’t see.

  What I didn’t see was garden. What I did see was forest. Just a dozen paces from the back door were tree trunks. A wall of them. Masses and masses. Thick trunks with a silvery bark. Barely three metres or so above the ground branches erupted from the trunks in a billowing mass. A mobile mass at that. Higher up a night breeze was blowing. The motion of the branches, plus the rustle of leaves, produced that sound of the sea: surging into a near roar before subsiding into a whispery hiss. The outermost tips of the branches hung low enough to almost brush the kitchen window.

  Down here was still. Rich forest smells advanced on me as I stood in the kitchen doorway. I glanced at Woody. He stood with his head thrust forward. His nose twitched. He was fascinated. He smelled a million scents he’d never smelt before. Hearing a whole symphony of sounds, too. Most of those would possess frequencies too high or too low for my limited human aural capabilities. All I could hear was that sea-sound of air rushing through the upper branches, mixed with the faint creak of timbers as they swayed.

  What now?

  Be flippant in a cool, film-star kind of way, by quipping to Woody, We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.

  The truth was I didn’t have any witty one-liners. I stood. Stared. Listened. Those shadows. That whisper of leaves. This sense of ineffable mystery … I couldn’t even muster a swear word that would be powerful enough to suggest the magnitude of what I saw. Or my surprise at how a forest manifested itself in my back garden.

  Without thinking it through, I found myself stepping forward into the night-time forest, wearing nothing but football shorts and a T-shirt. On my feet, leather slippers. Not the apparel of an explorer. Woody was as hypnotized by the miracle as I was. Sticking close to me, he walked forwards, sniffing, glancing from left to right, his ears flicking at every sound.

  Thing is I couldn’t see more than two or three metres ahead. The forest was that dense. Shining the torch upward, I saw an undulating ceiling of green. Still I felt the pull of the forest. Woody felt it, too. You couldn’t stop yourself. You wanted to push deeper into that dark, inexplicable interior. Was this the spirit of the wild hunt I’d read about in folk legend? The instinct to pursue and kill that over-rode all civilized notion of self-restraint.

  My heart thudded. Blood roared through my neck, over-feeding my brain with oxygen. The greens of the leaves seemed so bright. Tree bark had the brilliance of silver foil. Scents became richer. My ears homed in on the sounds of woodland creatures in the undergrowth.

  ‘Woody, we’re not in Yorkshire anymore.’ I managed my not so original one-liner at last. Then shot the dog a grin that seemed impossibly wide. A wolfish grin, my grandfather might have described it (as in ‘That young man possesses a wolfish grin. I don’t trust him.’)

  Dog and man moved faster. Canine and Primate. Monkey and Mutt. Our ancestors had been in partnership for a million years. Of course, this specimen of dog-hood, the Dalmatian, had been bred to produce a coat of luscious spots. I bore my mutant Shillito gene that resulted in my ‘silly toes,’ my largest foot digits possessing no nails. We loped through that strange, night-time woodland. I shone the light ahead. Within moments I’d lost sight of the house behind us. Shortly after that, we must have crossed the line where the garden fence should be that separated civilized lawn from wild meadow. Only of the fence there was no sign.

  Just find the end of the forest, that’s all, I told myself. When you’ve discovered the extent of it go back home. But running through a forest at
night is a strangely exhilarating experience. When we didn’t suddenly burst through undergrowth into open pastures I wasn’t disappointed. This thrilled me. It filled me with energy. I wasn’t tiring. I ran like I’d been born to run. I wanted to go faster. Go deeper. Go further. Go find it.

  It?

  That question did provoke other questions. Why did I have a sense that I was searching for something? What was there in this wood for me to find? For an instant I thought these questions about my sudden strange compulsion – a compulsion every bit as strange as the hall clock’s to start striking thirteen – might make me hesitate. But I kept running. My headlong dash became even more reckless as I dodged round tree trunks, jumped over fallen branches, even skirted a pond that held a layer of mist above its glassy, black waters. Woody loped alongside me. He easily matched my pace. Maybe he sensed we hunted, too … although what we hunted for was a complete mystery. And all the time my torchlight blasted against tree trunks. Above me, the breeze stirred the treetops into the music of a ghost sea. It sang of a restless unease. An edginess as if it had glimpsed events in a grim future.

  Then I found it. The forest ended in a band of bushes and saplings that grew sparser as the land ran uphill. Within a minute of leaving the forest I stood on clear ground. Here it was chillier than the confines of the trees. The breeze tugged at my hair.

  I saw I stood on a plain, which led to the mouth of a valley that penetrated a range of purple mountains. They were fearsome ones that rose into ferocious peaks to gnaw at the sky. Stone jaws forever worrying the bone-white cloud.

  My thumb found the torch button. I clicked it off. This bleak daylight hadn’t filtered through the dense canopy of branches in the forest, but here, at least, in the open it was bright enough to see. Woody padded forward onto a mound of earth to survey the approaches to the valley. He glanced back at me, waiting for my verdict. Move forward? Or stay?