Harvest

by Steve Merrifield

  “Let’s just get this done shall we.”

  He limped after her back to the cylinders and they repeated their chore until they got all four in the car and strapped on top. “I don’t think she can take anymore Cap’n.” Craig announced in a bad impression of Scotty from Star Trek. She agreed, but didn’t laugh which left him feeling like a prick. He leaned against the side of the small car and flexed his foot at the ankle and winced as he set it back on the ground.

  “Still hurting?” Kelly’s tone was cold and flat.

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  “Shall we go?” She started to walk around to the driver’s side.

  “What’s up?”

  She stopped in front of the car. “I am worried about Jason.”

  Her tone implied it should have been obvious. When they had woken up that morning they had found that Jason and Cat were gone. It was a worry, but Kelly had been in this frame of mood since last night. “Me too. Cat seemed to get on really well with him last night, so I can’t imagine she would let anything happen to him.”

  “You’re not worried about her?” Kelly threw her hands in the air, her tone of voice incredulous. “I find it weird that Cat causes so much trouble for us and you and Rachel won’t even consider that Jason might be at risk being with Cat. Wherever they are.”

  “Not as much risk as he will be in later.”

  “Oh, you are willing to acknowledge that now?” Her voice was thick with sarcasm.

  “I agreed with your concern.” He kept his tone steady despite the anger that swelled in his chest. He didn’t want to fall out with anyone, especially Kelly and especially on a day like today.

  She folded her arms and cocked her head to one side. “It didn’t feel like it last night.”

  Craig held his hands up, and some of his anger bled into his voice. “A lot happened last night, Kelly. We got attacked by that thing, then there was all that arguing between Cat and Rachel, I was trying to comfort Jason, yeah I didn’t take a lead but I didn’t really know what to say or do during a lot of that but I contributed, I took part.”

  She looked away and down, and leaned her weight onto one leg. “I know I’m sorry.”

  Craig decided that Kelly was hard to get close to. He would have thought their friendship, which although was very new, would have stood up against last night. If anything he thought they would be even closer today. “That’s ok. Everyone needs to blow off a bit of steam. Especially at times like this.”

  “I just don’t trust Cat.” She squeezed her hands into the pockets of her tight jeans. “Jason says he was being stalked by that thing, and now he has gone missing with Cat. What if she is under the things influence like Harry or Malik?”

  Craig nodded. “It’s possible, yeah. But we had to fight pretty hard to get her out of that building last night so I can’t imagine that was all a stunt for us to take Cat in. Plus she’s pretty much been a bitch since we met her so she wasn’t making the best job of getting in with us. I can’t imagine that Jason is all that important to the thing in the basement either. There are plenty of other victims left for it to take. We don’t know why they have both gone missing, but they both took part in figuring out what we are doing today, so I can’t believe they won’t be coming back to do their part.”

  “What if they were both taken?”

  “By the thing? We all agreed it was possible, but if it could take them it would have probably taken all of us. No, I think they just went out. Maybe Jason was scared and Cat took him out to comfort him. I don’t know.”

  “It would have only taken them to leave a note to stop us worrying.” Kelly shook her head disapprovingly. “If they don’t come back?”

  “I think we need Cat, but we go ahead as planned, I guess.”

  “You are right. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  He kicked a chunk of rubble into the thick weeds that sprung up all over the site. “Is that why you have been so short with me since last night?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged, although it bothered him more than a shrug could express. Despite what they had been going through they had had some nice times chatting together. He had been more open and intimate than he had been with anyone for a long time. He wondered if that meant anything to her. Meant as much as it now did to him. “Just save all that defensiveness up for when Cat comes back or we get down in that basement.” He offered her an awkward smile and got one back in return.

  They both climbed into the car. The engine professed and turned over wheezily as Kelly turned the key in the ignition. “It does this now and again. Just got to give it a few minutes and she usually starts up okay.” Kelly let the keys hang and rested her head on her side window.

  A light drizzle of rain spotted the windows and pattered sparsely on the roof of the car as they sat quietly. “Lets hope we don’t have to make a horror-film-exit by car at The Heights.”

  “Don’t start mocking the car again.”

  Craig briefly held his hands up and widened his eyes in mock fright.

  “I bet I know how you are feeling at the moment.” She looked at him blankly. “I will admit I’m scared if you do too.”

  She turned back to the window and stared at a fleck of rain, barely enough to form a running rivulet. “Before this the most I was ever scared was when my marriage broke down with Ian. I was frightened of losing him; absolutely terrified of losing what we had, losing someone’s love, and what life would be like without it. I thought that was it for me. I thought life was over for me. Now, facing this all that feels so stupid!” She slammed her palms against the steering wheel.

  “God, I love angry women.” She smiled back at him, and blushed and he knew he had the old Kelly back again.

  “I wish I could go back and tell myself to lighten up and not see the end of a relationship as the end of the world. Doing what we are going to do today, and the consequences of that: that’s real fear.”

  “It certainly puts things in perspective,” Craig admitted.

  “Anything you wish you could change?”

  “Renting a flat in The Heights.” They both laughed. “I wish I had achieved something. All I have is a rented flat I can barely afford, debts I keep moving around but never reduce, no love life and a half-arsed attempt to go it alone. Not much of a life.”

  “I’m the other way round, after Ian I have just focussed on me. It’s about all I can manage – and just lately I have come to realise I haven’t done a very good job of that.”

  The grey cloud was passing over and returning the blue sky to them, there would be a rainbow somewhere. He remembered a drunken Sunday afternoon at his flat with Vicki when she had spotted a rainbow over the city, and she had dragged him off of the sofa to watch it. He had thought they might kiss that day. She had belched loudly instead sending them both into giggles. “I think my friend Vicki is dead.” Craig found himself saying, feeling instant relief, like getting a splinter out after a good few days digging at it.

  Kelly was quiet for some time. “What makes you say that?”

  Craig explained the photograph and that Vicki hadn’t answered her phone or responded to his texts. “She hasn’t even showed up at the office. No one has seen her since she came to see me yesterday.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s okay. Maybe I’m thinking the worst.” Craig provided his own unsatisfying platitude.

  He flinched at her hand suddenly being on his leg and she took the gesture back. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting it. Put it back.” He knew it was a stupid thing to say, but she did it and the connection felt good. For a few moments they sat together, deliberately not looking at each other and stared out of the windscreen watching the grey cloud scroll away. When there was only blue sky she reached for the keys and the engine came to life as her hand left his leg.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Cat stood in the street and stared up at the three high-rise towers. Other than the boarded up shops at the base of her
building all three towers were physically identical, although through her eyes she could see that her building was different. It was darker, as if in shadow. It was like a twisted twin tower had taken its place. She had noticed the difference when she first returned to her flat; the walls in the corridors, stairwells and even her own home were tainted. No, she corrected herself, she couldn’t see the difference she could sense it. She had thought it was her experience before her coma and the stories that Rachel and the others had related to her that coloured her perception, but it wasn’t.

  Cat knew the difference between imagination and the supernatural. She could just about remember the times when she had been a kid and had talked to people that were not there. Rachel had picked up on it straight away and encouraged her, but she had seen the look on her mum’s face. It scared her. Her mum would never have said how she felt, but Cat knew it had worried her so Cat ignored the dead. It seemed the dead soon get tired of not being listened to because she couldn’t remember seeing or hearing anything after the age of about eight or nine.

  Those experiences were so long ago she almost doubted them. She couldn’t remember feeling any different, just she could see and hear things that others couldn’t or maybe didn’t want to see. It was different now. Since she had been awakened from her coma she was different. Changed somehow. The thing in the tower that had come to her that stormy night, a night that only seemed like yesterday but incredibly was three weeks ago, had left something of itself within her head. It wasn’t physical, she didn’t have any scars on her scalp; it wasn’t in her brain. Whatever it was it was in her mind, the intangible part of herself. She had seen a documentary on parasites on the Discovery Channel, things that invaded the body and influenced the mind using chemicals, this was the psychological version. Now her mind was awakened to another level of consciousness.

  It enabled her to see that the building had cancer in its fabric, her sense was like x-ray and she could see that the walls and the floors were all run through with malignant shadowy veins that crawled with blackness, like bugs in fast flowing slime or spiders scurrying in shadows, radiating out and rushing back in on themselves. She had sensed it converge on Malik at the hospital, then on Harry before he had died, and on her floor during Rachel’s visit last night. She daren’t look at herself, for she knew she would see that same dark energy flowing through her too. The source was below the ground in the basement. Her destination.

  In Parasites Attack or whatever it had been called, the narrator had explained how the parasite influenced the host to do things that put them in danger, making snails go up high where they would be prone to being eaten by birds, just so the parasite could spread. Was she going to get eaten? The thing in her head seemed to swell with her fear and she focussed on her breathing. In and out. Calming and relaxing. The way she had dealt with the panic attacks after mum had died and she had moved out of Rachel’s.

  As her fear subsided a little, the thing in her mind settled too, but it didn’t go. It stayed, ready to pounce. She couldn’t put this off any longer. She crossed the road, passed through the lobby and headed down the stairs to the sepulchral basement.

  Cat looked over the large metal door to the basement. She pushed at it but it refused to move. That strange alien presence brooding in her head clung to her rising anger and fear, riding it; begging to be remembered, urging her to use its power to rip the obstructing door from the wall as she had when she had reduced the fire door to kindling the previous night; but she couldn’t risk wasting her only weapon. She was unsure if any use of it would deplete it and she planned to use her power to destroy the evil within the flats. The power recoiled then strained in her head at the very idea, causing a dull ache behind her eyes. It was as if the power had a separate intelligence that worked against her, urging her to release it, to spend its strength, leaving her defenceless before the ‘thing’ in the basement she planned to face.

  She clenched her eyes and took a deep breath, calming herself and bracing her concentration against the force in her head as if denying the discomfort of a migraine. It squirmed and became still. She opened her eyes and smiled to herself, that’s it. Behave yourself. There was so much she didn’t know and couldn’t hope to understand about the thing in her head, only last night it had chased her anger and struck Kelly down. How much of that action had been her will and how much of it had been the will of the thing in her head? Just how much control did she have over this? No matter, she dismissed. She had to face the evil that had turned her life upside down and forced her into a group she wanted no part of.

  Bitterness at being made to ‘belong’ festered within her, fuelling her resolve. She fought and kept her mind contracted against the raw, squirming presence. She was not going to be able to open the door, but if the group’s guesses were right there was another way into the basement. Cat mounted the stairs with a determined pace and crossed the lobby to the unused staircase marked with a strict sign ruling that the door be kept locked. It opened freely. Cat slipped inside. The landing beyond was dark and cool. Shafts of hazy dust-filled light cut through the air above her from the out of view windows on the landings above. The charcoal gloom forced her to take careful steps and feel her way along the smooth cold handrail until the stairs finished and she had descended as far as she could.

  Hell was quieter and colder than she had imagined.

  The small window in the door before her was a vacant void of black. She peered through. In the barely definable light she could see dust and scraps of litter and what looked like a battered fire extinguisher congealed in slime. Kelly had fought off the thing that had attempted to snatch Cat at the foot of the stairs, when it had retreated and receded into the light the extinguisher Kelly had used for a club had gone with it. Was this proof that the portal of light led somewhere down here? Strangely Cat didn’t need a discarded extinguisher to tell her this was where it was: She knew.

  The door was a heavy fire door but it opened easily. She fumbled for a light switch as the quicksand darkness swamped around her. Her courage retreated from the dark and hid behind the tense concentration of her mind and the force it held back, as if it was a totem of faith that could ward off whatever might be lingering in the dark that surrounded her. Her fingers fumbled, desperate for a switch that would banish the dark, while her mind was poised, ready to relinquish her control of the power in her mind. Doubts soaked into her from the dark. If she held a splinter of the entity, then would part of this power be enough against the whole?

  The lights snapped on and exposed the crisp white hospital room around her.

  The aggressive determination that she had brought to the basement seemed alien now she stood in the brightly lit private ward. She blinked rapidly as she adjusted to the light and received snippets of information from her surroundings; the scuffs on the floor, drooping daffodils in the vase, battered Venetian blinds against the windows, the high back chair upholstered in a dusty-pink leatherette. Each image not only built a picture of the room, but shaped her thoughts and emotions even though she felt like an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle piece that couldn’t be placed. Cat’s eyes acclimated to the glare of her new environment, and although she recognised the room, it was the fear and grief that helped her recognise the moment.

  She allowed herself to look upon the final image that would complete the room. The hospital bed that held her mum. Rachel pulled Cat close to her. The gesture and the feel of Rachel’s clothes, the warmth of her body, even her scent was familiar and welcome. This was a time when she would have readily accepted Rachel and her embrace. The fear-stoked anger and determination that had fuelled her into the basement subsided within the seductive comfort. They stood together for sometime, wordlessly sharing the view of her mother.

  Cat remembered the tiredness of that day, and the memory of it spread from her psyche into her body and bones. The months of waiting had left her emotionally numb and physically broken. She had spent all that time being strong for her mum to make it easier for her, and
now the journey was almost over she could feel her defences against the grief falling. The desperate agonising sorrow and twisted anger frightened her.

  Rachel must have sensed her wilt within the embrace. “Cat, she needs rest. She’s weak. You need to rest too.”

  Rachel had found Cat at college that morning before her first class had even started and told her that the hospital had called and they expected it to be today. Cat had left college with Rachel and they had watched over her in turns. It was now late, the early hours of the next day, but there was nothing they could do but wait. Each barely discernible breath that her mother took, each protracted sigh was the cocking of the gun and the snap of its trigger in the Russian roulette guessing game of which breath would be her last, Cat being desperate for it not to happen on her vigil.

  Although Cat knew it was coming, she was still startled by the weak gravelly rattle that wheezed weakly from her mother. Rachel’s grip on her shoulder tightened.

  “Come on, you need to rest or you will be asleep on your feet.” Rachel’s tone was light but there was a sense of urgency about her.

  Eighteen months ago Cat had allowed herself to be shepherded to the door, she let the adult take over, gave Rachel responsibility of the vigil. She had known what the change of breathing meant and she had been grateful for Rachel sparing her from it. There was a row of seats in the corridor which both Rachel and herself had taken turns in using as a bed. That’s where Cat had retreated to. She had even managed to sleep. She must have slept deeply because when she awoke she had found that her head was on Rachel’s lap and she didn’t remember her joining her on the seats.

  Rachel had stroked her hair then whispered. “She’s gone.”

  Her mother had been alive, then dead and Cat had been spared the pain of what had happened in between. The grief and anger she had hidden from had possessed her so completely and with such strength and suddenness it had frightened her, she remembered hearing a terrible shrieking and finding it was her own hysteria. The hatred for Rachel had been instantaneous but she hadn’t fathomed why until many months later.