Harvest

by Steve Merrifield

  Cat wrenched free of Rachel’s arm that once again shepherded her towards the seats and the sleep that she had taken eighteen months ago. She wouldn’t let Rachel take away her last moments with her mother. Not this time. Cat should be the one to say the final goodbye.

  “I will stay with her. I want to be with her.” Cat stepped away from Rachel, and stood defensively between Rachel and her mother. “I want to say goodbye.”

  The muscles in Rachel’s face twitched and flickered with the confused thoughts that must have been playing through her mind. She emitted several sounds before forming hesitant words. “Of course.” Rachel hugged Cat but the embrace stiffened when Cat just stood in her arms and made no effort to return the gesture. Rachel waked backwards to the door, looking reluctant to leave. “I’m going to get a coffee and stretch my legs. Just down the hall. I’m not going far. Come and get me if…” She hesitated in the doorway. “I know! I will get you a hot chocolate while I get a coffee. I will bring it straight back. I won’t be long. Please, please get me if… Please call for me.”

  This was all new. Cat had changed how things had happened. The script of the past was discarded and the memories stopped here. Rachel was gone and now Cat would be the one to say goodbye. These would be her mum’s last moments and she would no longer have to rely on Rachel’s description of them. She could feel the despair ball in her stomach like a smooth hard boulder in her gut that weighted her insides down to ripping point. Something wet touched her hand and when she held her hand up she found a clear rivulet, it was joined by another and another until she realised she was crying. She touched her face and was shocked by the stiff and contorted mask that creased up around her tears. Until the sobs wracked her body it seemed her grief was just a torture of the flesh with the cramps, spasms and seizures that took hold of her body, but as she approached the bed to watch her mum die she knew her the pain would come.

  She found her mothers hand in the bed covers, it felt like a bundle of sticks. The cancer had eaten her away. Her face had changed so much from what she had known before; her cheeks shallow and her eyes sunken; her hair dry and pale like sun scorched grass. She was unrecognisable as the woman that had played with her, told her off, laughed with her, taken her to school, made her packed lunch, sent her to her room, taken her to the park, sung to her. She had loved to sing. She could barely whisper now. This was it. Her mother was dying and there was nothing she could do.

  “Mum,” she managed to croak. “Mum.” The tears came hard and fast, streaming down her face. This was the first time she had cried so wildly in front of her mother since her mother had asked her to be strong for her. She surrendered now. She didn’t care. “Oh, mum…”

  There was the tiniest pressure on her hand and her mothers deep eyes flickered open. “Kitten – my head feels empty,” her voice flashed into a stunted giggle that her body couldn’t maintain. It was the morphine; they had been increasing it. The drug would be poisoning her by now, killing her quicker than the Cancer. Sucking her into a painless sleep. ‘Sleep?’ She laughed bitterly at her romantic sentimentalism – Not sleep. Death!

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Cat’s mother whispered.

  It was true, she hadn’t been there, and she had lived with guilt and torment ever since. Now it would be different. She would have closure and Rachel would be the one to miss saying goodbye. “You have always been here for me.” She managed over the tightness of her throat. “I want to be here for you.”

  Her mother turned away from her. “I’m so sorry I’m not going to be here… I don’t want to leave you.” A tear tobogganed down the crease of her cheek and caught like a crystal in the hairline at the side of her face.

  “Don’t,” Cat pleaded softly.

  “Rachel is going to be here for you,” she breathed weakly. “Let her be your mother. She has so much love for me and you – you couldn’t want for anyone else.”

  “I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”

  “Don’t.” Her weakened state reduced her conviction to a fragile plea. “I didn’t have to ask her to be there for you, she cares so much. You know you’re the daughter she never had. It came so naturally to her to be there for you when I couldn’t.”

  Cat stood over her mother and watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. She was right; Rachel had always been there for her, it had been like having a second mum in replacement for the dad she had never known. It had always been her mother and Rachel for as long as she could remember. All Rachel had in the world was Helen and Cat, and all Cat ever had was her mum and Rachel. She experienced a sickening plunge of guilt at the thought of taking Rachel away from her mother’s side. “Do you want me to get Rachel?” It had to be close now. 3.40 am had been the time. She probably had minutes at that. The clock ticked, hacking the seconds away. She knew things were different this time, but she felt that death would still be punctual and be the constant that endured in this alternate experience.

  “Get her and then come to me,” her words seemed strangely surreal, as if there was a conspiratorial motive beyond wanting to say goodbye.

  Cat frowned at her own sudden inappropriate suspicion and dismissed her paranoia. Rachel appeared in the doorway, sentinel, waiting – waiting or guarding? Guarding what? The insecurity clambered heavily up her body like some zombie from the earth. Rachel seemed to fill the door, blocking her exit – but why would Cat think of escape? Why should she? Cat wanted this moment with her mother. She had played this fantasy of events in her head a dozen times every day since her mother died. She wanted nothing more than to say goodbye.

  The underlying menace that writhed in her gut was out of place, as if her head was firing false signals to all her senses. Rachel moved to the bedside and her warm smile disarmed her. Cat couldn’t hate her anymore. They could share this. She saw Rachel’s open hand reaching out for her. She could take it, face her mother’s death with Rachel and let the transition of losing one mother and gaining another be seamless. Smother pain with comfort, douse grief with love. Let go and move on. All she had to do was lower her defences.

  A fire extinguisher ripped through the air before Cat and struck Rachel full in the chest. The white of the hospital room shattered with the impact of the extinguisher as if the room was a reflection on a mirror fracturing into a spider web of darkness, its black strands expanding until the white hospital room and Rachel and her mother were replaced with blackness.

  Cat found herself surrounded by disorientating darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom in time to see the undertaker folding into the shadows under a blow to its chest from the extinguisher that Jason had swung into its chest. The extinguisher clattered to the floor and Jason snatched Cat’s hand and tugged it roughly.

  Startled and confused Cat held her ground, she searched the patch of shadow where the undertaker had toppled but couldn’t see any sign of movement. Her head raced with confused thoughts. Jason tugged at her, pulling her away, his face desperate and full of fear, wincing in the undertaker’s direction, expecting another attack. She was drunk from the vision of her mother and Rachel, and living the memory of a time when it was easy to love Rachel. She took some staggered steps with Jason before she understood that ‘it’ had gotten into her head. The thing that lived in the fabric of the dark knew her hidden desires, wishes, fears, and most crippling memories, and had used them against her, leading her to betray herself to it. The realisation stunned her and she relaxed into Jason’s persistent direction.

  As she tumbled through the dark a gradient in the colour of the shadows became apparent. In the direction the undertaker had been luring her there was a broad circular patch of darkness infused with a faint shade of green. The association of that colour with the thing that stalked them lashed her into matching Jason’s deliberate pace. The encounter Jason had saved her from had shaken her determination to face the thing alone, yet the fighter inside her needed to see it, to see what ‘it’ truly was, to finally see the true face of the enemy that toyed with th
em and tormented them from beyond the veil.

  Cat slowed her pace and twisted her wrist from Jason’s grip. She ran toward the pool of green that seemed to hover unanchored in the dark. She realised it was a hole in the wall and leaned into the void looking for the source of the light.

  She saw it.

  The diffusion emanated from a luminescent green mass, crudely angular like an obelisk, it was difficult to gauge the scale in the gloom, but it looked at least three feet taller than her.

  The breath was forced from her as Cat was yanked roughly backwards. Jason had returned for her and was determined to escape with her. She had seen enough. The obelisk, despite its crude architectural shape was strangely organic, with a frame of gnarled bone under a stretched covering of fleshy translucent skin. Something unrecognisable incubated within.

  Her mind strained to extract more details from what she had glimpsed but she hadn’t lingered long enough and her concentration was dominated by navigating the uneven floor of broken masonry. That was until suddenly she could see the floor in detail as it was lit by a surge of green light that sent shadows scurrying into hiding amongst the recesses, and flickering and writhing from place to place from an oscillating light.

  The light drove the pair to a narrow gap that Jason darted through while Cat staggered to sidestep through. In her half-turn she saw that the hole in the wall had become a caldera of fierce green light split by the jagged blade of the undertaker’s silhouette rising from the ground. Its shape was blunted as it repositioned its tall flat-topped hat, then lurched towards her in lunging strides, a splinter of the green energy that controlled the undertaker filtered from its eyes and ragged mouth like a possessed Jack-o’-lantern.

  Leaving its chrysalis and incubating form, the entity boiled out of the hole with a rush of pungent air, taking the form of a symmetrical Rorschach of perpetually moving swirls and eddies of power, urging its undead stalker in for the kill. The undertaker drew its blade while the light blazed around the marionette corpse in a threatening irreverent aureole as the entity in both its forms closed in.

  Poised mid-motion Cat hesitated between the lockers that narrowed the doorway. She was on the threshold of retreat but her hate of this thing fortified her resolve into belligerent defiance of the thing that had infected her mind, imprisoned her in a coma, and toyed with her most painful memories. Her longing to make a stand against this thing ached in her chest, yet the seamless way it had put her in a fantasy world frightened her.

  Cursing the thing and her fear, she complied with Jason’s desperate tugs and they raced across the residential basement of The Heights. The shadowy gloom was dispersed by the green light pouring itself through the gap in the lockers, and she could hear the undertaker’s even steps at their backs as it stalked after them. The fire door was dead ahead, but it didn’t take much of a calculation for her to realise that by the time they reached it, stopped to pull the door open and take their turn to dash through it, the things would be on them.

  She wouldn’t make it through the door.

  Her hesitation at the lockers had cost Cat her escape, and if Jason wouldn’t let her go then it would undoubtedly cost him his too. She cursed herself for her recklessness and at the futility of their escape attempt, but her impotence collapsed under the weight of a desperate anger and hatred within her skull for the thing that would claim them at any moment, for the thing that altered her, imprisoned her, tormented her; used her mother! For the thing that would kill them.

  The mental sphincter around the thing in her head relaxed, eager and wide, and the power within exploded out of her in a volcanic release of rage, radiating invisibly out from her as a shockwave.

  Jason pulled the door open and with euphoric disbelief they both made it through. In her haste to escape she shook off the brief wild stab of pain in her head. Cat and Jason didn’t stop running until they reached the sanctuary of the small grassy common in the middle of the three high-rise towers and the seeming safety of daylight life. She pulled Jason to her, as much for relief and comfort as for thanking him. Shaking and panting heavily she thanked him. “You’re a little. Short for a. Stormtrooper. Aren’t you?” she joked as she tried to compose herself. She read his baffled expression at her Star Wars quote and she waved it away. “Don’t worry. I’m mad. With shock!”

  She let go of him and dropped to her knees while she tried to regain her breath, Jason sat in the grass with her. “Did you. Follow me?” She panted.

  He struggled to breath and talk. “Yeah, I saw you sneak out this morning. So I gave you a head start and followed you.”

  “Why?”

  He frowned and angrily shoved her shoulders. “I told you I need all of your help, but I think we need you the most, I wasn’t going to let you walk out on us.”

  She pushed him away and he fell onto his rear and didn’t return to his attack. “I’m sorry.” The disappointment in herself swamped her. It was a feeling she had felt often since her mum had died, usually when her thoughts strayed to Rachel. “How come you didn’t stop me from going down into the basement?”

  “I thought it was a stupid thing to do, but I didn’t know whether you were going down there to try and kill it by yourself, or whether you were reporting to it or something.”

  She shoved him in the chest this time. “You thought I might be in with that thing?”

  “You don’t even understand what it did to you, what it is that you can do. I saw your face at the hospital when you used your powers on Malik and again at Rachel’s last night when you turned them on Kelly, it didn’t seem like you had much control and you looked just as frightened of your powers as everyone else was. It’s hard to trust something, or someone, you don’t understand.”

  Cat nodded, she had only met him yesterday but it was the second time she found herself questioning whether he was a very small adult or an adult in disguise as a kid. “Either way you took a big risk in following me down there.”

  “I had to know.”

  “And now?”

  “I trust you.” There was conviction in his voice. “But I still don’t think you know whether to trust yourself or the power you have.” Jason looked up into her face questioningly, but his smile faltered and his face adopted a worried expression.

  Following his stare at her face, her fingers felt for the focus of his concern. There was a warm wet slick under her nose and she found her fingers were wet with bright crimson blood. She remembered the pain in her head after releasing the thing in her mind, the adrenaline of her escape had masked it, but the aching discomfort was still there. She had only let go of the power for an instant, and that had only stalled the things in the basement, yet it had done this to her. How much would she have to let go to release enough power to kill the thing, and what would be left of her afterwards?

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Zoe Sampson wheeled the elderly Peter Sinclair down the ramp from the high rise in his wheel chair.

  “Where do you want to go today?”

  “Go?”

  Peter had moments of vagueness because of his dementia. “Yes, where would you like to go; what would you like to do.”

  “Where are all the children?”

  Any other time it might have been just a random statement from a misconnection in his disorganized brain, but his observation was chillingly appropriate. “I don’t know. That’s what a lot of parents round here have been asking themselves lately.” She frowned at the drama of what she said; she was meant to take him out and give him a good time, not depress the poor bastard. “Probably got bored with the common and they are off playing somewhere else.” Probably playing somewhere safer than the shadow of a building where kids go missing. “Where would you like to go? What would you like to do?”

  “I am sorry, are we friends? Are we courting? No… No… I am married.” He started, and seemed to suddenly become conscious of being in the wheelchair. He studied his hands, tracing the prominent veins that clung to the bones beneath his paper thin s
kin with a quivering finger. “No. I am old. Old and married. And you’re my nurse.”

  “Come on then. What’s my name?”

  “Zoe.”

  “Ooh! Showing off now today, Mr Sinclair.” She patted him affectionately on the shoulder of his tweed jacket with her spare hand. “I woke up the other morning and I couldn’t remember my own name – I think you just recovered quicker than I did.”

  “Hung-over?” he scoffed.

  She laughed. “You guessed it.” She liked him. He was polite, and didn’t treat her like a Red Coat that should be entertaining him every second of their little jaunts. He was often quite content to watch the world go by from a café, and only talk when something came to him, or when he slipped into confusion. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t make the effort, she might be worlds apart from girls he might have known when he was her age, but he didn’t criticize. He always seemed to accept her the way she was, whether she cursed, lit up a fag or talked about a mental night out, there was no nod of disgrace or tut of disapproval which she would have gotten from her grandparents. Grandparents she didn’t bother with anymore.

  “Girls drink too much these days,” he observed.

  “Yup. Everyone does too much of everything these days.” She stopped the wheelchair and pushed the breaks on. She fished her packet of cigarettes out of her bag and walked in front of him to talk with him.

  “I expect you are right.” He watched her light up. “I think Eadie had a hang over the other morning.”

  Her eyes widened. “No! Mrs Sinclair?” In her exclamation she missed her mouth and her cigarette fell. It bounced off her Nurses dress in an angry display of orange embers before it hit the floor.

  He broke into a wheezing Muttley guffaw. “She made a sherry trifle and then we had a few glasses when dinner was finished.”