“I need you to entertain yourself. I er… Don’t know how long I will be. If you need anything just call my mobile. Don’t worry if I don’t answer straight away. I might be talking with Claire.”
He stood dumb and allowed his mum to pull him close.
“I love you… Don’t you worry too much, okay honey?” she whispered through hot moist lips at his ear. Jason heard her ask if he was alright and he nodded distantly. Losing Emily was impossible to understand, but now Amy too… With his dad also gone his world was being eaten away, as if parts of it were being systematically erased. He wanted to scream and give into the grief that always seemed to be in the back of his mind and the bottom of his heart. He needed to be strong for his mum, be strong for himself. She kissed him, pulled away, grabbed her bag and headed for the door. He knew his mum needed to be with Claire, but he wanted her too. The door slammed behind her and he listened to her hurried steps fading into the quiet of the corridor.
Silence.
Fears stirred in the dark corners of his mind. Terrors hid behind the furniture and the closed doors of the flat, slinking out from behind thoughts of distraction in music, cartoons or Xbox. The crayon creature from Amy’s picture haunted him. First the safety of his family had gone, and now he no longer felt safe within the walls and comforts of his home.
Rachel’s lift rattled up to the fourteenth floor and the doors slid open onto the communal corridor. Rachel stepped out hesitantly. She swallowed her apprehension that nagged her incessantly. She had wanted to make this visit the first time she had been invited into the high-rise building, a building that seemed like a fortress to the uninvited, but after last night there was no guarantee she would be in the position to gain access to the flats again. The doors squealed shut behind her and the lift rumbled downwards and away, stranding her should she need a hasty retreat.
On this uppermost level the air howled around the corners of the hard concrete tower and whistled through a crack in the far window that framed a square of cool blue sky at the end of the corridor. At the opposite end a window panel rattled with the scrabbling fingers of air that pulled upon any relief on the buildings surface. From that window the morning sun pushed its bright warm yellow light almost half the way up the hall, far brighter than the other floors she had been on. Beneath the sound of the whispering currents of air there was a quiet that lent this floor an atmosphere of being deserted and isolated.
She stood before Cat’s door and didn’t give herself the chance to change her mind. She rapped the knocker. The sound echoed outwards, clattering and resounding off all the other doors, reaching the end of the corridor before being choked and silenced. Rachel became aware of the spy hole that faced her, staring with its beady cyclopean eye, lit from the light within the flat. She waited for the eye to blink as Cat came to the door. It was a bold move for Rachel, but she accepted it was possibly futile as it was unlikely Cat would open the door to her.
She wasn’t purely indulging her painful longing for reconciliation and closure on an issue that haunted her, Rachel knew Cat had talents like her own. To her knowledge she had never used them but if this activity had spread out within the building, then Cat might have experienced something similar to that strange dark entity of energy and raw emotion that Rachel had encountered in Amy and Emily’s bedroom. Rachel shook the memory of that experience from her mind, for it seemed to squirm within her mind as if the remembered event had a life of its own.
The eye in the door had yet to blink, or the door to pull open.
Rachel knocked again, concern dawning on her as she noticed six inches of splintered wood running along the edge of the door where the lock met the doorjamb. Rachel fingered the raw chewed wood that was exposed from the white gloss of the doorframe.
“Can I help you?”
Rachel spun round to the short, older stern looking woman, who leaned from a neighbouring doorway. “Just calling for a friend…” Rachel carefully eyed the who looked decidedly odd in a knee length cardigan and a colourful crocheted hat. She looked dark, scruffy and dishevelled against the crisp clinical creams and whites of the corridor.
“There’s no one there…” The old woman eyed her in return with an arched eyebrow. “You a friend? You know where the girl is, don’t you?” She asked accusingly.
“I was hoping she would be here. She hasn’t moved?”
“You aren’t close then… If you don’t know where she is… Unless no one has contacted you? Doesn’t seem like she had much in the way of friends or family…” The woman openly weighed the level of trust she could place upon Rachel. Her thin puckered lips pursed as she stopped, apparently unfinished in making her judgement.
Rachel decided to step in and tilt the balance in her favour. “I am as close as she has to family. I was checking in on her. We haven’t spoken in a while.” She delivered the bare truth and waited for the woman’s verdict.
The rag-like lady seemed to warm slightly, her sharp expression softening. She emerged from her flat and leaned on the wall. “I hate to tell you. The girl had to go to hospital.”
Rachel suddenly thought of Helen, the promise she had made to her and her heart became a lead weight in her chest.
The older woman seemed to pick up on Rachel’s shock and shifted uncomfortably on her feet, bringing herself out from the wall. “I have heard that she stabilised. She hasn’t woken yet though, that was what I last heard from the hospital.”
Her face flushed with the shame in claiming to be as close as family, yet not knowing what had happened to the girl. The girl she had said that she would care for as if she were her own child. “What happened?”
“I remember; it happened in the morning. I heard all this crashing and bashing around. I came out to see what was going on. I could hear the girl screaming. She wouldn’t answer her door. So I called the police. She must have had some kind of ‘mental episode’. Or drugs…” The small lady paused, but Rachel suspected she was fishing for gossip. “She ruined her flat. She was out cold when they found her. She’s in a private room at the hospital if you want to visit her. Actually, you could do the girl a favour,” the woman resolved as she fished a small bunch of keys from her pocket. “And it would be helping me too. I don’t get out much you see, legs aint what they used to be now, nor my head for the outside either. You could take her some things?” She smiled hopefully, revealing a maw of black and yellow teeth eroded into pins. She held up the key. “Alec, the caretaker, changed the locks for her ‘coz the police busted her door in. He fixed it up well though. She has been in hospital for three weeks now and I’m sure she could do with some fresh things.” Taking Rachel’s smile as acceptance of the job, she rattled a key in the lock. “Shame I haven’t been able to help more. Don’t know her really, kept herself to herself, but she seemed nice enough.”
The woman pushed the door open but it momentarily resisted her, a rush of air hit against them as if the door had been hermetically sealed and the air pressure had changed with its opening. The woman managed to force the door from the grip of the wind that howled louder from within the flat now the door had opened. The cold air bit viciously at them both while the noise of flapping plastic lashed at their ears like the flapping of some dread bird. Rachel followed the old woman’s example of pulling her clothes close to her as she entered. She let Rachel enter first; herding her through the flats claustrophobic hall with its doors off to the bedroom, and the bathroom, and into the lounge.
The lounge walls were a crisp lime green, while the furniture seemed to be an ash colour, but it was hard to gauge what kind of home Cat had made for herself since she had left Rachel’s because the room looked like a tornado had swept through and shredded the room into debris and a scene of carnage.
“Looks like a bomb hit it, doesn’t it…?” the woman clicked disapprovingly. She smelt of pear-drops.
Rachel dared to take a few steps through the mess. There was a crushed sideboard to her left, the sides pulped with its chipboard bared from beneath
the wood grain-laminate in ragged cracks and splits. The contents of the draws; papers, bills and letters were spread about the room like confetti. The wall behind the remains of the furniture was indented, the centre of it caved inwards to reveal the back of the plasterboard wall for the bedroom beyond. The couch that looked as though it had originally been arranged further out into the room, was sagging with it’s back broken and the hard wooden frame pressed against the green fabric, the bulk of the sofa now rammed into what was left of a large bookcase with an impact that had demolished several of the shelves, spilling their burden.
Rachel was puzzled at the extreme extent of the damage. “You’re saying Cat did this?”
The lady shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone else come out. There was no one else in here when they came in.”
Rachel focussed her attention to the sideboard with its back forced through the plasterboard wall. On the wall leading away from her a picture-frame was embedded flush with the plaster, the glass fractured into a splintered web. She noticed other items of debris embedded into the walls as if pressed in by a great expanding force. She looked to the jagged yawning spaces that were once windows, their glass gone leaving sharp sparkling teeth. The holes were taped over with clear plastic that rippled and flapped in the wind. “It’s hard to believe that one person could do…” Rachel surveyed the devastation in incredulous shock, “all this.”
The woman grunted in a disdainful way communicating that she believed anyone capable of anything.
Rachel stepped closer to the middle of the room, it was from this vantage point she observed that the debris radiated out around her in a blast pattern, as if a bomb truly had gone off in the middle of the room, blowing everything outwards. Rachel made a full 360-degree turn in surveying the pattern of the damage.
A psychic blast slammed violently into her mind. Her perspective shifted from the middle of the lounge where she stood to a view from the edge of the room, looking in at the area where she should have been. The room was restored to its original undamaged state.
A noise forced itself into her head like a train whistle exploding in a tunnel, screaming through her mind, its crescendo lashing her senses with hot pain. Green light blazed into the room with albescent intensity at its core that paled her surroundings into obscurity. Her eyes adjusted to the light in her mind’s eye and within that fire she saw the slender figure of Cat in her nightclothes. Cat was snapped from her feet and suspended mid-air at the heart of the light over the very spot where Rachel had stood.
Cat’s face was a contortion of pain and defiance as if the very air about her menaced and tortured her. The fall of her shoulder length red hair was disturbed into wild writhing Medusa strands. Light exploded from Cat’s head in a shockwave that rippled through the air, blasting the contents of the room to the walls. Rachel cowered from the vision of the powerful blast that played within her mind. The anguish faded from Cat’s face and she sank to the floor as if time itself had slowed to a torturously lethargic crawl. Cat sprawled, crumpled and motionless on the floor like a discarded marionette.
“You alright, love?” the lady asked with a distrustful tone and puzzled expression. “You should be careful in here, could do yourself an injury with all this stuff.”
The vision of Cats assault was over and she found herself staring at the beige cord carpet glittering with its sprinkling of broken glass, Cat was gone and Rachel was restored to her physical position in the middle of the room. Rachel tried to reassure the woman with a smile despite the sting of hot tears pressed into her eyes by the wrench of seeing and feeling Cat in so much distress. She dabbed a balled up tissue against her face as she fought to contain her shaken will. “Cold in here…” she excused her watering eyes and nose. Rachel clambered to make sense of what had just happened. The flash of emotion and power had been similar to the experience within Amy and Emily’s room, except this time there had been a defined image of the event that had occurred.
Once again her clairsentience had helped her pick up the trace or the memory that the burst of psychic energy had left within the room at the point she had stepped into. Rachel was well aware that concentrations of electrical conduits, bad rewiring or faulty electrical equipment could create powerful electromagnetic fields that could subliminally affect the senses, inducing nausea and hallucinations, it was thought to be the most common cause of suspected paranormal activity, but mostly it was mild, nothing as overwhelmingly powerful or clear as the potent nightmare she had just experienced. It was quite evident that something had happened to Cat far beyond a ‘mental episode’, but there had been something else beyond her senses of sight and sound… The wordless-screaming-noise seemed to leave a wake echoing within her mind, like an unformed thought lacking clarity or mental voice; primal, raw and aggressive. A residue of a sentient entity, just as there had been at the Chamber’s flat, only this time it had been more intense and powerful. Within this anonymous thing she had sensed in the lounge there had been a caldera of emotions, fear, curiosity, confusion; a madness of jumbled intense feelings that were at once satisfied and harmonized into menace and intent.
Rachel crunched back across the debris but before she could agree to the old lady’s request of taking Cat some belongings she noticed a glint of silver behind the open door. She crouched and found three photo frames protruding from the debris. She pulled at the buckled silver frame that had drawn her attention, careful of the blades of glass that flowered outwards, and studied it, recognising the picture instantly.
Helen.
Rachel had the same photograph on her mantle-piece at home.
She liberated the second frame. It held a photo of Helen holding a six-year-old-Cat’s hand on a pebbly beach, the breaking surf frozen in time. Rachel remembered the daytrip to Brighton. The edge of the photograph ran close to Helen’s shoulder disturbing the symmetry and balance within the framing of the image. Helen had once been the centre of the picture, flanked by Cat and Rachel. Rachel fingered the edge of the photograph where it had been trimmed. Rachel had been holding Helen’s other hand before a blade had sheared through the photograph. The reminder of the hate and bitterness that Cat held for her cut her deeply.
The last frame was in two pieces. With a trembling hand Rachel slipped the photograph from the pile of broken glass and shook the glittering slithers from it. It was a more recent one of Cat taken within the flat when it had been in order. It confirmed the accuracy of her vision. More significant was that in the photograph Cat was holding a kitten nuzzled to her face.
A small black and white cat.
The old lady interrupted her as she saw the picture. “Oh, Lord! I clean forgot about that. She had a cat. It ran out when the police bashed in. I took it in and cared for it. I like cats, but haven’t had one for a while. The poor thing must have had the scare of its life in here when all this happened. The thing ran off when I opened my door one day. I tried to chase it. But – well. Needless to say, it moved faster than I could. I hope the little thing didn’t come to any harm. Cat’s are quite independent though, I’m sure it has found itself a few homes by now.”
The black and white kitten was the likeness of the cat that had come to Rachel’s flat all those days ago. Grim realisation planted its chilled spindly fingers on her skin. Three weeks ago Catherine had been assaulted by some ‘thing’ in her flat. Three weeks ago a cat found it’s way to her… An omen?
Catherine’s cat?
Cat? – Catherine?
Chapter Seventeen
Craig swiped his camera up and shoved it in his padded shoulder bag and jogged to the door. Vicki waited, dressed in her familiar baggy jumper and tight fitting jeans.
“You took your time? Haven’t gone and got yourself a babe have you?” Vicki teased.
“If I did I would break it to you over coffee; not just tell you on my doorstep like this.” He down turned the corners of his mouth and gave her puppy dog eyes. “Wouldn’t want to shatter your hopes and wishes.”
“Sod, the
coffee, we could celebrate with a pint of Snakebite that my stalker is finally getting a life.” The mention of snakebite recalled unpleasant memories of a night with Vicki drinking him into a stupor.
“What’s the job then gov?”
“A source in the council has told me a councillor makes a weekly trip to a gay sauna on Chalk Farm Road.”
“Really? Is being gay still news?”
“I think it would be news to his wife and three kids.”
“The front page of the local rag isn’t the best way to find that out.”
“He should have thought about that before he started getting his jollies in the steam rooms.”
News is news and that was it for Vicki. She was right, he didn’t have what it took to be a journalist. “So we watch and take pictures of him going in.”
“That’s the plan so far.”
“Not sure I like the ‘so far’ part of that but I’m in. I need the money.” This really was cheapening his talent. He was glad there was a distance between them and the west end, all he needed was Vicki pimping him as paparazzi. If his career led to him making a living from snapping some heartthrobs sweat patches or some pop-star going commando he might just end it all now.
“So, come on then, you gonna tell me how you really busted your arm or are you sticking with the ‘I fell running up the stairs’ story, when we all know you wouldn’t dream of taking stairs when there’s a perfectly good, if not scary, lift?”
Craig flushed at having to lie to her as they headed to the lift. “Well if you want the truth. I was looking through those photo’s of you and I couldn’t control myself – in all the frenzy my arm popped its socket.”
“You sick bunny.” She closed her eyes tightly shut and shook her curly mop of honey blonde hair as if her mind was a snow-globe. “I’m just erasing that image from my head.” Vicki allowed for a pause that was pregnant with a change of tact. “So you weren’t disturbed in the night? What with the police running around here in their size twelve’s…”
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