Hotel Midnight (11 page)

The horse’s head rose higher, the neck arching – now
suggesting
something more cobra than mammal. Even the mane was more membrane than hair. Once more Jackie tried to force the warning scream from her mouth, her eyes locked on the dark shape that bore down on her daughter. Instead, her breath hissed through her lips:

‘I remember you. Good God, I remember you.’

‘What’s that you said, Jackie?’ Ben looked round, speaking through the pencil gripped between his teeth. ‘Has number
eighteen
gone down again?’

‘No, it’s … nothing.’

‘Uh?’ He glanced up from the technical manual to check the screens, his broad forehead gleaming under a wispy fringe. ‘Camera eighteen’s the lemon if we’ve got one. I’ll go down and check it.’

‘No, not yet!’

He looked stung by her razor voice. ‘OK. You’re the boss, Jackie.’

She no longer heard him. Thumbing the mic button, she said, ‘Caitlin. You might as well come back to the pod. We’ve got glitches.’

On six TV screens Jackie saw the blonde head nod. Quickly now, the pretty seventeen-year-old jogged along the aisle toward the office. Jackie immediately hit monitor keys firing up cameras in her wake.

Where are you? Where are you?
She searched the aisle behind Caitlin, hunting for the horse’s head that moved with that
churning
motion. At the same time she listened for her daughter’s feet on the stairwell, willing her to get through the pod door so they could shut—

Shut it be damned. Lock it tight. We’ll barricade the door. We won’t let that monster in. We’ll
—

‘Hey, Jackie.’ Ben whistled. ‘What the hell’s that in aisle three?’

‘Hurry it up, Caitlin.’ Jackie snapped the words into the mic: they rolled across the canyoned face of the supermarket like the word of God. On three monitors, one in distorted close up, Caitlin glared up at the camera.
Yes, Mother dear. Any more
orders, Mother dear?
The girl’s scowl said it all.

Jackie shot a glance over her shoulder. ‘Ben? Where are you going?’

‘Didn’t you hear? I told you I was going to check out what’s on aisle three.’ He watched her strangely now. ‘Do you feel OK, Jackie?’

She whipped her face back to the screens, scanning each one that Caitlin passed through either in dwarfish miniature or bloated giant.

‘Jackie?’

Jackie glared at aisle after empty aisle. The horse’s head shadow had vanished. Behind her the door opened. Caitlin entered with a flash of rebellion in her eye. ‘It’s like an oven down there. I’m not going out again until I’ve had a Coke.’

A melting sense of relief poured through Jackie. Taking a steadying breath, she said, ‘Ben, you said you saw something in aisle three. Where exactly?’

‘Screen five. It’s a ceiling cam. I can’t make it out.’

‘Where? I don’t see it?’

Jackie noticed Ben raise an eyebrow at Caitlin that as much said
Why’s your mother playing the super bitch today?
Then he added, ‘At the top near the intersection. It looks like someone lying on the floor.’

Rolling the tennis ball-sized camera remote, she zoomed in on the thing that lay like a fallen corpse, its swollen head at the foot of a cereal stack.

‘Aw, he’s gone and fallen over.’ Ben grinned.

‘What is it?’ Jackie’s voice was brittle.

Ben’s grin broadened. ‘Don’t you see?’

‘Would I ask you if I could?’

Caitlin answered. ‘It’s only the Honey Bear cut-out. I must have knocked it as I passed.’ She shook her head. ‘Jeez, Mom, what are you so up-tight about?’

‘Nothing. I’m all right.’

Ben said, ‘Look, Jackie, you’ve been burning the midnight oil on this job for too long, why don’t we—’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Take a look in the mirror, Jackie. Those bags under your eyes … we could carry groceries home in them.’

Jackie knew Ben was trying to lighten the atmosphere with a joke. And maybe that was it. Maybe she was overtired. But this was the biggest contract yet. Everything must work; everything must be one hundred and one per cent before the supermarket reopened.

Ben realized he’d penetrated her shell. ‘Let’s call it a day. I’ll fix us all a big cold salad while you unwind with a gin and tonic. Sound good to you?’

Jackie sighed. ‘It does sound good to me. In fact it sounds damn wonderful. Call security and get them to open the door.’ She touched icons on the computer screen that would activate the automatic system. Now any intruders (and any guards tempted to lightfinger a bottle of Scotch) would be caught on video. ‘Done,’ she announced. ‘Let’s get some fresh air.’

The pod exited directly into the supermarket parking-lot. All part of the new thinking in security. To avoid ‘contamination’ by supermarket employees, CCTV operatives sealed themselves in their sterile pod at the start of their shift and exited by a separate door at the end of it. No fraternization; no social intercourse: no colluding.

Jackie’s business machine was fuelled by hi-octane paranoia – supermarket owners don’t trust customers; supermarket managers don’t trust their staff; security guards on the day shift don’t trust those on nights: so Jackie Vorliss wins an heiress’s ransom to staunch that cash bleed-out.

Sun scoured the car-park. Its new blacktop filled the air with tarry fumes so thick you could almost cut slices with a knife. Jackie’s white BMW sat out there as lonely as a skull on a desert plain.

Ben and Caitlin flinched before the onslaught of summer heat. But at that moment Jackie felt a freezing sensation run up through her bones to the back of her neck. Suddenly she was no longer in the parking-lot with her daughter and boyfriend. She was thirteen years old. Standing in the warehouse back in a cold northern town where winter gales from the sea cut like a blade. That’s where she’d seen that sinister horse’s head before. It had risen from the floor, a mass of veined black with monstrous eyes. Seconds later Melody Tranter had burst against the warehouse wall. Coroner photographs recorded the rare butterfly pattern left there in luscious crimson daubs.

Yes, I remember you … Jackie Vorliss walked in her own
envelope
of mid-winter air on that blazing August day. She raised the image in her mind: the horse’s head of shadows, Bible black, all veined and somehow engorged with sinister promise.
Yes, I remember you.

That evening, Caitlin and Ben treated her like an invalid. Dressed in her bathrobe, Jackie was made to sit in the cool of the
air-conditioned
lounge while she sipped a gin and tonic over boulders of ice. She could smell the garlic they crushed for the salad
dressing
floating from the kitchen. Their voices came ghosting into the lounge, too.

Ben said, ‘I haven’t see her like this before.’

Caitlin replied, ‘It’s that supermarket job. It’s got too big for her.’

‘She hasn’t been sleeping well either.’

‘I’m worried, Ben. It’s like she’s not really here.’

‘If she’s not any better in the morning I’ll get her to see a doctor.’

‘You mean you’ll try. She’s a walking-talking definition of
stubborn
.’

Although Jackie heard them it seemed it didn’t relate to her and really they were talking about a stranger. Meanwhile, her past had begun to exert its own gravitational pull, tugging her from the four-bedroom house with its serene pool lying in the grove of trees. In a strange, dislocated way she seemed to look down through the eyes of a hovering bird of prey. She saw the
distinctive
tiles that were the colour of ripe cherries and the pink stucco walls. Good God, she was fiercely proud of that house. Once in a red heat of fury she’d chased a would-be housebreaker in her bathrobe. The police officer said it was a good thing she hadn’t caught the intruder. She’d interpreted that as the thief might have harmed her, but Caitlin and Ben agreed it would have been the thief who was the one in real danger. They said it jokingly … well, half jokingly over breakfast the next day. The police did arrest one John T. Dardis. What’s more, Jackie identified Dardis (age thirty-eight, former mailman, former school caretaker, former security guard) as the man climbing in through the kitchen window, and he did have fifteen previous convictions, but the police maintained that ‘evidence was insufficient’. And released him. But what happened later caused Ben to comment that perhaps there is Divine retribution after all. Dardis wound up in six meaty hunks on a railway line. Cause of death: multiple injuries as a result of being diced by a locomotive seemed obvious – only the rail authorities insisted that no trains had run the night he died.

The past with all the dark gravity of a dead star drew her back through time. Her parents had moved here to the city when she was fourteen. It wasn’t a smooth transition. She seemed unable to find her feet at the new school. The other girls gave her heat on her backwoods accent, her clothes, her clunky black shoes and, most damning of all, the spectacles she wore. Maybe kids are more forgiving now. But if you wore spectacles as a young teen then, my God, you might as well have had a dirty great fish head growing out of your forehead. Her schoolwork suffered; to avoid taunts she skipped lessons; got grounded; her parents lost patience with her. Life sucked. Three years later she was out of school in the great big shining world with no qualifications.

And with a coincidence she should have relished, she found herself working in the same supermarket where Vorliss Security Systems now installed a state-of-the-art CCTV system as part of a major store refit. Then, plain old Jackie Burton worked in a refrigerated room packing raw meat with chicken grit crunching beneath her feet and that cloying smell of carcass rotting in her nostrils. She might have wrapped raw animal flesh in Clingfilm until her dying day if she hadn’t married TV repairman Dave Vorliss. To pay for summer vacations he moonlighted, setting up simple CCTV systems for homeowners so they could see who the hell it was ringing their doorbell late at night simply by hitting a button on their TV remote. Then came one of those life-changing moments. Jackie happened to hear that a local market gardener was going down the tube because so many people were helping themselves to his produce. Jackie offered to install a CCTV system out in his fields on the understanding he only paid a fee when his profits returned. Rather than the three obsolete video cameras lashed to trees, maybe the signs:
WARNING
– CCTV PROTECTED: WE
ALWAYS
PROSECUTE. 38 CONVICTIONS THIS YEAR were the most potent deterrent (along with the
fictitious
claim of thirty-eight convictions). People stopped eating the man’s strawberries for free, Jackie and Dave got paid and Vorliss Security was born.

As if Fate must balance good and bad luck in your own personal ledger, so bad fortune followed. Dave drowned in a water-skiing accident eighteen months later. Water-skiing? Hell, if the security business hadn’t earned so much cash he’d never have indulged in such a bourgeois pastime in the first place. Ying balanced yang; summer followed winter, both by season and in her heart, because then came wonderful luck. Jackie found she was pregnant by Dave.

Eight months after she’d buried him Caitlin was born. Jackie didn’t believe she could love another human being more. Above hands that bunched into marshmallow fists was a face that became a lens that drew the whole world back into beautiful focus again. And yet fate wouldn’t allow everything to be perfect. When she tried to breast-feed Caitlin there was no milk flow. She wasn’t dry; far from it, but for some reason she was expressing blood. Doctors ‘uhmed’ then concluded it was ‘just one of those things’. Maybe it was. Anyway, Caitlin prospered on dried baby milk. She was perfectly healthy. Yet when Caitlin had her yearly eye tests Jackie would be physically sick with anxiety.
Don’t let her have to wear glasses; please God, make her eyes perfect.
Jackie prayed her own daughter wouldn’t have to endure the ordeal of teens spent in glasses. She needn’t have worried. Her daughter’s eyesight was perfect; as was her figure. She swept effortlessly from healthy childhood into being a beautiful blonde teenager who drove boys nuts.

With new responsibility came a new determination. Jackie didn’t sell the business; instead she won more ambitious contracts. Within a few years she fell in love with one of her employees, Ben Morris, a slightly built electronics engineer who had the knack of marrying closed circuit cameras to elaborate computer systems. His digital imaging meant that when you got the ‘do you recognize this man?’ on ‘most wanted’ programmes you weren’t presented with a figure made entirely out of smoke rings that his own mother wouldn’t recognize. Criminals got caught.

Of course, such a relationship was tricky; the firm’s dozen employees now regarded Ben with a degree of suspicion. In the world of ‘Us And Them’ he’d definitely managed to slip away to the ‘Them’ camp. But he was popular enough to make it all work. Better still, Caitlin took to her new stepdad.

Jackie woke to the sound of shouting. She found she was still on the sofa. The cocktail with its ice melted and now fizz-less tonic sat on the table beside her. The faraway shouting rose in pitch.

She’d awoken with that ‘monkeys in my mouth taste’, as her mother put it when sleeping out of synch in daytime. Even so, it wasn’t far off midnight. Rubbing her neck she went to the window to look out into the night. Lights blazed through the orange grove. Someone was taking a midnight swim. If it was those damn kids from down the street again … She swung open the window. Instantly, hot summer air rolled back the cool
atmosphere
of the room. The heat filled her lungs like hot soup, making it hard to breathe.

Two figures splashed wildly. With the window open their shouts sounded loud and excited. Jackie angled her head to find a clear view through the trees. Now she could see the block of turquoise radiance that was the pool. Caitlin and Ben swam races with one another; they were laughing like crazy; spray cascaded in pearly drops.