Hotel Midnight (14 page)

She went to the bedroom where she sprayed herself with scent, checked her long, curling blonde hair, then gave it a jet of
hair-spray
to make sure it stayed in place. ‘There, thirty-six years old and still a beauty.’ She smiled into the mirror meaning the
compliment
in a faintly jocular way. But she did feel good and, if she were honest, she looked good, too; her blonde hair shone, her eyes sparkled, her face glowed from a super-abundance of Whitby fresh air, good food and – don’t cha’ know it? – a whole heap of good loving. This ‘second honeymoon’ as they jokingly called it, made her look years younger. She’d just added a touch of lipstick that was a knowing, lascivious red when she heard the knock on the door. Smiling, she remembered her promise. In a second she slipped off her clothes, then padded barefoot to the door.

Lie naked on the kitchen table and murmur, ‘Supper is served
.’

She smiled even more broadly at the mental image.
Maybe later, girl
… She slipped back the bolt then turned the handle ready to pull open the door to see Ben’s surprised face.

But, what if it’s the old man with those tiny glittery eyes
?

‘Good point,’ she murmured to herself. Slipping the chain back on, she opened the door an inch, making sure her body was well hidden behind it.

A good job, too.

She looked out onto an empty landing; craning her neck, she saw an equally empty staircase, too, with the brown wooden
stair-rail
switch-backing its way into darkness below. For a moment she thought she saw a shadow moving through the gloom. ‘Ben … Ben? Is that you?’ Confused, she tried to see at either side of the door without opening it any further. Cold air slid up from the darkness to make her shiver so much her skin puckered into goose flesh.

No. There’s no one there. But who had knocked on the door?

A knock came again. She started so much her forehead bumped against the doorframe.

‘Ben?’ The darkened stairwell gobbled up her whisper. Hell, it didn’t take a genius of observation to tell there was no one down there. Who’d creep about in the darkness anyway, when there were light switches on every landing?

Again came a sharp tap of knucklebone on wood. Following that came a moment’s absolute silence before the sound of the distant foghorn prowled its way up the stairs like a ghost.

Confused, she shut and locked the door. Maybe it was a bird under the eaves, or maybe air in the pipes … she’d only just pushed the rationalizations through her head when the knock came again – impatient, demanding:
let me in
. She went into the kitchen where the cooker made faint clicking sounds, but those were nothing like the sharp raps on wood she’d heard. Pulling back the curtain, she looked out onto the expanse of rough grass, which provided a parking area for the apartments. Through the mist, she made out fire escapes at the back of the buildings.

‘Idiot,’ she hissed with relief. Ben must have crept up the fire escape for some reason, for some foolish romantic reason, she hoped. The tapping came again; this time she hurried through into the bathroom where the fire-escape door exited onto the escape itself. ‘Idiot, idiot,’ she whispered, amused. Would she find him there with roses as well as the wine?

She shot back the bolts and threw open the door that swung with a startling shriek of seldom used hinges. Running ice fingers over her naked body, came the night air, heavy with sea damp and tang of brine. Immediately, the foghorn cried louder than ever now she was outside.

No Ben. No nobody. Nothing – but mist curling its tendrils round the ironwork of the open-air staircase. Good grief. What the hell’s happening? Who was tapping on the doors then running away? Anyone would think it was….

But, damn it,
it was!
Suddenly, she expected to hear the call of ‘Trick or treat?’ After all, this was the last day of October. Whitby would celebrate Hallowe’en, too. Come to that, Britons had
celebrated
it as a religious festival for thousands of years, long before Christianity had washed up on its shores. But why hadn’t those Whitby kids done the ‘trick or treat’ ritual first? Instead they’d knocked on the door and run away? She had no sweets but she could have paid the little tykes off with some coins.

Arms across her naked breasts, she retreated into the bathroom and partly closed the door with just her head out in the cold night air. ‘Hello?’ she called. Then waited a moment, listening for
children’s
voices, or a cry of ‘Trick or treat.’ All that reached her, however, was the near supernatural lowing of the foghorn. Suddenly irritated she called down, ‘You’ll break your stupid necks running up and down these steps in the dark.’

With no answering shout, not so much as a ‘Shut up, you stupid cow,’ from the kids, whoever they were, she shut the door, then rammed home the bolts.

She’d no sooner done that than a rap sounded on the door to the landing.

‘Damn kids,’ she hissed. Once more she went to the door, but a flash of her naked body in the hallway mirror changed her mind about opening it straight away. She waited for a moment. When the knucklebone sounded again she called out, ‘
Ben? Is that you
?
’

No giggles. No ‘Trick or treat?’ Nothing. Damn well nothing. Blast them. And here I am running around the place in my
birthday
suit, she fumed.

As she went to the bedroom to get dressed she heard the sharp rap on the fire-escape door. This time she ignored it.

Twenty minutes later, the pizza had reached a perfect golden brown; cheese bubbled and the aroma of its spices filled the rooms where Bram Stoker had gazed out the window and dreamed his dark dreams.

She waited. No Ben showed.
Great, just great
. Soon the pizza’s crust began to burn. Annoyed, she yanked it from the oven
catching
her hand on the hot metal interior. Damn … The pizza flipped off the tray to land face down on the carpet.

Well, this was turning out be a perfect evening … Ben’s gone walkabout; the local Whitby kids are tormenting the hell out of me; the carpet’s just gone and got itself a cheese shampoo – what next? For the next minute or so she busied herself scraping the goo from the carpet and dumping the whole lot in the bin. Maybe they should have eaten out as she suggested anyway, but Ben wanted a romantic evening in. Romantic, my foot; he’d either taken a scenic stroll round fog-bound Whitby or had been tempted into one of the pubs for a beer.

Result? One ruined pizza; one set of frazzled nerves; one pissed off lady.

When the next tap on the door came she was ready for them.

‘Stop that!’ she snapped, launching herself through the
doorway
onto the landing. Once more stairs plunged down into darkness; once more there was no one there; once more she’d made an idiot of herself. No. No she hadn’t. Those trick or treaters were going to be told exactly – EXACTLY – what she thought of them. She ran lightly down the carpeted stair, hitting light switches as she went, flooding landing after landing with light. ‘You come back here … what do you think you’re playing at?’

She hit the light switch on the first floor to find an old man standing outside an apartment. The same old man, in fact, that she’d seen looking up at her earlier. She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, half-ready to accuse him of knocking on her door; then she noticed he leaned on a cane.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ he asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

‘It’s those damn kids….’ She took a calming breath. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that some children have been playing rather
annoying
games.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘they would do that.’ Then he gave a little smile that caused his eyes to dwindle into two glassy specks in his face. ‘It’s the time of year I’m afraid.’

‘I know … Hallowe’en. But they don’t trick or treat. They just knock on the door and run like hell.’

He gave a whispery chuckle. ‘A local custom. Whitby has a
variation
of Hallowe’en; it’s called Mischief Night.’

‘Mischief Night.’ She sighed. ‘I figure that gives kids a licence to do exactly that?’

‘Precisely. It’s great fun as a child but tiresome when you’re as old as I am.’

‘What now? They’re going to spend the next five hours knocking on my door and running away before the little darlings go home to bed.’

‘Something like that. Do you have a car?’

‘Yes, why?’ She felt a sinking sensation.

‘Then, I’d check it if I were you. Some children get a bit carried away. They might have let the tyres down or put broken glass under them in the hope you don’t notice in the morning.’

‘The little …’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Thanks for the
warning
.’ She smiled. ‘And thank you for your concern.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. It’s only I heard you calling, and, well … I thought you might be having a bit of trouble.’

‘I’ve managed to ruin supper and my husband’s bugged out – nothing I can’t handle.’

‘Well, if you should need me, I live here. Number one.’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’ She smiled again. ‘And very neighbourly of you.’

‘Not at all … goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight.’

Feeling a little less irritated she climbed the stairs to her
apartment
. Even so, she’d have a choice word or two to say to Ben when he managed to wend his way back from whatever bar he’d wandered into.

Still no joy with the TV; a snowstorm on every channel. She drummed her fingers on the armchair, ignoring the tapping on the fire-escape door to the rear and to the landing door.

‘Go away. I’m from down South. I don’t celebrate Mischief Night.’ She’d called out the words in a half-humorous way, but she itched to get her hands on the little brats. Now an hour had ticked away since Ben had so cheerfully bounded down the stairs promising to be back in minutes.
Damn
.

With the time creeping up to eight it was dark outside. What’s more, the thick mist swamped everything in a lake of white, stained here and there with uncanny blotches of orange, marking where the streetlights lay buried. That’s all she could see. Meanwhile, the foghorn continued its cry. A melancholy sound that rolled out across the ocean to die of loneliness somewhere in the mist.

After a while even the knocking of knucklebones on her door stopped. The brats had either grown tired of tormenting her or they’d turned their attention to other things like—

Oh shit. The car. All it needed was for the yobs to trash the hire-car, then life would become even less rosy than it had been over the last couple of hours. Damn, double damn, triple damn … she pulled a jacket over her sweatshirt and jeans, and once more Ingrid went downstairs.

The instant she left the apartment block fog swallowed her. Ten paces from the apartment she couldn’t even see the building when she looked back into that impenetrable grey wall. Nor could she see the car, even though they’d parked the thing just outside. She followed a pavement now wet and somehow unpleasantly greasy from the mist. Parked cars dripped as if they were stalactites in a cave; they looked as if they’d been there a thousand years.

Soon, however, she found their car. What little light filtered through this murk had turned its red livery into a morbid brown closer to the shade of congealed blood. It only took a moment to see that the car hadn’t been touched; its doors were locked; no one had wedged tacks or glass bottles under the wheels in
celebration
of the no doubt ancient and occult festival of Mischief Night (when everyone else in the free world was lighting candles in pumpkin heads, eating vampire bat fudge and wearing funny spook masks, damn it).

Great, now her thoughts had taken on an acid quality. But she found she was no longer irritated but angry; a hot burning anger at that. Ben had played a dirty trick on her. Why the hell hadn’t he come back from the supermarket yet?
Because some whore gave him the eye on Church Street
… No. That wasn’t Ben’s style.
He’s been mugged; he’s lying unconscious in one of those little streets; the cold killing him by inches
… Oh God, why did she have to think that? Now she couldn’t simply storm back to the apartment then sit drinking vodka, waiting for him to return so she could give him a piece of her mind….

He’s simply missed his way, that’s all, she reassured herself. It’s dark; it’s foggy, so foggy, in fact, you can hardly see five paces in front of you. He’ll have taken a wrong turning somewhere and probably even now he’s standing scratching his head, wondering where the hell the apartment had vanished.

Ingrid zipped up her jacket then determinedly set off for the seafront, the mist snuffing out the sound of her footsteps. In fact, the mist killed all sound apart from the mournful cry of the foghorn. Even the whisper of the sea no longer reached her. And there were no people or cars about even though it couldn’t have been much later than eight. Maybe they were all home protecting their property from Mischief Night kids. She walked as quickly as she could through the mist, seeing nothing but a few slick paving slabs, while every so often dark coffin shapes lying on the
pavement
loomed toward her. At first she’d stopped, thinking who on earth would leave a coffin out here? Perhaps kids had broken into a funeral parlour and … But no; they were only seat benches. Then again, in this near dark was it surprising her imagination played her up something rotten?

She put her head down as if charging the wall of grey in front of her; already salt deposited by the sea fog ran into her mouth with a briny sharpness; it found the burn on the back of her hand, too, causing the blister to sting like fury. God, what a night, she thought. What a damn awful night.

After walking for a few moments, the dark monolithic shapes of old houses closed in on her as she entered the narrow lane that ran down to the supermarket. Whether lights burned through windows she couldn’t tell. This nightmare mist hid everything but the diffuse outline of buildings. She moved faster now, plunging down a long flight of steps between cottages that, she
remembered
, led to the supermarket.