The Midnight Hour Read online

  Late Sunday night, after an empty and dispiriting weekend, Emily tossed and turned and kicked the duvet off. It landed on the pile of books she’d started and abandoned that week, even their usual magic leaving her untouched. She rocked on her bed cradling Feesh the crocodile, who didn’t help to fight a growing chill that had nothing to do with the heat being off. Above her on the wall, the serving plate–sized wheel of the Abbits, the moving sculpture of the three black glass hares, spun on and on in their endless chase. They ran nose to tail, their feet on the outside of the circle, their three ears pointing inward as the spokes of the wheel, a clever illusion that made it look like they all had two ears each. They were called the Abbits because she had trouble with her R’s when she was little. Even though her mom had told her they were hares (and she should know because she made them), Emily insisted they were called “abbits.” She’d been difficult even then, apparently. Her poor mom … Her mom had been gone too long, and maybe (probably) it was all her fault for driving her away with her terrible gob. If her mom wasn’t back tomorrow, she would pin her dad in a corner of his shed and make him tell her the truth. She would. She’d said the same thing the night before, too.

  As midnight arrived the first chimes drifted over from Big Ben: one, two, three, four. She whispered the old words her mom had taught her that went along with them:

  “All through this hour,

  Lord be my guide;

  That by thy power,

  No foot shall slide.”

  As the first bong pealed out after the chimes, the squeak and clatter of the letter box rattled up the stairs, along with the rustle-thump of something hitting the mat. She shot straight up and jerked the curtain back. A slim, black-clad figure on a bicycle shot out from the circle of the streetlight’s glare, faster than any bike she’d ever seen. Was it electric or something? She sat there in the dark. Someone had delivered something late at night again, the same as the night her mom left … A second later she was out of bed, hopping over piled-up books and pelting downstairs.

  Emily collided with her dad coming the other way at the bottom. He caught her before she fell. Who knew he could move so fast? He kept his arm around her. On the mat at their feet lay a big brown envelope, made of a thick, waxy paper. Her dad scooped it up. On the top corner of the envelope were two more of the large black stamps. They were embossed with a skull shape and had a livid red postmark stamped over them. Written across the front, in a big sloping scrawl, was their address, and Emily’s name.

  “That’s—” her dad began.

  “Mom’s handwriting,” Emily finished. He took a long, hard look at the envelope and then handed it to her.

  It was heavier than she’d expected, and the paper was stiff. The flap was sealed with a round, red wax blob. Her dad watched her, shifting his weight from foot to foot. She jammed a thumbnail under it and levered it open, snapping the seal in the process. Inside was a folded-over piece of paper, thick as cloth. There was something else in the bottom, but she was desperate to read the letter first. Crawling across the page, her mom’s old-fashioned, drunken-spider handwriting was instantly recognizable.

  The letter was classic Mom. Obscure, slightly bonkers, and with dubious spelling. It read:

  It also had a useful sketch of a hedgehog with an arrow pointing to it, in case of confusion.

  Emily turned the letter over, but there was nothing else.

  Her dad was reading over her shoulder. He was rubbing his face, and his eyes were half closed in thought.

  “I’m a worrier because you’re a reckless eejit,” he muttered under his breath. “I need to get in.”

  A week’s unasked questions bubbled up, a volcano about to erupt.

  “Dad? What’s going on? What’s she talking about?”

  He didn’t answer her, but, stone-faced, reached for the envelope. “Can I have that, please?”

  She’d never seen him look or sound this serious before.

  “Dad? What’s—”

  He took the envelope, dangling forgotten from her other hand, and shook it. There was a jangling sound from inside. He tipped it up over his open hand. As something glinting and metallic slid out, she could have sworn he moved his hand out of the way on purpose. The tangled metal clinked onto the floor.

  “Oops,” he said. “Here, you grab them. They’re for you, anyway.”

  Her fingers recognized them before she did—rough and smooth, cool and curiously warm, clinking together as she lifted them. Her mom’s necklace of old coins, the “bad pennies” as she called them. She’d worn it every day for Emily’s whole life. It was a simple silver chain with thirty or so coins hung from it, all with holes punched in the middle. Emily’s earliest memory was grabbing at the coins as they dangled over her. The coins were all different colors: brassy, golden, and silvered, and covered in the oddest of writings and alphabets, none of them making any sense. Her mom had worn the necklace forever, and now she’d taken it off and sent it back to her. Why?

  Her dad was examining the envelope and letter carefully under the light.

  “I knew something was wrong, but would she listen?” He reached a hand out to touch the handlebars on his bike and gave an exasperated sigh.

  “I need to find out where this was sent from. If I could just get in tonight, but it’s past midnight now and …”

  He trailed off as he noticed her glaring at him.

  “In where? What do you mean? WHERE IS SHE?”

  He sighed, rubbed his chin, then sat down on the stairs and gestured for her to join him. She stayed standing up, rigid with worry.

  “I’m sorry, love. It’s … very difficult to explain, but it’s all to do with your mom’s old life and where she comes from.”

  “Ireland?”

  He hesitated.

  “Yes. Kind of. Pretty much.” He sighed. “Her family is actually over here now, and—”

  “WHAT! I thought she was in Ireland! Why hasn’t she been home?”

  Emily started to leak a bit at the corner of the eyes. She was absolutely not a crier (the other night didn’t count) so it must just have been excess brain liquid or something. Her dad pulled her down onto the stairs and put his arm around her, and that made more brain juice leak out.

  “Look, your mother has a very complicated relationship with her family and where she used to live …”

  “Why hasn’t she phoned?”

  “They have … almost no phone signal there. It’s a very backward part of town.” He blushed as he said it. He was a terrible liar.

  “It’s because of me, isn’t it? Because I’m horrible.” She’d been thinking it for days.

  He turned her around so he was eye to eye with her.

  “It’s not you, Puzzle, I promise, and you are not horrible. Almost never, anyway.” He smiled just a little as he said that, and she nearly smiled back. “It’s just your mom being her usual self. She’s not famed for forward planning, is she?”

  “But what’s she going on about?” The whole letter was just bonkers and she was going to explode soon if she didn’t get some answers.

  “It’s just there’s so much to explain about … everything.” He pinched his brow as he thought. Big conversations were not his specialty. “Look, we’d agreed we’d give you The Talk when you were old enough to understand, but this has all come out of nowhere …”

  She really hoped it wasn’t going to be that talk. Not now, not with her dad. She’d probably die.

  “… and your mother should be here for it. It’s not for me to talk about her family stuff, it just wouldn’t be right.”

  “But—”

  “Please, just listen. I think your mother is currently doing something dange—unwise, something unwise. I need to go and make sure she’s okay.”

  His face was tight and serious again. Was her mom in trouble?

  “Once I go into the Night—my post office, I can speak to somebody who knows all about letters and find out where this one was sent from.”

&nbs
p; “Then what?”

  “Then I find her and bring her home. When she’s back, we’ll sit down and talk about it all properly, I promise. Okay?”

  She sniffed a particularly loud and disgusting sniff, then nodded.

  “Can you go now? I don’t mind being on my own.”

  He grimaced. “I can’t. The doors to the office are locked after midnight. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time. Why don’t I make us a hot chocolate, and you’d better feed the hedgepigs, hogs, whatever they’re called.”

  Emily didn’t have pets. “Animals aren’t things to be owned,” her mom would always say whenever Emily had begged for a puppy. What she had instead was the wide and eccentric circle of things her mom fed in the garden. Birds, foxes, badgers, and her mom’s favorite of all, hedgehogs. Or hedgepigs, as she insisted on calling them. Her mom would buy all types of fancy cat food for them and they would sometimes both sit out at night to watch them feed. Emily was pretty certain her mom talked to them, too, when she wasn’t there. She was a big ’hog fan herself. She related to their prickly, bumbling progress and had total envy for their ability to roll into a spiky ball. How many times a week would that be useful?

  She went out with the stinky cat food to load up the saucers, and there, right on their back step, was a hedgehog, half balled-up and on its side. He was breathing, the little tummy moving, but his tiny pink tongue was sticking out and he looked very under the weather. She picked him up with care and brought him back in. Her mom volunteered at Hedgehog Rescue, so this wasn’t the first time she’d done this. She popped the patient in a high-sided cardboard box, made a hot-water bottle, and got one saucer with water and another with a tiny bit of cat food. The hedgehog still wasn’t doing much, so she melted some honey in warm water and ever-so-slowly dripped a bit from her finger into the side of his mouth, right on the hanging-out tongue. The tongue moved, the nose wrinkled as he sniffed, and small black eyes appeared from under the folds of his face. Encouraged, she gave him a bit more, and he smacked his lips and swallowed it.

  “That’s it, Hog. You drink some of that.”

  He righted himself, and slurped some water from the saucer. He was inching over to sniff the cat food as her dad came in with the hot chocolate.

  “What’s this, then?”

  “This is Hog. He’s poorly. Is it okay if he stays in here?”

  Her dad crouched down to look in the box.

  “Of course. I’d never hear the end of it otherwise.”

  The Hog turned to look at them both and gave a little grunt, then proceeded to curl up by the hot-water bottle and started to snore.

  She took the Hog out into the garden in the morning as he’d been bumbling around okay, but he turned his nose up at the offered freedom and returned to the corner of the box. She’d been secretly glad, and he was now snug in her room and whiffing faintly of cat food and leaf mold.

  By mutual unspoken agreement she hadn’t gone to school but, by the end of the day, she almost wished she had. She spent all of it waiting for it to be time for her dad to go to work. She wanted him to go straight away, but his office didn’t open until super late apparently. She had been very patient about the whole thing.

  “But I thought you said they closed at midnight.”

  “They do, you have to be there just before. It’s a … security thing.”

  “It’s a stupid thing!”

  They’d come close to an argument, the quiet, empty peace of the last week broken by last night’s delivery.

  She spent the rest of the day sitting in her room to avoid accidental fireworks. The gob could not be trusted when she was this wound up. The Abbits chased one another’s tails above her head. It was one of the few bits of her mom’s sculpture she’d ever liked. She sat and watched them spin as she toyed with the coins now hanging around her neck. The “bad pennies” were a strange new presence, and sat heavy on her. The coins were both warm and cold against her skin, and sometimes hotter or colder than she expected.

  Her dad called up. “I’m going!”

  She ran down and held the door for him as he wheeled the big, old bone-shaker of a bike outside. As it passed her, she reached out on impulse and rang the bell. It trilled out, brassy and bold. He smiled.

  “You used to do that all the time when you were little. Drove your mom mad.”

  He gave her his serious look, reserved for lectures on road safety and bicycle maintenance.

  “Can you just stay in the house? And don’t answer the door until I’m back.”

  “Erm, okay.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine, but I worry, that’s all.”

  He kissed her on the cheek, and fuzzled her hair in a way he hadn’t since she was little. She didn’t even tell him off.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He hopped aboard and freewheeled down their street. She stayed in the doorway until he was all the way out of sight, his red bike light disappearing into the darkness. She shut the door and, after a pause, double-locked it before she went to bed.

  Her dad did not come back in the morning. He did not, in fact, come back all that day or that night. She had phoned him again and again, but it didn’t ring out, or go to voice mail, it just made a peculiar beeping noise, then a sticky screech, as if he was abroad or in outer space or something. She hadn’t gone to school again the next day, but waited at home in the hope he’d return. That night she sat up late with the Hog on her lap, despite being pretty sure he had fleas, and scratched his nose and pretended it was going to be all right. Her dad was going to come back, and bring her mom with him. Any minute now. She played one of her mom’s old punk records so the house wouldn’t be too quiet, and fell asleep sitting up and still dressed.

  Now, the day after, she had to admit it: Her dad was missing, too. Something had happened to him the same way something had happened to her mom. The sensible thing to do was phone the police.

  She was halfway to the phone when it dawned on her she wasn’t old enough to be on her own. If she told the police, or anybody, they’d ask her if she had any relatives, and she’d have to say “none she knew anything about,” and then they’d take her away in a van to reform school, or whatever it was they did to semi-orphans. That was if her school didn’t send somebody first. They had already left two messages saying something about unexplained absence and truancy officers. What was she going to do? Someone was going to find out and take her away. But who would wait here in case her mom and dad came back? Who would look after the Hog?

  She slumped onto the little seat beside the phone in the hallway and leaned back into the coats hung above it. As she did, her mom’s perfume of spray paint and varnish wafted out of her old bomber jacket, and her dad’s gardening coat gave out a cloud of greenhouse and bonfire. She leaned farther in and breathed it deep. As she did, the gate clicked outside and she sat up. It must be her dad! She was halfway up to open the door for him when she was gripped by a horrid vision. What if it was the truancy officer? Through the frosted glass of the front door, a blurry figure approached the house. It was tall and thin, with a cap and a bright-red scarf. Whoever it was, it wasn’t her dad. She sank back into the coats and stayed still. The figure rang the bell, then rapped the letter box, too.

  “Hellooo, is the gentleman of the house here? It’s really quite important, so it is.”

  He had a rich, rolling Irish brogue, creamy with charm. He rang the doorbell again and banged the letter box hard. He pressed himself close to the glass, his black shape filling it.

  “I’m on officially business-like and all that. I have to discuss yer family situation with ye.”

  Emily was close to being sick in her lap. He WAS an inspector.

  “Helloo? I’m a very important message. I mean, I have a very important massage, relating to yer daughter and going you-know-where.”

  That was it, they were going to put her in the van. The man leaned h
is head against the glass, and through it the shadows made his face a skull.

  “Why aren’t ye here? I’m definitely not late. I’ll grant there was a certain sense of urgency in the original instruction … but it’s clearly not my fault.”

  What?

  “Helloo? This is very inconvenient for me, y’know? I made certain commitments, regarding the delivery of this massage. Under fierce duress, I might add. She’s a vicious mare, she is. Begging your pardon obviously.”

  His head moved against the frosted glass, the prism splitting his outline into a thousand different shapes.

  “I definitely didn’t go to the pub on the way, no matter what ye might hear.” He paused. “Oh jaysus, he’s already gone in, hasn’t he?”

  What was he talking about? She inched forward on the seat, and his head snapped up.

  “Is someone there? Helloo?”

  He disappeared from view. A grimy-fingered hand lifted up the letter-box flap, and a beady eye was pressed to it. She gasped and jammed herself back into the coats.

  “Would that be the wee lady of the house? Are ye the daughter? Is that it?”

  Emily didn’t dare breathe.

  “Have they both gone and left ye? Ye positively shouldn’t be there on yer own. Absolutely not. It’s a terrible idea.”

  She squeezed herself so still she might never unclench again.

  “Ye should probably come with me. Maybe just open the door and we can have a chat about it all, eh? It’s all fine, I know yer ma and da.”

  Emily was very glad she’d double-locked the door after her dad’s parting words, but it was a thin barrier between her and this odd, odd man.

  “Helloo? Little girl? Oh, this isn’t helping, and I’ve a terrible head from last night, I really do.”

  He sighed.

  “Look, if ye are in there, ye shouldn’t be on your own. It won’t be me next comes to yer door, that’s all I’m saying. It’ll be something worse.”

  The letter box creaked shut and he reappeared at the glass.

  “Nothing? Honestly? Right, well, I’ve done me best, anyone would agree.”