Free The Memory of Midnight by Pamela Hartshorne

door. She wasn’t in the kist. Thank God she wasn’t shut up. She could breathe. Jerky, shallow breaths, but she could breathe.
    And she could remember.
    A dream. That’s all it had been.
Tess
, she was Tess, not Nell, and she was in York. She remembered now. She was in Richard’s flat, and Oscar was sleeping in the other
room.
    Oscar! The thought of her son jerked Tess upright. Muddled by the lingering fear of waking and not knowing who she was, she almost fell out of the bed and stumbled along the passage, careening
off the walls in her exhaustion.
    Oscar was sound asleep, his arms flung high on the pillow. Tess laid her hand lightly on his body and let the steady rise and fall of his chest calm her. She was properly awake now, but her mind
was jangling still from the vividness of the dream.
    She could remember exactly the eerie light, the dampness clinging to her lashes, the smell of wet rope and river and dried fish. Tom, his thin, homely face alight with a longing to explore the
world. And herself as a girl, restless and brimming with energy. Tess could still feel the roughness of the linen shift against her skin, the weight of the sturdy clogs encasing her feet, the way
they skidded slightly on the slimy cobbles.
    Tess had never dreamt that clearly before.
    In her dream, she had had memories. Of poor, rabbity Joan. Of Ralph’s teeth. Of the terror of being shut up in a box. Was that normal? Tess wrapped her arms around herself and chewed the
inside of her cheek as she stood looking down at Oscar in the darkness. Dreams didn’t work like that, did they? This hadn’t felt like a dream at all. It felt as if she had been there,
lived there. It felt like a memory.
    Which it couldn’t be, of course. Immediately, Tess started to rationalize. She was a historian of sorts, after all. The sixteenth century was her period, and the clothes, the houses in her
dream were familiar to her. It wasn’t surprising she had dreamt of that time, especially given the work she was going to be doing for Richard. Moving into his flat had obviously been a
catalyst. This house would have been standing in the sixteenth century. Perhaps not in the form Nell and Tom would have recognized, but it had been here.
    In fact, it would have been surprising if she
hadn’t
dreamt of Elizabethan York.
    How strange to muddle it up with some garbled knowledge of vampires, though. Tess wondered where all that about poor Joan’s burial had come from. As far as she knew, there had been no
belief in vampires at the time . . . but why was she trying to make sense of a dream anyway? Perhaps a psychologist could make something of it but she wasn’t going to waste any more thought
on it. It was just a dream. It didn’t matter, and she had other things to think about.
    Still, she wouldn’t sleep now. She was churning with a mixture of fear and fascination. She couldn’t get the dream from her mind: the fog hanging low over the river, her horrified
fascination with the dead girl who would be buried with a stake through her heart, and how easily her young mind had jumped to other concerns.
    Tess pulled a hoodie over her vest and shorts and padded restlessly through to the front room without turning on the lights. In the glow from the shop fronts outside, she booted up her main
laptop. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well do some work.
    The clock at the bottom of the screen read 03.14.
The dead of night
, Tess thought and then wished she hadn’t. Something about the word ‘dead’ struck cold between her
shoulder blades.
    The street below was empty. It had stopped raining but the air was still damp and she huddled into her hoodie. She should have put on some tracksuit bottoms as well, but they were in the chest
of drawers in the back bedroom and she didn’t want to go back there.
    Not in the dead of the night.
    ‘Stop it,’ Tess told herself out loud, but her voice came out shakily.
    Pressing her lips together, she opened the document