Hotel Midnight by Simon Clark Read Free Book Online

against the intense glare. Then he watched.
    They had left their coffins; moving with speed and agility; even the geriatrics. Now he could see funeral clothes flash into flame to drift off in layers like burning tissue. The flames ate the skin, peeling it off in feathery pieces of ash. But the flames had no effect on their purpose. Danny watched them work.
    They picked up the coffins. Quickly, they stacked them into two pillars side by side with perhaps a metre between them. It reminded Danny of his days at the tractor factory when he’d watch the old skilled engineers at work. These people in the oven, even though they burned like fireworks, spitting jets of flame from mouth and ears worked with the precision of craftsmen, knowing exactly where each component went. When the coffin pillars were complete they laid the lids across from one pillar to the other until they had formed something that resembled an archway.
    Even in that raging inferno they took their time; they made careful adjustments to the archway as if it needed to be perfectly aligned with some invisible geometric line.
    By now, even once fat corpses were thin as soft, fatty tissues boiled into vapour; ribs began to show; fingers naked of skin dropped away. Arms and legs became jerking sticks. Movements became clumsier.
    But the work was nearly complete.
    Danny whispered in wonder: ‘What are they making? For God’s sake, what are they making?’
    His eyes watered so much from staring into the brilliant flames, he was forced to look away, then blink until they were clear. When he looked back, the shock of what he saw forced him to recoil so violently he fell flat on his back.
    Because there, on the other side of the glass, a face looked back at him. The face burned furiously. The picture burned into Danny’s mind was of a beautiful girl with hair blowing around her face; only the hair was aflame. Skin burned away in layer after shrivelling layer. The teeth were chips jutting from bubbling gums. The tongue, a charcoal stick, sliding from side to side over charred lips. The eyes alone seemed untouched; they stared back at him, coolly, with such a shocking intensity he couldn’t breathe. He saw them scrutinizing his face, assessing from his expression why he was there, and what was he thinking? Maybe the burning girl wondered if he would interfere with their work? When she appeared satisfied he would not, she returned to assist her colleagues with their labours.
    After the furious pains in his back had at last eased sufficiently, he pulled himself back to the oven doors where he looked in through the spy-hole. Through the roaring jets of fire, so bright he had to screw his eyes almost shut, he saw what the burning corpses had built. It was a doorway made from coffins and coffin lids. The wood blazed furiously. In that intense heat the construction could last no more than a few minutes.
    Then, as Danny watched, the burning corpses began to slowly file through the doorway. They never came out the other side. One by one, the burning corpses simply vanished.
    ‘Ahh …’ The pains in Danny’s back grew so intense that he had to hobble through to the rest room. He dissolved three Solpadol in a mug then swallowed the fizzing liquid down in one. Then he dragged himself back to the crematorium oven with its spy-hole that possessed such an irresistible pull on his curiosity. With a huge effort of will he forced himself to focus his eyes so he could see through the inferno. The gateway was little more than a white flare; the outline skeletal now that it had been burnt almost to ash. It couldn’t hold together much longer. But still the dead men, women and children walked through.
    Through into what? Into where?
    The painkiller oozed through his body to dampen the back pains. What’s more, they lightened his head. He wasn’t afraid; no, only curious. In the name of God, what lay beyond that incandescent doorway?
    Then … just for a second … he saw.
    Going, going