Black Angel

I'd like to say that I slept like a baby but I didn't. My dreams were tortured by the haunting sound of an infant crying. I searched everywhere that I could in the dream but I couldn't find her. I knew she was a girl. I don't know how I knew it, instincts I guess. One minute her crying was close to me, the next it was miles away, just a whisper of distress on an icy wind which whistled through the derelict structure. It had been a hotel once. It was built to mimic a castle, with towers and turrets, battlements and arrow slits. Though its shape was imposing against the seascape, it was painted white, like a vision from a fairytale. Once a place full of laughter, wedding feasts and christening parties but now in my dreams, it was a burnt out shell perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking a stormy sea. The white fascia had turned to mottled green, blistered and peeling. Smoke-burns snaked from the empty windows like eyelashes above blackened sockets. They seemed to offer a view into an infinite black abyss. Nettles and thorny weeds pushed their way up through the crumbling floors. When I looked towards the ceilings, I could see an angry sky through the gaping holes in the roof. The slates and rafters had collapsed, leaving the timbers hanging dangerously. Lightning forked earthwards, momentarily illuminating the heavy black clouds like a massive camera flash. The ear-splitting thunder threatened to shake the decaying building to the ground. Echoes of the past reverberated from the crumbling walls, ghostly laughter mixed with sounds from the past; tears of joy and tears of sadness. As I walked through the remnants of the bar, I glimpsed the ghostly hotel owner sitting alone on a stool crying into his whisky. His head lolled onto his right shoulder, his broken neck no longer capable of supporting its weight. His eyes bulged almost ready to pop and his tongue hung from the corner of his mouth like a fat black slug. He didn't seem to notice that the wooden bar was nothing but a charcoaled frame, the optics long gone, the staff moved on to different jobs years ago. Next to him was the rope with which he eventually hung himself to escape the pain of losing his philandering wife and the insurmountable debts that she had left behind. Although it was a dream, I shouted at him none the less. I needed help to find the girl. No matter how loud I shouted, my pleas for help went unheard. I felt the desperation of the years gone by, dragging me down like a weight around my waist, slowing me down as I ran in search of the source of the tortured cries of the infant. I knew the child was a stranger to me and yet something told me that there was a connection somewhere. I had to find her. Every door was locked and every window barred. When a corridor opened in front of me, I ran as fast as the weight would allow me but I never made any progress. It was like running on a giant treadmill through mud. The desperate sobbing was ripping my heart out. I had to find her. My nightmare was interspersed with gravelly laughter from behind me. It was evil laughter whispering in my ear, a ghostly echo like an itch that you can't scratch. I knew it was Jennifer Booth who plagued my dreams but every time I turned around, she was gone, the laughter replaced by the soul destroying sobbing of a baby in distress and a lingering stench of decomposition. It was the same dream every time I closed my eyes. I couldn't stop the landlord slipping the noose around his neck and I couldn't find the child. My frantic search left me exhausted when I awoke. It seemed that there truly was no rest for the wicked and wicked was what I had become