Harvest

by Steve Merrifield

  He fingered the button for the lift, acutely aware of Vicki’s intense gaze boring into him, searching for a reaction. He didn’t give in to it. “Police? Didn’t notice. Had an early night. Slept like a baby.” Without looking he sensed Vicki had raised her brow at his denial, as if the movement had created displacement in the air. She could see what he had seen in the mirror that morning as he fixed his tie and styled his hair, his frame was sagging with the weight of his lethargy, he looked withered and wasted within his clothes, his youthful face was pale and sullen with his eyes puffed and vacant.

  “Why do you look like shit then?” she joked but with a voice edged with concern.

  He allowed a measure of his frustration at her doggedness into his voice. “I dislocated my arm yesterday. What’s your excuse?” He quickly covered his emotions with a grin, but hoped it had been enough to make her back off. Part of his bitterness was the fact that over the last couple of years Vicki had become the closest thing he had to a good friend, but he couldn’t trust her with what had happened last night without it being opportunistically used for story. He relaxed from his defensive posturing, but any thought of finding sanctuary in their usual playful humour was quickly suppressed by his mood and guilt for lashing out at her. “Actually, I had lots of nightmares. Not nice,” he confessed, although ‘nightmares’ didn’t adequately describe the things his unconscious had been subjected to. The things he had seen had been so vivid and disturbingly real they had been more like traumatic memories than dreams.

  “Could this nightmare be a guilt complex? Because of something you’re keeping from a good friend maybe?”

  Craig allowed himself to go with the wave of humour she offered. “Hmmm, let me think? Now, Miss Freud do you think my dream of an old man being drowned in his bath is a guilt thing?” Craig rubbed his chin miming thought.

  Vicki’s face soured briefly as Craig elaborated on his dream and gave a vivid description of the old man in his dream had died. “Ooh… Nasty.” Vicki folded her arms and turned to Craig in a motion of defeat. “Okay, you win! You have foiled my oh-so subtle manipulation. But, seriously what happened last night? I know the Chambers other kid has gone missing; got a friend in the force. Your name popped up, but no details. He didn’t divulge anymore. So give it up”

  Craig panicked at the revelation that his name had come up in connection with what had happened. His guilt caused a rising nausea from being found out and for the culpability of his part in Amy’s disappearance. “I can’t.” He admitted reluctantly. “I have been told not to talk to the press.”

  Vicki scrutinised him, squinting her eyes as if that would focus her deeper into his mind to get to the information she sought. “You are the press,” Vicki scolded with equal humour and frustration.

  “Oh, I am when you want me to be!” He laughed as a distraction from the chord that reverberated jarringly at her statement. “I thought it was stick to what you know best?” He held the camera up as a prop. Craig could see that Vicki felt the sting of his words and instantly understood the mistake of her hypocrisy.

  They stood in tense silence for a while. She flicked him playfully. “Sorry. Just scared of competition I guess,” she skulked forlornly. “Putting my own insecurity aside, you know that if I had any influence at all I would get you onboard somehow.”

  Craig didn’t look at her, but just grunted in acknowledgement. After the overwhelming events of the previous night he was surprised by the selfish resurgence of his mundane resentment towards the stunted, unsatisfying direction his career and life had taken since university. Before university he had thought his passion and talent for photography would be the realisation of his aspirations. In reality he hadn’t achieved the distinction needed to compete with his art-house peers, and his freelance work was hardly satisfying his creativity, merely serving the function of paying his bills. It offered him little money or time to improve his portfolio. He was envious of Vicki having a fulfilling outlet for her creativity, and that increased the power of gravity that her profession had on him, although without the necessary qualifications he could be chasing up a dead end.

  Craig ignored a second flick from Vicki meant to prompt him into his normal self. “Oiy!” she shouted coarsely in his ear. “Don’t blank me out Mr!”

  He squirmed, trying not to react as Vicki danced about him poking the flesh of his sides. He surrendered to laughter and told her to leave him alone, but she didn’t relent. “Right, you cow. You’ve asked for it.” He jumped up and down causing the car to shudder each time he hit the floor, Vicki’s face blanched and she clutched at the handrails, glancing uncomfortably about her.

  “Okay, okay. You win,” she conceded.

  The lift stopped and the doors opened to two female paramedics as Craig landed from a jump. He froze, caught out, with his arms curled towards his sides and his hands knuckled into loose fists. In what must have looked like a monkey impression. He snapped his arms to his side and relaxed against the wall.

  “Oh, very smooth.”

  “I thought so,” he returned to Vicki. “Ladies.” He said to the paramedics, puzzled by their expectant stares until he saw the trolley chair between them. It was smothered with a red blanket and beneath it were the awkward jutting angles of a body.

  Vicki acted first, stepping from the lift to offer them the space they needed, and using Craig’s sling as a reign she guided him after her as if he were a distracted child. Craig dawdled after her onto the second floor, his head craning after the ambulance crew as they took their places in the lift.

  “What happened?” Vicki fished instinctively.

  The two paramedics didn’t look up, but one of them announced without emotion; “Drowned in his bath.”

  One of the medics left the side of the trolley for the lift controls and a bare arm flopped from beneath the cover on the trolley. Its skin was shrivelled with age and pale, clammy like plucked chicken flesh. A drop of water dripped from its withered curled fingers as the doors closed shut and the lift trundled away.

  Down the corridor he saw a female police officer comforting an old woman that he recognised from his dreams. She was the wife of the drowned man. A rush of dread from the disconcerting manifestation of his nightmare was followed quickly by grimy guilt when he saw that the police officer was one of the officers that had arrived at the Chambers when Amy vanished. He looked away and straight into the face of a visibly shaken and accusatory Vicki.

  “Drowned in the bath? Just like your dream. Now, you are scaring me.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rachel put her arm through the small handle of her handbag and tucked the body of it awkwardly under her arm, freeing her hands to carry the small sports bag she had taken from Cat’s and packed with a change of clothes and toiletries. Rachel’s mind was still awash with questions and concern for Cat and the threat that lingered within the Heights. The lift doors parted and Rachel was surprised to see a young boy standing within. She recognised him as Amy’s friend, he eyed her with a questioning concentration as she joined him and smiled consciously at him; did he know Amy – his friend was now gone? Did he know of her involvement? Rachel was no stranger to the grief-fuelled spite of children.

  Rachel nodded a polite greeting to the boy as he said a distracted “hello” to her. She frowned curiously as she noticed that none of the lift buttons were lit. She prodded the ground floor button and turned back to the boy who had no apparent destination. “What floor did you want?”

  “Ground floor.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, wondering why that button hadn’t been selected and he had ridden the lift to the very top of the building instead.

  “What’s a medium?”

  If she wasn’t suspended in a metal box over ten storeys off the ground she would quite happily have had the ground to open up underneath her feet. Although she wanted him to understand, she was not in the mood to explain and justify her abilities, and she felt too vulnerable herself to deal with his questions about the twins and
deal with the boy’s grief. The guilt was instant but she was thankful for him cutting in and saved her from having to answer.

  “Mum said you think you know things that other people don’t, and that you can help find people who are lost. Tell if they are alive?”

  Rachel shifted uncomfortably. She wasn’t going to be able to escape. “I have an ability which lets me see, and sometimes communicate with people that have passed away.”

  He eyed her cautiously as if she offered tempting sweets under some condition he was reluctant to accept. “You mean, like the woman in that old film Poltergeist?”

  Rachel closed her eyes under a frown. She hoped there was nothing about her that resembled the diminutive dwarf-sized medium, Tangina Barrons with her nasal southern American twang. She wished she could send that character into the light. “Yes, but I’m a bit taller and not so dramatic.”

  “Emily and Amy disappeared just like the girl in that film.”

  Rachel had strongly denied any belief in that theory when Claire had suggested it but it was now the case. “Yes, I think they did.” She watched him receive this confirmation, hoping she hadn’t been too honest with him. He took it into some inner consideration.

  “Are Amy or Emily still alive?”

  The question was gently delivered, but from a child it struck her with the force of an axe. “I don’t know,” she lied. She was sure from her experience on the nexus in the twins’ bedroom that Emily was dead, and now she could only assume that Amy had shared the same fate. Despite her attempt to save him from grief he looked to the floor with a grim face. He had a strange knowing look and there was fear in his dark eyes.

  “Claire told my mum they have ghosts, and they took Emily and Amy.”

  “Oh? And what does your mum think?”

  “It’s weird because mum and Claire have been best friends since before I was born, they have known each other since they were at junior school together, but mum doesn’t believe her, she thinks Claire isn’t thinking right, she’s worried about her. I thought that coming from Claire she would believe her.”

  “People have different ideas about things. Different beliefs. Sometimes people just don’t agree with each other. It doesn’t mean they care any less for each other though. People find it difficult to believe in some things until they experience it themselves.”

  “So ghosts are real?”

  There was a hopefulness riding the end of his question. “To me they are, yes.”

  “Don’t you get frightened of them?”

  “No.” She lied. They never used to, her ability and her understanding of the spirit world had led her to believe that danger only existed in the living world, but now she wasn’t sure. Although she didn’t want to admit it to herself.

  He frowned. “and monsters are real too?” His question burned intensely in his eyes.

  She now knew that in the land of the dead that existed alongside the land of the living there were undead monsters to fear and her talent suddenly frightened her for the first time. “Yes.” It felt wrong to admit it to a child and she felt guilty instantly, but she could see from the relief on his face that her answer had somehow relaxed him from some inner turmoil.

  “You were there last night weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Claire told my mum that at first even you weren’t sure whether to believe her. I heard mum tell her friend that she thinks you were only there to keep Claire happy, or you were there to make money out of them.”

  Rachel sensed a deep adult vein through his physical youth from his gentle coercion for her to justify her involvement. “I couldn’t accept payment for my time on this occasion, and I certainly wasn’t humouring her.” He shrugged off her reasons and she suppressed some frustration with him; she wanted him to believe her. “Claire simply needed someone else to experience what she had experienced.”

  “Did you? Experience or see anything?”

  She bit her lip. He was good, getting her hot under the collar by challenging her character and motives, weakening her for a question he must surely know she would be reluctant to answer honestly to him. She had already said more than his mother would be happy with; maybe children needed the comfort of their parents’ institutional disbelief in the irrational. “No. Nothing,” the lie sat uncomfortably between them.

  “If it makes you feel any better I think my mum was wrong. I think you were there to find out what was happening and you wanted to help.”

  “Thank you.”

  To Rachel’s relief the lift landed with a gentle bump and the doors opened onto the lobby of the ground floor. “Well this is our floor.” She said as a prompt to bring on the goodbyes. She wanted out of this awkward conversation, but more than that, since she had woken up that morning in Craig’s flat she had experienced an underlying urgency to get away from the building. Somehow the place seemed different, smaller, and claustrophobic – suffocating; as if the very building was looming in around her, intimidating her into leaving as Harry had attempted when she had first arrived. Being so close to the main door and the safety and freedom beyond, the feeling intensified, hounding her resolve.

  The boy held his hand out and Rachel looked at the adult gesture for the oddity that it was. She took it gently and Jason introduced himself. She gave her name in return and left the lift expecting the boy to follow, but instead he lunged for the button of another floor and flopped back against the wall. His eyes were sad. Before the doors could close fully he called after her: “Please help.”

  The lift whined away leaving her alone in the lobby but for his oppressive words. She was distracted from her misery by an intense sense that she was being watched. Instinctively she knew where to look and found a shadow cast face staring back at her from behind the reinforced glass of a fire escape door marked “NO ENTRY”. Harry watched her intently from the gloom.

  Unnerved by his determined stare Rachel turned away and rifled through her bag in a play of distraction while surreptitiously keeping the door in her periphery vision should it open. She walked quickly to the main door, breaking her wary surveillance to focus on opening it, his unknown intent pressed menacingly against her back.

  Rachel was certain she heard the fire door pull open in her wake. The hairs on the nape of her neck bristled in alarm and she hastily clamped her bags under her arms to free her hands to open the main door. She yanked the door open as Harry’s presence bore down on her. He felt so close she expected the door to be forced from her grip and slammed shut before she could escape. She prematurely dived through the gap that was barely wide enough for her, bashing both elbows painfully in her clumsy desperation to escape. She slammed the door closed against Harry.

  Seized by the euphoric reassurance of public exposure Rachel gulped her hammering heart back into her chest, and with the safety of the heavy door firmly shut between them she dared herself to pause in her escape and study her stalker through the glass, but found the lobby was empty.

  Rachel had been so absorbed with thoughts of Amy, Harry, the boy she had met in the lifts, and all the strange and disturbing encounters she had experienced at the Heights, that she found it hard to recall her bus journey to the Royal Free hospital, but upon entering the hospital her thoughts had concentrated upon seeing Cat again and her worry for her condition. Anxiety at this reunion, even when Cat would be unaware of her, heightened Rachel’s awareness of the world around her and the corridors of the hospital provided a bewildering array of stimulus.

  The vending machine coffee that she held in her hand had a rich pungent wake, some of the patients that passed her were stale and unwashed, and occasionally there was the faint but noxious smell of urine and faeces from clinical waste areas. The bright fluorescent lights pressed down their glare on her tired and sensitive eyes and splashed back at her from distortions and depressions in the glossy linoleum flooring. The clusters of bold coloured signs crowded in on her like insistent railway signals jutting into the corridors and jostling for her attention and d
irection, each new sign threatening to derail her memory of the directions given to her by the reception staff. She leapfrogged from one landmark to the next trying in vain not to hinder visitors, porters, doctors and nurses who travelled with her or intersected her path or came at her from opposite directions in a bewildering demand on her concentration, coordination and awareness. Normally her senses could have been selective in what they processed, but in this place the dread in her head and the remembered grief in her heart left her at the mercy of her environment.

  This drab concrete building, with its high-rise design that was just as brutal and hard in appearance as The Heights, had been the last place Rachel had seen Helen alive.

  It had borne silent dispassionate witness to their last words together and the promise that Rachel had been unable to keep. That time and Rachel’s failure teetered on the brink of memory, but she couldn’t allow it to descend upon her as each pertinent sign shortened her path to Cat.

  Rachel cautiously headed into the ward. She stopped and gave way to two porters manoeuvring a bed that held a sleeping patient. A nurse walked alongside wheeling the patients intravenous drip stand before her. Rachel stood fixed, stalled by the tragic youth of the girl on the bed. An elderly couple accompanied in her wake like pallbearers. Rachel was unsure if they were living or spirit. The man flashed Rachel a pained smile of empathy as they followed their relative who, whether they were dead or alive, couldn’t be reached.

  That’s what Cat will be like. Despite being in the same room together, Cat would still be out of reach.

  Her resolve broke momentarily and a sob wracked her body in one jarring spasm. She dowsed her sudden surge of emotion and regained control. She swiped an errant tear from her face and shakily filled her lungs with air that was too warm and stiflingly thick with clinical smells to provide any refreshment for her spirit. She followed the wards corridor through the soft noise of people and hospital equipment until she reached the nurses station.