MY NAME IS NOT MIDNIGHT

MY NAME IS NOT MIDNIGHT EXCERPT

EXCERPT

It was a horrible, dispiriting place, smelling of old despair, endless neglect. Vomit-yellow, the walls bubbled and peeled, while one naked lightbulb swung from the ceiling on a frayed and hissing cord. Bugs scuttled up and down shredded wallpaper, fell off and lay kicking, doomed to death. Wind rattled doors left locked for two decades, the sound like the rattle of skeleton bones.

At the corridor's end, near the back porch that had once been the servants' entrance, stood the dreaded cellar door, a slab of oak slashed and hacked as if by a knife. A rusty padlock hung from it.

Agrippa thrust the key into the padlock and flung the door open with dramatic gusto. Foul smells flooded the already rank hall—mould, damp, decay....and nameless odours.

"Still the brave man?" the Sestra taunted, her crimson brows tickling the band of her wimple. "Back out if you want, Blaize...I'll send the pathetic girl instead." She cast a contemptuous glare at Esme, who clung to Anthia's hand weeping silently.

"No, I'm OK, just let me get on with it," Blaize spat, and he stepped onto the mildewed stairs that descended to the depths below.

Agrippa snorted and slammed the cellar door behind him, locking it securely. "Little fool," she sneered, and then, turning to the children huddled behind her: "There's nothing more to gawk at. Get on with your homework, I will inspect it later. Esmerelda, go to your place of punishment. Think about what you have done, what you've made Blaize do, and learn from it. You wicked child."

"Yes, Sestra," said Esme weakly. Turning from her sneering guardian, she entered the servants' porch and squatted on the cot set up for penitent children. Despite the squalor of her surroundings, she was glad to be away from the others. The orphans would probably hate her now because of Blaize. He was the one they looked up to, and now he was in the cellar...

Lying down on the cot, she yanked a ragged blanket up to her ears. Outside the gale had become a storm; sleet lashed the Manor windows, rattling, tapping. Water flooded under the exterior porch door, floating flakes of plaster and the upturned corpses of drowned beetles. In the corner, bunch-backed spiders spun nests, while on a peg above the bed a crusty coat left by some long-gone scholar flapped its arms in drafts as if alive.

Esme shut her eyes, refusing to look. The coat seemed to be beckoning for help—or perhaps it sought to draw her in, to smother her in its stinking folds.

Just as the darkness had smothered Blaize as he entered the cellar.

A guilty tear trickled down her cheek, soaking into the yellowed pillow.

Please let him be OK...

But of course he would be ok. Bloody Bones was just a myth. Or so the orphans told themselves, day in, day out. A made-up nursery bogeyman invented to make them behave..

"Monsters don't exist," she murmured, repeating it over and over like a prayer. "Monsters don't exist."

Finally she fell into a restless dream-haunted sleep, in which she imagined she heard screams and crashes from below, mingled with the ghostly howls of the storm.

Screams that couldn't be real.

For monsters didn't exist...did they?