Harvest

by Steve Merrifield

  It was easy to forget that the only thing that bridged the age gap and connected them was what had happened to them, and no one knew about that. The last thing he needed was to look like he was grooming Jason. “Good point. Give me the shake back.”

  He laughed. “Hey, I don’t have any problems. Even if you were to buy me some fries next time it would be fine by me.”

  Craig gave him a little shove. He was a cheeky fucker. Craig remembered Kelly was trying to get away from her association with being the ready meal cook and cook something from scratch tonight. “You want to grab a bite now? My treat.” Jason nodded, and he steered the boy towards Kentish Town. “Actually I was thinking that I can do much better than fries when we catch up again; Star Wars is playing at the 02 in Finchley Road as part of their classics series, you and Kelly need an education in all that is good about Star Wars so I thought as Cat is a fan we could all have a bit of a reunion over popcorn or something.”

  “Did you know that film is twice my age?”

  “Shut up.”

  Kelly paced backwards and forwards in the small and cluttered lounge while she waited the two minutes out. She surveyed the mess and longed for the call that would tell her that her flat was sold and they could move out of their rented one. Every room had towering stacks of boxes from Kelly and Craig’s old places, it wasn’t worth unpacking, and she didn’t want to get comfortable. She was keen to get a new place with Craig and start their lives over again.

  But what if…

  No. She topped herself. She had been Miss Sensible and made them have the conversations about the age-gap about what they wanted from life. They were compatible she reminded herself. They wanted the same things.

  They had become lovers straight away. It was a passion she hadn’t felt in a long time, it didn’t have the tenderness of first love or the staleness she associated with marriage but they ached for each others bodies and it was exciting and fun. She no longer had the empty hunger for love and affection, she would reach for him or more often than that he would reach for her. There was none of the desperation she had felt in marriage. She had never felt so safe.

  She checked her watch. One minute and thirty seconds.

  The last three months had changed things in a way Kelly had never thought possible. Kelly, Craig, Cat, Jason and Rachel had had to change, to do things they had never thought themselves capable of; to stand up to nightmares, to destroy demons physical and spiritual. She dwelled for a moment on the thought of Rachel. She hadn’t seen her fall, but she had seen her body in the dirt and flames. She sucked in a deep breath and busied herself in tidying up after Craig. So many had died at The Heights; consumed and transformed by that thing. She caught sight of her reflection in a mirror propped against a wall and was startled by her haunted look, it was the same look she had seen on Craig’s and Cat’s face on the three occasions they had met for a drink in the last two months and talked about The Heights.

  Craig’s future looked good. He hadn’t told his family yet but he had two other short stories being considered for publishing and he was half-way through a rough draft for a novel. He was pouring himself into his computer hour upon hour. It was probably cathartic. The novel wasn’t a direct retelling of what they had experienced, Craig didn’t think he could do that, he didn’t want to be seen as profiteering from the tragedy but his works were definitely inspired by those events. The short story he was getting published was about losing someone and the burden of being the only one to miss them and keep them alive in memory. It was about Vicki.

  One minute. One minute? She listened to her watch tick. It hadn’t stopped.

  Some of the other residents at the tower would have their own stories, but the media had moved on, and so had the topic of talk for the locals. It was difficult having experiences that no one else would entertain outside of fiction. How many horror novels had been inspired by real experiences? Maybe the genre itself was born from trying to get the weird and the frightening accepted and believed.

  The last time her patrol car had taken her past the flats she had seen a ten foot graffiti mural of a death-like undertaker sprayed on a patch of the ground floor wall. Perhaps some of the teenagers that had survived the flats and knew the truth were finding their own way to spread it and keep it alive in people’s memory. Maybe Camden would get its own urban legend.

  Thirty seconds. She wanted to be sick. She didn’t know if it was anxiety or the nausea she had been feeling for weeks.

  Kelly rarely saw people she recognised from the flats, most of the familiar neighbours at The Heights had gone. Too much had happened. Too many people were gone. There was a hole in the community there. There were too many questions that demanded answers for people to feel comfortable living there again. It seemed she was not alone in wanting to move on and find somewhere new to rebuild. Kelly had heard rumours that The Heights were no longer being considered for the protection of becoming listed. Possibly because of the negative associations, but Kelly wondered whether the magical influence that Rachel had suggested, had dissipated and the significance of ‘three’ no longer needed to be preserved within the landscape. Kelly smiled at herself, Rachel lived on in her. She would be so proud.

  Kelly had changed in so many ways now. She had even made the effort with work colleagues and was waiting for there to be a night out planned so that she could make herself go to it. She wanted to fill her life up. She checked her watch. The two minutes were up. She returned to the bathroom and peered at the plastic stick that sat on the toilet cistern. Now she just had to tell Craig that she was pregnant.

  Cat removed the dried flowers from the railing and they crumbled in her grip. She tied a fresh bunch in their place and a bitter wind wracked them, flapping the leaves and prying at the delicate petals. She didn’t know how long she would keep up these visits. She didn’t really know what she wanted by coming to The Heights. To prove to Rachel, if she was still there, that she thought of her? She wished her love for Rachel had been stronger than her anger for her mum’s death. Not only was she haunted by the relationship she had lost with her mum, but she was also haunted by the relationship she could have had with Rachel. Rachel could have eased her grief. Two words were all Cat would have had to have said in those precious few moments before going down into the basement. “I’m sorry.” She said to the flowers. “I’m sorry.”

  The tower served Rachel’s memory well. As epitaphs went The Heights were pretty impressive ones. The tower loomed above her, stark and grey, but it was just concrete and glass now. She had beaten back the life that had once possessed it. It looked more drab than she remembered; dark stains from weathering and pollution ran from ledges and orifices, making each ridge in the moulding look like a bared rib on an emaciated body, each window looking like an eye in a sunken socket. The building looked sick. Graffiti had begun to weave its way onto the walls like weeds crawling out from behind the dying and diseased looking holly bushes quicker than they could be whited out. Maybe it wouldn’t make such a good memorial after all. Two more months and the real grave stone would be ready. Cat had gotten her ashes interred with her mum and a new stone engraved for them both. It was the least she could do.

  The tower had the feeling of decline. She couldn’t face going back there to live after they had killed the thing in the basement. She was staying at Rachel’s flat and was looking for a place where she couldn’t see The Heights on the horizon. Somewhere closer to university. She had negotiated a couple of month’s extension of her course because of the trauma’s she had experienced and planned to go back after Christmas. She wasn’t the only one that had wanted to get away from the tower. The urge to move on seemed to have infected a lot of the residents of the tower. If you went into a local estate agent you could practically pick the floor of your choice and the direction you would like to face there were so many flats for sale in the building.

  Away from the tower it had been easier to force back whatever it was that the thing had left in her mind. She treated
it like a bad memory and walled it up in her head as she had done with so many other things and she left it alone. When she returned to The Heights she worried about the strength of that barrier. She felt a fear and anxiety, which although she guessed was natural at returning to a place where there had been so much danger and loss, she knew that somehow the feelings came from the part of her mind she dare not go. It wasn’t her fear. She ignored the feeling as much as she could even though it shaped her thoughts. Leave. Go home.

  LEAVE NOW!

  It was ridiculous, the only thing she had any reason to fear and flee had been blown to pieces and crushed and then those remains burned into ash in the inferno that had raged in the basement. Despite winning the battle there was something within her that was bitter and defeated, and again they were not her feelings; a secret side to her psyche that contradicted her relief at overcoming the evil.

  Having secured her flowers she decided to give into the anxious urgings. The door to the tower opened and a woman struggled through with a double-pushchair. She recognised her but didn’t know her. Cat skipped up the steps and held the door open and guided her wide load through. The girl walked as if she was pregnant and as she stood back from her struggle and blew out a sigh she saw she was showing through her top. The girl thanked her and Cat nodded acceptance, but her hasty retreat was halted by the girl calling out after her.

  “Haven’t seen you about for a while.” She smiled and pulled a large brightly coloured children’s carry-all into a better position on her shoulder.

  “I moved out.” She smiled as friendly as she could.

  The haggard looking twenty-something cast her eyes back at the building “Lots of people are moving out.” She faced Cat. “Not surprising really after everything that happened. Me and mine are off soon.”

  “I know what you mean; when those kinds of things happen it gives you itchy feet.”

  “Itchy? My feet want to run! I can’t wait to escape from our cramped two bedroom place what with baby on the way. After everything that we have lived through we need a new start somewhere else. Give the kids a nicer neighbourhood away from all this.” She rolled her yes in an impression of bliss.

  Several of the girl’s words anchored themselves in Cat’s head; ‘run,’ ‘escape,’ ‘new start’ – ‘somewhere else’.

  The girl continued. “A lot of people are in the family way at the moment. It’s a regular baby-boom. They say it happens in times of stress. People get down to it. Comfort I guess.”

  Craig and Kelly had been brought together by what happened, and Kelly was now three months pregnant. Cat couldn’t escape the girls earlier words; ‘RUN,’ ‘ESCAPE,’ ‘NEW START’ – ‘SOMEWHERE ELSE’. They played in her mind in a mantra she couldn’t stop; a mantra that she had already followed in her own actions. To get away from everything that had happened. Except now she wasn’t sure that there might be an alternative more subconscious motive.

  The girl leaned forward conspiratorially and spoke with a knowing tone of a shared secret. “You three months gone too?”

  Cat smiled and laughed, but it died in her throat as she realised the girl was commenting on the way she was rubbing her tummy. It had been bloated for a month now. She had been nauseous. She had missed a couple of periods. No. Now she did laugh. It was ridiculous. She wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t had sex for nearly a year. She looked down at herself, at the small rise of her tummy against the material of her tee-shirt. She wanted to be sick. She turned and ran.

  RUN – ESCAPE – NEW START – SOMEWHERE ELSE.

  She could hear the mantra clearly now, but it hadn’t come from her mind, it had come from the thing in her head. She understood it. Craig and Kelly with their baby, Jason and his mum, all the residents that had left or were leaving had on some level heard or felt that same an urge to leave. How many of those women were pregnant?

  They had been right about the thing’s motive, it did want to consume and grow. Somehow, like a cuckoo or a parasite it had left its young behind with people and families that would instinctively protect them. It would no longer be vulnerable from being concentrated in one place, but would be spread out across the city and maybe beyond. Hiding in the children like it hid in Cat’s mind, they would grow up in new neighbourhoods and communities. In hospitals, nurseries, schools, colleges – they would find the perfect breeding grounds.

  Then the disappearances would begin.

  ###

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