The Midnight Hour by Neil Davies Read Free Book Online

him to see he noticed that the shadow was still on his left eye.
    It had darkened!
     
    He tried not to blink as he followed the optician’s light with his eyes.
    “Well Mr Hamilton, there’s nothing there I can see.”
    The optician, a small grey-haired lady dressed in a dark suit that seemed more business than medical, took the light away and he finally blinked.
    “Your eyesight is fine, better than average for your age, and I can’t see any evidence of a foreign body. Nothing that would explain the problem you describe.”
    Yet it’s there right now , thought Richard, blurring everything on that side. And I’m sure it’s getting darker!
    He said nothing out loud, afraid it would sound accusatory, as though he were calling the woman incompetent. Afraid, even more, that it would make him sound crazy!
    She seemed to take his silence as doubt in her diagnosis.
    “I’m very sorry Mr Hamilton, but there really is nothing physically there in the eye. Whatever this thing is it’s not something I’m able to treat. Perhaps a doctor.....”
    Richard was stung into speaking. This was getting too close to his own fears to be comfortable.
    “You think it’s all in my mind? You think I’m hallucinating or something?”
    He was aware his voice was perhaps too loud. He hadn’t meant it to be. He felt he was losing control.
    “Mr Hamilton.” The woman spoke calmly, smiling at him, but backing away slightly all the same.
    She thinks I’m crazy!
    “All I can say for certain is that there is nothing physical interfering with your eyesight. It may be that more investigation needs to be done.”
    He saw the face of the receptionist from the outer office peer around the corner of the examining room and then disappear just as quickly.
    Probably getting ready to phone the police in case the crazy person loses it!
    He pushed himself out of the chair and rushed out of the office, not even stopping to pay.
     
    He phoned in sick to the office the next morning, the third morning in a row.
    How could he work? He felt he was going blind in his left eye, the shadow creeping further across each day, darker, more impenetrable.
    He sat on the edge of his bed, forearms on the top of his thighs, head down, sobbing.
    If only Lisa were here. She would know what to do. She would take control.
    Christ he missed her!
    He curled up naked on the unmade bed and closed his eyes, crying himself to sleep.
     
    This time there was no field, no sunlight, no quiet bubbling brook.
    This time there was the darkest of dark alleys and a thick, greasy fog.
    Shadows moved ahead of him, around him, but with a wonderful wave of relief he realised there was no shadow on his eye. To be able to look around without that blackness always there, to feel that he wasn’t, after all, going blind…
    As before he realised he was in a dream, but it felt no less real for that, and despite the darkness, the threat of the dream, he found he did not want it to end. Just to be able to see clearly again, even if it couldn’t last.
    There was one thing missing. One person .
    She was there.
    Lisa! Standing in the alley just ahead of him, vague but unmistakable in the fog.
    She was wearing some kind of long dress and what he could only describe as a ‘bonnet’ on her head. The whole look was decidedly Victorian. The whole dream was Victorian.
    As he drew closer to her, his beautiful Lisa, he lifted his hand to touch her gently on the shoulder, to feel her softness, her warmth, once again.
    There was no hand! Only a black, barely definable shape leaving trails of oily dripping darkness as it moved. It was his. It moved under his control. But only by the furthest leap of the imagination could anyone call it a hand!
    He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out. Instead he vomited thick black bile into the air that burned his throat, blistered his mouth. He looked down at his body. Saw only darkness.
    Lisa began to turn towards him, finally aware of his presence, and