The Midnight Hour Read Free

immune. The hotel had been deserted, somewhere to stay before she moved on again. Then they had arrived, and she had never moved on, rarely moved out of the room.
    From the very beginning it had been midnight. She had no idea what they did before that time. She never saw them if she ventured out onto the streets, into the deserted shops during daylight. But at midnight it began. Every night. Without fail. For over 3 years!
    “Clare!”
    The shout had a sing-song quality to it, like a child goading a playmate in the playground. She felt her stomach turn over at the sound of it, closed her eyes, chewed at her lower lip.
    “Can Clare come out to play?”
    It was a man’s voice. No. More like a child’s, a teenager perhaps. Young certainly.
    She could hear others, not the one calling, laughing. Somewhere there was a congratulatory whoop . A brief smattering of applause.
    It was not the first time they had called to her. She guessed it was a form of bravado, almost a rites of passage thing with them. Most of them were only in their teens after all. What happened to them when they grew older? Where were the older ones, the ones who had been there from the very beginning? Perhaps they stayed quiet, in the background. Baiting was a young person’s game!
    “I’ve got something for you Clare. Open the door and its all yours!”
    More laughter. Several whoops . The music seemed to grow louder.
    She covered her face with her hands. She would not let them goad her into responding. She knew from experience that if she stayed quiet they eventually got bored and moved on to other things, things more interesting than the mad woman in the hotel room.
    Behind her hands the tears began.
     
    00:30am
     
    The floorboards by the far wall were loose. She noted their creaking as she paced the room. They had been loose for as long as she could remember. It wasn’t important, it was just something she noticed.
    They had stopped calling her name a couple of minutes ago. Her name, crude suggestions, eventually angry abuse when she refused to even acknowledge they were there outside her door. Towards the end someone had started hammering at the wood, shouting obscenities. For a while she had been afraid the lock would give way, or the hinges, and that they would come pouring into the room. She had backed away to the shuttered window, frightened, crying, trembling.
    But it had stopped. The door had held. She had sank to her knees in an attitude of prayer, but she had given up praying long ago. There could be no one worth praying to, not when you saw what had happened to the world.
    Carol, her six year old daughter, had been the first. Not just the first in their family but the first in the whole town. It was a notoriety Clare would have gladly done without.
    The slim pale girl had died quietly, apparently painlessly, in the invisible, insidious way the plague had of taking its victims. Clare had been holding her. Matthew, her husband, had stood beside her. There was nothing anyone could do.
    Matthew had himself died just a week later, but he wasn’t the second. By then hundreds had died, perhaps thousands. The town had been decimated quickly, quietly, ruthlessly.
    Within a month, when there was only herself and maybe twenty others still alive, she had walked out. No packing, no planning. Just out of her front door, down the main street and away. Away. That had been all that was important.
    By then bodies just stayed where they fell, in the middle of the street, on their porch, in a shop doorway. There was no one left to clear the corpses away. At least, no one who cared.
    The loose floorboards creaked underfoot again.
    Some hidden part of her mind shouted at her, called to her. The floorboards were important.
    Why?
    She slowly got down on her hands and knees, placing her palms against the worn carpet. She could feel the floor vibrating with the bass of the music outside.
    “There’s something here I should remember.”
    She whispered the words,