As she spoke to the short stout female nurse she became disembodied, experiencing reality from the depths of a muffling fugue. The bright-eyed nurse’s cheerily bobbing voice writhed sluggishly in her ears as the woman acknowledged her request to see Cat, but warned her that although she was breathing independently she might be startled by the sight of Cat being nourished and hydrated by intravenous drip and toileted by her catheterization. She reassured Rachel that Cat was receiving physiotherapy to maintain her joints, muscles and skin.
“The tests of her blood chemistry came back normal, and the EEG scan showed no trauma to the brain; nothing that currently indicates why Cat is in a coma.”
The world moved at half-speed as Rachel processed the information. The nurse pointed down the corridor ahead of them to Cat’s private room. Rachel’s consciousness snapped dizzyingly back to reality at the sight of a tall man staring into her room through its glass wall. Most of the figure was wrapped in a large dark and unseasonable winter coat, while his head was topped by a broad brimmed black hat that shadowed his features. He stood a dark shape, almost a silhouette in contrast to the sun exposed room beyond the glass.
“In fact Cat has curiously high brain activity for someone in a coma.”
The nurse failed to register her prompting expression of curiosity regarding the watcher and Rachel was forced to stop her and mouth her question to her. “Who is that?”
The nurse leaned closer to Rachel and whispered discretely. “Vicar or priest; says he’s watching over her. Been here every day since she arrived I think. He says he’s praying for her. He must be a good friend of hers to spend all his time here. I’m starting to wonder if he ever leaves!” She widened her eyes theatrically and used up the last of her breath from her talking in a fleeting laugh of exclamation, but it failed to distract Rachel from this man’s discomforting devotion to his vigil.
Rachel studied his back as they approached and considered the nurses words: A good friend? She wondered if she could claim to know Cat anymore than this stranger might. Did he have more right to be with Cat than Rachel did? If he was a priest then it was unlikely. Cat and God? Cat had hardly been the kind to turn to religion, but then it had been over a year since she had seen Cat – she could have changed; God knows she had needed to. Cat had been against religion since Helen had… died. It was still difficult putting Helen in the same sentence with death.
Rachel squinted through the slats of the Venetian blind, trying to glimpse Cat beyond the glass wall. The nurse opened the door for her and Rachel thanked her. As she crossed the threshold she stole a sideways glance at the man who kept vigil. She started at finding his attention had shifted onto her with eyes glaring hard and penetrating from a jaundiced bone-tight face. With her subtle glance exposed Rachel tried to smile at him, but the gesture withered and died under the repellent stare of his waxy feverish face. She shut the door behind her and deliberately avoided looking back at the glass wall, knowing his eyes were still bearing in on her.
The July sunshine broke through the window and into the plain white room and fell as an ethereal dust hazed spotlight on the bed that dominated the room. The light was blindingly scintillant along the large chrome cot-sides and the sunlight’s brightness overexposed the colour of the wires that led into the bed from the equipment mounted on a trolley. Rachel registered the sound of the heart monitor with its reassuringly steady rhythm as she followed the cables toward Cat, but she found she couldn’t complete the journey and her eyes ran a coward’s retreat to the bedside cabinet. It was clear of well-wishing cards and the vase was empty of water or flowers. There was no sanctuary at the cabinet; it only served as a reminder that without Rachel Cat only had the concern of the strange man outside her room.
Rachel allowed her eyes to fall upon the small frame within the covers. Cat looked slight against the large bed, almost obscured by the sheets neatly pulled up to her shoulders. The shock of auburn hair fanned out on her pillow like a fall of autumn leaves swept around a tree. Her alabaster arms were laid by her side on top of the sheets, one was fed with the intravenous drip while a finger on the other hand was clipped to the heart monitor. Rachel blanked out the instruments and apparatus and focussed on the fresh smooth skin of her face that was blank of expression like virgin snow. She was beautiful. Rachel gripped Cat’s bag and fought from crying. She knew that had Cat been conscious Rachel would not be standing there but would have been retreating from a torrent of abuse. Despite Cat being comatose there somehow seemed to be a disturbed atmosphere of enmity between them that left Rachel believing that even now her presence offended Cat and was unwelcome.
With Cat before her the wounds she had inflicted on Rachel’s heart were meticulously remembered as a fresh experience. The regrets poured out of her with an arterial energy: If only things had been different, to have only been there when Cat needed her, to have been able to fulfil the promise to Helen, to care for Cat as only Helen had done.
“Cat,” she announced, conscious that there would be no reply. “I know you don’t want me around. But I heard you were here and I was scared for you. I brought you some things.”
Announcing her presence made a hole in the silence which began to yawn uncomfortably without a reply. Rachel stepped to the bed and set the cup of hot coffee down on the bedside cabinet, imagining Cat’s rage and abuse flailing and thrashing in the depths, trying to free herself from the coma’s overpowering gravity to respond. She hesitantly placed the bag on the bed wondering if her presence would be the shock that would wake a sleeper. She unzipped the bag and started to empty it and decided to fill the gaping silence with a commentary of the items she had brought.
As her fingers found the plush body of the next item in the bag she bit her lip against the emotion that strummed it into a quiver. She brushed the battered cuddly toy against Cat’s hand. “Remember Terrence Ted?” She disguised the fluctuation of her voice with a throaty shallow laugh. “You kept him all this time. I saw him on your bed at the flat. He must be nearly twenty years old!” Rachel braced herself against the determination of her emotion by scrunching her grip on the bear’s body. “I bought him for you from the gift shop in this very hospital. When Helen… When your mum – when she went into labour with you.” The weight of misery for Helen and Cat crushed her resolve. “Why did you push me away? All I ever wanted was to be there for you. Your mother wanted to know someone was looking out for you. It’s what she wanted.”
A deep personal need for atonement sobered her from her indulgent grief. Ignoring the tears cooling on her cheeks she drew a chair to the side of the bed. “Well. I guess I had better make the most of you not fighting me.” She grinned falsely with a determined old-school hockey sticks stoicism bolstering her words. “I’m here for you until you wake. So that gives you incentive to open your eyes and tell me to bugger off.” Putting any thought of rejection aside she gripped Cat’s hand firmly in hers. “So don’t be stubborn. Wake up!”
Cat declined the order like an obstinate top hat failing to produce a rabbit after an abracadabra. The exclamation of silence gave way to the calm of the background noise of the ward and brought with it a heightened awareness of the watcher on the other side of the glass wall. She refrained from looking in his direction but the thought of him and his constant glare wore down the barricade she had erected against his presence. Something about him ate at her instincts; the way he looked at her… There was a familiarity in his stare: A menace she felt acquainted with.
Rachel sought her coffee to distract her senses only to have her fingers gnashed at by bitter coldness. Her hand recoiled and the radiance of the cold burn subsided as quickly as it had ignited, studying her fingers she found there were slithers of delicate ice dissolving and sliding from her finger tips. She wiped the water on her sleeve before tentatively poking the drink. It was heavier than it had been when she had put it there, inexplicably weighted down.
Rachel peered into the cup and discovered a glistening fractured black crystalline s
urface. Needing confirmation that the drink was indeed unexplainably frozen she poked the cup harder, but with a caution reserved for retrieving something from a venomous snake.
She jumped as Cat’s heart monitor panicked with a pernicious squeal that crammed its jagged sound into her ears. Rachel’s shock jogged her cautious touch into a shove and the cup tipped over, she instinctively righted the cup only to be scaled by a slop of coffee that was hot and fluid again. She turned her attention to the heart monitor machine, its electronic blurt had lasted only a second or two and left a buzzer droning in its place. Cat’s eyes flickered as if she would wake and Rachel sat forward and grasped her hand, despite the eerily strange change to her coffee her focus narrowed to following the sporadic twitches of life that played across her face.
Rachel’s concentration was shattered by a resonating bang and she snapped round to see the wall of windows reverberating from the strike of the man’s palms on the glass. He glared intensely at Cat. Rachel followed his stare and found Cat’s face was motionless, her apparent struggle to break from the murky surface of her coma had been defeated by determined undercurrents dragging her back into the depths of sleep. Rachel sagged back into her chair exhausted from the white-knuckle shocks and waited for the flickering charge of energy in her chest to dissipate.
A swarthy dishevelled porter entered the room with a machine on a trolley, his loose blue tunic and trousers sailed about him as he glided purposefully to the bed and apologised for his intrusion, seemingly having missed the disturbance Cat’s spectator had made. “Don’t worry.” He nodded his head to the heart monitor. “The noise just indicates the equipment is playing up.” Which seemed good enough reason to worry. He casually groomed a lock of his shoulder length hair away from his face before silencing the machine. He unplugged it and disconnected Cat from it with the same casual efficiency he held for the other sockets and connections.
Rachel half-listened to his further explanation, more concerned with what had just happened to Cat and her coffee.
The porter persisted. “She have trouble with electrical gear at home?”
A silence pressed itself insistently against her thoughts and Rachel suddenly realised the porter’s unanswered question. She quickly constructed the half-perceived sentence and politely asked him to elaborate.
“Well, this is the twelfth machine she has had. There’s never anything wrong with them. They work again after a few hours. At first we thought it was the electrics in her room.”
“But?”
“But… This is her third room. Now we just keep swapping the machines over.”
The porter connected Cat up to the replacement machine he had brought in and wheeled the faulty machine out. As she watched him leave Cat’s watcher dominated her field of vision from the frame of the glass wall. Her skin tensed from an icy plunge of realisation as the mask of the man fell away and she recognised his glare of grim purpose that had haunted her with its familiarity. It was the same fierce intensity she had seen in Harry’s face.
Chapter Nineteen
The door to Craig’s flat opened and Kelly was surprised by the gloom.
“Are you budgeting?”
Craig studied her blankly for a few moments before appearing to register her meaning. “Oh… I just woke up. It was light when I nodded off.” He snapped the light on but Craig still looked grey. “You just woke me up actually.”
“Sorry. I had to work late and Rachel hadn’t called so I thought I would pop in on the way up and see if she had called you.”
Craig rubbed his eyes slovenly and stepped aside for her to enter and shut it behind her.
“Still sleeping off last night then?” She held her ground, pressed against the wall in the hall waiting for him to take the lead and move into the flat. He didn’t. “Has Rachel called you?”
“No, I haven’t heard from her yet. You worried?”
“A little I guess, although I am not even sure what I should be worried about.”
“You heard from your people, the police, at all?”
“No, but I’m on edge the whole time expecting them to call.”
“How is the arm?” She needlessly pointed to his injury and wished that asking after his injury had been her first question. “By the way…” She added rolling her eyes at her thoughtlessness.
“That’s okay. It’s actually not too bad,” Craig huffed his words on the tail of a yawn. “Might try without the sling tomorrow. Fancy a tea?”
Kelly deliberated over the offer, and realised she had taken a discomforting amount of time to decide. “Yeah, that sounds good.” It might be the first time they spent any time alone together socially but it wasn’t a marriage proposal. “I’ve had a rough day. I need a good cuppa!” The events of the previous night had changed things; they had experienced something disturbing together, an event that she only accepted as fact due to it actually being a shared experience. She needed to be around Craig and Rachel to help her make sense of things. She didn’t dare to call him a friend, but he was no longer a stranger to her, or a predatory threat. They walked through to the kitchen, which still caught a little of the dying light of the day.
Craig stood at the sink filling the kettle. “They gave you a difficult time about last night didn’t they?”
Kelly sagged against the doorframe, slouching within her uniform that had been uncomfortable all day after the lecture she had received from a fraught Bill Harris, her sergeant, over her involvement with the Chambers. She released her hair from its tight knot and let it fall where it wanted to. “I got a dressing down. I got ribbed. But, I think I have been my own worst critic. Been beating myself up all day for getting involved – for what happened.”
“Don’t.”
“Easily said, I have a monopoly on neurosis. Why did I get myself involved?”
Craig shrugged. “Well, I would blame me.”
“I might just do that.” Strangely, it had been because of him. She rubbed her face confounded by how it was most likely her own agenda to get involved with Craig, but she didn’t want to dwell on that. That conflicted dramatically with some very conscious life decisions regarding involvement with men. “So weird… Ugh! Things are so weird!”
Craig flicked the kettle on. “I know – I keep trying to sort it all out in my head. I mean where do you go with a train of thought that involves kids going missing and ghosts? How do you possibly follow that up?”
“I know. I know. I would doubt it too if I hadn’t seen it and been half-terrified myself. Accepting it at face value doesn’t even help, because what do we do now? Get a mad medium like Derek Acorah or an Indian spirit guide…” her words raced to keep up with her outpouring of frustration, “…or the bloody Ghostbusters!”
Craig sat at the table and he motioned for her to join him. “Well we already have the mad medium.”
Kelly laughed, but felt slightly defensive of Rachel. “She is nice though.”
“Yeah, I know. She’s harmless enough. I feel bad about doubting her intentions now.” Craig looked at her searchingly. “You still worrying something has happened to her?”
Kelly fingered the edge of the wooden tabletop. “No. I don’t know. Just after last night, not knowing what happened or how, it makes it hard to know if we or others are safe or not.”
He seemed to recognise her discomfort with her openness and got up to make their drinks. “It’s hard to feel safe. Whatever is going on is happening here, so Rachel is probably okay. Although I guess we don’t even know what we are dealing or whether it is confined to this place, let alone how to deal with it.”
“Are you suggesting we do nothing?” She bit her lip as soon as she heard the bite in her tone.
“Hey, I’m all up for getting to the bottom of this thing, but unless you know what’s going down, there isn’t much we can do.”
Craig met her gaze and held it until his reason overpowered her misdirected frustration. “Sorry… I wasn’t getting at you.” Kelly raked her hair from her face
. “‘Going down?’ ” she quoted him with an arched eyebrow.
“Yeah, that was a bit street wasn’t it?” he conceded as he returned to his seat and slid her drink over to her.
“Maybe for the nineties.” She rested her face in her hands.
“You don’t like feeling out of control do you?”
She wrestled with not wanting to be understood, especially by a man. “No, but then who does?” She admitted reluctantly as she looked up.
“Yeah, but it seems that more frightening to you. The uniform you wear… What you stand for in the force must make you feel a sense of security. Yet now the Police can’t deal with what’s happening.”
“I know… Did you sugar this?” she avoided.
“One and a half just as you like it.”
Talking with Rachel the night before had been the closest she had come to talking about her past, and here she was with her fragile nature exposed again. “I seem to be very transparent lately.”
“I only remembered how many sugars you took…”
Kelly grinned. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know. Well you might be questioning your effectiveness as a police officer in this situation, but if it helps, you do look very good in the uniform.”
Kelly’s face reddened but surprisingly to her his cheesy compliment dissolved her frustration and she was glad of it. “Tea’s lovely. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, your photography job. How did it go?”
“Three hours opposite a gay sauna waiting for a straight married councillor to turn up.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
Craig cocked his head to one side. “Haha. No. That was the problem. He was a no show.”
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