Hotel Midnight by Simon Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

… gone. The doorway collapsed into ash. Those that hadn’t made it through the doorway stared vacantly at the pile of burning embers. Then they began working in an unhurried way on a second doorway. Only it was far too late now. Bone burnt to cinder manoeuvered coffins that were little more than shells of ash. Futile. Within moments, the gas jets had devoured them; one by one the corpses that had been left behind sank to the floor where they stopped moving, to lay in this bath of roaring fire. In the morning they would be shoveled into urns. Nothing more than cold dust.
    Danny staggered, panting, to the rest room; there he sat on the floor, his back to the fridge. It had only lasted a second, but he had glimpsed something beyond that doorway built by the incandescent dead. He’d seen cool green meadows; a stream lined with willows; in the distance had reared a mountain of grey rock. Only this mountain had a human face. He’d seen the dead leave the inferno. They had walked into paradise … because he was certain it must be paradise. And he’d witnessed the burnt cadavers instantly become young again. The expressions on their faces stayed nailed inside his head. Happy. Happier than he’d ever seen anyone before. He closed his eyes.
    Before his brain shut down, the word HAPPY circled around the inside of his head like a new moon trapped by the gravity of a cold and lonely planet.
     
    The next night Danny stood alone in the loading bay. Softly he sang, ‘Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling …’ He sang as he waited for it to happen again. He knew that it would. Inside, something new orbited the centre of his mind. Revelation. He knew without the tiniest, most insignificant scrap of doubt that he witnessed a miracle take place every night. Should I tell anyone?
    Will I hell!
    Share your cake at school, Danny, his teachers would tell him. Share your cake with your friends. That’s the polite way to behave. He’d been left with bleeding crumbs. Danny had learnt the tough way that sharing really meant allowing others to take your possessions . So, share this? No! No way! This is all mine!
    Danny had lost his career in engineering; he’d lost his health; he’d lost his self-esteem. Now he’d found the burning path to happiness there was no way on God’s Earth he’d lose that!
    So. Eye to the spy-hole. He watched that day’s crop of corpses work in their life-giving atmosphere of flame. He rehearsed mentally what he’d do. As soon as the doorway was complete, and they had begun their exodus to paradise, then he would follow them there.
    That exodus began. Danny spun the gas valves shut, killing the flames. The heat would still be enormous, but he’d be in through the oven doors, across the floor, then into the doorway in less than three seconds.
    Danny gripped the brass valve wheel. Quickly he spun it shut. Then he swung open the oven doors.
    Disaster!
    The hot air scalded his face; he gasped; his eyes watered; roast meat smells filled his nose; post-mortem grunts filled his ears. Without the flames the corpses simply collapsed to the floor. Danny stepped over them as they lay vomiting boiling blood.
    Fierce blue flames jetted like Bunsen burner jets from mouths and anuses as expanding gasses sputtered outwards.
    The doorway of still burning coffins was closed. All that lay beyond was the asbestos block wall. Choking, skin scorching, Danny stumbled back out of the oven into the loading bay, where he limped back to the rest room to dissolve more Solpadol into a mug before gulping it down.
    Yes, it’s a setback, he told himself as he glared at his scorched face in the mirror, but he’d find a way through. By heaven, he would. He promised himself that. All it required was effort and commitment, then he would pass through to the other side of that burning doorway to a sublime realm where pain, loneliness and misery could not survive.
     
    Danny was ready the next night. The burning corpses had finished the