Hotel Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

beat the glass; their mouths framing the word No! No! over and over again. I broke the first match. Tossed it onto the dirt. The second burned soundly. I dropped it onto the fuel soaked material . With a roar, the blankets, along with the whole rear quarter of the car, burst into flame.
    It burned so brightly it looked as if I’d hitched a piece of God’s own sun to the car’s tail. Then came that eerie, timeless drive….
    I didn’t bother with the roads. I drove the car forward along the driveway, down the side of the house, sheering away a drainpipe that cracked the windscreen; then I was bumping over the back lawn. Seconds later the burning car burst through the hedge like a torpedo. Headlamps blazing, engine roaring, tyres buzzing, I powered across that wheat field. The crops parted before the car. Mixed with the sound of the flames I heard the rush of wheat stalks against metal. Behind me I left a trail of fire. The summer dry wheat was alight, too. Smoke rolled into the night sky. Sparks rose to meet the stars. Flames lit those hundred acres as bright as day.
    And there I was: driving a burning car. It must have resembled some dirt-hugging comet, carving a fiery streak across the earth. The creatures that were too slow were crushed beneath the tyres, then, in turn, the burning crops cremated them. Some rose into the air like ravens before me. Others fled back to their subterranean aerie. And I drove on. I didn’t slow the car. I held it straight as a guided missile locked onto its target come what may, do or die.
    At the lip of the crater I opened the door. Then I stepped out into the flying wheat.
     
    Geologists know more than me. They said the burning car had ignited naturally occurring methane gas in the pit. Later, whole families came from miles away to watch the pillar of flame jetting out of the ground as high as an oak tree. With a sense of the Biblical it burned for forty days and forty nights. No amount of water could quench that fire. At long last, however, firefighters succeeded in capping the hole with concrete. The field was black all winter. Then the farmer ploughed and sowed again. It’s green with barley now. The things that escaped the blaze had flapped away like starlings before the onset of winter. It’s my belief they’re not adapted to the light of this world. That they withered to dust with the rising of the sun. Here I sit typing. Moonlight spills onto the carpet. The scar tissue of that one bad burn between thumb and forefinger pulls tight a little as I hit the space bar. That’s a small price to pay.
    Cryer bought the script I wrote last winter. It’s about what lies beneath this eggshell thin crust we call solid ground. The contract (which is as thick as a telephone directory) lies here on the desk beside me. So….
    Do I still work for mail-sort? Am I contented? Am I rich?
    Those questions seem unimportant now.
    Because I’ve just noticed the window is open. The noise I heard earlier is getting louder by the minute. It’s the sound of roosting birds, I guess.
    I can hear their sharp claws upon the roof. 

THE BURNING DOORWAY
     
     
    ‘I told you, I saw them moving.’
    The night-time attendant at the crematorium had almost shouted the words into the phone. This thing had frightened him, his hands were shaking. He wanted to let loose a mouthful at his supervisor who obviously didn’t give a flying fig. The lazy sod was probably sitting at home, a can of beer in his greasy hand, gawping at the television. What did he care that his tuppeny ha’penny assistant was alone in the crematorium with them moving about there … making those noises that made him sick to his stomach?
    ‘I’ve looked in there, Mr Winters, I can see them moving about.’
    He heard his boss over the phone give a sigh. The sigh that says ‘Oh, no, here we go again.’
    ‘Danny,’ his boss began, ‘when you were offered this post, you were told it wouldn’t be very pleasant. To be bloody blunt, our job,