Free Hotel Midnight by Simon Clark Page B

one-liner at last. Then shot the dog a grin that seemed impossibly wide. A wolfish grin, my grandfather might have described it (as in ‘That young man possesses a wolfish grin. I don’t trust him.’)
    Dog and man moved faster. Canine and Primate. Monkey and Mutt. Our ancestors had been in partnership for a million years. Of course, this specimen of dog-hood, the Dalmatian, had been bred to produce a coat of luscious spots. I bore my mutant Shillito gene that resulted in my ‘silly toes,’ my largest foot digits possessing no nails. We loped through that strange, night-time woodland. I shone the light ahead. Within moments I’d lost sight of the house behind us. Shortly after that, we must have crossed the line where the garden fence should be that separated civilized lawn from wild meadow. Only of the fence there was no sign.
    Just find the end of the forest, that’s all, I told myself. When you’ve discovered the extent of it go back home. But running through a forest at night is a strangely exhilarating experience. When we didn’t suddenly burst through undergrowth into open pastures I wasn’t disappointed. This thrilled me. It filled me with energy. I wasn’t tiring. I ran like I’d been born to run. I wanted to go faster. Go deeper. Go further. Go find it.
    It?
    That question did provoke other questions. Why did I have a sense that I was searching for something? What was there in this wood for me to find? For an instant I thought these questions about my sudden strange compulsion – a compulsion every bit as strange as the hall clock’s to start striking thirteen – might make me hesitate. But I kept running. My headlong dash became even more reckless as I dodged round tree trunks, jumped over fallen branches, even skirted a pond that held a layer of mist above its glassy, black waters. Woody loped alongside me. He easily matched my pace. Maybe he sensed we hunted, too … although what we hunted for was a complete mystery. And all the time my torchlight blasted against tree trunks. Above me, the breeze stirred the treetops into the music of a ghost sea. It sang of a restless unease. An edginess as if it had glimpsed events in a grim future.
    Then I found it. The forest ended in a band of bushes and saplings that grew sparser as the land ran uphill. Within a minute of leaving the forest I stood on clear ground. Here it was chillier than the confines of the trees. The breeze tugged at my hair.
    I saw I stood on a plain, which led to the mouth of a valley that penetrated a range of purple mountains. They were fearsome ones that rose into ferocious peaks to gnaw at the sky. Stone jaws forever worrying the bone-white cloud.
    My thumb found the torch button. I clicked it off. This bleak daylight hadn’t filtered through the dense canopy of branches in the forest, but here, at least, in the open it was bright enough to see. Woody padded forward onto a mound of earth to survey the approaches to the valley. He glanced back at me, waiting for my verdict. Move forward? Or stay?
    Now I glanced back at the forest. I should return to the house. Only did I know the way back home? I couldn’t even be certain about where I’d exited the forest exactly, never mind picking my way back through those millions of trees.
    ‘You took your time coming.’
    I turned sharply at the sound of a strange bark of a voice. A man appeared from behind a bush. He was as tall as me with short-cropped blond hair. A scar ran from the man’s mouth up across his cheek to the bottom of his eye in a vivid red weal. He wore something like leather cowboy chaps over woollen trousers. Bare chested, he carried a bundle on his back by a broad leather strap that ran across his shoulder, much as a soldier would carry a rifle. His blue eyes blazed at me. One thing I couldn’t fail to notice was the spear that he carried in one hand. It was tipped by a long spike in green metal.
    He spoke again. ‘Surely, you recognize me. No? Maybe not. You will,