The Midnight Hour Read Free Page A

not even realising she had said them aloud.
    A drop of sweat dripped from her forehead onto the back of her hand. Her breathing grew heavy. She could feel more sweat running from her back, down her sides, under her breasts.
    She felt ill.
    “Perhaps the exercise wasn’t a good idea after all!”
    But she knew it wasn’t the exercise. It was a memory. A memory fighting it’s way to the surface through barriers that had been strong and impenetrable for almost 2 years. Since the last time these floorboards were lifted. Since just after the one time she had let people into this room.
    She scratched at the edge of the carpet, managed to get a hold and pulled it back. She heard little popping, tearing noises as the worn material snapped free of the edging strips it had settled back onto all that time ago. Dust rose into the air, into her lungs, making her cough, but she kept pulling until the bare floorboards lay before her and the carpet was folded back under her knees.
    Three strips of board side by side had been broken and placed back at some point. Now they lifted easily as one by one she pulled them up and placed them carefully to one side.
    Her heart was thumping almost as loud as the music as she reached a trembling hand down into the darkness below the floor, muscles tensed for quickly pulling away if anything should move.
    Her fingers found the soft cloth of a bag and, clutching it tightly, she lifted it into the light. A grey cloth bag, heavy with whatever was inside it. She shuffled backwards, allowing the carpet to fall back over the bare floorboards, over the hole she had made.
    The bag made a metallic noise as she placed it on the bed, metal on metal.
    Taking one deep shaky breath she pulled open the bag.
     
    00:50am
     
    Clare stood before the bed, one hand covering her mouth, the other twisting nervously at the bottom of her t-shirt. In a line before her lay the contents of the bag. Three knives. A wide-bladed hunting knife. A serrated edged army knife. A machete. Even after all this time they shone, clean, polished. Without touching she knew they were razor-sharp.
    As she looked at them the memories, painful, horrible memories, came screaming back into her head.
    Death from the plague was not quiet, peaceful like she remembered. But she had not been able to watch her daughter die in the agonies of that terrible illness. Instead she had decided her daughter would die quickly, in her sleep, with her mother by her side. Her daughter had been the first.
    When her husband had shown the first symptoms of the plague it had been a relatively easy decision to show him the same mercy she had shown her daughter. And then the neighbours had been infected, then the families down the road that she knew by sight but not by name.
    It had got easier the more people she released from their agonies. She had realised she had a calling, a gift even. In this time of panic and fear she could bring peace and calm. She knew then that she had to go out into the world and help all she could.
    But things had gone wrong here, in this city, this hotel room. Wrong when she had let those others into her room, into her body. Even though she had released them from their anguish afterwards it had not been the same. She had sinned. She had slipped from her path.
    She had hidden the knives and her mind had conveniently forgotten the rest.
    Until now.
     
    00:58am
     
    The army knife was tucked into the waistband of her trousers. The hunting knife was in her left hand. The machete lay on the bed.
    She turned the key in the door.
    She was ready. She had rediscovered her purpose in life, her reason for living. Her calling .
    She didn’t need to hide in this room anymore.
    She pulled open the door, reached back and grabbed the machete in her right hand, smiling as the thud thud thud of the music grew suddenly louder, filling her body with a sensuous pleasure she had not experienced for so long.
    Clare danced out into the plague-infested world slicing