Hotel Midnight Read Online Free PDF

slashed at road and sky with torchlight, revealing trees, fence posts, ditches. The white lines on the road materialized from the dark in ghostly stripes. My breath gusted between my teeth.
    Paula would be here on the bus at any second. I had to be there when….
    I stopped dead in the road. And that was the moment I realized that Paula’s bus had, Heaven forgive me, arrived early.
    In the road lay Paula. I recognized the long, fair hair. Her jeans were torn; her legs were painfully splayed. Her bag lay ten yards from her body, the contents splashed across the road – lipstick, cracked mirror, mobile phone, coins, pens. Her attackers, I saw, were still there. One squatted obscenely on her chest. The rest crouched around her. Their heads ducked down at her beautiful face. Again, that wet lapping. Black membrane wings straightened , shook, then curled back against their bodies. Those things were in ecstasy. They shuddered with pleasure, their vast yellow eyes glazed with rapture.
    What made me do it I don’t know. I switched off the torch. Then I moved. Those things were so focused on my daughter that they didn’t see me. I ran at them, moving silently, staying silent, until the last second: then with a roar that seared my throat I punched the power button on the torch, blasting them point-blank . And I watched as that brilliant light seared their eyes like a Pentecostal flame. With a screech, they spread bat-like wings and lifted into the air. Beating wings snapped into my face, the blows stinging. Savagely, I lashed at the creatures with the torch. In that mad flurry of wings, talons and flashing light I saw the bloodied incisors, those lips like black rubber, their evil yellow eyes that were ablaze with a terrible craving.
    Seconds later they were gone. Their body shapes revealed only by whole clumps of missing stars, as if their silhouettes possessed a dark power to excise pieces of Heaven itself. Stunned, I stood there panting. Paula lay on her back at my feet. Her arms were crossed over her face; her leather jacket slit a dozen times as if by a razor. Then as I gazed at her motionless body a clump of her lovely fair hair drifted down from the sky.
    Violating it, a smear of red. My throat moved convulsively. At last, I crouched down to my daughter. As I did so, I saw something that I expected least in the world at that moment. She moved her arm – then I heard her whisper one word: ‘Dad….’
     
    Sometimes the rhythms that govern the pace of our lives speed up or slow. Time flies. Time drags. After carrying Paula back to the house and setting her down on the bed where she was born, the rhythm of time altered for me at that moment.
    Events accelerated; I moved faster; yet time itself, as measured by the mantelpiece clock, seemed to slow to a funeral crawl. I saw everything so sharply. By candlelight, I watched Kathy bandage those cruel slashing cuts on Paula’s forearm. I saw with absolute clarity her brother dab antiseptic with incredible tenderness onto her grazed forehead. I watched how Paula’s glazed eyes stared at the ceiling, and how they cleared as if a mist evaporated between them and my own. And I remembered shining the torch through Jake’s bedroom window out across the field. Whereas the wheat crop had appeared entirely grey in the starlight now the central part was black. A glossy black: shiny as a beetle’s shell. Those membrane-winged things with the yellow eyes were oozing from the pit like crude oil welling from a borehole. As I watched, I saw a thousand yellow eyes fixed hungrily on our home. I knew they would come soon. They’d tasted our blood. They had a liking for it now.
    Again with a super-quick fluidity I was downstairs once more.
    Vividly, I saw the can of lawn mower fuel in my hand. I remember its rainbow colours as I poured a full gallon over the back of the car and onto the blankets I’d tied there. I remember Jake and Kathy at the bedroom window, eyes wide, faces white, as they